[In the following essay, Wolfley examines the thematic structure of Gravity's Rainbow.]

Since its publication in 1973, Gravity's Rainbow,¹ by Thomas Pynchon, has attained a cult following, which continues to grow. There is even a current vogue of inflicting its tortured 760 word-crammed pages on innocent undergraduates. But, for all this interest, the body of admiring commentary that has sprung up around the novel has so far failed to develop any coherent approach to its central meanings. This essay offers a usable handle on the novel's ideas by demonstrating Pynchon's pervasive indebtedness to the school of psychoanalytic culture criticism best exhibited in the two major works of Norman O. Brown—Life against Death and Love's Body.² I want to caution, however, that this essay does not convey much of the complex texture of GR [Gravity's Rainbow], particularly of the many subtle ways the book parodies and subverts certain received notions about the nature and function of literature itself. I am concerned primarily with thematic structure, rather than with esthetic surface, where the moment-to-moment reading experience lies. Other paths should and will be taken with this novel. But my purpose will be served if this essay helps a few of my readers not just to start but to finish a novel that bids well to stand as one of the greatest of our time.

I

The structure of GR is episodic, with vignettes from multiple plot lines intertwining like the molecules of a dozen covalent chemicals dumped together at once. As indicated by the stylized square film-projector sprocket holes used to divide the chapters, Pynchon's chosen artistic metaphor is the novel as movie; and, while the idea of the omniscient narrator as camera eye has long been cliché, Pynchon's handling of the device is consistently fresh and imaginative. GR is basically a takeoff on the historical-novel genre, as processed by the makers of B-grade movies about, and of, the period of World War II. The book bears out McLuhan's assertion that the content of any medium is another medium, but Pynchon has turned on its head McLuhan's observation that “The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera.”³ For the content of the novel GR is a hypothetical movie—a melodramatic and occasionally musical rendition of a number of stories about World War II, themselves perhaps drawn from novels. (We find at the end of the book that we, Pynchon's readers, have been watching this movie in the Orpheus Theatre in Los Angeles.) But this series of Chinese boxes has serious intellectual content. GR constitutes a revisionist analysis of a turning point in contemporary history: the resolution of the European power struggle and the transition to the postwar balance of terror and the on-again-off-again cold war that we still live with.

Like Pynchon's two previous novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, the plot of GR takes the form of a quest attended by numerous interlocking conspiracies. As before, narrative “plot” is continuous with conspiratorial “plot.” The central character, Tyrone Slothrop, is a familiar sort of American antihero and Everyman: schlemiel and victim, he is nevertheless providentially protected. His conditioning as an infant by onetime behaviorist Laszlo Jamf—who went on to develop a mysterious plastic capable of evoking erotic responses in human beings—results in a correlation, during his tenure as an intelligence officer in the London of the blitz, between the locations of his sexual adventures and the actual rocket strikes. This phenomenon gains the obsessive interest of Edward Pointsman, a master behaviorist and leader of the research group known as The White Visitation, who (with funds provided by corporate authorities who think Slothrop can be used to locate a corps of black rocket troops they want to destroy) sends Slothrop into the “Zone” of recently defeated Germany to search for a special rocket equipped with Jamf's plastic. Pavlovian Pointsman wants a perfect test case that will prove once and for all “the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul” (p. 86). Slothrop willingly quests for the unique rocket, No. 00000, believing that its secret device (the Schwarzgerät—which Slothrop never learns is actually a human being shrouded with Jamf's plastic, Imipolex G) will help him understand why and how he was originally conditioned and what it means. Like all metaphorical Grail seekers, he is really after some special understanding of himself, of his nature and situation, that will allow him to live and act in the world. Associated with Slothrop's quest are several major subplots, including the stories of (1) the perversely romantic Major Weissmann (SS code name Blicero), who develops and fires Rocket No. 00000, with his passive lover, Gottfried, dressed in white lace and surrounded with Imipolex G, in the nose cone; (2) the engineer Pökler, whose daughter Blicero keeps hostage in return for his work on the special rocket; (3) the half-Herero, half-Russian Enzian, who leads the black rocket troops and who in his African youth was the lover and protégé of Blicero; and (4) the career Communist Tchitcherine, Russian half brother of Enzian, ostensibly working for Soviet Intelligence but actually seeking personal revenge on Enzian for what he perceives as the career-ruining shame of having a black half brother.⁴

Movie techniques pervade even the finest details of Pynchon's narrative presentation. For the movie audience the mere sequence of scenes is sufficient; if we fail to catch the connections favored by the director, we invent others equally adequate to our needs. Thus, a scene in GR typically plunges us into a chaos of human appearances and material appurtenances objectively described, and we perforce read on, foundering haphazardly toward an understanding of the present action—of what is simply going on. Pynchon composes, it would seem, by first projecting an imagined scene on the screen of his mind and then transcribing what he has observed according to the unmediated sequence of raw perception. Moreover, the main significance of hardly anything of importance is ever revealed at first mention. As a result, it is virtually impossible to assimilate the book in a single reading. GR is designedly difficult to read because Pynchon is determined to have the manner of his fiction mirror the complexity of contemporary existence.⁵

Furthermore, Pynchon's view is “phenomenological,” in the sense that official pronouncements and the interpretations of establishment historians are meaningless in the face of the reality of the event, the immediate impact on the human organism and its hope for a viable future. We are being told not to try to read from cause to effect; we should start with the human reality of the effect and read back from that to the significance of the event. The determining factor in Pynchon's allegory of the human condition is the unholy alliance that has developed between, on the one hand, media, technology, and the inanimate in general and, on the other hand, the will to power of those who control the dominant commercial and bureaucratic structures. It is suggested that at some point during World War II Western culture (like that atomic pile at the University of Chicago) reached a “critical mass” (see p. 539) that evoked revolutionary changes in the nature of experience. The egalitarian, pop-culture esthetic of GR has disturbed many readers. But this is precisely the relevance of Pynchon: that, more successfully than anyone else to date, he has assimilated into an essentially novelistic sensibility the pertinence of those powerful antiliterary modes and tendencies that presently threaten to swamp a large part of the humanistic tradition. In so doing he has to some extent tamed them and made them accessible to that community of the strictly literate that yet remains. GR, which has been called “the most important novel to be published in English in the past thirty years,”⁶ has the potential to give the novel genre a new lease on life. Pynchon's spirit of experimentation (with recent extraliterary modes and with older literary conventions) is liberating, and the example of his novel returns the genre to its original concerns with social responsibility and the human comedy. His democratic attitude toward all his materials (which together constitute a very large world indeed) means that, more than ever, nothing need be excluded from the novelist's repertoire.

II

From the beginning Pynchon's writing has been haunted by an awareness of T. S. Eliot's fundamental point—that a totally secular culture is absurd and unworkable. Having killed all the old gods, we turn and, out of the strangest materials, reify new and more terrible gods. The one line in GR that could serve as motto for all the rest occurs in Walter Rathenau's lecture (through the lips of medium Peter Sachsa, from the other side of the Zero) to the gathered “corporate Nazi crowd.” “All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic” (p. 167). Western history is actually propelled by savage atavisms more deadly than those obtaining in Darkest Africa, and yet we persist in rationalizing our behavior and giving “explanations” for the horrors that surround us. It is no wonder that Pynchon writes as one surrounded by madmen. That we tolerate the intolerable is a source of constant amazement to him, and out of that sense of wonder he writes.

Clearly GR is as much about the period during which it was written as it is about 1944-45. “Between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood” (p. 739). This novel is Pynchon's version of Why Are We in Vietnam? But, even more than the Vietnam debacle, this novel is the etiology of the Cold War and the nuclear balance of terror, as the conclusion (in which an atomic warhead is surrealistically delivered on us by rocket in Los Angeles) makes explicit. Indeed, in innumerable ways GR reads like a historical product of the late fifties, when the Cold War was most intense. One reason for this is that Pynchon's sensibility was formed in the late fifties at Cornell and around Greenwich Village. A further reason is that this period produced the book that provides a conceptual framework into which the literary content of a fiction such as GR can be subsumed. In the Introduction to Life against Death Brown anticipates the thrust of his entire argument and adumbrates the deepest fears of the fifties intellectual:

… it begins to be apparent that mankind, in all its restless striving and progress, has no idea of what it really wants. Freud was right: our real desires are unconscious. It also begins to be apparent that mankind, unconscious of its real desires and therefore unable to obtain satisfaction, is hostile to life and ready to destroy itself. Freud was right in positing a death instinct, and the development of weapons of destruction makes our present dilemma plain: we either come to terms with our unconscious instincts and drives—with life and with death—or else we surely die.

(LAD [Life against Death], p. x)

Brown begins with the Freudian postulate that the essence of Homo sapiens is repression. Individual man represses himself in the name of deferred gratifications and, through the institutions of society, collaborates in a condition of general repression. Repression of the self precedes social repression. Human consciousness, through which man is able to stand back and rationally impose on himself a painful self-denial, is a form of disease, since the division of the self into subjective and objective violates the organic unity with nature experienced by every other animal. “We are all therefore neurotic” (LAD, p. 6). Further, the whole of human “culture”—including language, religion, and all the arts and sciences—emerges in this view as a product of the universal neurosis. Unable to accept on the instinctual level the denials of rational consciousness, man attempts to compensate through sublimations, and sublimations accumulated over time lead to “civilization” and the full panoply of cultural artifacts. These increasing refinements evoke the illusion of linear sequence and development that we think of as history. Brown's concept of history is extremely complex. Ultimately he sees history as the result of an unwillingness to die, and therefore an inability to live, an inability to live in and for the body and be satisfied with just being here.

History is also viewed as the product in human praxis of the gap between what men tell themselves that they want and what unconsciously they really want. Brown further supplements his theory of “the psychoanalytical meaning of history” with Mircea Eliade's distinction between cyclical time (proper to tribal societies) and linear time (proper to detribalized Western man). Great stress is laid on the conclusion of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents: unless mankind finds a way out of the snowballing accumulations of repression and attending guilt, “the sense of guilt may swell to a magnitude that individuals can hardly support” (quoted in LAD, p. 15). That is, unless an alternative path can be found, the whole structure of human culture will most likely undergo a catastrophic collapse. It is inevitable that there someday be an end to the Western mode of history making. As an alternative Brown would prefer, as he puts it in the final chapter of LAD, “the abolition of repression.” But he has the courage to face and state directly his knowledge that “the malignant death instinct can unleash those hydrogen bombs” (LAD, p. 307).

Now it must be stressed that, Frederick Crews notwithstanding,⁷ the scientific validity of Brown's analysis is not at issue: experimental verification of Brown's postulates will never be forthcoming, nor does it matter. LAD articulates to perfection a mind-set that has been popular among a certain class of alienated American intellectuals since the twenties, and Brown is simply the most provocative member of a broad movement (exemplified in its activist form by Wilhelm Reich and his legion of present-day disciples). With the current reaction against sixties radicalism, Brown has become rather unfashionable, and his presence in contemporary culture criticism shows signs of fading. Yet it should be apparent that GR, a sixties novel born late, is shot through with the particular style of Freudian thinking represented by Brown. The issue here is the use Pynchon made of those ideas identified preeminently with Brown.

In V. we recognize the influence of Henry Adams' dark meditations on the second law of thermodynamics. But entropy is naturally conceived as a sort of straight-line decline toward inanition, leading to a gradual cessation of all the motions of life. In GR Pynchon reverses his theme but picks up another of Adams' concerns, the acceleration of history, and his metaphysical speculations now center on the far more violent implications of gravitational pull—the exponential acceleration of falling at thirty-two feet per second per second. Gravity, not entropy, applies to a world that will most likely end with a bang, not a whimper. And, within the structure of Pynchon's social speculations, gravity in the macrocosm corresponds to the mechanism of repression in the little world of man, the microcosm. Lyle Bland “imagines that he has been journeying underneath history: that history is Earth's mind, and that there are layers, set very deep, layers of history analogous to layers of coal and oil in Earth's body” (p. 589). He discovers “it's hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter. … To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody …” (p. 590; second ellipsis Pynchon's). At one point Nora Dodson-Truck, a mysterious psychic with a decidedly “heavy” personality, makes an amazing discovery: “In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is, literally, the Force of Gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History …” (p. 639; ellipsis Pynchon's). And, when we recall that her husband, Sir Stephen, is one of the most notably “repressed” figures in the novel (his sexual inadequacy is a direct result of his conscious acceptance of his role as a mere pawn of the higher authorities—see pp. 215-16), the connection becomes obvious: repression gives us individuality and culture, a collective history, as gravity gives the earth form and configuration. Physics provides the metaphor for metaphysics, and for social theory as well. Gravity is the ultimate metaphor in the novel for the human repression that is its theme.⁸

At the limit of Brown's analysis there are only two alternatives, each achieving through different means the same end: the disappearance of man and the abolition of human history. Either we allow the accumulation of guilt to draw us into racial suicide (most likely through nuclear weapons), or we abolish repression and allow our bodies to enter into a resurrected state of polymorphously perverse erotic being, without guilt and also without what we now think of as “consciousness.” The psychological and political obstacles to the latter alternative are so great that we seem condemned to the former. Brown and Pynchon, however, not only mutually fear the fiery consummation of the world but, paradoxically, seem simultaneously to long for it. “To bring this world to an end: the consummation devoutly to be wished, the final judgment” (LB [Love's Body], p. 232)—this I take to be one meaning of Pynchon's title. God sent the rainbow to Noah as a promise that the world would never again be destroyed by flood, but made no promise excluding fire, and Revelations suggests that fire will indeed be the mode of the final judgment. Brown's chapter on “Fire” in LB contains many potent suggestions: “Set fire to the sacrifice. … The real prayer is to see this world go up in flames.” “To heal, to cauterize. Therapy as apocalypse, conflagration; error burned up. Not catharsis but cruelty” (LB, p. 177). Brown's outlook matches the brutality of Pynchon's vision. Further on, Brown cites Pasternak to the effect that “art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John” (LB, pp. 206-07).

Although references to our special fire, the atomic bomb, are few in GR, they resonate powerfully. Slothrop is given a revelation of the bomb sitting at a curb staring at a scrap of newspaper headline that proclaims: MB DRO / ROSHI; and the accompanying wirephoto is analyzed in genital terms. The narrator's sadness over the event is indicated in the paragraph prefacing Slothrop's revelation: “At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be found for every street now indifferently gray with commerce, with war, with repression …” (p. 693; ellipsis Pynchon's). Brown would prefer, like all of us, that the fire were God's, not man's; figurative, not literal: “To find the true fire … Hiroshima mon amour. Save us from the literal fire. The literal-minded, the idolaters, receive the literal fire. Each man suffers his own fire” (LB, p. 182). Pynchon has it both ways. On the final page of GR the fire is not only man's thermonuclear self-destruction but at the same time the fire of God's wrath, manifested as that hand pointing down from the clouds to zap us for our sins. Each civilization, like each man, suffers its own fire. In this connection, I think it would be simplistic to view the conclusion of GR as merely a warning, along the lines of science-fictional dystopias. Pynchon surely sympathizes with the exhausted Blicero, who tells Gottfried (God's Peace): “I want to break out—to leave this cycle of infection and death” (p. 724).

Naturally the other alternative, the abolition of repression, also attracts Pynchon, and it receives due consideration in the rather contrived scene in which Thanatz tells Ludwig that “a little S and M never hurt anybody.”

“Who said that?”

“Sigmund Freud. How do I know? But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.”

(p. 737)

Besides being a nice jab at Marxism, whose contemporary states show no sign of withering away, this constitutes a perfectly serious endorsement of the “polymorphously perverse” body, free of repressions both inner and outer. If childhood were released of all adult-imposed sexual inhibitions, the distortions evolving from what Brown calls “the peculiar prolongation of infancy in the human species” (LAD, p. 28) might indeed be counteracted. (But, however serious Pynchon may be about Thanatz' “Sadoanarchism,” the speech in context is compromised by the humor of Thanatz' motive, and by everything we know about him as a character—his name is an allusion to Thanatos, the Freudian term for the death instinct.)

As Thanatz' vague reference to “the Structure” indicates, Pynchon throughout GR plays on our wonderment over who or what really exercises power (that is, enforces social repression) in the world, and how. Hence the rhetorical trick of capitalizing third-person plural pronouns. Something about our world induces a paranoid sense that it is not ourselves who control our destinies; therefore it is natural to speculate over who does. Curiously, Pynchon seems more interested in intensifying our paranoia than in providing an answer, easy or complex.⁹ However, GR has aims very different from those of, say, a straightforward sociological work like G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? The question raised is equally crucial in psychoanalytic theory, and Brown's solution is frightening in its lucidity: “If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed, sacred obligations which appear as objective realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion” (LAD, p. 252). As students of Brown know, the bleakness of this position produces serious tensions at the end of Life against Death, where Brown attempts to make an optimistic conclusion. These tensions are finally resolved in Love's Body when he deliberately removes the discussion from the realm of practicality and effectively gives up on the “real” world.¹⁰

The final section of GR is titled “The Counterforce” precisely because Pynchon feels this tension also. It should be called “An Investigation into the Possibility of a Counterforce,” for it is a soul-searching inventory of the resources possessed by the intelligentsia for resisting the depredations of the military-industrial-political complex. Sadly enough, the appraisal is negative, for Pynchon finds himself caught within the same logic in which Brown was trapped. Roger and the other participants in the Gross Suckling Conference “are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that's the hard fact. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while” (pp. 712-13). We let it go on, we participate in our own shackling, because the repression that society imposes is made possible only by the individual's initial repression of himself. Brown is adamant in his insistence that self-repression precedes social repression, and his chapter on “Sexuality and Childhood” explains the sequence as a function of that “peculiar prolongation of infancy in the human species”: “… the infant's objective dependence on parental, especially maternal, care promotes a dependent attitude toward reality and inculcates a passive (dependent) need to be loved, which colors all subsequent interpersonal relationships. This psychological vulnerability is subsequently exploited to extract submission to social authority and to the reality-principle in general” (LAD, p. 25).

Under what auspices does the Gross Suckling Conference take place? “Well, Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling. Swaying full-color picture of a loathsomely fat drooling infant. In one puddinglike fist the Gross Suckling clutches a dripping hamhock (sorry pigs, nothing personal), with the other he reaches out for a human Mother's Nipple that emerges out into the picture from the left-hand side …” (p. 707). The humorous irony of this softens the sense of failure; but, as we have seen, Pynchon does not always stand off so far. At one point, after the narrative breaks into square brackets for almost the only time in the novel, he ominously implicates himself in the evil that is his subject: “I am betraying them all … the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus” (p. 739; Pynchon's ellipsis). Pynchon and Brown thus agree that the reason social amelioration is impossible is that the slaves love their chains. They must; else the situation would be otherwise. This interpretation is not likely to endear Pynchon and Brown to anyone with Marxist leanings, but, as it turns out, they both explicitly reject Marxism as a political philosophy and theory of human nature, and for the same reasons: its materialism ignores the fact that the world is a projection of spirit, and its much touted dialectical method is merely a cover for a perverted millennialism, itself an excuse for totalitarian structures.

The primary locus for the theme of repression in GR is, not Marxism, but a strangely similar dogma—namely, Calvinism, particularly the form we encounter in Slothrop's Puritan background. Slothrop's ancestors, obsessed with the hand of God proclaiming, not life to Adam's outstretched hand, but rather judgment, generation on generation of longed-for death, put much of their money “into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money, and the Word” (p. 28). In one way or another Pynchon manages to trace back to early Calvinism some of the major perversions of the modern world: racist wars, urban blight, the cash nexus of society, sexual fetishes and dysfunctions, runaway technology, our projection of every interior evil onto a nature conceived as lifeless, inert, “out there”—on and on. Thus Pynchon's view of historical development agrees with Brown's: “whereas in previous ages life had been a mixture of Eros and Thanatos, in the Protestant era life becomes a pure culture of the death instinct” (LAD, p. 216). (LAD is in fact a massive indictment of “Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism” as the source of our ills, with Max Weber appearing as just more grist to Brown's dialectical mill.¹¹) The attributions of the artist are confirmed by the psychoanalytic doctrine that “the entirety of culture is projection” (LAD, p. 170). The world without is the world that was within.

The main reason for Pynchon's hostility to the Calvinist tradition is that it divides society, on specious and hypocritical moral grounds, into two unequal classes, which he usually refers to as the Elect and the Preterite. The universe itself becomes divided into a part that matters (the immortal and immaterial souls of the Elect, predestined for salvation) and a part that does not matter (the souls and bodies of the damned, and the entire natural world). Calvinism also splits the geocultural world into a Western Elect and a non-Western Preterite. Westerners are Faustian: aggressive, alienated, obsessed with history. For them nature, the entire natural world, is dead. Man is composed of flesh and spirit, eternally at war. Brown accuses Christian theology of committing “its own worst sin, the sin of pride,” for taking man “out of this real world” (LAD, p. 16). The subjective-objective illusion results in an eternal and painful division between mind and object, self and other, human society and nature. Western man is perpetually confused by the paradox of being in but not of the world. Non-Westerners generally do not suffer from these delusions, and they are especially free from the supposition that time is linear and must someday end in judgment.

III

“The dynamic of history is the slow return of the repressed” (LAD, p. 230). Indeed. One of Freud's most useful observations is that what we most violently repress will inevitably return as the determining factor in our neurosis, and Freud does not hesitate to extend this principle to cultural analysis. The return of the repressed is an essential component in the psychoanalytic theory of history and culture, and it takes on primary significance in any reading of GR because it dominates so much of the narrative action of the tale. As this section demonstrates, the principle manifests itself everywhere, but the major illustration is the history of the Hereros in Germany, led by Enzian. Pynchon is here exercising his talent for prophecy and cultural allegory. Aside from averting nuclear holocaust, the greatest challenge the West presently faces is that of establishing toward the Third World a constructive policy acceptable to an electorate that is mainly intent on maintaining its material privileges and that has never granted the right of nonwhites to a place in the neo-Calvinist creation.

The dilemma faced by the Schwarzkommando (the black rocket troops) is faced by all non-whites, and again Brown provides a key: “Cultures … differ from each other not in the content of the repressed—which consists always in the archetypical fantasies generated by the universal nature of human infancy—but in the various kinds and levels of the return of the repressed in projections made possible by various kinds and levels of environment, technology, etc.” (LAD, p. 171). For the Schwarzkommando the environment is Germany and the Zone, and the specific technology is the rocket. Enzian's personal crisis began “when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. … Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature …” (p. 324; first ellipsis Pynchon's).

The essence of Pynchon's irony is that the repressed, reified as black tribesmen, return literally, back to that Europe which tried so hard to suppress the knowledge of their very existence. Not differently but only more openly than everyone else in the novel, they take the rocket as their totem, and the geometry of its flight becomes the model for what history they have left. Only Enzian and a few other skeptics fight a political holding action against Enzian's opposition, “the Empty Ones,” who have the advantage because they have accurately diagnosed the meaning of Western history and intend to imitate that death wish in the microcosm of the tribe. “Revolutionaries of the Zero, they mean to carry on what began among the old Hereros after the 1904 rebellion failed. They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide. They would finish the extermination the Germans began in 1904” (p. 317). The Empty Ones exemplify Brown's observation that “The link between the theory of neurosis and the theory of history is the theory of religion …” (LAD, p. 12). Furthermore, they justify their mania in terms drawn from Eliade. Tribal time is nonprogressive, cyclic, since the paradigm is the myth of the eternal return. But Western time is linear, as unnatural as any purely straight line in nature, and demands a complete end someday. The rocket's parabola provides a connection between the two conceptions; it is a cycle cut off, stopped midway, unable to swoop down and return again. “They calculate no cycles, no returns, they are in love with the glamour of a whole people's suicide …” (p. 318).¹²

Brown traces some of our most unpleasant symbolic associations back to early Protestantism and its peculiar origins. For Luther, an entire moral complex of anal repulsions associating blackness, excrement, and death was cathected by his special concept of the Devil—traditionally the Black Man, and seen by later fundamentalists in the Negro. The explanation of the Schwarzkommando offered to his colleagues by Gavin Trefoil of the psychoanalytic wing of Psi Section exhibits the same insight as Brown's “Studies in Anality”: “He had not meant to offend sensibilities, only to show the others, decent fellows all, that their feelings about blackness were tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about putrefaction and death. It seemed to him so clear … why wouldn't they listen? Why wouldn't they admit that their repressions had, in a sense that Europe in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic has lost, had incarnated real and living men …” (pp. 276-77; first ellipsis Pynchon's). Now in context this is both dramatic—and to that extent provisional—and wildly comic; but it is nevertheless as close as we are likely to come to the meaning of the whites' relation to the blacks in the novel.

This fact is reinforced by the narrator's analysis of Slothrop's subconscious attitude toward blacks. We are introduced to Slothrop's elitist inheritance in the sodium amytal session set up by PISCES, in which Slothrop fantasizes an encounter with the historical Malcolm X “in the men's room at the Roseland Ballroom” in Boston (p. 63). Slothrop's Orpheus-like trip down the toilet in pursuit of his “harp” is a descent into a comic-Jungian underworld of white stereotypes about blacks, and tells us more about Slothrop's Puritan ancestors and their living presence in contemporary racism than about friendly Slothrop as an individual—though it's part of the point that he is his past. The journey through the shit-encrusted sewer (pp. 62-67) suggests also that the entire following action of the novel is going to take place in a hell of white Protestant fears and obsessions. This is finally made explicit in one of the disjointed episodes near the end of the novel when the narrator returns to the subject of Slothrop's racist background and spells out its psychoanalytic meaning, just in case we had missed the point:

Well there's one place where Shit ‘n’ Shinola do come together, and that's in the men's toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet. … Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That's what that white toilet's for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet's the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain's the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm's in the toilet slappin' on the Shinola, working off whiteman's penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit ‘n’ Shinola.

(p. 688)

Scatology, some of it funny and some not so funny, is merely the most obvious evidence of Pynchon's adherence to the psychoanalytic theory; yet it deserves attention, for it takes us to the heart of his moral vision. Anyone reading for the first time of Brigadier Pudding's coprophagous submission to his own Domina Nocturna in the form of Katje is understandably stunned. The passage is an incredible tour de force, as powerful as anything in the novel, and it hardly needs comment: the “open copy of Krafft-Ebing” (p. 232) the Brigadier passes on his way to the tryst nearly tells it all. Pudding's anal-intellectual obsession with the “long pathology” of the European balance of power (p. 77) is matched on the emotional level by the sexual organizations resulting from his battlefield traumas as a pawn in that game. As he champs down on Katje's turd, “thinking of a Negro's penis,” the most overwhelming anal-erotic experience of his life comes back to him in all its original intensity: “It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem” (p. 235). The members of the Pulitzer advisory board who thought Pynchon was doing this merely to shock have a long way to go.¹³

The reductio ad absurdum of the political and scientific drive for knowledge and dominance occurs when the Schwarzkommando, intent on solving the mystery of the Schwarzgerät, go looking for onetime rocket engineer Horst Achtfaden, and find him on a most strange naval vessel: “The Rücksichtslos itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism [than Nazi racism]: that of the specialist. This vessel here is a Toilet-ship, a triumph of the German mania for subdividing” (p. 448). Pynchon is continually aware of that commonplace of intellectual history, that Germany was the home of the scientific method on a large scale (see also LB, p. 198). And his presentation of character as based in sexual orientation accords with Brown's postulate that all our mental operations are extrapolations of our sexual organizations.

The central figure in Pynchon's attack on the anal-erotic character of science conceived as a program of dominance (of others and of nature) is Pointsman—whom we first encounter, appropriately enough, with his foot in a toilet bowl (p. 42). Pointsman represents everything from the mad scientist of the pop media to the “B-mod” enthusiasts who currently infest the classrooms of America. In a less secular age he could even be Faustus, his intellectual progenitor; as the curse of “the Book” approaches ever closer he feels the ancestral impulse: “Yes, recant, grovel, oh fabulous—but before whom? Who's listening?” (p. 140). Devoted to mechanistic interpretations of linear cause and effect, Pointsman is unable to appreciate the nondeterminist implications of Roger Mexico's specialty, statistics. Mexico seems oblivious to the old pieties, is perhaps unaware “that in his play he wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. What if Mexico's whole generation have turned out like this? Will Post-war be nothing but ‘events,’ newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?” (p. 56). In the novel's rainbow spectrum of sexual orientations, the behaviorist is naturally the onanist: masturbation is a perfect model of controlled stimulus-response. As interesting as the justice of the sexual mechanism is the nature of Pointsman's one exclusive erotic fantasy. Cock in fist, does he visualize forties-style pinup girls? “Here's an erection stirring, he'll masturbate himself to sleep again tonight. A joyless constant, an institution in his life. But goading him, just before the bright peak, what images will come whirling in? Why, the turrets and blue waters, the sails and churchtops of Stockholm …” (p. 141). No, his sexual organization is dominated by a deferred anticipation of receiving the Nobel prize; and when he does have sex with a woman the effect is weak and dribbling, nothing compared to his self-induced orgasms (cf. pp. 169, 143).

“An organism whose own sexual life is as disordered as man's is in no position to construct objective theories about the Yin and the Yang and the sex life of the universe” (LAD, p. 317). Pointsman's self-repression is as violent as it is massive, and it requires a control of self as great as that he hopes to impose on others. Seeking a physiological basis for all human behavior, he meets his nemesis in Slothrop, whose apparent control of the V-2 strikes is the author's most telling joke on the Western fetish of cause and effect. (“Events are related to other events not by causality, but by analogy and correspondence,” LB, p. 209.) In the face of such an imponderable, Pointsman cracks up, triggering the narrator's major statement in refutation of determinism (see p. 275). His mental disturbance takes the form, fitly enough, of schizo-phrenia. In an earlier discussion with Mexico, Pointsman had denounced Pierre Janet's mystical tendencies: “The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish” (p. 88). Now he hears a voice in his head, his inner opposite, telling him the way to retain Mexico's services as funding gets tighter is to commit the despicably evil act of having Jessica, Roger's love, secretly transferred out. The chapter ends with Pointsman in total confusion: “‘Yang and Yin,’ whispers the Voice, ‘Yang and Yin … ’” (p. 278; Pynchon's ellipsis).

The repressed also returns in the form of various Oedipal conflicts, and these become more numerous as the novel proceeds. This topic is given comic treatment in the story of young Otto Gnahb (whose first name is the same as that of Otto Rank, who, Brown notes, “went so far as to claim that the traumatic experience of birth is the cause of neurosis,” LAD, p. 114). Brown explains how in Freud's deepest formulations of the Oedipal conflict Mother and Father are really interchangeable (LAD, p. 126 and passim), so that little Otto's theory of the Mother Conspiracy (GR, p. 505; see also “the story about the kid who hates kreplach,” p. 737) is thematically continuous with Slothrop's more classic conflict: “… there is a villian here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager's own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that” (p. 674). In one of the most brilliant twists of the plot, Slothrop discovers that he has been literally sold by his father to an international cartel (for Jamf's experimental purposes) “like a side of beef” (p. 286). Pynchon wants us to know, if we don't already, that we have all been sold by our father-figure authorities to commercial interests, though in ways perhaps once removed. (I suspect that Pynchon was also thinking about the impact of the draft at the time he was writing.) We are afforded a glimpse (p. 682) of Slothrop's mother, Naline, making an apparently sincere effort to return her son to the “safety” of America; but we know that subconsciously her real intent is to practice even more refined tortures on her offspring. Slothrop's suspicion of her (as of Broderick) is more justified than Otto's of Frau Gnahb. With both parents Slothrop's fears are not just projections; though, as Freud insisted, whether such fears are generated by fact or fantasy is irrelevant to the nature of the complex. Furthermore, Jamf's conditioning of the infant Tyrone functions as a metaphor for the Oedipal mechanism: a curse that dates from his unconscious childhood, which he cannot escape and of which he is not even aware, and that impels him toward compulsive and retributive genital contacts.

The climax to all this comes right at the end of the novel when the metaphor of the Zone is applied to the entirety of present-day America—America, which has always had a special propensity for the Oedipal conflict. In this vision Weissmann, having now attained archetypal status, appears as

the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail.

(p. 747)

By presenting the matter in these terms, Pynchon is in effect following Brown's command: “Go down and stay down, in the forbidden zone; a descent into hell” (LB, p. 241).

In this chapter on “Sexuality and Childhood” Brown discusses the theory that “the pattern of normal adult sexuality (in Freud's terminology, genital organization) is a tyranny of one component in infantile sexuality, a tyranny which suppresses some of the other components altogether and subordinates the rest to itself” (LAD, p. 27). And he develops this insight to argue that genital organization is constructed by the death instinct. In other words, our adult concentration on the end pleasure of genital organization is viewed as a direct product of those particular Western neuroses that are reflected in our social environment, characterized as it is by commerce, technology, and war. In every important case, sexual behavior in GR conforms to the social criticism implied in this theory. There is no totally healthy sex in the novel because the characters are all participating willingly in a society committed to the death instinct. Each of the sexual oddities is traceable to some peculiarly Western social perversion. While homosexuality is not viewed as abnormal per se (see p. 616), all its manifestations within the novel's time frame are viewed as distinctly perverse, and all the other conceivable “deviations” are labeled as such.¹⁴ Literary-romantic considerations cause Pynchon to soften his criticism in the case of Roger and Jessica's heterosexual affair, but repression triumphs as Roger comes to admit that “Jessica believes Them” (p. 628). The burden of the Roger-Jessica subplot is not so much the limitations of genital organization as Freud's observation that “There is no longer any place in present-day civilized life for a simple natural love between two human beings” (LAD, p. 141).

According to the term Brown takes from Freud, children are polymorphously perverse: nothing is unnatural to them. Slothrop has a childlike animality about him that would seem to make him an exception to the general repression. But Slothrop is a complex character, because, like most other American protagonists, he is at once in and out of society, both programmed and unrepressed. Actually it is Slothrop who carries the full curse of genital organization. His epic genital capacity derives directly from his mysterious link with the charismatic, phallic rocket (symbolic of technology) and, as we should expect, proceeds in inverse proportion to his capacity for spiritual love—which is nil. His only romantic attachment, to Katje, is grotesque, given what the reader knows about her that Slothrop does not. His coupling with the child Bianca does not extend his sexual range; in fact, in the act he imagines himself “inside his own cock,” like Gottfried in the rocket, and his orgasm is the blast-off: “Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?” (p. 470). Slothrop, we learn, is an extension of the rocket; it may even be that his penis has been replaced or grafted with Imipolex G. Genital (which could be what that G stands for) organization is for Slothrop precisely a tyranny; the penis he thought was his own really belongs to the Firm, or perhaps to father Broderick, who first sold it to the Firm: “In genital organization we identify with the penis; but the penis we are is not our own, but daddy's …” (LB, p. 57). The larger issue is indicated by the formulation of Bruno Bettelheim, another theorist cited approvingly by Brown: “Only with phallic psychology did aggressive manipulation of nature by technological inventions become possible” (LAD, p. 280). Western man bred technology out of his drive to dominance—sexual, social, and material—and now the Frankenstein monster returns to dominate man's sexual fantasies and functions, narrowing them to the exclusively genital.¹⁵

IV

Under conditions of general repression we cannot hope to escape the returns of our negations or of our assertions. The villain is nothing less than human nature itself, and the diseased rationality it employs. As with the “dream of annihilation” in V., there is a horrid secret at the center of GR, a secret that the narrator hesitates to reveal directly because it sounds mad; it can never be proved, only felt. But the idea is simple: man's uniqueness in the creation is a function of his sickness, of the fact that he is the one true aberration in nature. Geli Tripping, self-styled witch, is permitted a vision of this central horror.

… human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an over-peaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally.

(p. 720; opening ellipsis Pynchon's)

Unable to be satisfied with simply being here, being alive, collective man, through repression both personal and social-historical, has pursued the death instinct nearly to the extreme of sacrificing all nature to the logic of his compulsion.

Geli's vision shares a chapter (pp. 717-24, IV, “The Counterforce”) with a chronologically and narratively unrelated episode, Blicero's farewell monologue to Gottfried on the eve of the sacrificial firing of Rocket 00000. (Since Blicero's gesture takes place long before the other stories conclude, the narrator introduces it in snatches where it seems most effective.) Germany's and Blicero's hopes for the ultimate dominance are about to be shattered by America, which was, when first found by the white man (as Blicero propounds), “A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. … America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it” (p. 722). Europe is to be punished for the sin of negation, exclusion, but ironically America the punisher presents an identical face of dominance: not better, but more powerful. Blicero finds that the enemy is like himself, and merciless. “American Death has come to occupy Europe” (p. 722). European man is humiliated by his own specter.

This chapter is the thematic apex of the novel's flight. The vision and the monologue, thus “framed” by their own set of sprocket holes, are segued together in one narrative rush that blurs them into a single comment. Though Geli's vision, at least, falls within a loose order of events, the two scenes, like everything else in the novel, could have come anywhere. But thematically they belong together, and here at the end of the book, because they state, as directly as the narrator ever dares, the ultimate significance of the entire action. They are dramatic enough to complement what we know of Geli and Blicero and discursive enough to qualify as commentary on the final unfolding of the action.

V

The end of GR is, in ordinary terms, pessimistic: the Counterforce fails, Slothrop is lost, Blicero's romantic affirmation offers only sterility and death, the Schwarzkommando are eliminated from history, the bomb falls on us all in Los Angeles, the world ends. The expressions of hope along the way have been few; but Pynchon does recognize, as a minor character puts it, the possibility “that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History” (p. 540). Dialectics, in fact, becomes the charm Pynchon holds up, as he finished his novel, against the vampire logic of one-way time; and this is precisely the straw at which Brown grasps for the conclusion of LAD. A culture committed to the reality principle is presided over by Thanatos, the death instinct. Yet Eros still lives, and, if a dialectic can be established between Eros and Death, some way of finding each in the other, there is hope. Brown defines dialectics as “an activity of consciousness struggling to circumvent the limitations imposed by the formal-logical law of contradiction” (LAD, pp. 318-19). According to the Aristotelian law of contradiction nothing can be, or be in, its opposite. Either a thing is A, or it is not-A. If A, then not not-A. It is in the nature of the law of contradiction to negate. And the law of contradiction is a close description of Calvinist dualism: things are divided into two separate and opposite categories and then pushed apart, polarized as much as possible. “We may therefore entertain the hypothesis that formal logic and the law of contradiction are the rules whereby the mind submits to operate under general conditions of repression” (LAD, p. 321). Dialectical consciousness, on the other hand, would be “the struggle of the mind to circumvent repression and make the unconscious conscious”; it would be “a manifestation of Eros”; and it would be “a step toward that Dionysian ego which does not negate any more” (LAD, pp. 321-22).

Throughout GR Pynchon pits dialectical consciousness against the dead hand of dualism. Dialectical reality receives notable expression in the vision of primal unity attributed to the non-Westerners and associated with the natural world as it existed prior to Western consciousness. Enzian, who reconciles in his person the antinomies of black and white, is obsessed with the idea of return. Eliade's “myth of the eternal return” is in fact a religion of dialectics. For Enzian in his youth, still in Africa, “God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including black and white, male and female …” (p. 100; Pynchon's ellipsis). Because of his unique position, Enzian comes closer than anyone else in the novel to fulfilling the traditional role of hero. (His opposite is Blicero, another kind of specifically romantic hero.) Later, speeding (in two complementary senses) through the German night, paranoid about technology, Enzian thinks, “Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom” (p. 525).¹⁶

As a matter of esthetics, the dialectical impulse common to Pynchon and Brown is evidenced mainly in their increasing reliance on metaphor and symbolism. Brown escapes the logical difficulties of LAD by shifting in LB to the abstract realms of transcendental mysticism; and toward the end of GR Pynchon escapes the strictures of his realistic story line by increasingly fading into surrealism and thematic fancy, playing variations on themes already established. Brown, however, uses the term “symbolism” in rather special ways. As he puts it in the chapter on “Unity,” “Symbolism is mind making connections (correspondences) rather than distinctions (separations). Symbolism makes conscious interconnections and unions that were unconscious and repressed. Freud says, symbolism is on the track of a former identity, a lost unity …” (LB, pp. 81-82). In other words, Brown's symbolism is conceptual and associative.

Pynchon employs this sort of symbolism, and he is also interested in what the symbol-making impulse tells us about human nature. The runaway symbolism in GR (e.g., the double S) sometimes just points to Pynchon's favorite notion that all of reality is invariably a mental construct. If we take the specific constructions too seriously, not only do we miss the point, we become the point. There is a neat correlation between the omnibus feminine symbolism of the mons veneris in V. and the omnibus masculine symbolism of the rocket in GR; but the hopeless paranoid projections that impel the endless quests of V. should serve as warning. The subject is not the “meaning” of the symbol but our very Western propensity to seek meaning, to project it into the most empty vaginal void, if necessary. On another tack, the lapses into surrealism in GR (e.g., the pie-throwing episode, pp. 332-36) operate as confirmations of the inadequacy of a perceptual structure based on the reality principle, and the same goes for the thematic use of drugs and movie-director talk. “Upside down. Not the reality-principle but surrealism. Surrealism, a systematic illumination of the hidden places and a progressive darkening of the rest; a perpetual promenade right in the forbidden zone” (LB, p. 241).

Pynchon is also trying to say something about the ultimate illusion, which most of us are not yet ready to accept as such, the illusion of personality. Brown insists that “psychic individuals” are “an illusion” (LB, p. 82) and that “The inner voice, the personal salvation, the private experience are all based on an illusory distinction” (LB, p. 87). In GR the illusory nature of the phenomenal world and the transparency of the individual are evidenced by dreams and archetypes, among other means. “Symbolical consciousness is the interpretation of dreams, of this life as a dream” (LB, p. 218). GR begins with Pirate Prentice's dream of an evacuation that is simultaneously a descent into hell. Dreams and dreaming pervade the narrative, to the extent that the line between various waking and sleeping, conscious and unconscious, states is instructively blurred.¹⁷ And Pynchon would agree that “there is only one psyche, a general possession of mankind” (LB, p. 86), with the reservation that archetypes themselves seem to be to some extent culturally determined. Recent “black humor” fiction in general displays a surprising lack of interest in that pastime of the fifties, the identity crisis or search. Some critics complain that Pynchon's characters are merely conceptual, two-dimensional.¹⁸ But this objection makes sense only in terms of more traditional fictional paradigms requiring that characters have absolute psychological coherence (i.e., that they be like Shakespeare's). Pynchon's treatment of Slothrop, for instance, seems to follow Brown's formula (itself traditionally Christian): “The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost” (LB, p. 161).

Symbolism in GR also takes the form of “signs,” especially of the sort dear to the early Calvinists, for whom nature was God's book, and every natural object or occurrence appeared as evidence of a spiritual state or allegorical lesson. Here for once Pynchon is in sympathy with Slothrop's ancestors, and with all the idealists throughout history who have thought that, even if the external world is real, and not just God's movie, we can have no direct knowledge of it, so that the only “rational” way to approach the world is to view it as a system of symbols relating to inner states or spiritual realities. “Everything is symbolic, everything is holy” (LB, p. 239). Everything is a sign, nothing is “real.” In the modern wasteland, with all the monotheistic gods dead and Pan still suppressed, the signs are evidence of spiritual waste. Slothrop learns to read the signs of the times in public graffiti (see pp. 623-26 and 733-34).

One unstated metaphor is that of the book itself as rocket flight. It begins with a V-2 going up over the Channel and ends with an ICBM falling on Los Angeles, and the final section (all of “The Counterforce,” or at least from p. 674 to the end) disintegrates into flying fragments like a rocket exploding, ending, like all such charismatic events, with a loud and resonant silence. Matter and manner are thus joined, fused by the white-hot heat of intellect. Yet this fusion is accompanied by a special sort of tension, located in the reader and generated by Pynchon's deliberate stepping-up of the degree of surrealism to an almost intolerable level. This tension is finally dissipated in the fear and pity of Gottfried's sacrifice, in our recognition of the religious-romantic meaning of Blicero's final gesture—and in the sobering realization that we too have been sacrificed, that in a real sense our end has already been spelled out.

Two specific factors create tension in the reader: violations of historical chronology and the progressive disintegration of the narrative into chaos. The fiction of linear time is fruitfully violated by reminiscences of American adolescence and by snatches of media and street experience in Los Angeles from the period the novel was being written. For example, the sequence of pages 674-81 is a surrealistic vision of adolescent Tyrone's Boston (or is it L.A.?), rocket city-state of the future, as reification in media terms of all of America's Oedipal conflicts and accumulations. Freud saw the Oedipal conflict as the basis of human culture, and McLuhan showed how the media have become a collective central nervous system. The combination is explosive. In the final movement Pynchon is gravely attempting to compose sequences “forever beyond the reach, the rape, of literal-minded explication” (LB, p. 264). One way is to load the narrative with more fresh, evanescent suggestiveness than it can bear. Brown's chapter on “Freedom” provides many pregnant recommendations: “A symbol is never a symbol but always polysymbolic, overdetermined, polymorphous. Freedom is fertility; a proliferation of images, in excess. The seed must be sown wastefully, extravagantly. Too much, or not enough; overdetermination is determination made into chance; chance and determination reconciled. Too much meaning is meaning and absurdity reconciled” (LB, pp. 248-49).

Another weighty means of blowing up the narrative (thereby forcing the reader to take up the burden of meaning personally, or give up) is “to reconnect words with silence; to let the silence in” (LB, p. 258). Brown and Pynchon are both fighting “Against gravity; against the gravity of literalism, which keeps our feet on the ground” (LB, p. 259). The solution advocated in the final chapter of LB, “Nothing,” is silence: “Get the nothingness back into words. The aim is words with nothing to them; words that point beyond themselves rather than to themselves; transparencies, empty words. Empty words, corresponding to the void in things” (LB, p. 259). The stakes are high, the goals many: a purgation and cleansing, setting the stage for a fresh start; repealing repression, annihilating all inhibitions; and, the sine qua non, making the unconscious conscious.

“The real meaning of the last days is Pentecost” (LB, p. 220). In the final movement Pynchon speaks in tongues, and the model is von Göll, surrealistically framed in his own movie sitting on “an unusually large infant's training toilet,” high on sodium amytal:

“Through evil and eagles,” blithers the Springer, “the climate blondes its way, for they are no strength under the coarse war. No not for roguery until the monitors are there in blashing sheets of earth to mate and say medoshnicka bleelar medoometnozz in bergamot and playful fantasy under the throne and nose of the least merciful king. …”

(p. 746; Pynchon's ellipsis)

Like all the concluding weirdness of GR, this is and is not nonsense. A great deal can be read into these lines, and the wonderful thing is that it cannot all be determined, that each of us is free to bring his or her offerings of paranoia and solipsism. “The Babylonian confusion of tongues redeemed in the Pentecostal fusion. Many meanings dwelling together in unity; because it is the unspoken meaning that they mean” (LB, p. 253).

The tension generated by the final section—between the reader's expectations for literary endings and the author's determination to defeat those expectations—is itself a paradigm of the dialectical imagination. The choice is between, on the one hand, an artifice completed, fixed, and therefore dead and, on the other, the pulse of life; and the synthesis of elements is an art form, the novel genre itself, brought back to life. A similar dialectical tension exists in an absolute sense between style and content in this novel. The content affirms death, since it tells the truth: that we are all like Slothrop, who is “in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race's, death” (p. 738). The style affirms life, since the intuitive basis of that marvelously poetic and spontaneous prose is the author's own enactment of what Brown calls “an erotic sense of reality” (LB, p. 81). The nihilism of GR is only apparent; it is actually anarchy that Pynchon affirms, and the medium is the message. The orgasmic rush—the continual nowness—of Pynchon's present-tense style is a direct transcription of the life instinct. By joyfully embracing and celebrating all the death instincts of Western man in a style of unmediated euphoria, GR dramatizes the perpetual struggle of life against death. And thus we disaffirm the supposed pessimism of GR. The solution is Rilke's, as quoted by Brown: “Whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life” (LAD, p. 108).

Pynchon's style is also his primary evidence against determinism. He shares with most contemporary novelist an obsession with man's freedom; Pointsman represents no idle threat. It is strange how critics keep looking to the mere content of novels for some kind of hope—for confirmation of the old humanistic concept of the self, or for evidence of the resistance of human goodness against the inroads of greed and power, or for some overt moral; whereas, strictly speaking, and from a psychoanalytic point of view, there isn't any hope—certainly not of the kind they entertain. We are all under sentence of death. But Pynchon does have a kind of hope, though like Brown's hope it does not attach to anything in this material-political world. Nothing really matters but individual freedom, and Pynchon knows that the best defense of freedom is not Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, or even dialectics, but the miracle of language itself—language, an irreducibly intuitive symbolic process.

Notes

1. All page references to Gravity's Rainbow are given in the text and are taken from the standard edition (New York: Viking, 1973). The Viking hardcover and paperback versions are the same. I abbreviate Gravity's Rainbow as GR.

2. Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), abbreviated LAD, with all page references to the Wesleyan paperback edition, first printed in March 1970; and Love's Body (New York: Vintage-Random, 1966), abbreviated LB, with all page references to the paperback edition published in 1966.

3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, 1964), p. 18; see also p. 305.

4. Other relevant subplots have to do with Roger Mexico (Pointsman's associate) and Jessica Swanlake, two sides of a love triangle; triple agent Katje Borgesius, an exotic Dutch blond who vamps Slothrop and lets herself be used and abused in various decadent sexual arrangements; “Pirate” Prentice, a British officer whose capacity for fantasy and the dream world provides ominous overtones to the literal action; and a large number of associates in The White Visitation, including “cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians, Couéists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots,” etc. (p. 77). Minor subplots abound.

5. Richard Poirier, perhaps Pynchon's most sensitive critic, puts it well: “If in the structure of his books Pynchon duplicates the intricate networking of contemporary technological, political, and cultural systems, then in the style and its rapid transitions he tries to match the dizzying tempos, the accelerated shifts from one mode of experience to another, which characterize contemporary media and movement” (“Rocket Power,” Saturday Review of the Arts, March 1973, p. 60). This essay is still probably the best general introduction to GR. And it must be credited with providing the seminal suggestion for this study.

6. Edward Mendelson, “Pynchon's Gravity,” The Yale Review, 62 (Summer 1973), 631. Obviously I think that one can add the intervening four years (or even a longer period, though that's not necessary) to this statement and have it still hold true. It's strange, but in reading one gets the feeling that GR somehow qualitatively subsumes everything that has happened since its putative action of 1944-45. Mendelson's more recent essay on GR (“Gravity's Encyclopedia,” in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz [Boston: Little, 1976], pp. 161-95) provides an interesting basis for this feeling in its thesis that GR is not properly a novel at all but an “encyclopedic narrative.”

7. Frederick C. Crews, “Love in the Western World,” Partisan Review, 34, No. 2 (Spring 1967), 272-87. This influential spoiler essay has been reprinted as “Norman O. Brown: The World Dissolves,” in Frederick Crews, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975). Crews, who admits that he was disillusioned by the discovery that Brown is not “true” in a Marxian, positivist sense, complains that “psychoanalysis for Brown is not science but poetic philosophy, just as its harshest critics have always said” (PR, p. 277), and that in all important controversies Brown “never once deviates into petty considerations of evidence” (PR, p. 278).

8. Gravity is also important to Pynchon because it remains one of the most embarrassing mysteries in modern science. No one has yet produced, to everyone's satisfaction, a single set of equations uniting what we now know about gravitational and electromagnetic phenomena. There is no “unified field theory.” Therefore “gravity's rainbow” is also “the beauty of gravity's mystery.” The problem of gravity, in layman's terms, is action at a distance—a favorite of mystics in all ages.

9. Scott Sanders objects that “Pynchon's conspiratorial imagination tends to make our social organization appear even more mysterious than it really is, tends to mystify the relations of power which in fact govern our society” (“Pynchon's Paranoid History,” in Mindful Pleasures, p. 157; this essay was originally published in Twentieth Century Literature, 21, No. 2 [May 1975], 177-92.) Aside from the intriguing question of what “really is,” my analysis should demonstrate that Sanders has seriously misread Pynchon's strategy, partly through an assumption that the novel genre is really a branch of descriptive sociology.

10. Crews rightly stresses this shift, though he is hardly fair in viewing it as a moral transgression on Brown's part; but such is the burden of the reprint's subtitle (“The World Dissolves”) and of his general conclusion: “He eliminates our problems by eliminating us” (PR, p. 286).

11. In his book-length review of Pynchon's works, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1974), Joseph W. Slade gives to Weber something of the same prominence I give to Brown. But Weber's thought is more properly viewed as one more set of background materials for the historical narrative, though at times he is very much in evidence.

12. On p. 732 Enzian comments to the leader of the Empty Ones, Ombindi, “I'm projecting my own death wish, and it comes out looking like you.” And on p. 726 the narrator shouts, “Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only the peak that we are allowed to see. …”

13. The three members of the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction recommended GR unanimously, but the fourteen-member advisory board decided to give no prize for 1973, certain members describing the jury's selection as “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten,” and in parts “obscene” (paraphrased and quoted from the New York Times, 8 May 1974, p. 38). Those who enjoy making paranoid connections (such as the one I made in noting that the date of the Times item just cited is also Pynchon's birthday) should see Mathew Winston's “The Quest for Pynchon,” in Mindful Pleasures. Winston's essay is a judicious and tactful exposition of the major public facts available about a writer who has always displayed an obsessive but quite understandable insistence on his personal privacy. An intimate, firsthand account of Pynchon the man was published by Jules Siegel in Playboy (March 1977) under the title “Who Is Thomas Pynchon … and Why Did He Take Off with My Wife?” Siegel's essay, unfortunately, lacks Winston's taste, but it is nevertheless of biographical significance.

14. In Blicero's monologue, pp. 723-24, Pynchon explicitly equates homosexual love with death and heterosexual love with life. Enzian's attitude toward the word “deviations” is ambivalent (p. 319). He does not like the term, but accepts its use.

15. A corollary of man's capitulation to his own creature (technology) is man's impoverishment of nature. See Webley Silvernail's fantasy of the lab as just a larger maze, and the important elegiac lament that follows, pp. 229-30.

16. Various episodes of the book are illuminated by this view of the novelist as dialectician. Thus, the fundamental intent of the Counterforce (aside from their immediate interest in trying to save Slothrop) is to introduce a dialectical element into the prevailing climate of dualism. Thus the ambivalence of the narrator's concluding attitude toward Slothrop may signal, not confusion on Pynchon's part, but rather a higher unity of opposing views, a conjunction of evaluations mutually exclusive and yet equally “true.” Only the law of contradiction insists that, if Slothrop is saved, he is not not-saved, and vice versa. And my reader can identify many more examples. But, however we interpret the various syntheses, we always return to one truth: “Dialectics rather than dualism is the metaphysic of hope rather than despair” (LAD, p. 84).

17. Mircea Eliade, in Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meaning of Initiation in Human Culture (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 127-28 and passim, establishes that the dream life and unconscious operations in general always express themselves in religious symbols. Thus Slothrop dreams of a woman who is found “at the bottom of the river. She has drowned. But all forms of life fill her womb.” He finds that “This dream will not leave him. He baits his hook, hunkers by the bank, drops his line into the Spree” (p. 447). He has become the Fisher King as described by Eliot, searching for fertility in a land now spiritually sterile. As Brown comments, “to see symbolism is to see eternal recurrence” (LB, p. 200).

18. A revealing example is provided by David Thornburn in “A Dissent on Pynchon,” Commentary, 56 (Sept. 1973), 68-70. He complains that Slothrop is not allowed individuality by his creator, and, if Slothrop is an “emblem” of “all white Americans,” then this answer “defines Slothrop yet again not as an individual but as a member of a class, a mere carrier of meanings outside himself …” (p. 70). The overall objection concerns “Pynchon's failure to allow his characters an imaginative space of their own” (p. 70). There is no answer to this sort of criticism, except that of irrelevance. The real question is whether Pynchon understood the irony of his godlike creation and manipulation of everyone—manipulators and manipulated alike—in a novel so much concerned with questions of free will, determinism, and control. I think that in writing he did understand this irony and that he and his fragmented narrative persona play on it in numerous ways—though to establish this properly would take far more space than I have here. But I also think that the particular romantic esthetic of this novel dictated that such formal concerns as this not be very central to the novel's purpose.