SOURCE: McHugh, Patrick. “Cultural Politics, Postmodernism, and White Guys: Affect in Gravity's Rainbow.” College Literature 28, no. 2 (spring 2001): 1-28.

[In the following essay, McHugh examines Pynchon's construction of white male identity in Gravity's Rainbow.]

You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him.

(Barthelme 1975, 179)

Published in 1973 and steeped in the politics of altered states and alternative consciousness, Gravity's Rainbow foregrounds the political question central to debates in the 60s between the counterculture and the New Left: Does alternative cultural practice lead to change in social history? Can culture transform patriarchy? Capitalism? Western civilization? In the years since its publication, Gravity's Rainbow has become canonized in the academy as a classic postmodern novel because its disrupted narrative conventions, its indeterminate epistemology, and its countercultural politics anticipate, indeed, influence later theories of postmodernism. However, Gravity's Rainbow does not live by cultural politics alone. More ambitiously, it focuses on the emotions of cultural politics. Both a comedy of radicalized consciousness and a tragedy of that radicalized consciousness's inability to change an unjust political and economic system, it engages the joy and the terror of cultural resistance to social injustice. In contrast to prevailing conceptions of postmodernism, Gravity's Rainbow articulates a complex, historically resonant, and surprisingly intense affect.

More specifically, Gravity's Rainbow articulates the affect particular to white male postmodernism. The white male characters of the novel occupy a uniquely conflicted position within the cultural politics of resistance. In one way, these white guys are victims like everyone else of the forces of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. Yet unlike everyone else, of course, the forces of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism grant privilege to white guys. Moreover, the patriarchal ritual of succession happens precisely through (oedipal) resistance. Thus the question of cultural politics for white guys in the novel, especially the naive young Ivy Leaguer Tyrone Slothrop, is how to resist without this resistance itself becoming a form of complicity and perpetuation. Again, Gravity's Rainbow clarifies this by now familiar postmodern conflict, but more remarkably clarifies the emotional experience of this conflict. The white male characters of the counterculture, especially Slothrop, move between the pleasures of a hippie-style resistance to “The Man” and the paranoia that such “resistance” is yet another manifestation of the power of “The Man.” In terms of later debates on postmodernism, Gravity's Rainbow's white male characters help clarify the emotional experience of liberation and its limits proper to postmodern critiques of representation.

Gravity's Rainbow's innovative narrative form re-creates this emotional experience for its readers. It explores cultural politics within a multi-layered, discontinuous collection of narratives that are often boisterous, preposterous, and slapstick. The novel always retains concrete historical reality as its referent, but it presents history in grotesque characterizations and cartoonish allegorical plots punctuated by disruptive digressions and an often-playful mocking narrative voice. Thus the terrors of history, specifically of the Cold War, get displaced by the pleasures of the narrative. The political implication is that culture can transform history, indeed that pleasure can transform history, which echoes credos from the 60s and from postmodernism. Yet Gravity's Rainbow also signals in Marxist fashion the material limits to this cultural politics. Thematically, it marks the complicity of the cultural resistance of its characters, again specifically its white male characters, with the forces of capitalism and patriarchy. Structurally, it reminds its readers of the concrete historical and political limits to such cultural pleasures as reading.

I.

Gravity's Rainbow is in large part organized around the question of countercultural politics. Virtually all the zany plots and subplots involve the issue of how cultural practice shapes material reality. From fairy tales to pornographic films, from drug-induced hallucinations to the experience of other people's fantasies, from the lessons of games and toys to the magical spell of the words “fuck you,” the novel explores forms of language, discourse, and culturally determined significance. The issue is power. Which ones can shape material reality? Which ones cannot? What are the social consequences of this play of power? And how can that play be changed in order to save the world from apocalypse? During the 60s, listening to different music, wearing different clothes, or doing drugs not only defied cultural norms, but heralded an altogether new order of being. Flowers or free love would stop the missiles by changing the consciousness of the missile makers. With affiliations to Heideggerian ontology and connections to the cultural politics of postmodernism, 60s radicalism sought social change not through political activism alone but also through cultural revolution. Thus the novel's incessant forays “beyond the zero” into the more intangible and spiritual dimensions of cultural practice serve to emphasize its concerns with cultural politics.

This cultural politics, of course, like the cultural politics of resistance in the 60s and in postmodernism, presents with the clarity of a melodrama the contours of its central conflict. On one side, an oppressive and hegemonic “System” serving an elite or “Elect” “They” is coercing the entire planet toward military apocalypse. On the other side, a victimized, mostly powerless, and likeablely human “preterite” “us” attempts in varying ways and with varying degrees of manic euphoria and desperate futility to counter the apocalyptic momentum of the System. This melodrama is, of course, historically recognizable. Referring generally to the terror of the Cold War, it conveys the resistance of the radicalized 60s to the status quo, especially to the nuclear madness of U.S. military policy. Despite its WWII setting, then, the indisputable central conflict is not between Allied and Axis powers. Nor, despite the obvious Cold War tension, is it between NATO and the Eastern Bloc. Nor even, despite the exploration of African, Asian, and Latin American politics of liberation, is it between Eurocentric peoples and those they colonized. The significant conflict happens “elsewhere,” between the “System” and those of all stripe and affiliation who choose to resist it.

This melodrama features a villain familiar to the 60s and even more familiar to postmodernism: White men in power, or more especially the discourse that establishes and maintains that power. On “Their” side, Nazi rocket science and its Cold War legacy evoke a familiar version of totalitarian evil. In Gravity's Rainbow, this “evil” comes across as originally a cultural phenomenon: the historical determination of a way of thinking deeply rooted in the traditions, the institutions, and the individuals of western patriarchal society. This cultural context is most clear with the Nazi director of the rocket program, Weissmann or “white man,” also known as Blecheröd or Blicero, the “bleacher” who turns everything white. He is dressed out with an assortment of features consistent with the more strident postmodern analyses of the western metaphysical tradition. His idea of uniting the German people is depicted, especially in the plight of the scientist Franz Pökler, as an exercise of power achieved through a subjugating discourse of coercion and exclusion. Weissmann's use of science to foster destruction suggests a postmodern critique of the ontological and epistemological violence of the Enlightenment. His enactment of the Hansel and Gretel story as a sadistic sex game and his sadistic sexual history with Enzian of the colonized African Herraros indicate a phallocentric European sexuality unconsciously fixated on domination, pain, and cruelty. Above all, Weissmann's desire for transcendence through the destructive flight of the Rocket itself indicates a configuration of discourse and desire whose trajectory is apocalyptic. In short, through Weissmann, Gravity's Rainbow develops a 60s/postmodern critique in which social inequities and the threat of global annihilation point to the patriarchal discourse and desire of the White Man.

The Allied opposition to the Nazis is similarly governed by a culture of domination. As Virginia Woolf put it before the war, the Allies in the novel “out-fascist the fascists.” White guys from Britain and the U.S. in particular are, in Gravity's Rainbow, driven by a flattened technological version of the Enlightenment whereby the earth and its people are resources to be used for the purposes of those in power. Here Pointsman is Weissmann's counterpart. The real power at “The White Visitation,” he directs the research at PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender) by manipulating funding, patients, colleagues, and assorted employees. A devotee of Pavlov, he sees the world through a binary logic of stimulus and response, on and off, cause and effect, the logic of western metaphysics reduced to the precise calculations of machines. Moreover, for Pointsman and PISCES, this science of the psyche, this Enlightenment faith that the order of numbers lies behind not only nature but also human nature, seeks less to explain than control. Indeed, the object at PISCES is to discover and master the “control inside.” Thus Pointsman exemplifies the approach to social control prevalent in capitalist democracies. Unlike the overt coercion of Weissmann and the Nazis, also unlike the Big Brother supervision that Tchitcherine, Franz Pökler's Russian counterpart, suffers from his Soviet superiors, Pointsman pursues “hegemony” in the Gramscian sense. In Western countries, people are led to choose their own repression, mistaking mass social-psychological manipulation as the exercise of personal and political freedom. Like Weissmann, then, Pointsman desires control; but he has none of Weissmann's Germanic passion for metaphysical transcendence, and his means of control is not fascist coercion. Rather, he exemplifies a more Anglo-American, pragmatic, hegemonic, capitalist desire for the “control inside.”

This focus on the “control inside” is most evident in Pointsman's treatment of the American counterpart to Pökler and Tchitcherine, Tyrone Slothrop, who is the closest thing in the novel to a main character aside from the Rocket itself. In this allegorical story line, what draws Pointsman is Slothrop's strange secret connection to the Rocket. As Pointsman and PISCES discover, the map of London indicating places where the Rocket has landed corresponds exactly to the map of London on which Slothrop indicates with stars the places of his sexual liaisons (real or imagined). What's more, as the narrative eventually reveals, the infant Slothrop was the object of secret research at Harvard. Lazlo Jamf, a visiting German scientist, in collusion with Slothrop's father and uncle, conditioned, in classic Pavlovian manner of stimulus and response, the infant Slothrop to get an erection in the presence of a newly developed plastic, Imoplex G. This same plastic turns out to be the key element in the Rocket's guidance system. Aware of Slothrop's history, Pointsman focuses on the apparent reversal of cause and effect, stimulus and response, Slothrop's sexual response before the arrival of the plastic-guided Rocket. Pointsman marshals considerable institutional resources in an elaborate scheme to unlock and master the potentially awesome power of Slothrop's apparent capacity to control the Rocket.

Both Weissmann and Pointsman follow in the tradition of European discourse, particularly of the Enlightenment, which is the prime target in Gravity's Rainbow of its cultural politics, not least because Enlightenment discourse has demonstrated its power to shape material reality.¹ Like many dystopian critiques of Enlightenment, though in a decidedly cartoonish Luddite melodrama, Gravity's Rainbow presents the nightmare of a hyper-technological society made possible by a discourse concerned only with calculation and control, the empty purity of number, the mechanical certainty of binary thought. The novel presents the “materiality” of Enlightenment discourse in at least four crucial ways, each reflecting Luddite perceptions of technology. 1) Pavlovian conditioning indicates the power of Enlightenment discourse to control human behavior, including something as ostensibly natural as sexuality. 2) The centrality of plastic indicates the power of human discourse to shape material reality at the molecular level, transforming natural carbon arrangements into something not only artificial but also malleable and manipulable. 3) The political form of this technological vision is rationally organized social oppression, the apotheosis of which is of course the Nazi death camps, whose historical reality haunts the novel. 4) More immediate in the novel is the Cold War terror of nuclear apocalypse. Enlightenment discourse has gained the power to transform material reality at the sub-atomic level and as a result to destroy all life on the planet with the simple, binary, on/off push of a button.

II.

Through Slothrop's efforts to escape Pointsman's control and uncover for himself his connection to the Rocket, Gravity's Rainbow explores a number of forms of cultural resistance that could be considered postmodern, from avant-garde transgression and its “liberation ontology” to an exploration of the culture of various “others.” In each of these explorations, Slothrop sets the oedipal pattern for white guys, in which every attempt to escape or resist is either evidence of the White Man's control or, worse, complicity with the White Man's power. Other white guys in the novel, notably Roger Mexico who joins the “counterforce,” further solidify this pattern of necessary but futile resistance. More powerfully still, this pattern in the novel is not restricted to white guys. Despite exclusion from and victimization by the patriarchal power exemplified by the Rocket, its technology, and its underlying sexuality, none of the non-white or non-male characters has any more success than Slothrop in resisting the Rocket. Gravity's Rainbow shows both the possibilities for freedom opened by cultural resistance, but also the limits to freedom and resistance. That is, in the end, no form of countercultural politics in Gravity's Rainbow escapes the limits of critique and complicity.²

At the outset in his fight against “The Man,” Slothrop seeks freedom through a countercultural politics of rebellion and pleasure, pleasure in rebellion, transgression. Always a bit of a rogue, he becomes explicitly rebellious, indeed AWOL, when he confirms his paranoid suspicions that he is the object of “Their” experiment for control of the Rocket. Assigned to the Casino Hermann Goerring on the French Riviera, told to study plans of the Rocket, and presented with the beautiful Katje, Slothrop is observed by Pointsman's crew who seek to unlock the secret of the link between the Rocket and Slothrop's sexuality. Learning of the experiment, Slothrop takes off at the earliest opportunity, donning a zoot suit, 40s symbol of rebellion, and heading off into the Zone to escape “Their” control. Soon learning of “Their” earlier patriarchal programming of his infantile sexuality, he decides to discover for himself the truth about his penis and the Rocket. Thus Slothrop sets out on a mock quest for freedom and self-knowledge, which exemplifies what Andreas Huyssen calls 1960s avant-garde postmodernism (1986). It is avant-garde in its challenge to conventions, postmodern in its embrace of the popular, and recognizably 60s in its effort to take its countercultural politics into the public sphere.

Throughout his quest, Slothrop enjoys the pleasures of avant-garde cultural resistance to social authority by exploring the forbidden delights of the Zone outside “Their” control. A Massachusetts hipster in the post-Hitler German Zone, Slothrop hooks up with revolutionaries, drug dealers, smugglers, and others living in the seams of power. He trades his zoot suit first for the garb of “ace reporter” Ian Scuffling, then for the uniform of Rocketman, daring superhero of the cultural revolution, who facilitates drug deals, trades in contraband and counterfeit cash, and “Leaps broad highways in a single bound!” (Pynchon 1973, 380). A major part of Slothrop's pleasure in the counterculture is of course libidinal frenzy. Slothrop encounters all manner of women ready and willing to take him into their bed (or wherever). He moves from one sexual encounter to another across the Zone, ending up finally in an orgy on board the Anubis, ship of decadence sporting pornographic movie stars, European royalty, and all manners of sexual combinations. Thus Slothrop's sex and drug trek combines pleasure and transgression acted out in the fashion of the postmodern avant-garde, in the public sphere, at times in direct confrontation with the authorities.

In Gravity's Rainbow, however, this countercultural politics has limits. Slothrop's antics challenge “Their” authority, but may not really escape “Their” control. Everywhere in the murky Zone, he encounters possible signs of “Their” continued control, not least his unexplained ability to evade “Their” control. Even his quest may be “Their” idea:

he knows as well as he has to that it's the S-Gerät [the Rocket] after all that's following him, it and the pale plastic ubiquity of Lazlo Jamf. That if he's been seeker and sought, well, he's baited, and bait. The Imoplex question was planted for him by somebody, back at the Casino Hermann Goerring, with hopes that it would flower into full Imoplectique with its own potency in the Zone—but They knew Slothrop would jump for it. Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about and he doesn't. …

(Pynchon 1973, 490; ellipsis in original)

Though the extent of “Their” control may be the effect of Slothrop's rampant paranoia, the narrative nonetheless opens the possibility that Slothrop's quest for freedom and knowledge may be just part of “Their” plan, his Rocketman pleasures the effects of “Their” programming of desire, his very resistance the form of “Their” control. Caught in the oedipal contradictions of this 60s paranoia, Slothrop becomes less a figure of countercultural resistance than a figure for hopes shattered and revolutions failed.

Again anticipating Huyssen's map of the postmodern, Gravity's Rainbow pursues this exploration of 60s cultural politics into its ontological dimension. Slothrop appears next in the novel reborn as a “crossroad,” dispersed across the Zone, and engaged, it would seem, with a new more spiritual sexuality:

now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of the public clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. …

(Pynchon 1973, 626; ellipsis in original)

Here Slothrop is a figure of the “liberation ontology” of countercultural politics. Rather than playing “Their” game, rather than defining himself through the pleasures and paranoia provided by “Their” power, Slothrop retreats into an existence untouched by “Them.” Fragmented, dispersed, disengaged from patriarchal oedipal processes, he seems to have accomplished the purpose of oppositional cultural politics: an alternative consciousness, a re-coded identity (or non-identity), a new way of being, no longer “Their” tool either as victim or victimizer. Thus dropped out, purified, tuned in with his miraculously found harmonica, and in the natural groove, Slothrop exemplifies hippie alternative consciousness. Thus fragmented, deterritorialized beyond the oedipal pale, and open to the sublime workings of Desire, Slothrop also exemplifies, again from Huyssen's map of the postmodern, the liberation ontology of poststructural versions of cultural politics.

In Gravity's Rainbow, however, the ontology of cultural politics is highly uncertain. Slothrop's paranoid efforts to be free, pure, unvictimized and unvictimizing, along with any such aspects of 60s cultural revolution or postmodern cultural politics, is like the Christianity of Slothrop's Puritan ancestors, who sought to establish God's shining city on a hill, a heavenly kingdom on earth, a beacon of righteousness to the world. On one hand, it is an inspiring example of redemption, as indeed Slothrop's example inspires the counter-force. His Christ-like sacrifice of self, his God-like dispersal across the Zone, and his born-again hippie saintliness work like martyrdom to inspire the preterite cause of transforming the world. On the other hand, rather than being born again, Slothrop is more likely dead. Or, as those in the counter-force recognize, he is incredibly naive, the typical naive American. If he doesn't give up the ghost entirely, Slothrop never gives up the ghost of his own innocence, acting throughout as if some pure sinless existence were possible. His dispersal across the Zone and his disappearance from the world of the novel suggest that no such utopia is possible, which is also the common pronouncement about hippie alternative consciousness. Moreover, Slothrop's appearance later in the novel, staring uncomprehendingly at a “wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white public bush” (Pynchon 1973, 693), associates his born-again sexuality with the mushroom cloud at Hiroshima. Finally, as a re-coded white male identity with a pronounced preference for perfect innocence, Slothrop's hippie saintliness and messianic message evoke the defensive inoffensiveness and alternative piety typical of political correctness, which, as Slovoj Zizek has said, is the last bastion of metaphysics.

More than an inability to escape the patriarchal power of the Rocket, Slothrop also faces evidence that he is complicit with that power. This complicity is especially evident in the unintended but nonetheless real violence of his programmed sexuality. Back in London, pondering the significance of the matching maps of Slothrop's desire and the Rocket's landings, Jessica Swanlake asks Roger Mexico nothing about poor Slothrop's sexuality or victimization or liberation, but rather, “What about the girls?” (Pynchon 1973, 87). What happens to the women Slothrop desires after he leaves and the Rocket arrives? This question also applies to Slothrop's libidinal frenzy in the Zone. Following the orgy on the Anubis, Slothrop has sex with twelve-year-old Bianca, whose spanking by her mother sparked the orgy, and whose life is likely threatened by such “Anubian” pleasures. She seduces him in an explicit appeal for his help in escaping the Anubis and her apparently murderous mother. But Slothrop has only one thing on his mind, and when he's done, he's gone. “So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculation against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love bites … but coming back is something he's already forgotten about” (471; ellipsis in original). Even after he finds, apparently, Bianca's dead body on the lower decks of the Anubis, he continues his piggish course. The narrative details his transformation from zoot-suited rebel to Rocketman to chauvinistic pig, a swine-hero in a pig costume which “seems to fit perfectly. Hmm” (568). Though he's sickened and haunted by Bianca's death, he goes on following his programmed sexuality, taking off his pig costume for “an hour's game of hammer and forge” with a fatherless teenager, “fair, a young face, easy to hurt” (571).

To be sure, throughout all his sexual adventures, Slothrop never forces the situation. He is an object of female desire as much or more than a slave to his own programmed desire. He is just playing a part for which he, and the women and girls too, perhaps, are culturally programmed, all victims/perpetrators of the Rocket sexuality dominating the world of the novel. But Slothrop's innocence is nonetheless culpable. The narrative makes this clear by connecting Slothrop's American innocence to the ugliest of Americans, Major Marvy. In some ways, Marvy is Slothrop's opposite, “Their” willing organ who chases Slothrop through the Zone, the object of countercultural pie-throwing, the avatar of abusive power. He is, moreover, avowedly racist and misogynist, fully and unabashedly consumed by the sexuality of violence, as his response to a whore dreaming of home shows.

He'd rather not look at her anyhow, all he wants is the brown skin, the shut mouth, the nigger submissiveness. She'll do anything he orders, yeah he can hold her head under water till she drowns, he can bend her back, yeah, break her fingers like that cunt in Frankfort the other week. Pistol whip till blood comes. …

(Pynchon 1973, 606; ellipsis in original)

With none of Marvy's explicit malevolence, Slothrop is nonetheless at the same whorehouse engaged at the same time in the same activity. Moreover, when the MPs raid the place looking for Slothrop in a pig suit, they grab Marvy instead who's donned the suit in lieu of his lost uniform and its 2[frac12] vials of cocaine. Finally, when Pointsman's proxies remove Marvy's testicles and plop them into alcohol instead of Slothrop's own more coveted pair, the narrative both spares and condemns Slothrop, indicating both that Marvy's malevolence is far more worthy of castration, but also that Slothrop is not so different from Marvy. In this secret-sharer connection, Slothrop is evidence of a common analysis of hippie life and especially free love as just another flavor of male vanity and power. More broadly, Slothrop becomes a figure not just for revolutions failed but revolutions betrayed.

The complicity of Slothrop's resistance is again evident as Gravity's Rainbow explores one more version of counter-cultural politics familiar from the 60s and from the postmodern critique of white male discourse: Multiculturalism. In a comic book story/fantasy late in the novel, Slothrop assembles the “Fabulous Four,” a mod squad comprised of Slothrop, Maximillian, Myrtle Marvelous, and Marcel—one white, one black, one woman, and one machine. Echoing in even more mocking tones the countercultural agenda in the novel as a whole, this team is on a mission to “rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the day's 24 by colleagues of the Father” (Pynchon 1973, 674). In addition, the “FF” is hampered by Slothrop's “Pernicious Pop” who orchestrates random attempts to kill his prodigal son. This multi-countercultural team has various cross-dressing adventures and other opportunities for members to demonstrate their unique “Fatal Flaws,” but ultimately it succeeds not in defeating the Father and rescuing the Radiant Hour but only in surviving. As Slothrop's own fantasy of multiculturalism, the “Fabulous Four” mission poses two familiar possibilities for the relation between white guys and multicultural politics. Perhaps Slothrop's movement toward the “other”—he last appears in the fantasy wearing a dress—suggests the figure of a white male transformed through some process of identification, or guilt, or consciousness raising, into a new identity and way of being equal to and in solidarity with those marginalized and victimized by The Man. Or Slothrop's fantasy of the “Fabulous Four” is subject to his white male middle-class paranoid obsessions, messianic delusions, and likely failure. In this latter case, Slothrop is a figure of white male colonization of the “other.”

The possibilities and limits of Slothrop's various identities sharpen the novel's question about white guys. Unquestioned in Gravity's Rainbow is the need for white guys to change. The White Man's identity and sexuality, his way of thinking and being, and his domination of the “other” involve sundry terrors personal and political, spiritual and apocalyptic. Thus the cultural discourse that grounds the identity and political hegemony of white men needs to be altered, displaced. What is in question in the novel is the material possibility and the material limits of this change. Can white male discourse change or be changed? Can the discourse of the preterite overcome not only the material momentum of History but also its own complicity and messianic delusions in order to transform what needs transforming? A white guy with a Harvard education as an infant and an adolescent, Slothrop is a figure of what needs changing. As a rebellious young man, he is willing to change, actively trying to change, for his own survival, freedom, and psychic health, and perhaps also in solidarity with other preterite. Yet his efforts to counter the white male legacy and escape into the margins of the oppressed may be an extension of white male legacy. Everything poor paranoid Tyrone tries raises the question of complicity and futility.³

This uncertainty about getting outside the critique and complicity dynamic of countercultural politics extends beyond Slothrop to the “counter-force” that Roger Mexico, Slothrop's British counterpart, joins. As Mexico discovers, Pirate Prentice, Osbie Feel, and others have long been working both sides of the “Them/us” melodrama, the middle ground excluded by Slothrop's puritan naiveté. Gravity's Rainbow explores here a disruptive cultural politics less obsessed with purity and innocence. Since no pure revolutionary outside is possible, the task of resistance is to fight the dominant discourse from within. For example, though Pirate Prentice performs his function as an intelligence officer, even living other people's fantasies so they can focus on their soldierly duty to kill more efficiently, he also works to create an effective oppositional agency, a “we-system” to counter the “They-system.” As he explains to Mexico, this is a version of cultural politics, a representational system aimed at resisting “Their” system of oppression. Prentice calls it “creative paranoia.” It functions counterculturally. In Osbie Feel's words: “‘They're the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements'” (Pynchon 1973, 639). Echoing Kerouac's On the Road and Mexico's own disruption of one of Pointsman's meetings, this cultural politics aims to disrupt “Their” discourse, open up other possible arrangements, but not to establish a new system of authority or new codes of identity and desire. In Huyssen's map of the postmodern, this would be 70s and 80s postmodernism, or as he sometimes indicates postmodernism proper. After the failure of the cultural revolution of the 60s, which is also in Huyssen's analysis the last gasp of avant-garde modernism, postmodern forms of representation remain critical of the institutions and discourses of power but no longer evoke in avant-garde style a revolutionary or redemptive outside.

While celebrating this cultural politics, Gravity's Rainbow also marks its limits. The novel undeniably creates sympathy for the counterforce and its cause. Yet the novel presents the possibility that the counterforce's creative paranoia, no less than Slothrop's politics of pleasure, fails to alter material reality. Mexico succeeds in disrupting a meeting and a dinner party but doesn't himself hold much hope of disrupting much more. Moreover, it indicates that the counterforce, no less than Slothrop, is in complicity with “Their” power, even if that complicity is located in a different part of the anatomy. In the terms of Mexico's paranoia, “The Man has a branch office in each of our brains …” (Pynchon 1973, 172). The novel also indicates that perhaps the counterforce, like Slothrop, has its own messianic tendencies. The paragraph immediately following the description of creative paranoia suggests that, as a cultural politics, it may be like the dubious fanatical spiritualism of Nora Dodson-Truck, who is an easy mark for “seances that wouldn't fool your great-aunt” (639), who echoes creative paranoia in “true messianic style” with her belief that “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” (639; emphasis in original). In other words, perhaps the belief that an oppositional “we system” will actually affect material history is a full-fledged messianic delusion. Furthermore, Gravity's Rainbow also opens the possibility that, rather than opposition to the system, countercultural politics may in the end support it. Gravity, after all, is not only that against which the Rocket must struggle, but also that which brings the Rocket back to earth: Gravity's Rainbow.

Gravity's Rainbow's exploration of white male resistance to “The Man” anticipates much of Huyssen's map of postmodernism, from avant-garde excess, transgression, and indeterminacy, through poststructural liberation ontology, on to the affirmation of the culture of the “other.” Yet unlike Huyssen, who seeks to distinguish weak or ineffective postmodern cultural politics from “resistance postmodernism,” Gravity's Rainbow explores the possibilities of and especially the limits confronting each of these efforts to resist patriarchal power. In this sense, the novel anticipates another well-known theorist of postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon, who elaborated the idea that postmodern cultural politics is both critical of and complicit with the dominant discourse (1989). Thus Slothrop's antics expose the workings of power, including especially how the White Man's discourse of Enlightenment leads to concrete institutional practices of subjugation and control. Yet his own cultural politics of resistance to the White Man's power may be controlled by that power, or, worse, may in fact be a version of that power. Hutcheon goes on to argue for a necessary “second-stage operation” for cultural politics. After the postmodern critique of representation has exposed the workings of power in discourse, cultural politics must re-code identity and sexuality to redress power inequities. This is Hutcheon's claim for discourses of the “other,” such as certain feminisms, which are able to get outside the oedipal frame that contains Slothrop and the white guys of Gravity's Rainbow. However, a countercultural politics of women and minorities that escapes the dynamic of critique and complicity is, in Gravity's Rainbow, uncertain at best. No doubt the countercultural situation is decidedly different for the nonwhite/nonmale “others” in Gravity's Rainbow. This is most evident with Greta Erdmann, Weissmann's female counterpart. Her identity and her pleasure come not from wielding the power and control represented by the Rocket but from being its victim; and unlike Slothrop, whose “victimization” is evidenced by his wielding Rocket power, Greta, Bianca, Enzian, Katje, and a host of others are victims because they are not only subject to but excluded from Rocket power. Yet none of the nonwhite/nonmale characters do any better than Slothrop in countering “Their” Rocket power.

The female characters are generally victims of the Rocket, willing or not. Greta, Bianca, and who knows how many of Slothrop's “girls” seem hopelessly lost. Other female characters pursue paths of resistance and redemption, and some hold out genuine possibility, but all are subject to the limits of Gravity's Rainbow. Leni Pökler's courageous activism has even less change against the Nazi machine than Slothrop does against Pointsman. Geli Tripping succeeds in putting a love spell on Tchitcherine, and raises the possibility of women's magic redemptive love resolving the ancient enmity and violence between brothers, though how long Geli's trip will last or what good it is against the Rocket is unclear at best. Some female characters indicate not only ineffectiveness but also their own form of complicity. Jessica Swanlake, whose love with Roger Mexico may hold the promise of freedom and redemption, betrays that promise when she retreats into the bourgeois security of her Jeremy's world. Most of all Katje, who like Greta and Jessica chose to play her role as “Their” tool and target, who loved Weissmann and worked for Pointsman, in the end seeks redemption for playing “Their” game. She wants to help save Slothrop. But as her final conversation with Enzian shows, she finds it hard to escape her own conditioned reflect to please men by being what they want her to be, and she may also find it hard to escape her own desire for the Rocket.

The “third world” characters of Gravity's Rainbow also offer critique and resistance, ineffectiveness and complicity. Squalidozzi and the Argentine anarchists long to bust open the confining Borgesian labyrinths of their homeland, tear down the “Fences of Property,” and open again “that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky” (Pynchon 1973, 264). But they seem doomed to the material confines of their stolen U-boat and the secret labyrinths of espionage. The New Turkic Alphabet seems to give the peoples of central Asia a weapon to avenge their ancestors murdered by Russian settlers, as “the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way” (356). But in the novel nothing comes of it. More central to the novel is the plight of the African Herraros. Brutally colonized, cut off forever from their traditional tribal ways, they exist in the tension between national suicide and the Schwarzcommando quest for Rocket power, as if their two chances for political freedom were death or obtaining for themselves the White Man's terrible power. On a personal level, Enzian is devoted to his people's struggle and brings special intelligence and wisdom and a scholar's desire to understand life in the Zone. Yet central to his understanding is that his identity, like Katje's, is indelibly marked by his own love for and masochistic sexual history with Weissmann. The implication is that postcolonial struggle will not liberate some precolonial and thus pure, whole, or redemptive identity or culture. Rather, their liberation, like Slothrop's, is a struggle against the material effects of the discourse of the White Man both geo-politically and spiritually, and that transforming the White Man's discourse and its material effects faces limits ranging from ineffectiveness to complicity and perpetuation.

In the end, no form of countercultural politics in Gravity's Rainbow escapes the limits of critique and complicity. The final scene is telling. A Nazi Rocket shot in 1945 is descending in 1970 upon a movie theater, its audience, and its manager, Richard M. Zhlubb. In allegorical terms, the fascist legacy at the origins of the Cold War looms apocalyptically while the preterite are contained, manipulated, and anaesthetized by the culture industry and its politicians. In this theater, cultural politics meets the material limits Marx and Engels delineated for ideology: In the context of material history, cultural ideas have about as much substance or reality as a ghost. Thus countercultural politics is figured in the novel as so much mysticism “beyond the zero” and appears in the end like the pious moral teachings of Slothrop's long dead Puritan ancestor, whose preterite prayer the narrator offers to the audience and exhorts them to sing along as the Rocket “reaches its last immeasurable gap above the roof of the old theater” (Pynchon 1973, 760).

However, the novel remains undecided about the question of cultural politics. The Rocket's Cold War momentum favors apocalypse but it remains uncertain, and while it is still up in the air the cultural revolution may yet have material effect. To be sure, Gravity's Rainbow offers no decisive affirmation of uncertainty or indeterminacy, as if uncertainty of apocalypse were itself a guarantee of salvation. Here the apocalypse is uncertain, but infinitely more uncertain is the effectiveness of cultural resistance. The uncertainty, the lack of closure, the “last immeasurable gap” indicates the possibility and, quite powerfully, the limits of countercultural politics.

III.

Gravity's Rainbow clearly sympathizes with the cultural politics of resistance. But this sympathy takes form not as an affirmation but as an exploration of the experience of cultural politics. Familiar from the 60s and often repeated in postmodernism, this experience involves what it feels like to engage the possibilities and the limits of the effort to change history. That is, unlike Huyssen and Hutcheon and other theorists of postmodernism, and unlike academic readers of Gravity's Rainbow, who seek to decode, dismiss, or otherwise judge what cultural politics is or should be, the novel itself seeks to explore the emotional experience of cultural politics. More specifically, it explores the euphoria of the desire for liberation embedded in a cultural discourse that opens real historical possibility and, at the same time, the paranoia of that same desire as it confronts real historical limits.

This emotional experience, which Gravity's Rainbow both explores through its characters and recreates for its readers, stands in stark contrast to the “warning of affect” Fredric Jameson describes (1991). In this highly influential Marxist reading of postmodern culture, which includes perhaps the only explicit analysis of the postmodern “structure of feeling,” Jameson identifies a shift from the profound existential anguish of modernist alienation to the surface euphoria of postmodern fragmentation. This waning of affect reflects uncritically the processes of late capitalist society. Thus for Jameson, postmodernism is significant not because it provides resistance or opposition, but because it articulates the logic of commodity production and consumption leading to the “world space of multinational capital.” Only Marxism, through a process Jameson dubs “cognitive mapping,” can provide critical perspective on current conditions and thereby orient thought and action to material history. The affect of Gravity's Rainbow, however, with its combined euphoria and paranoia, defies Jameson's claims about a “waning of affect.” Indeed, the novel explores a very similar affect to the one that permeates Jameson's own position—not his repudiation of a largely punchless postmodernism, nor his celebration of the rebellious 60s, but the position he elucidates in The Political Unconscious. There he seeks, just as Gravity's Rainbow, to preserve the value of the desire for liberation while at the same time mark its worldly limits. Thus, he declares, “History is what hurts.” But whereas Jameson is decidedly modernist in his secure if melancholy faith in the Marxist cognitive map he argues is the one best way to navigate through history on the great Sisyphysean course of liberation, Gravity's Rainbow is postmodern in its manic and paranoid leap of renunciated faith in maps and in liberation.

The “Story of Byron the Bulb” from Gravity's Rainbow thematizes this conflicted affect. Focusing on the potential for resistance of alternative intellectual and cultural practices, the story is an allegory of the conflicts of discourse and power that the novel as a whole explores more fully and historically. In the story as in the novel, the focus is on the politics but also the emotional experience of the politics. Moreover, as a mocking cartoonish allegory with a deeply conflicted theme of melodramatic righteousness and historical impotence, the story, like the novel, wraps its anxiety in a delightful textual structure, thus reproducing for the reader the affect it thematizes.

“Byron the Bulb” begins with the political promise of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the “enlightenment of the Enlightenment.” Early on, while Byron is still in “Bulb Baby Heaven,” he knows that he will soon enter an oppressive society run by a faceless and deceitful corporate bureaucracy motivated only to preserve its power and profit. Though ostensibly committed to the Enlightenment, to bringing light into the world, uncovering truth, empowering freedom and justice, Phoebus, the maker of bulbs, is no more than a cog in a vast cooperate cartel that uses Enlightenment as a ruse in service of social control: “these bulb folks are in the business of providing the appearance of power, power against the night, without the reality” (Pynchon 1973, 647). Thus the Enlightenment, along with the knowledge and technology it enables, serve a repressive social system that co-opts truth into deception, the potential of empowerment into the power of big business, the promise of freedom and justice into the pursuit of corporate profit. Born as a tool of this repressive business, a bulb engineered to serve it as its agent of false Enlightenment, just as Slothrop was conditioned to serve the forces of patriarchy, Byron is from the beginning enlightened to the ruse of Enlightenment and sets out on a life of resistance. He is, then, a figure for the dissident intellectual enabled by his position in the social system to perceive the repressiveness of the system and dedicated to transforming his role from cultural agent of repression to cultural agent of freedom.

As a young bulb, Byron, like his namesake, takes a Romantic view of his dissident role. Believing in revolution, solidarity, violence, he dreams of

hatching some really insane grandiose plan—he's gonna organize all the bulbs, see, get him a power base in Berlin … 20 million bulbs, all over Europe, beginning to strobe together, humans thrashing around the twenty million rooms like fishes on the beaches of Pure Energy. … So Byron dreams of his guerrilla strike force. …

(Pynchon 1973, 648-49; ellipsis in original)

As Byron discovers, of course, such romantic revolutionary fervor is naive. A single lowly bulb has no chance against the vast multi-national corporate cartel, in which Phoebus is partner to the power-producing Grid and enforcer of the order of light. Thus, in the way of the realistic Bildungsroman, Byron matures; still resistant, he nonetheless discovers his limits and finds his place among the ordinary bulbs. He puts aside his quest for a revolutionary world order and focuses on the possibilities of life within his given world.

In time, Byron develops a more properly modernist cultural politics. He survives a series of near-fatal encounters with Phoebus hitmen out to destroy him because his increasingly evident immortality undoes planned obsolescence and thus threatens corporate profits. Along the way, he experiences the essential existential confrontation with his own death and the nothingness that is the condition of bulb existence, “the structureless pool from which all glass forms spring and respring” (Pynchon 1973, 651). As a wise consequence, Byron accepts his own finitude and withdraws into the anonymity and alienation of his own agonized but still resistant consciousness. Like Ellison's Invisible Man, Byron survives in the forgotten underground aporias of the power structure, still plugged into its power, draining the system, hastening its collapse in anticipation of an altogether new and unimaginable order of being. He explores the limits of thought and language, prophetizing a revolution in consciousness and perception.

Whenever he can, he tries to instruct any Bulbs nearby in the evil nature of Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of light energy alone. Phoebus has restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, operate among the dreams of men.

(Pynchon 1973, 653)

Like the avant garde modernist artist, whose unique vision opens the possibility of a more profound cultural revolution, Byron pursues and articulates the possibilities for new identities, new ontological realms, and a new meaning of freedom, not limited to some rational utopia but heretofore unimagined planes of existence. Here the angst of the artist alienated from a repressive and narrow world is redeemed in the possibility of some new order of being.

This leads Byron directly to postmodernism because, of course, modernism too is a failure. Byron succeeds in exploring new identities, new frequencies, and learns “how to make contact with other electrical appliances” (Pynchon 1973, 684). No longer restricted to a single, unified, integrated Bulb in solidarity with other Bulbs, he is liberated to a multiple, fragmented identity. But, as is the fundamental lesson of postmodernism, Byron learns that each mode of identity is still plugged into the Grid, still produced and controlled by Phoebus. Each of the multi-identity possibilities is still subject to the same capitalist conditions of existence, each a form of consumption. The fragmentation of identity does not disrupt or escape corporate capitalism; the multiplicity of signifying practices is always contained by a pervasive, powerful, and flexible political economy. In short, Byron learns that there is no outside to the system, no material and no cultural outside. Yet through it all, Byron maintains his original and abiding commitment to resistance. Through his immortality, he gains historical consciousness and can thus see more clearly the pattern of repression in its full breadth, with no horizon of freedom. Yet he continues to resist, risking his life preaching against Phoebus, to explore the potentialities of difference.

This postmodern cultural politics leads Byron into its own special realm of affect. The longer Byron lives, the more he understands the system's extent, and “the grander and clearer it grows the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything and still be as impotent as before” (Pynchon 1973, 654). Rather than remaining in the modernist angst of this infinitesimal freedom gained by this melancholy knowledge, however,

on Byron will be visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor, perverse bulb, enjoying it. …

(Pynchon 1973, 655; ellipsis in original)

Still inside the system, still dependent upon it for his very sustenance, still unable to alter it even as he survives in its aporias, still full of the anger his historical knowledge of oppression engenders, and still full of the frustration that such knowledge does not lead to freedom, Byron goes further, into the realm of postmodern affect, enjoying his anger and frustration, enjoying the pleasure of impossible resistance. Byron knows, and feels the pain of knowing, that the power of the multi-nationals is inescapable; yet he himself has eluded that power. His potential liberation and his pleasure rest not with his knowledge of the truth derived from historical consciousness, which teaches him only about powerlessness. Rather, potential liberation rests with his own futility and frustration. His continued oppression is the indication of his potential freedom, his failure the ground for his hope, his anger and frustration the condition of possibility for his perverse pleasure.

Thematically, this conflicted affect of Gravity's Rainbow pertains in the first instance to rebellious white guys. The nonwhite/nonmale characters of Gravity's Rainbow that resist the System are subject to the critique and complicity dynamic of countercultural politics, but their emotional experience of this dynamic appears to be different. Some join in the fun, like Commando Connie, “loose khakied newshound and tough-talking sweetheart to every GI from Iwo to Saint Lô” (Pynchon 1973, 714), who follows Roger's lead and contributes her “vomit vichyssoise,” “hemorrhoid hash,” and “bowel-burgers” to the posh dinner party. Some feel the pangs of ineffectiveness and complicity like Katje and Enzian. But the dynamic is different because on one hand the experience of victimization is on the masochistic rather than sadistic end of Rocket power and sexuality. For example, politically aware and active Leni Pökler ends up as the prostitute “Solange,” whom Slothrop in his Major Marvy phase engages. She and Slothrop are similar, both dreaming out of futility about the safety of Bianca/Ilse. But Slothrop's pleasure, his relative freedom, and even his inability to protect Bianca except in his dreams point to his secret link to Rocket power, whereas Leni's pleasure if any as a prostitute, her relative lack of freedom and choices, and her inability to protect Ilse except in her dreams point to her powerlessness in the face of the Rocket. On the other hand, the experience of cultural politics and social change is more sober and perhaps more optimistic for nonwhite/nonmale characters. In their conversation near the end of the book, Katje and Enzian are both fully aware of the difficulty of their chosen paths of resistance and potential redemption, but they have nonetheless both made some progress on their respective paths. Unlike the comic-book oedipal frame of Slothrop's quest, which leads to the disintegration of his identity, Katje's and Enzian's quests for self-knowledge and liberation seem to hold out the possibility, along with ineffectiveness and complicity, of coming into their own.

The white male characters of Gravity's Rainbow that resist the System have no access to this modernist, Sisyphysean liberation narrative. Rather, like the male European Byron the Bulb, rebellious white guys can project no authenticity to quest after, no future to narrate, except in terms of the pleasures of futile resistance. Even Slothrop, who remains dazed and confused throughout the novel, captures a comic-book glimpse of this conflicted affect in his “Fabulous Four” fantasy.

Any wonder it's hard to feel much confidence in these idiots as they go up against Pernicious Pop each day? There's no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery. This is less a fighting team than nest full of snits, blues, crochets and grudges, not a rare or fabled bird in the lot. Its survival seems, after all, only a matter of blind fortune groping through the marbling skies one Titanic-Night at a time. Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn't cancel out to apathy—it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives).

(Pynchon 1973, 676; emphasis in original)

Because of his white, male, class privilege, his Harvard training as both infant and adult, he has readier access than, say, Katje or Enzian to the pleasures of resistance. At the same time and because of the same privilege and training, Slothrop is more paranoid about “Their” power to control him or kill him, as well as more paranoid about his own complicity with “Their” destructive power. Operating exclusively within the oedipal frame of his resistance to patriarchy, Slothrop seems to recognize here something of the limits to that resistance and, consequently, to feel something like Byron's perverse pleasure in futile resistance.

In a narrative frame somewhat more complex than Slothrop's comic book melodrama, Roger Mexico is another rebellious white guy feeling the emotional dissonance of counter-cultural politics. His social status as an officer and a gentleman gives him access to “Their” meetings and posh dinner parties which he disrupts, Dada-like, with scatological bad taste. His social standing also, however, leaves him open to the paranoia of becoming “Their” complicitous pet. Moreover, his countercultural activity works against his love for Jessica, which complicates and intensifies the emotional dissonance of manic resistance and likely futility.

“Fungus Fricassee!” screams Roger the Rowdy. Jessica is weeping on the arm of Jeremy her gentleman, who is escorting her, stiff armed, shaking his head at Roger's folly, away forever. Does Roger have a second of pain right here? Yes, sure. You would too. You might even question the worth of your cause. But there are nosepick noodles to be served up buttery and steaming, grime gruel and pustule porridge to be ladled into the bowls of a sniveling generation of future executives, public popovers to be wheeled onto the terraces stained by holocaust sky or growing rigid with autumn.

(Pynchon 1973, 716)

The pleasure of Roger's countercultural politics and its small success conflicts not only with despair for its overall ineffectiveness but also grief for its emotional cost.

Gravity's Rainbow re-creates this dissonance of pleasure and pain for the reader by combining comic distance and delight with tragic pity and terror. The narrative provides tons of textual fun, the satisfaction of siding with the hippie good guys, the turn-on of rebellion and transgression, the textual pleasures of indeterminacy, and of course laugh-out-loud hilarity. At the same time, the narrative draws the reader into the pain of history, the terror of the Cold War, the fear of victimization, the guilt of complicity. Structuring a remarkable balance between comic and tragic affects, the novel leaves the reader emotionally strung between the manic euphoria of cultural revolution and the absolute terror of nuclear night.

The comedy is perhaps more apparent, as in the “Story of Byron the Bulb,” a mocking allegorical cartoon about an immortal light bulb pitted against the evil empire of Phoebus and the Grid. Similar fun abounds in the novel at large. There's the sheer energy of the overstuffed plot: plenty of sex and drugs and jazz, a surfeit of wildly imaginative skits about giant adenoids and trips down the toilet, slapstick scenes replete with pillows and seltzer water and cream pies, numerous witty rhymes, silly songs, and “Rocket Limericks” mockingly celebrating the dark side of the fun.

There was a young fellow named Crockett,
Who had an affair with a rocket.
If you saw them out there
You'd be tempted to stare—
But if you ain't tried it, don't knock it.

Then there's the playful, mischievous, erudite, often obviously delighted narrative voice, fooling around with language “a-and” mocking the characters with wry editorial interjections—“seems to fit perfectly! Hmm”; “Leaps broad highways in a single bound!” Moreover, the novel's many unresolved uncertainties—like the ultimate material effect of cultural politics—also indicate textual pleasures of the proper French theoretical sort, disrupted narrative and epistemological conventions, supplemental signifiers leaking out of the profuse narrative, the epidemic of ellipses indicating the trace of meaning escaping the shackles of language and reason. In short, Gravity's Rainbow functions comically to distance readers from its disturbing tales and themes. Its energy, its humor, its indeterminacy, all structure for the reader feelings of escape, possibility, future life, potential redemption.

At the same time the narrative draws the reader into its pathos. Beneath its cartoon silliness, the “Story of Byron the Bulb” is about terror and futility and frustration. Elsewhere in the novel, the reader is more obviously drawn into this pain. Some of the bizarre anecdotes are agonizing, like the vision of the desperate and doomed evacuation that opens the novel, or the story of Frans Van der Groov's “purest form of European adventurism” (Pynchon 1973, 111), the dogged and self-destructive annihilation of the entire “race” of harmless and hapless dodo birds with a primitive musket one by one for years on end. The narrative voice, too, its mocking tone and epistemological uncertainty intact, can be almost as pained and accusatory as a Greek chorus, as in this comment on Bianca addressed, perhaps, to the reader, particularly the male reader, who may have enjoyed Slothrop's sexual adventurism, including his S/M pleasures and nymphet fetish, just as Franz Pökler and others enjoyed watching Bianca's conception during an orgy filmed by Max Schlepzig.

Of all her putative fathers—Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pökler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrücken night, on the other—Bianca is closest, this last possible moment below decks here behind the ravening jackal, closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying, sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker … She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody had to tell you.

(Pynchon 1973, 472; ellipsis and emphasis in original)

Finally, of course, is the Cold War nuclear terror of the Rocket itself, which remains, disruptive narrative pleasures notwithstanding, an undisturbed referent throughout the novel.

Gravity's Rainbow structures its conflicted affect for all readers, even if at times it addresses specifically its white male readers. This is evident in the novel's frequent use of the pronoun “you.” Since grammar affords many possible referents from no one to everyone,⁴ readers of any hue or gender can consider the “you” a figure of speech or narrative convention that bears no reference to them, or they can consider themselves addressed and perhaps included in some way in the events, observations, or emotions narrated in the novel. For example: the “you” in “a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as nails” is probably most readily read as nonspecific and impersonal, a substitute for “one” or “a person,” but it could also be a reference to similar feelings in the reader regardless of race or gender. Or again: “Does Roger have a second of pain here? Yes, sure. You would too.” While all the grammatical possibilities remain, here the “you” is more readily read, or performed, more personally, as an invitation to the reader, probably regardless of race or gender, to empathize with Roger. Put another way, then, the use of “you” works in support of the novel's combination of comic and tragic affects, simultaneously distancing readers from and drawing them into the narrative.

Yet a novel about the material effects of the discourse of the White Man, which is centered if anywhere on the struggles of a white guy to escape the control of the White Man, and which is written by a white man, unsurprisingly addresses itself at times more directly to a white male reader. Such a reader may identify more readily with Slothrop, and thus have readier access to his pleasures, his paranoia, and what might be his guilt. Moreover, some uses of “you” in the novel appear more directed toward a white male reader: “Of all her putative fathers … Bianca is closest … to you. …” The indeterminacy of the pronoun reference, not to mention the obscurity of the passage, affords the possibility for the reader to remain distant, not close to Bianca, not implicated in her fate. But the passage may also be performed as a direct address to the reader. Here the reader, particularly he who is eligible to be among the “putative fathers” like the white guys mentioned in the passage, is told that Bianca is closest to him, that he is perhaps implicated in her fate.⁵

In the end, however, just as the nonwhite/nonmale characters of Gravity's Rainbow are included in the critique and complicity dynamic of cultural politics, so the dissonant affect of pleasure and angst is not restricted to white male readers. The final scene is again telling. The song and the context of singing it in the movie theater under the descending Rocket structure for all readers the novel's perverse pleasure in apocalyptic terror. Through the use of the pronouns “us” and “we,” the narrator suggests that the audience in the theater includes also the readers of Gravity's Rainbow. “The screen is a dim page spread before us … old fans who've always been at the theater (haven't we?) …” (Pynchon 1973, 760; ellipses added). This passage refers to the novel's well-developed film motif, in which characters' lived experience is mediated and influenced by films they see. Franz Pökler being moved by the S/M images of Alpdrücken to sire his Ilse is one of the more evident examples of film's capacity to affect material history. As an instance of the novel's general concern with the material effects of culture, the film motif echoes the novel's melodrama of cultural conflict, in which many characters, including some white guys, find it necessary and perhaps impossible to counter the culture of the White Man. Bringing readers into the theater and under the Rocket thus implicates readers, white guys or not, in the terrifying material effects of white male discourse.

By involving its readers in the experience it narrates, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel in the sense that it re-creates the experience of postmodernity. Its self-reflexivity focuses its readers on a world of experience already narrated by a decentered and indeterminate profusion of information, images, stories, yet a world still dominated by a discredited white male discourse. It also reminds its readers that reading, like film-going, is a cultural activity, and thus it implicates readers in the critique and complicity dynamic of cultural politics. For all its pleasures, the insights it provides, the consciousness it alters, reading is of the mind and spirit and its material impact has limits. In this way, Gravity's Rainbow re-creates for all its readers the perspective and experience of an age when the project of modernity as defined by male Europeans to transform human existence in the image of reason has succeeded too terrifyingly well. Yet further transformation by reason is just more of the same, and transformation by some discourse from beyond seems unlikely at best.

Gravity's Rainbow is postmodern in one further, crucial sense: it involves itself in the experience it narrates. The narrator, too, is in the theater, contained like the rest of “us” by the culture industry, anticipating the Rocket's descent, and encouraging us to find pleasures while we can. The implication is that Gravity's Rainbow may offer insight, even a form of countercultural resistance, to its readers, but only within the same limits it explores thematically. Its countercultural insights may be revelatory, transformative, even liberating for readers, yet they still may be ineffective against the Rocket and the materiality of the discourse that produced it. It is, after all, only a novel, and we are only reading. Or the novel's material impact may simply be to perpetuate the System no less than any other commodity. It is, after all, bought and sold. Unlike modernist self-reflexivity, then, which focused readers on the creative processes of the art work or the creative vision of the artist as the source of potential redemption and transformation, Gravity's Rainbow implicates itself in the dynamic of critique and complicity. In the end, the novel mocks itself, as if its countercultural politics were mere amusement, opiate for the masses, as well as a kind of messianic delusion, a puritan preterite prayer offered up by the narrator playing the role of a TV show host.

As readers, then, we are all invited to imagine ourselves in the theater of postmodernity, to feel the terror of containment and control in a world already narrated by a patriarchal tradition whose final apocalyptic chapter is looming, and to feel also the desire for an effective countercultural politics that remains possible, but highly uncertain, not visible on the screen, perhaps “a film we have not learned to see,” perhaps “beyond” the final page of the novel, perhaps in our own material reality. Effective cultural politics may lie in our own altered consciousness, the insights we take away into power and discourse and desire. Yet the existence of such a cultural politics of reading seems powerless to stop the Rocket or the System that produced it, ghostly spirit against material history, like singing while the Rocket descends. And even if the novel gives us insight into the repressive and destructive course of history, even if it offers possibilities of countercultural resistance, and even if that resistance has a chance of material effect, the novel like a film can offer its possibilities only as images, fodder for the culture industry that contains the novel, its images, and us. Still, we read the novel; and the fact of our reading, the reality of our insights into the mechanism of power, the continued existence of our preterite frustration and terror, belies the impending apocalypse. So the narrator's self-mocking invitation in the novel's last line to join the preterite song, like Zarathustra playing Lawrence Welk, encourages us to celebrate and enjoy, perversely, our desperate and terrifying existence, because in that desperation and terror is possibility.

Notes

1. Especially relevant as a critique of enlightenment thinking is Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), whose ideas enjoyed wide currency in the 60s through the work of Herbert Marcuse and others.

2. Critics of Gravity's Rainbow are often, perhaps even always, concerned with resistance to established power, though none has framed this concern directly as an issue of countercultural politics. Raymond M. Olderman (1983) comes close by delineating Gravity's Rainbow's conflict as the 60s dichotomy between “freak” and “straight” consciousness; but he doesn't address the issue of whether alternative consciousness is materially redemptive or effectively resistant. Though he shows how the characters combine elements of both “freak” and “straight,” he implies that “freak” consciousness is de facto spiritually redemptive and socially transformative, like—to borrow the novel's metaphor—God's grace, if only it were possible for humans to be wholly “freak.” In short, Olderman doesn't recognize the novel's critique of “freak” consciousness.

   In this sense, Olderman is typical of critics generally, who focus on Gravity's Rainbow's critique of establish power and seek the novel's view of the most effective form of political resistance and/or spiritual redemption. Even when accounting for the novel's ambiguity or uncertainty, as most critics do, most nonetheless choose one path of resistance and/or redemption as the one best chance. For example, Olderman chooses Geli Tripping's witchly love, and many others in the Christian and humanist traditions choose love in one form or another as, again in the novel's metaphor, the way, the truth, and the life. A more recent critical camp emphasizes the novel's epistemological indeterminacy as the ground for resistance and liberation, as in Judith Chamber's straightforward proclamation: “Our salvation is in our willingness to tear away the illusion and live in the uncertainty we have exposed” (1992, 169). Leo Bersani (1989) argues that Gravity's Rainbow presents and undermines such alternatives as love and indeterminacy (or “anarchy”) and offers true if incomplete redemption and resistance only in the ontological alternative represented by Slothrop's eventual dispersion of identity. Others offer more idiosyncratic readings of redemption. George Levine (1976) suggests an existential path with his injunction to follow Leni Pökler and “penetrate the moment.” Douglas A. Mackey (1980) sees an affirmation of excess. Robert D. Newman (1986) understands an uncomplicated call for unity of the preterite under heaven and on earth. Still others find a rejection of the possibility of redemption and thus, like Tony Tanner (1982), declare an apocalyptic vision in Gravity's Rainbow.

   In contrast to this critical approach, which demands the presence (or absence) of a “redemptive vision,” I argue that Gravity's Rainbow frames its concern with resistance/redemption specifically as cultural, explores the Marxist question about the material possibilities and material limits of each and every of its many forms of cultural resistance and redemption, and is ultimately concerned with the emotional experience of possibilities and limits.

3. The history of criticism on Gravity's Rainbow shows an increasing willingness to acknowledge the novel's critique of masculine identity. Early on, critics tended to dismiss this critique. David Leverenz writes: “To the Pynchon who throws shit in my white male established American face and calls it mine, I respond first with confused intimidation, even guilt, and then with annoyed dismissal, both to what he preaches and to that he preaches” (1976, 248). Less defensively, Marjorie Kaufmann writes at about the same time: “Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as a whole, can be read as a thinly disguised treatise written in support of radical feminism and its analyses of ‘patriarchal history’ and ‘patriarchal society'” (1976, 225); but she dismisses this reading as wrong and reductive, preferring instead a humanist vision of Gravity's Rainbow as a world of failed love.

   More recent critics take as a matter of course the critique of patriarchy, but only Wes Chapman (1996) places it at the center of his reading. He focuses on the novel's exploration of the oedipal conundrum of males resisting masculine identity. He argues that Gravity's Rainbow presents an anti-essentialist resolution of the oedipal conundrum, whereby masculinity is written so large as to be obviously both socially constructed and dangerously flawed. However, Chapman goes on to criticize Gravity's Rainbow for the inadequacy of this resolution.

   Gravity's Rainbow shows, I think, the limits of a pro-feminist politics based too exclusively on anti-essentialist theories. Simply to disperse one's identity throughout the cultural fabric, as Slothrop does in the end of the novel, is not a viable alternative; nor is it adequate simply to gesture to the complicity of one's identity in oppressive structures. Ultimately, pro-feminist men need to work toward positive subjectivities which neither co-opt feminism nor revel masochistically in self-abasement, but reconcile self-fulfillment with recognition of women as subjects.

   (Chapman 1996, 6.3)

   My contention is that Gravity's Rainbow is itself centrally concerned, especially through Slothrop, not only with the critique of masculinity, but also the material limits to that or any other cultural critique. In this light, Chapman's desire for a wholly reconciled masculine identity is not unlike Slothrop's desire for a pure sinless existence: admirable, even necessary, but a tad naive in its unexamined faith in the power of thought to transform material reality, and its attendant unconscious alternative piety and messianic heroism.

4. Brian McHale (1985) itemizes the various possible referents for “you,” though he argues that the one impossible referent is the reader. John Capecci (1989) validates McHale's analysis of multiple referents but talks about them as multiple possibilities for “performing” the second person. Thus Capecci opens the possibility of not just an epistemological but also an affective response to the novel. He also corrects McHale's view that “you” cannot be performed as a direct address to the reader.

5. Critics have engaged in a mini-debate over the “putative fathers” passage, indicating that it is a crucial passage in the novel, especially for reading the novel's critique of white male identity. Marjorie Kaufmann (1976) argues that the text implicates all readers in Slothrop's responsibility for Bianca's death. Bernard Duyfhuizen (1991) labels this a “misreading,” a falling into the “reader-trap of Bianca,” in that the text's indeterminacy renders Bianca's death, Slothrop's culpability, and especially the reader's involvement uncertain and ultimately beside the epistemological point. Wes Chapman (1996) argues that insofar as the passage is addressed to all readers, it typifies the novel's marginalization of women who could never be accused of the sentiment, “probably some hooker.”

   It seems to me that the passage is sufficiently indeterminate to allow for a number of possibilities, including perhaps most readily the possibility that the narrator is directly addressing its white male readers and mockingly, tauntingly provoking us to examine our own response to Slothrop's pleasures. In short, this passage and others like it draw the reader, especially the white male reader, into the critique and complicity dynamic of countercultural politics and thus into the conflicted affect of postmodernism.

   In this context, Michael Bérubé's analysis of pornography in Gravity's Rainbow is interesting (1992). He argues that, in the novel, pornography is a discourse not about transgressive liberation ala Sade or carnivalesque resistance ala Bakhtin; rather, it is a discourse about power and control. Bérubé shows how the novel's exploration of pornography is like the novel's exploration of paranoid hermeneutics, how they are both discourses concerned with power and control. Moreover, Gravity's Rainbow presents pornography straight, as pornography, as a discourse designed to engage its readers in its pleasures; at the same time, the novel criticizes the play of power and control inherent in the discourse. In other words, Gravity's Rainbow's treatment of pornography involves complicity and critique for itself and its readers. Bérubé writes:

   If Pynchon's pornography self-consciously implicates itself, and us, in the problematics of representation and nostalgic reunification, we need to ask in turn what it represents, and to read Pynchon's pornography not as the locus of transgression and disturbance, nor as the limit and instance of popular resistance and discursive carnival, but as the enactment and exposure of strategies of power, domination and control—which are what imaginary, totalizing unities always seek to establish.

   (266)

   In this displacement to a hermeneutics of power and control, Bérubé's analysis of the novel's “enactment and exposure” of pornography thus avoids more deftly than I exploring any reference pornography may have to sexuality, male identity, or the “us” it implicates.

Works Cited

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Bartheleme, Donald. 1975. The Dead Father. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Bersani, Leo. 1989. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations 25: 99-118.

Bérubé, Michael. 1992. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Capecci, John. 1989. “Performing the Second Person.” Text and Performance 9.1: 42-52.

Chambers, Judith. 1992. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Twayne.

Chapman, Wes. 1996. “Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Giganticism of Gravity's Rainbow.” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal 6.3.

Duyfhuizen, Bernard. 1991. “‘A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt’: The Reader-Trap of Bianca in Gravity's Rainbow.” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal 21.3.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. “Mapping the Postmodern.” In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Andreas Huyssen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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———. 1991. “Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” In Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kaufmann, Marjorie. 1976. “Brünhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity's Rainbow.” In Mindful Pleasures, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little Brown.

Leverenz, David. 1976. “On Trying to Read Gravity's Rainbow.” In Mindful Pleasures, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little Brown.

Levine, George. 1976. “Risking the Moment.” In Mindful Pleasures, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little Brown.

Mackey, Douglas A. 1980. The Rainbow Quest of Thomas Pynchon. San Bernadino: Borgo Press.

McHale, Brian. 1985. “‘You Used to Know What these Words Mean’: Misreading Gravity's Rainbow.” Language and Style 18.1: 93-118.

Newman, Robert D. 1986. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: South Carolina University Press.

Olderman, Raymond M. 1983. “The New Consciousness and the Old System.” In Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking.

Tanner, Tony. 1982. Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen.