SOURCE: Tanner, Tony. “Gravity's Rainbow.” In Thomas Pynchon, pp. 74-95. New York: Methuen, 1982.

[In the following essay, Tanner demonstrates how Gravity's Rainbow subverts the traditional methods of reading, suggesting that this strategy renders conventional attempts to interpret the text ineffective.]

Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is a novel of such vastness and range that it defies—with a determination unusual even in this age of ‘difficult’ books—any summary. It defies quite a lot of other things as well. There are over 400 characters—we should perhaps say ‘names', since the ontological status of the figures that drift and stream across the pages is radically uncertain. There are many discernible, or half-discernible, plots, involving, for example, the GI Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual encounters in London during the war uncannily anticipate where the V2 rockets fall; a rocket genius named Captain Blicero (later Major Weissmann); Franz Pökler, who worked on the rocket but is hoping to retrieve his wife and daughter from the concentration camps; Tchitcherine, a Soviet intelligence officer (who, among other things, has to impose a Latin alphabet on an illiterate tribe in Central Asia); Enzian, his half-brother and leader of the Schwarzkommando, a Herero group exiled in Germany from South-West Africa which is trying to assemble the secrets of the rocket, and which also seems bent on self-annihilation. These plots touch and intersect, or diverge and separate, as the case may be. Somewhere at the back of them all is the discovery by the nineteenth-century German chemist, Kekule von Stradonitz, of the model of the benzene ring, which made possible the manufacture of the molecular structures of plastic and, ultimately, rocketry.

There is a good deal of well-informed technological reference in the book—inserted not gratuitously but to demonstrate how technology has created its own kind of people (servants) with their own kind of consciousness (or lack of it). There is evidence of a whole range of knowledge of contemporary ‘specialized’ expertises—from mathematics, chemistry and ballistics, to classical music theory, film and comic strips. There is also a prevailing sense of the degree to which modern life has been bureaucratized and turned into an impersonal routine (Max Weber is alluded to and his phrase ‘the routinization of charisma’ quoted twice—as Edward Mendelson, again, was the first to point out). As before, many other writers are alluded to, directly or indirectly—Melville, Conrad, Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Rilke (crucial), Borges (always important for Pynchon, but in this novel finally named), etc. Out of all this—and much, much more—Pynchon has created a book that is both one of the great historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses.

I think it is important to stress that the novel provides an exemplary experience in modern reading. The reader does not move comfortably from some ideal ‘emptiness’ of meaning to a satisfying fullness, but instead becomes involved in a process in which any perception can precipitate a new confusion, and an apparent clarification turn into a prelude to further difficulties. So far from this being an obstacle to appreciating the book, it is part of its essence. It is the way we live now.

Gravity's Rainbow does indeed have a recognizable historical setting. It is engaged with Europe at the end of the Second World War and just after. In choosing to situate his novel at this point in time, Pynchon is concentrating on a crucial moment when a new transpolitical order began to emerge out of the ruins of old orders that could no longer maintain themselves. At one point he describes the movements of displaced people at the end of the war, ‘a great frontierless streaming’. The sentences that follow mime out this ‘frontierless’ condition in an extraordinary flow of objects and people, and conclude: ‘so the populations move, across the open meadow, limping, marching, shuffling, carried, hauling along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don't yet know is destroyed forever’ (p. 551). A later passage suggests what is taking the place of this vanished order. ‘Oh, a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul’ (p. 566).

The Rocket is specifically the V2, which was launched on London and, because it travelled faster than sound, crashed before the sound of its flight could be heard—a frightening disruption of conventional sequence and cause—effect expectations. (Hence the famous opening sentence, ‘a screaming comes across the sky’.) It also becomes the paradigm product of modern technology, and, in making it the central object of the book, Pynchon is clearly addressing himself to the sociopolitical implications of contemporary trends in history. But he refuses to do this in a conventional narrative way because conventional narrative procedures were themselves products of that vanished bourgeois order, and it is no longer possible to ‘read’ what is going on in any conventional manner. Thus Pynchon's characters move in a world of both too many and too few signs, too much data and too little information, too many texts but no reliable editions, an extreme ‘over-abundance of signifier', to borrow a phrase from Lévi-Strauss. I stress this first because, before attempting to indicate what the novel is ‘about’ in any traditional sense, I think it is important to consider how to read it, for more than anything else this book provides an experience in modern reading. People who expect and demand the traditional narrative conventions will be immediately disoriented by this book.

There is one phantasmagoric episode in a ‘disquieting structure’ which is a dream-version of some contemporary hell. We read: ‘It seems to be some very extensive museum, a place of many levels, and new wings that generate like living tissue—though if it all does grow toward some end shape, those who are here inside can't see it’ (p. 537). Now not only is this applicable to all the dozens of characters in the book itself—drifting in and out of sections, participating in different spaces, finding themselves on different levels; it is both their dream and their dread to see an ‘end shape’ to it all, though of course, being in the book, they never will. But—and I think this is very important—nor do we as readers. One of the things Pynchon manages to do so brilliantly is to make us participate in the beset and bewildered consciousness which is the unavoidable affliction of his characters.

As you read the book you seem to pass through a bewildering variety of genres, behavioural modes, and types of discourse: at different times the text seems to partake of such different things as pantomime, burlesque, cinema, cabaret, card games, songs, comic strips, spy stories, serious history, encyclopedic information, mystical and visionary meditations, the scrambled imagery of dreams, the cold cause-and-effect talk of the behaviourists, and all the various ways in which men try to control and coerce realities both seen and unseen—from magic to measurement, from science to seances. At one point, one character is reading a Plasticman comic; he is approached by a man of encyclopedic erudition, who engages him in a conversation about etymology. Here is a clue for us: we should imagine that we are reading a comic, but it is partly transparent, and through it we are also reading an encyclopedia, a film script, a piece of science history, and so on. There is only one text but it contains a multiplicity of surfaces; modes of discourse are constantly turning into objects of discourse with no one stable discourse holding them together.

This is not such a bizarre undertaking as it may sound. We can all read and decode the different languages and genres Pynchon has brought into his book. Modern man is above all an interpreter of different signs, a reader of differing discourses, a servant of signals, a compelled and often compulsive decipherer. In Henri Lefebvre's use of the word, we do live in a ‘pleonastic’ society of ‘aimless signifiers and disconnected signifieds’ on many levels, so that you can see evidence of hyper-redundancy in the realm of signs, objects, institutions, even human beings. Wherever we look, there is too much to ‘read’ (‘Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?’, p. 258). But never before has there been such uncertainty about the reliability of the texts. One character in the novel, making his way across the wastelands of post-war Europe, wonders whether it does contain a ‘Real Text’ (p. 520). He thinks that such a text may be connected with the secrets of the rocket; but perhaps the ‘Real Text’ is the desolate landscape he is traversing, or perhaps he missed the Real Text somewhere behind him in a ruined city … Reading Pynchon's novel gives us a renewed sense of how we have to read the modern world. At times in his book it is not always clear whether we are in a bombed-out building or a bombed-out mind, but that too is quite appropriate. For how many of those rockets that fell in London fell in the consciousness of the survivors, exploding in the modern mind? And, looking around and inside us, how can we be sure how much is Real Text, and how much is ruined debris?

In all this it is impossible to say with confidence what the book is ‘about', but constantly you have the sense of many things that it seems to be about. We might consider the title, or titles, of the novel. Originally it was to be called Mindless Pleasures. We can perhaps infer the intention behind such a title from a passage in which a girl, Jessica, temporarily in love with the rebellious Roger Mexico (of whom more later), thinks of her other suitor, Jeremy, who is the quintessence of the Establishment.

Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. … Damn them, they are wrong.

(p. 177)

Pynchon has ever been a sympathetic supporter of ‘second-class trivia', which would seem to include those ‘mindless’ pleasures that have no interest in ‘the War', which ‘the War'—and all the official organization, technology and bureaucracy it represents (is the product of)—dismisses and disavows. One basic struggle or opposition in the book, then, is indeed between ‘mindless pleasures’ and the all-too-mindful pains and perversions of ‘the War’.

The second title suggests the opposition another way. The ‘Rainbow’ inevitably triggers reminiscences of the rainbow in Genesis, which was God's covenant to Noah ‘and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth’ that there would be no more destruction on the earth. Gravity, by contrast, is that law (not a ‘covenant’) by which all things—‘and all flesh that is upon the earth'—are finally, inexorably, drawn back down and into the earth: an absolutely neutral promise that all living things will die. The trajectory of the rocket—which at the end of the novel is both a womb (it contains the living figure of Gottfried) and a coffin (arguably embodying the death and perversion of all life-giving love and sexuality)—exactly enacts this stark ironic ambiguity. And in this apparently hopelessly proliferating novel the rocket is always there. It is phallic and fatal, Eros transformed into Thanatos, invading ‘Gravity's grey eminence’ only to succumb to it, curving through the sky like a lethal rainbow, then crashing to the earth. Does it strike by ‘chance’ or according to some hidden design, some ‘music’ of annihilation which we shall never hear but which is always being played?

Around the rocket and its production Pynchon builds up a version of wartime England and post-war Europe which is staggering in both its detail and its fantasy. In addition, the novel, as if trying to reach out into wider and more comprehensive contexts, extends back into colonial and American history, down into the world of molecules, up into the stars, back even to Bethlehem when men saw another kind of burning light in the sky. In all this, certain abiding preoccupations may be discerned. Pattern, plots and paranoia—these are familiar in Pynchon's world; add to those paper, plastic, preterition, probability theory and Pavlovian conditioning, and some of the main themes have been listed. (The alliteration is not, of course, accidental: Pynchon, as author, knows that he is engaged in an activity related to Stencil's search for V. Unlike Stencil, however, he is constantly breaking up the gathering pattern of echoes, clues and similarities.)

What emerges from the book is a sense of a force and a system—something, someone, referred to simply as ‘the firm’ or ‘They'—which is actively trying to bring everything to zero and beyond, trying to institute a world of non-being, an operative kingdom of death, covering the organic world with a world of paper and plastic and transforming all natural resources into destructive power and waste: the rocket and the debris around it. ‘They’ are precisely non-specific, unlocatable. There is always the possibility of a They behind the They, a plot behind the plot; the quest to identify ‘Them’ sucks the would-be identifier into the possibility of an endless regression. But, whatever Their source and origin, They are dedicated to annihilation. This is a vision of entropy as an extremely powerful worldwide, if not cosmos-wide, enterprise. From Their point of view, and in the world of insidious reversals and inversions They are instituting, the war was a great creative act, not the destruction but the ‘reconfiguration’ of people and places. They are also identified with ‘the System’ which removes

from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit. … The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time … [that it] sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply. … Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide.

(p. 412)

The ecological relevance of this is all too frighteningly obvious.

Inside the System everything is fixed and patterned, but its organizing centre—its ‘soul'—is the rocket. To the extent that the System and everyone inside the System in one way or another converge on the rocket, they are converging on death. Outside the System, and one of its by-products as it were, is the Zone in which nothing is fixed and there are no patterns or points of convergence. There are ‘no zones but the Zone’ (p. 333) says one voice. This is the area of ‘the new Uncertainty’: ‘in the Zone categories have been blurred badly’ (p. 303). In the Zone everything and everyone is adrift, for there are no taxonomies, and no narratives, to arrange them. If all the concepts are blurred, can the people in the Zone have any knowledge of reality, or are they perhaps nearer to reality by living in a deconceptualized state, fumbling around among the debris left when the prisonhouse of language itself seems to have been destroyed? In the Zone there are only ‘images of Uncertainty’. This involves a release from feeling that one is living in a completely patterned and determinate world, but also a panic at being outside any containing and explaining ‘frame’ (in his review Richard Poirier wrote at length on the significance of the ‘frame’ throughout the book). Those outside the System seem doomed to go on ‘kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance, and trying to string them all together … to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition … to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste’ (p. 590).

Figures in the book inhabit either the System or the Zone or move between them (or do not know whether they are in either or both, for of course System and Zone have no locational as well as no epistemological stability), and this in turn elicits two dominant states of mind: paranoia and anti-paranoia. Paranoia is, in terms of the book, ‘nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected’ (p. 703). Of course, everything depends on the nature of the connection, the intention revealed in the pattern; and just what it is that may connect everything in Pynchon's world is what worries his main characters, like Slothrop. Paranoia is also related to the Puritan obsession with seeing signs in everything, particularly signs of an angry God. Pynchon makes the connection clear by referring to ‘a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia’ (p. 188). The opposite state of mind is anti-paranoia, ‘where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long’ (p. 434). (This may be a reference to the lines in The Waste Land:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.

(‘The Fire Sermon’))

And, as figures move between System and Zone, so they oscillate between paranoia and anti-paranoia, shifting from a seething blank of unmeaning to the sinister apparent legibility of an unconsoling labyrinthine pattern or plot. ‘We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness; it is terror to us’ (p. 264). Those who do not accept the officially sanctioned ‘delusions’ of the System as ‘truth', but cannot abide pure blankness, have to seek out other modes of interpretation. Thus ‘Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity’ (p. 582). This is the carnival of modern consciousness which the book itself portrays.

All this is related to our situation as readers. To put it very crudely, the book dramatizes two related assemblings and disassemblings—of the rocket, and of the character or figure named Slothrop. Slothrop is engaged in trying to find out the secret of how the rocket is assembled, but in the process he himself is disassembled. Similarly the book both assembles and disassembles itself as we try to read it. For, just as many of the characters are trying to see whether there is a ‘text’ within the ‘waste’ and a ‘game behind the game’ (p. 208), that is what we are having to do with the book as it unfolds in our attention. There is deliberately too much evidence, partaking of too many orders of types of explanation and modes of experience for us to hold it all together. Reading itself thus becomes a paranoid activity which is, however, constantly breaking down under the feeling that we shall never arrive at a unitary reading, never hold the book in one ‘frame’: the sense of indeterminateness is constantly encroaching on us. We fluctuate between System and Zone, paranoia and anti-paranoia, experiencing both the dread of reducing everything to one fixed explanation—an all-embracing plot of death—and the danger of succumbing to apparently random detritus.

Behind all this is the process of nature itself, working by organization and disorganization. The rocket is described as ‘an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature’ (p. 324). It engorges energy and information in its ‘fearful assembly’; thus its ‘order’ is obtained at the cost of an increase in disorder in the world around it, through which so many of the characters stumble. But in its fixity and metallic destructive inhumanity it is an order of death—a negative parallel of the process of nature, since its disintegration presages no consequent renewal and growth. That is one reason why at the end the rocket is envisaged as containing the living body of a young man (Gottfried), for this is the System inside which man is plotting his own annihilation. If we as readers try to win away one narrative ‘system’ from the book, we are in danger of repeating mentally what They are doing in building the rocket. To put it in its most extreme form, They are trying to reduce all of nature's self-renewing variety to one terminal rocket; we must avoid the temptation to reduce the book to one fixed meaning. That is why our reading should be paranoid and anti-paranoid, registering narrative order and disorder, experiencing both the determinate and the indeterminate,¹ pattern and randomness, renewing our awareness of our acts and interpretations as being both conditioned and free, and of ourselves as synthesizing and disintegrating systems.

In this way we can to some extent be released from the System-Zone bind which besets Pynchon's main characters, in particular the figure of Slothrop. What happens to Slothrop is in every sense exemplary. One of the earliest events in his life is being experimented on in a Pavlovian laboratory (which is related to the obsession with all kinds of control and ‘conditioning’ that the book also explores). He is last seen, if seen at all, on a record cover. In between he has been the Plasticman and Rocketman of the comics he reads, played a variety of roles for English and American intelligence, been involved in the distorted fantasies and plots of dozens of figures in post-war Europe, all the time approaching the centre, the secret of the rocket, which is also the absolute zero at the heart of the System. He knows that he is involved in the evil games of other people, whether they are run by the army or black-marketeers or whatever, but he cannot finally get out of these games. Indeed, leaving all the games is one of the hopes and dreams of the few people with any human feeling left in the book. But it remains a dream. (This is problematical. Of one character we read: ‘Pökler committed then his act of courage. He quit the game’ (p. 430). And an earlier comment seems to allow of this possibility:

But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play—and be unable then to continue in the same spirit. … Nor need it be anything sudden, spectacular—it may come in gentle—and regardless of the score, the number of watchers, their collective wish, penalties they or the Leagues may impose, the player will, waking deliberately … say fuck it and quit the game, quit it cold …

(p. 107)

The problem is that there seems to be nowhere to go if you ‘quit the game'—though I suppose it could be an internal secession—unless it means to get lost in the Zone. But that is not an unequivocal experience.)

Reality has been pre-empted by games, or it has been replaced by films, so that people can be said to live ‘paracinematic lives’. As Slothrop moves through different experience-spaces, he suffers a loss of emotion, a ‘numbness', and a growing sense that he will never ‘get back’. Along with this erosion of the capacity to feel, he begins to ‘scatter', his ‘sense of Now’ or ‘temporal bandwidth’ gets narrower and narrower, and there is a feeling that he is getting so lost and unconnected that he is vaporizing out of time and place altogether. Near the end of his travels, Slothrop suddenly sees a rainbow, a real one, and he has a vision of its entering into sexual union with the green unpapered earth; it is the life-giving anithesis to the rocket's annihilating penetrations: ‘and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural’ (p. 626). After that he effectively vanishes. There is a story told about him.

[He] was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly—perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly—and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered.

(p. 738)

The disassembling of Slothrop is, as I have suggested, in some way related to the assembling of the rocket—the plan that went right—and it has far-reaching and disturbing implications.

The last comment on the possible whereabouts of Slothrop is this: ‘we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea’ (p. 742). This idea of ‘the preterite’ is very important in this book and, I think, central to Pynchon's vision; as he uses it, it refers to those who have been ‘passed over', those he has always been interested in, the abandoned, the neglected, the despised and the rejected, those for whom the System has no use, the human junk thrown overboard from the ship of state (a literal ship in this book, incidentally, named Anubis after the ancient Egyptian God of the Dead). Set against the preterite are the élite, the users and manipulators, those who regard the planet as solely for their satisfaction, the nameless and ubiquitous ‘They’ who dominate the world of the book. One of the modern malaises Pynchon has diagnosed is that it is possible for a person to feel himself entering into a state of ‘preterition’. But—and once again Pynchon's erudition and wit work admirably here—the idea of humanity being divided into a preterite and an élite or elect is of course a basic Puritan belief. In theological terms, the preterite were precisely those who were not elected by God and, if I may quote from one of those chilling Puritan pronouncements, ‘the preterite are damned because they were never meant to be saved’. In redeploying these terms, which after all were central to the thinking of the people who founded America, and applying them to cruelly divisive and oppositional modes of thought at work throughout the world today, Pynchon once again shows how imaginatively he can bring the past and present together.

One of Slothrop's ancestors wrote a book called On Preterition, supporting the preterite as being quite as important as the elect, and Slothrop himself wonders whether this doesn't point to a fork in the road which America never took, and whether there might not be a ‘way back’ even in the ruined spaces of post-war Europe:

maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up …

(p. 556)

This, then, is the organizing question of the book. Is there a way back? (Page 1 signals this question: ‘Is this the way out?’) Out of the streets ‘now indifferently gray with commerce’; out of the City of Pain, which Pynchon has taken over from Rilke's Tenth Duino Elegy and offers as a reflection of the world we have made; a way back out of the cinemas, the laboratories, the asylums and all our architecture of mental drugging, coercion and disarray (derangement)? Out of a world in which emotions have been transferred from people to things, and where images supplant realities? Where, ultimately, would the ‘way back’ lead, if not to some lost Eden previous to all categories and taxonomies, election and preterition, divisions and oppositions? Can we even struggle to regain such a mythic state? Of course the book offers no answers, though the possibility of a ‘counterforce’ is touched on.

The last section of the novel is indeed entitled ‘The Counterforce', and one figure, Tchitcherine, is convinced ‘There is a counterforce in the Zone’ (p. 611). But if there is an active ‘counterforce’ it would seem to be vitiated by its contact with, and contamination by, the System. A crucial figure in this possible counterforce is Roger Mexico, and here are some of his late doubts about its viability or possible effectiveness.

Well, if the Counterforce knew better what those categories concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man. But they don't. Actually they do, but they don't admit it. Sad but true. They 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 … which is worse: living on as Their pet, or death? It is not a question he has ever imagined himself asking seriously. It has come by surprise, but there's no sending it away now, he really does have to decide, and soon enough, plausibly soon, to feel the terror in his bowels. Terror he cannot think away. He has to choose between his life and his death. Letting it sit for a while is no compromise, but a decision to live, on Their terms …

(pp. 712-13)

In the event, all that Roger Mexico achieves (along with Seaman Bodine, an old Pynchon figure) is the disruption of an official dinner with obscene language. It is a gesture against the binding power of the official language, but not much more.

We hear no more of Roger Mexico after this incident. But, in a world dominated by the firm, the System, They, he does represent two crucial potential ‘counterforces’—in brief, ‘probability’ and love. There are a number of references to probability theory in the book, and their relevance can be appreciated if we recall Oedipa Maas caught between zeroes and ones as she found herself forced into a mental prison of binary oppositions at the end of Lot 49 [The Crying of Lot 49]. In Gravity's Rainbow the behaviourist Pavlovian scientist Pointsman is absolutely a zero/one man, and ‘If ever the Antipointsman existed, Roger Mexico is the man’ (p. 55)—because Mexico, who works with ‘probability', can exist and operate in those ‘excluded middles’ that in Pynchon represent the area of unforeseen possibilities and diversities. One passage makes this clear:

But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. … But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one—the middle Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion—the probabilities

(p. 55)

It has the effect of keeping open a gap in the systematized and systematic thinking of the System. That thinking can only accept cause-and-effect thinking, because that makes possible a fantasy of total control (‘We must never lose control’, thinks Pointsman, p. 144); but Mexico can see further:

there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less … sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle.

(p. 89)

Striking off at ‘some other angle’ would involve recognizing and accepting ‘probability', ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘discontinuity’ in the ‘curve of life’ (p. 664). All these modes of thought are enacted in the text itself (we are seldom confronted with zero/one choices; more often we find ourselves groping away in the forgotten richness—and darkness—of those excluded middles). But whether they are sufficient to act as a counterforce is less clear.

It might be asked if there are any other hints of effective positives—counterforces—in the book. Roger Mexico is one of the very, very few figures who experience a genuine kind of ‘love’ (with Jessica), based on real feeling, mutuality, loss of ego, true sensuality. But their love episode is, as it were, a furtive piece of borrowed time during the war; it does not survive, and Jessica turns to the Establishment figure of Jeremy as ‘safer’. There is indeed very little love in the book: perversion and betrayal (the children especially suffer) seem to dominate, not to mention various forms and degrees of extermination and mutilation. Religious hope is teasingly glimpsed at. During the truly astonishing passage describing the Christmas vespers attended by Roger and Jessica, with reference to the magi Pynchon writes:

Will the child gaze up from his ground of golden straw then, gaze into the eyes of the old king who bends long and unfurling overhead, leans to proffer his gift, will the eyes meet, and what message, what possible greeting or entente will flow between the king and the infant prince? Is the baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?

(p. 131)

The text suddenly flashes a half-ironic choice at us—to leave us unsettled between miracle and technology. But it hardly suggests any coming kind of salvation or true transcendence. Indeed, most of the figures in the book are somewhat like Barnardine in Measure for Measure (to turn again to what is obviously an important play for Pynchon), ‘insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’ (iv. ii). After the Advent service Roger and Jessica long for

another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw.

(p. 135)

But they find no such ‘clear way home’ and have to look for ‘the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark’ (p. 136). And that is the situation of most of the figures in the book. There are some traces of decent human feeling: strangers occasionally help, and among the ‘Humility’ there are still ‘a few small chances for mercy’ (p. 610). Kindness is mentioned—‘kindness is a sturdy enough ship for these oceans’ (p. 21)—but is insufficiently practised. Positive, generous, good human feelings and hopes and aspirations have not entirely vanished, but they are everywhere in retreat, and the attrition rate among them is dire. The counterforce (or counterforces) may have some kind of vestigial or underground existence. But it is not to be counted on.

There are recurring dreams of ‘freedom'—never realized—but if there is any hope it seems to reside in ‘the Earth’: Enzian dreams that ‘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), and in a late section headed ‘Streets’ that hope is again inscribed: ‘But in each of these streets, some vestige of humanity, of Earth, has to remain. No matter what has been done to it, no matter what it's been used for’ (p. 693).

This perhaps desperate faith in the regenerative powers of ‘the Earth’ accounts, I think, for a rather strange episode which follows immediately after the opening scene of the book. Pirate Prentice (the first named figure in the book, and of distinct importance) holds one of his Banana Breakfasts. Up on the roof of his maisonette in London there is a heap of old earth (and dead leaves and vomit and other decaying bits of organic life)—‘all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas’ (p. 5). So, in the midst of the destruction of war, growth, willy-nilly, continues. The Banana Breakfast is a fairly chaotic, farcical affair, but the bananas themselves—an unlikely enough presence in wartime London—signal a crucial phenomenon.

Now there grows among all the rooms … the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations … so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects …

(p. 10)

The banana—a comic enough ‘spell’ to set against the rocket—is nevertheless evidence of that endless generative power of the earth, that ‘assertion-through-structure’ which is the one real hope—perhaps the only genuine counterforce—against ‘Their several entropies’ (p. 302), and that accelerating movement towards death which seems to mark so many areas of the book.

The book moves to a climax that is a sort of terminal fusion of many of the key fantasies and obsessions in the book. It takes place in the American West (‘of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?’; Pynchon's book follows), and it should be noted that the last section as a whole becomes extremely difficult—impossible—to ‘follow’ in any way at all, as though the book demonstrates how any kind of narrative that seems to link together fragments and images is becoming impossible. The warning has been sounded earlier on: ‘Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end’ (p. 204)—or a book at book's end. Indeed, we are systematically juggled out of sense (any recognizable sense, at least), not allowed that repose and reassurance that any sense of completed narrative can bring. Yet the very last moment seems clear enough—and sufficiently disturbing. The opening page of the novel evokes the evacuation of London, with a crucial interposed comment: ‘but it's all theatre’. On the very last page we are back in a theatre. We are waiting for the show to start; as Pynchon comments, we have ‘always been at the movies (haven't we?)’. The film has broken down, though on the darkening screen there is something else—‘a film we have not learned to see’. The audience is invited to sing, while outside the rocket ‘reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre’. It is falling in absolute silence, and we know that it will demolish the old theatre—the old theatre of what is left of our civilization. But we don't see it because we are in the theatre trying to read the film behind the film; and we won't hear it because, under the new dispensation, the annihilation arrives first, and only after ‘a screaming comes across the sky’.

To argue on behalf of Pynchon's importance as a writer would be supererogatory. Placing him in a larger context is more difficult. More difficult, because he seems aware of all the literature that preceded him as well as the writing that surrounds him. From one point of view, he emerges from that extraordinary proliferation of experimentation in the novel which so deeply shaped the direction of American fiction during the 1960s and 1970s. Thus he takes his place in a period of American writing that includes such authors as William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, John Hawkes, John Barth, Robert Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Ishmael Reed, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and many others. The aesthetic funds alive at this time were various, but in particular I believe he was affected by the work of William Gaddis, whose novel The Recognitions (1955) exerted a general influence that has yet to be fully traced. This generation of American writers was in turn influenced by many European and South-American writers—in particular, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, but also Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Günter Grass. That list could be extended; but suffice it to say that Pynchon was writing his novels during an extraordinarily rich time of ferment and innovation in the contemporary novel, and quickly became one of its essential voices.

However, looked at from another angle, Pynchon's work takes its place in that line of dazzlingly daring, even idiosyncratic American writing which leads back through writers like Faulkner to Mark Twain and Hawthorne, and above all to Melville and Moby-Dick. And, taking yet another view, we might want to cite Tristram Shandy as an earlier experimental novel that lies behind him; but then Sterne points us in turn back to Rabelais, and both bear the mark of Don Quixote (as does Pynchon)—which is, in a manner of speaking, where the novel as we know it in the West began. Few major modern writers have not in some fashion returned to these origins, and thus we can see Pynchon continuing that series of radical shifts and innovations in fictional technique which was started by Conrad and James, and continued by Joyce—all of whom are more or less audible in his work. Which is all to say that he is both creatively eclectic and unmistakably original. From one point of view, the novel from its inception has always been a mixed genre with no certain limits or prescribed formal constraints; Pynchon, then, is in no way an ‘eccentric’ novelist, for the novel has no determined centre. Rather he is a key contemporary figure in the great tradition of those who extend the possibilities of fiction-making in arresting and enriching ways—not in this or that ‘Great Tradition', but in the great tradition of the novel itself.

Note

1. I was sent a very interesting essay on ‘indeterminacy’ in Gravity's Rainbow by Melvin Ulm and David Holt at Ohio State University, in which they suggest the relevance of the work of W. V. Quine—in particular, Word and Object—in considering what Pynchon is doing in the novel. To my knowledge the essay has not been published, but it does contain some fruitful ideas which merit attention, and I wish to acknowledge that I profited from reading it.

Bibliography

Works by Thomas Pynchon

Short fiction

‘The Small Rain’. The Cornell Writer, 6 (March 1959).

‘Mortality and Mercy in Vienna’. Epoch, 9 (Spring 1959).

‘Low Lands’. New World Writing, 16 (1960).

‘Entropy’. Kenyon Review, 22 (1960).

‘Under the Rose’. Noble Savage, 3 (1961).

‘The Secret Integration’. Saturday Evening Post, 237 (19 December 1964).

‘The World (This One), The Flesh (Mrs Oedipa Maas), and The Testament of Pierce Inverarity’. Esquire, 64 (December 1965).

‘The Shrink Flips’. Cavalier, 16 (March 1966).

Article

‘A Journey into the Mind of Watts’. New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966.

Novels

V. Philadelphia, Pa: Lippincott, 1963. London: Cape, 1963.

The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia, Pa: Lippincott, 1966. London: Cape, 1967.

Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking Press, 1973. London: Cape, 1974.

Bibliography

Herzberg, Bruce. ‘Selected Articles on Thomas Pynchon: An Annotated Bibliography’. Twentieth Century Literature, 21, 2 (May 1975).

Weixlmann, Joseph. ‘Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography', Critique, 14, 2 (1972).

For more recent bibliographical information, see Pynchon Notes, ed. John M. Krafft and Khachig Tölölyan, obtainable from Khachig Tölölyan, English Department, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 16457, USA. Six issues have appeared to date.

Selected Criticism of Thomas Pynchon

Books

Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.

Levine, George, and Leverenz, David (eds). Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1976.

Mendelson, Edward (ed.). Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978.

Pearce, Richard (ed.). Critical Articles on Thomas Pynchon. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Pétillon, Pierre-Yves. Le Grand'route: espace et écriture en Amérique. Paris: Seuil, 1979.

Plater, William. The Grim Phoenix. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Siegel, Mark. Creative Paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1978.

Slade, Joseph. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1974.

Selected articles

Abernathy, Peter L. ‘Entropy in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49’. Critique, 14, 2 (1972).

Davis, Robert M. ‘Parody, Paranoia, and the Dead End of Language in The Crying of Lot 49’. Genre, 5 (1972).

Friedman, Alan J., and Puetz, Manfred. ‘Science and Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow’. Contemporary Literature, 15 (Summer 1974).

Golden, Robert E. ‘Mass Man and Modernism: Violence in Pynchon's V.’. Critique, 14, 2 (1972).

Kermode, Frank. ‘The Use of the Codes’. In Seymour Chatman (ed.), Approaches to Poetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.

Kodony, Anette, and Peters, Daniel J. ‘Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49’. Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Spring 1973).

Ozier, Lance W. ‘Antipointsman/Antimexico: Some Mathematical Imagery in Gravity's Rainbow’. Critique, 16, 2 (1974).

———‘The Calculus of Transformation: More Mathematical Imagery in Gravity's Rainbow’. Twentieth Century Literature, 21, 2 (May 1975).

Patteson, Richard. ‘What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude in Pynchon's V.’. Critique, 16, 2 (1974).

Redfield, Robert, and Hays, Peter. ‘Fugue as Structure in Pynchon's “Entropy”’. Pacific Coast Philology, 12 (1977).

Richter, D. H. ‘The Failure of Completeness: Pynchon's V.’. In Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Sanders, Scott. ‘Pynchon's Paranoid History’. Twentieth Century Literature, 21, 2 (May 1975).

See also the critical articles in Pynchon Notes (see above, ‘Bibliography', for details).