Thomas Pynchon (1937– ) burst on the American literary scene when his first novel, V. (1963) won a William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of the year and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He followed with a much shorter work that is perhaps his most widely read novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). Lot 49 deals with some of the same issues (especially epistemological ones) that are crucial to Pynchon’s larger works, though its smaller scale makes it much more accessible. It also shows most of the stylistic characteristics for which Pynchon has since become so widely known: irreverent allusions to a variety of different forms of culture, informal and playful use of vernacular language, comically absurd character and place names, striking images and metaphors, and a general disregard for literary decorum. Eight years later, all of these characteristics and more would come to full fruition in Pynchon’s masterpiece, the sprawling Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that is still considered one of the definitive works of literary postmodernism and one of the greatest novels of any kind ever written.
Gravity’s Rainbow as Postmodern Novel
Declarations of the greatness of GR are legion. In an argument for the “importance of Pynchon” written soon after the initial publication of GR, Richard Poirier declares that GR “ranks with Ulysses and Moby-Dick in accomplishment and possibly exceeds them in complexity” (151). Much of the importance of GR lies in the perception that it occupies a central place in the canon of postmodernism. For example,Erik Ketzan begins his study of the presence of James Joyce in GR by reviewing arguments for the well-established critical notion that Pynchon’s novel plays somewhat the same paradigmatic role for postmodernism that Joyce’s Ulysses plays for modernism. Ulysses is almost certainly the novel to which GR is most often compared, largely for this reason—but also because the two novels have much in common in terms of their encyclopedic allusive literary complexity and self-conscious challenges to established rules of literary propriety. Ketzan outlines a number of ways in which he sees the presence of Joyce himself in GR, including the one overt mention of Joyce—along with Lenin, Trotsky, and Einstein—as one of a number of prominent personages who might have frequented the Odeon Café in Zurich at about the same time during World War I (262). Ketzan, in fact, extends this emphasis on the presence of Joyce himself in GR by arguing that Pynchon’s character Stephen Dodson-Truck can be read, at least in part, as a stand-in for Joyce.
If Ulysses is the quintessential work of literary modernism, then a close look at this novel gives us a much better idea of just what modernist novels are like. Similarly, if GR is regarded as the novel that best serves as a representative specimen of literary postmodernism, then an examination of this novel goes a long way toward helping us to understand the characteristics that make a novel postmodern. But, of course, the reverse is also true: reading GR within the context of postmodernism helps us better to understand postmodernism, but it also provides a framework within which to understand what is going on in GR. Molly Hite might simplify things a bit, but she usefully summarizes the relationship between modernism and postmodernism that is established in GR when she grants that Pynchon’s work seems to exhibit many of the formal characteristics of modernism, but that it is ultimately postmodern because its use of modernist conventions is actually employed as a parodic undermining of modernism (4).
Postmodernism is still somewhat of a contested terrain, partly because we still live in the postmodern era, so that postmodern culture is still evolving. I will read GR here primarily within the context of the theorization of postmodernism developed by Fredric Jameson through the 1980s and summarized in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which still stands as the most important description of postmodern culture and its sociohistorical background. Indeed, while minor modifications have been suggested to Jameson’s analysis, most of these pertain to the internet and other developments in postmodern culture that occurred after 1991 and thus do not pertain directly to GR.
One of the most useful updates to Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism does not really modify Jameson’s view at all but simply casts it in slightly different terms. What Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” is essentially the same thing as what Jameson calls “postmodernism,” with twenty more years of history behind it, years that have only extended what Jameson saw as the weak utopian imagination of postmodern culture. In particular, Fisher emphasizes the growing popular conviction in the years after Jameson’s work that there is no alternative to free market capitalism, partly because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which occurred just after the writing of Jameson’s postmodernism book. This collapse contributed greatly to the increased prominence of the extreme free-market form of capitalism known as neoliberalism. Indeed, drawing on the work of Oliver James, Fisher suggests that rising rates of “mental distress” are related to the growing power of neoliberalism, which again seems quite relevant to the predicament of many postmodern characters. As Fisher puts it, this trend shows that “instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high” (24).
GR is quite clear in its suggestion that capitalism (or at least the corporate entities that dominate capitalism) is a damaging force in the world, ultimately behind most destructive geopolitical events, such as World War II, the central historical event in the text, but also phenomena such as colonialism that are part of the background to that war. In GR, World War II is part of a vast, long-running conspiracies involving cooperation between international corporations such as America’s General Electric and Germany’s IG Farben. For Pynchon, the behind-the-scenes deals among these corporations transcend national boundaries and national loyalties, with the suggestion that their devotion to the bottom line is far more important to them than any sense of patriotism or national affiliation.
To this extent, GR seems at odds with Jameson’s notion that postmodern literature is ideologically aligned with capitalism. However, Jameson’s point is not that postmodern literature is never critical of capitalism; it is that postmodern literature is unable to imagine a viable alternative to capitalism. And GR, in fact, does not really envision or propose a viable systemic substitute for capitalism. For example, far from endorsing them, GR seems vaguely hostile to Marxism and socialism, which provide the most cogent systemic critique of capitalism and the most practical systemic alternative to capitalism, respectively. Thus, GR seems to accept the notion that capitalism itself is history’s principal bad actor during the modern period, but it seems unable to imagine any well-defined alternative that might have been better in the past or might be better in the future, even if it seems to want to maintain the hope that something might be better.
Jameson mentions Pynchon among the major exemplars of postmodernism that he lists at the beginning of his postmodernism book, though he then pays oddly little attention to Pynchon in the book itself until the concluding chapter, in which he mentions Pynchon’s interest in the history of Malta (primarily in V.) as an example of the postmodern tendency to treat history as a form of “in-group hobby or adoptive tourism” (361) and then mentions Wendell “Mucho” Maas from The Crying of Lot 49 as an example of the fragmented, “schizophrenic” psyche of the postmodern subject (375). Unfortunately, though, he does not directly engage with GR itself, even though numerous other critics have subsequently employed Jameson in reading that novel, which seems to exemplify Jameson’s theories of postmodernism in so many ways[1].
I will say more about the political implications and orientation of GR below. For now, I will concentrate on the formal characteristics of GR that are typical of postmodernism. For Jameson, the most important compositional strategy of postmodernist art and literature is pastiche, by which he means the borrowing of styles and motifs from the art and literature of the past. These borrowings, however, are carried out without any attempt to engage the original source in critical dialogue. Moreover, they ignore the fact that these originals were produced in a different historical context, so that the strategies used within them might mean something completely different than what they mean in the contemporary world. Styles and motifs borrowed from different cultures and (particularly, as emphasized by Jameson) from different time periods can be freely intermixed within the same postmodernist work, which tends to give postmodernist works a markedly ahistorical quality, with little or no sense of the historical process. Indeed, this loss of historical sense is a crucial characteristic of postmodernist literature for Jameson. It encompasses not just an inability to envision the past as a different time that led to the present by specific historical processes, but also an inability to imagine historical processes that lead to a future that is fundamentally different from the present. In short, postmodernist art is particularly lacking in the kind of utopian energies through which art, in the past, has helped to inspire social and political change.
Jameson also emphasizes that postmodernist artists employ this technique of pastiche because they are incapable of developing and maintaining the kind of distinct, individual styles that marked the work of the great modernist artists. Indeed, Jameson is consistently positive in his figuration of modernism as a sort of last wave of artistic resistance to the growing hegemony of capitalism in the modern world. Postmodernism, then, is the art that appears after this resistance has collapsed, leaving capitalism free to advance without opposition from this art, which, among other things, leads to a radical fragmentation of experience—both because of the tendency of capitalism to compartmentalize various phenomena for more efficient management and because the emphasis on innovation and expansion in capitalism lends an ephemeral quality to all aspects of existence. Importantly, Jameson relates the lack of distinct individual styles among postmodernist artists to the fact that they themselves lack the kind of stable, continuous identity that is needed to anchor such a style.
By pastiche, Jameson means the tendency of postmodern artists to borrow liberally from both the style and content of earlier works, treating the entire cultural tradition as a sort of aesthetic cafeteria from whose menu they can nostalgically pick and choose without critical engagement with the works being borrowed from or concern for the historical context in which those styles originally arose. Referring to this practice as the “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past,” Jameson, argues that this form of pastiche is,
like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of any laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. (Postmodernism 17)
David Harvey observes a similar tendency in postmodern culture when he notes that
postmodernists simply make gestures towards historical legitimacy by extensive and often eclectic quotation of past styles. Through films, books, and the like, history and past experience are turned into a seemingly vast archive ‘instantly retrievable and capable of being consumed over and over again at the push of a button.’ … The postmodern penchant for jumbling together all manner of references to past styles is one of its more pervasive characteristics. (85)
Importantly, for both Jameson and Harvey, this practice is not a choice on the part of individual artists, but an imperative necessitated by the conditions of life under late capitalism. Jameson particularly emphasizes his view that, partly because they themselves suffer from the psychic fragmentation he associates with the postmodern condition, postmodern artists are simply unable to develop and maintain the kind of distinctive personal styles that Jameson attributes to modernist artists. In his view, “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture” (Postmodernism 17–18).
Pynchon comes closer than perhaps any other postmodern author to establishing a personal style, though it is a somewhat casual style that is filtered through a variety of sources in literature—but especially in popular culture, including film, comic books, and even consumer products. As Frank McConnell puts it: “More than any other writer now working [Pynchon] is the poet of plastic flowers, tupperware dishes, television, and comic books—the entire artificially generated paraphernalia of contemporary urban life” (163).
In some cases, Pynchon overtly mimics the styles of others, as when he adopts an eighteenth-century style for his historical novel Mason & Dixon (1997) or when he wears “the linguistic mask of Raymond Chandler” in his 2009 detective novel Inherent Vice (Carswell 123). IN GR, however, more than openly mimicking the styles of his sources, Pynchon saturates his language with allusions, so that references to his sources (especially film) become simply a built-in component of his language. Pynchon characters such as Margherita Erdmann have worked in the Weimar German film industry, of course, but characters such as Slothrop and even the narrator(s) just naturally reach for film allusions as part of their way of understanding and describing the world, as do so many of us. (Sometimes it isn’t clear whether the allusions emanate from a character or from the narrator, but it doesn’t much matter. The point is the same.)
Of course, because the novel is set primarily in the 1940s, so the film allusions that permeate the text refer primarily either to the German film industry prior to the rise of Hitler or to Hollywood films of the 1930s. The emphasis in the former case is on the fictional S & M films of the fictional director Gerhardt von Göll, the nature of which tell us a great deal about the countercultural impulses that arose in Europe after World War I but that failed to prevent Europe from sinking into fascism and war[2]. The emphasis in the Amerian case, meanwhile, is not on respected masterpieces but on popular entertainments. Child stars Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney, for example, are probably the Hollywood personalities who figure most prominently in the text, with the latter even appearing as a character, of sorts, when Slothrop, dressed as the comic-book-like character Rocketman, travels to Potsdam, where the postwar order is being designed at the Potsdam Conference. Slothrop is there to retrieve some drugs stashed by Pig Bodine (who had also appeared as a character in V.); while in Potsdam, though, he runs into none other than Rooney, a fact Slothrop mentions to virtually everyone he meets for some time afterward. Slothrop himself seems flummoxed by this encounter. However, as is often the case, even Pynchon’s strangest-seeming historical anecdotes have roots in reality: Rooney was, in fact, awarded a Bronze Star for entertaining the troops in combat zones during the war[3].
In its tendency to draw upon both high and low culture for material, GR would seem to be the quintessential example of what Andreas Huyssen has in mind when he argues that postmodernism differs from modernism in its more democratic tendency ignore the traditional divide between “high” and “low” (or “mass”) culture, treating all forms of culture as valuable sources from which important insights can be gained. Granted, the use of significant amounts of material from popular culture (and in the same way that material from literary sources such as Homer or Dante or Shakespeare are used) would suggest that Huyssen’s vision of the elitism of modernism needs to be revised, especially in the case of Joyce (even if it well describes the attitudes of some of Joyce’s contemporaries, such as T. S. Eliot)[4]. Still, it is clearly the case that Pynchon both follows and goes beyond Joyce in his use of materials from popular culture, which sees as an integral part of the texture of day-to-day life for ordinary people and thus, if anything, as more important than “high” literature as a source from which to borrow material.
Pynchon also tends to draw upon material that is more contemporary to his own time than the sources alluded to by Joyce, up to and including very contemporary work, such as his quick gesture toward the work of fellow postmodernist Ishmael Reed, whose sprawling novel Mumbo Jumbo was published only a year before GR and includes a great deal of information about the history of the Masonic Order. Pynchon is surely alluding to Mumbo Jumbo when, after his own brief history of the Masonic Order in GR, he adds the following parenthetical note: “Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you’ll ever find here” (588).
In Joyce’s allusions to predecessors such as Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, the pastness of the past is preserved, and much of the point of the allusions is to highlight the ways in which the modern world of the twentieth century differs from the worlds in which these earlier writers lived and worked. In GR, the flow of time and history is much more complex, as I will discuss below. For now, I would simply point out that Pynchon’s use of allusions to earlier works seldom seems designed to indicate differences between the time periods of GR (the 1940s and the 1970s) and earlier time periods. Instead, most of the allusions to the past in GR—such as the novel’s many reminders of Slothrop’s Puritan ancestry or Europe’s colonial past—seem designed to indicate the persistence of the past in the present.
If pastiche is the most representative compositional strategy of postmodern art, then, at least for Jameson, the most distinctive formal characteristic of postmodern art is its tendency toward radical fragmentation. For Jameson, this formal characteristic reflects the broader phenomenon of the fragmentation of experience in the postmodern world, and one of the key markers of the postmodern condition is the psychic fragmentation of the individual subject. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Lacan, Jameson argues that, amid the increasing complexity and fragmentation of experience in the postmodern world, the individual subject experiences a loss of temporal continuity that causes him or her to experience the world somewhat in the manner of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic, Jameson says,
is condemned to live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the “I” and the “me” over time. (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 119)
Not surprisingly, Jameson suggests that this schizophrenic fragmentation in personal identity strongly influences postmodern narratives, in which the characters often experience fragmented, plural, and discontinuous identities. This schizophrenia also, for Jameson, can be seen in the formal fragmentation of the narratives themselves, leading to the production of postmodern “schizophrenic” texts by authors such as Samuel Beckett.
One of the best examples in all of literature of this inability to connect up experience over time is the scattering of Slothrop in GR. Based on “Mondaugen’s Law,” we are told that Slothrop’s “temporal bandwidth” is gradually narrowing in the latter part of the novel. Ultimately, he essentially dissolves into the landscape, though it is also suggested that me might have actually scattered into multiple Slothrops, distributed around the world. It is difficult, of course, to take this motif literally; the scattering of Slothrop is one of many motifs in GR that beg for a figurative interpretation, and Jameson’s description of the psychic fragmentation of the postmodern subject provides perhaps the best framework for performing that interpretation.
Of course, if individuals in the postmodern world have difficulty linking up one moment of their personal experience to the next, then it makes sense that individuals would have trouble conceptualizing the flow of history as well. Indeed, one key symptom of late capitalism as described by Jameson is the loss of a sense of history that would allow individuals to imagine a narrative structure to history, understanding the present as the future of the past and the past of the future. This inability, for Jameson, is meanwhile part of an even broader failure of “cognitive mapping,” in which, amid the vast complexity of the late capitalist world system, individuals have a great deal of trouble understanding that system and their place in it in general. In this sense, GR would seem both to be a symptom of the postmodern condition and a description of it, as well as an attempt to overcome it. After all, GR does seem badly to want to construct historical narratives and to map the interconnections among different phenomena in the world. Indeed, the notion of “anti-paranoia,” defined in GR as the sense that “nothing is connected to anything” is also declared in the text to be “a condition not many of us can bear for long” (434). The text even suggests that Slothrop, as he begins to scatter, his temporal bandwidth approaching zero, is “sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle” (434).
This experience of anti-paranoia is not, however, represented simply as a sort of blissful fading from consciousness. It is, indeed, represented as quite terrifying. Indeed, the one way in which GR might deviate most strongly from Jameson’s description of postmodernism has to do with the notion of “waning of affect”: for Jameson, the psychic fragmentation of the postmodern subject renders that subject unable to develop and maintain powerful emotional responses in the classic nineteenth-century sense. Yet the characters (and readers) of GR often experience powerful emotional experiences. For example, Patrick McHugh argues that the book is centrally concerned with an exploration of the particular affective experience of white males who wish to oppose “Them” but realize that their inherent privilege places them in a precarious position that always leaves them in danger of inadvertently making “Them” even stronger.
Gravity’s Rainbow as Menippean Satire
Traditionally, one of the best ways to get a handle on the characteristics of unusual books is to view them within the context of the specific genres in which they participate. With Pynchon, of course (and perhaps especially with GR), this kind of categorization is both especially easy and especially difficult, given that his work participates in so many different genres at once. As David Cowart puts it, “in his immense ambition and in the encyclopedic or Menippean energies that he deploys, Pynchon performs the very idea of literature—from its primitive beginnings through the capillary branchings of postmodern and post-postmodern practice” (Dark Passages 197).
Menippean satire takes its name from the 3rd century B.C. Greek philosopher Menippus of Gadara, none of whose writings survived but whose teaching and writings greatly influenced his student Lucian, who in fact sometimes featured Menippus as a character in his own Menippean satires, thus assuring the association of the name of Menippus with the form. Menippean satire is an irreverent form that challenges and mocks authority, institutions, and self-seriousness. It tends to be presented in a highly comic manner, even though it treats highly serious social and philosophical issues. It is stylistically diverse, often combining different styles and genres in the same work. It embraces messiness and often includes scenes of aberrant or shocking behavior; it can be quite crude, but it also often employs elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, as it looks at life from as many perspectives as possible, particularly those that are generally suppressed in polite society.
To an extent, the participation of GR in so many different genres can be taken as an indication of the way it exemplifies the Menippean “Second Line” novel described by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination. Indeed, Elliot Braha declares that “Gravity’s Rainbow, next to Ulysses, is perhaps the most exhaustive and far reaching Menippean satire in the twentieth century” (130). It is certainly the case that Menippean satireprovides one of the most broadly useful generic contexts within which to view GR and the other “big books” of the twentieth century; though an ancient Greek genre, Menippean satire has survived through the centuries, experiencing a particular resurgence in the twentieth century, both in terms of the use of Menippean elements in the work of writers such as Joyce and Pynchon and in the emphasis on Menippean satire by modern critics. Bakhtin provided the most extensive theorization of Menippean satire (closely associated with his well-known elaboration of the notion of the “carnivalesque”) in his readings of the work of writers as otherwise different as Rabelais and Dostoevsky, beginning at the end of the 1920s. Bakhtin’s work was not well known in the West, however, until it began to appear in French and English translations in the 1970s. In the meantime, the Canadian theorist Northrop Frye also called attention to Menippean satire in the 1950s, concentrating on the encyclopedic nature of the genre and on the tendency of its author to gather together a diversity of materials and voices in their works. Frye, for example, notes that “the Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon” (311).
The work of theorists such as Bakhtin and Frye has been extremely useful in helping us to understand some of the most important works of the literature of the past century. Numerous critics, for example, have pointed out the relevance of the genre as a context within which to view the work of Pynchon (see Braha, Hohmann 35-42, Morgan). Moreover, a number of commentators, including William Spanos, Linda Hutcheon (“Carnivalesque”), and Brian McHale have argued for a strong link between Menippean satire and postmodern fiction in general. McHale plainly states that “postmodernist fiction is the heir of Menippean satire and its most recent historical avatar” (172). He then goes on to offer GR as one of his leading examples to support this statement.
McHale’s comments on Gravity ‘s Rainbow, postmodernism, and Menippean satire are insightful and highly useful. However, his emphasis on technique poses the threat of collapsing Menippean satire into a merely formal category. As Bakhtin has particularly stressed, it is the essence of the Menippean satire to be a satire of something—to provide a concrete response to a specific social, political, and historical moment. Menippean satire is not merely a technique; it is primarily an attitude toward the world. Moreover, it is an oppositional attitude directed against specific targets. Julia Kristeva discusses the highly carnivalesque character of many novels that derive primarily from Bakhtin’s Second Line, which she refers to as “subversive,” or “polyphonic” novels, noting their close affinity with Menippean satire. She emphasizes, however, that “carnivalesque” does not connote frivolity: “The laughter of the carnival is not simply parodic; it is no more comic than tragic; it is both at once, one might say that it is serious” (Desire 70, Kristeva ‘s emphasis).
GR is filled with comic moments, some of them quite silly or sophomoric, but the silliness tends to have a serious purpose. Consider, for example, the moment early in the text when we are treated to a list of the items found on Slothrop’s cluttered desktop at the White Visitation:
“Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” (“He does have some rather snappy arrangements,” Tantivy reports, “he’s a sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing,” but Bloat’s decided he’d rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl . . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall—a dictionary of technical German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan—and usually, unless it’s been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too—Slothrop’s a faithful reader” (18).
The sheer excess in this list is quite comical, as are many of the specific entries—the phrase “bureaucratic smegma” is a Pynchon classic. This impressive list serves several other functions, as well. For one thing, it serves as a sort of microcosm of the text as a whole, indicating the encyclopedic collection of diverse materials of which GR is composed. For another, it indicates the basic Menippean messiness that this text endorses, opposing orderliness and control of all kinds. It also signals the prominence of lists as a structural feature throughout GR, lists that provide a direct link to the parodic epic catalogs of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It also provides one of the links between his fiction and earlier works in the Menippean tradition, such as those of Rabelais and Swift.
Lists are, among other things, perhaps the most direct way of packing information into a narrative, but again they need not imply exhaustion of possibilities. For example, consider the catalogue of audio tapes available in the glove compartment of the Volkswagen of Richard M. Zhlubb, Nixonesque manager of the Los Angeles theater where we are “viewing” the film that may in fact be GR itself :
CHEERING (AFFECTIONATE), CHEERING (AROUSED), HOSTILE MOB in an
assortment of 22 languages, YESES, NOES, NEGRO SUPPORTERS, WOMEN
SUPPORTERS, ATHLETIC—oh, come now—FIRE-FIGHT (CONVENTIONAL), FIRE-
FIGHT (NUCLEAR), FIRE-FIGHT (URBAN), CATHEDRAL ACOUSTICS
.. (882)
Note that, for one thing, this information tells us very little in terms of specifics, though it does nicely evoke the troubled social context of early-1970s America. In addition, the ending by ellipsis (which often happens in Pynchon’s lists) makes the list open-ended and indicates that it could theoretically go on forever were it not for the physical limitations of the book[5]. Pynchon uses ellipsis marks frequently elsewhere in the book as well, quite literally building spaces or gaps in the text of the type that indicate its incompleteness, despite its encyclopedism.
For a text that is chock full of so much diverse material, GR seems surprisingly concerned with calling attention to its own incompleteness. Not only does it systematically defeat final and complete interpretation, but it also thematizes incompleteness in a number of ways, which can be taken as a general endorsement of messiness and rejection of authoritarian control. For example, the text makes three different references to Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), who fled the Nazis in 1938 to come to the United States to take a position at Princeton University, where he became a friend and associate of Albert Einstein. At one point, Pynchon’s narrator characterizes the well-known “Murphy’s Law” (the idea that, if anything can possibly go wrong, it will) as a “brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel’s Law,” then immediately identifies the year 1931 as “the year of Gödel’s theorem” (275)[6].
The theorem to which Pynchon here refers was developed by Gödel in 1931, in response to the massive Principia Mathematica, published by Russell and Whitehead in as an attempt to develop a total system of mathematics. It was a monumental achievement, but Gödel was able to demonstrate that it was not, in fact, complete. More importantly, Gödel was able to prove that it is impossible in principle to develop a complete system of mathematics. Specifically, he showed that any “complete” system of mathematics must contain undecidable propositions—statements that cannot be demonstrated to be either true or false without reference to other propositions in the same system, which in turn cannot be demonstrated to be either true or false without reference to other propositions in the system, and so on, in an infinite series of self-reference. On the other hand, any system that does not contain such undecidable propositions necessarily cannot be complete.
Obviously, the emphasis on undecidability in Gödel’s Theorem makes it the perfect mathematical analog to GR. As Katherine Hume puts it, “radical uncertainty, whether scientific, philosophical, or deconstructive, is unquestionably a major feature of Pynchon’s world” (190). Pynchon himself no doubt invokes it for that very reasons, and even at one point specifically mentions it as an explanation for the fact that a list (of reasons to commit suicide) he has just provided (this one embedded on one of the many songs that also punctuate the text) cannot possibly be complete: “The trouble with it is that by Gödel’s Theorem there is bound to be some item around that one has omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy to think of off the top of one’s head, so that what one does most likely is go back over the whole thing, meantime correcting mistakes and inevitable repetitions, and putting in new items that will surely have occurred to one, and—well, it’s easy to see that the “suicide” of the title might have to be postponed indefinitely!” (320).[7]
Pynchon, of course, is well known for his use of metaphors from science and mathematics in his writing. In many ways, for example, his use of Gödel’s theorem is congruent with his use of the thermodynamic concept of entropy, perhaps the single scientific concept that has been most prominently discussed in relation to his work. In thermodynamics, “entropy” is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system, and to that extent is another measure of messiness. However, entropy is primarily important because of its role in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that any process that occurs within a closed system increases the amount of entropy in that system. Given that the universe as a whole can be considered to be a closed system, the implication of the Second Law is that the total amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe is steadily increasing, which leads to the notion that the universe is gradually winding down to a state of total disorder. Oddly enough, though, total disorder is essentially equivalent to total order (in the sense of total homogeneity); total disorder implies the complete absence of temperature differentials that would allow the flow of heat from one point to another, a prerequisite for the performance of any work. In short, the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies that the universe as a whole is irreversibly moving toward a state of complete homogeneity and statis—the so-called heat death of the universe.
David Cowart notes that Pynchon uses entropy and the Second Law as metaphors to express the idea for the “snowballing deterioration of the West” (Art of Illusion (2). This process has arguably proceeded much farther since the publication of GR. However, Pynchon is far from being a prophet of doom, despite the apocalyptic ending of GR. Cowart (who believes that critics have perhaps overemphasized the importance of Pynchon’s use of scientific metaphors) thus goes on to point out that human societies are not closed systems in the thermodynamic sense, so that the Second Law in no way implies that human civilizations necessarily decay over time. From this point of view, GR can be seen as a cautionary tale that warns of the potential decay of Western civilization; however, it only makes sense to produce cautionary tales if the negative events being warned against are, in fact, preventable.
Gravity’s Rainbow as Historical Novel
While GR is usefully illuminated by reading it within the context of Menippean satire, the most enlightening way to look at GR in terms of genremight be as an historical novel that is informed by Menippean energies. After all, as unconventional as it might be in comparison with the classic historical novels famously discussed by Georg Lukács, GR is clearly describable as an historical novel that centers on the final years of World War II in Western Europe, as well as the chaotic months that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the end of that war with the German surrender on May 8, 1945. GR even reaches back to a description of German atrocities in colonial Africa as historical background to the rise of Nazism, even as it also suggests, reaching back to Puritan New England, that certain aspects of American history were also part of the prehistory of the war. In addition, the novel gestures forward to the early 1970s and to a time contemporary with the novel’s composition and publication, subtly placing the Nixon administration and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam as points on the same historical timeline as World War II.
To this extent, GR accomplishes very much what Lukács (among others) would suggest that the best historical novels are supposed to do. It fictionalizes transformational events that were central to the flow of history within a narrative model of what drives history, establishing a sense that no historical event occurs in a vacuum but instead should be seen as part of an ongoing narrative in which world historical events occur within a context that is shaped by an extensive pre-history and that contributes to the shape of subsequent events in its future. Tony Tanner, in fact, declares that “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” (75). Similarly, building on Tanner’s work, Paul Bové has declared that, while critics have viewed GR from a variety of perspectives, “the most important critical perception is that GR is an historical novel and Pynchon an historical novelist. … Any reading or teaching of Pynchon must begin with the recognition that his novels stand in complex relations to history. Unfortunately, though, scholarship does not make clear enough either the nature of those relations or the importance of history to Pynchon’s poetics. It is essential that any reading or teaching of Gravity’s Rainbow proceed from a secure sense of Pynchon’s aesthetic relation to history” (659).
What that relation is, though, is not entirely obvious. Carswell draws upon Jameson’s characterization of the problematic nature of postmodern historicism, particularly the suggestion that we can no longer represent history directly, but can only represent pre-existing ideas about and representations of history. In particular, Carswell concludes that Pynchon’s representation of history really tells us more about the present than about the past (104). It is certainly the case that GR deviates dramatically from Lukács’s insistence that historical novels should be constructed in a realist mode that reflects a sense of history proceeding according to identifiable and rational basic principles. Bové, in fact, suggests that GR “generates a serious critique of Lukács’s basic worldview” (661). By this, Bové means that Lukács sees history as proceeding according to a rational, linear, and progressive model, while Pynchon associates this kind of metanarrative of history with “Them,” with the force of the Elect who traditionally dominate history. Pynchon’s sympathies, though, are with the marginalized and the downtrodden, who have typically been left by the wayside in the flow of history. In response, Pynchon seems to endorse the messiness of history in all its diversity.
In this sense, Bové would appear to be associating Pynchon with the popular model of postmodernism espoused by Jean-François Lyotard and others, who see postmodernism as centrally informed by a rejection of grand metanarratives of all kinds. That this would be seen as a direct repudiation of Lukács’s Marxist vision is not surprising, given that Marxism depends in such a central way on the notion that history proceeds according to well-define rational principles. On the other hand, for Lukács and other Marxist thinkers, this process ultimately unfolds precisely to the advantage of the marginal and the downtrodden so favored by Pynchon, which would suggest that Pynchon’s vision is not necessarily quite so opposed to that of Lukács as Bové would appear to indicate.
What might be more accurate to say is that most readings of postmodernism, such as Lyotard’s, that see it as an emancipatory, anti-authoritarian movement are directly opposed to Marxism, offering it as a sort of alternative. In a careful examination of the origins of the historical concept of postmodernity, Perry Anderson concludes that the work of theorists such as Lyotard, Ihab Hassan, and Charles Jencks (and even the ostensible leftist Jürgen Habermas), while claiming to view postmodernism as emancipatory, is thoroughly underwritten (and undermined) by a thinly-disguised, Cold War–informed polemic against Marxism and socialism. Indeed, the grand metanarratives decried by Lyotard and other postmodern champions of fragmentation are, for Anderson, simply coded stand-ins for the Marxist model of history. Thus, despite their seeming diversity (and its overt celebration of diversity) Anderson sees in most earlier theorizations of postmodernism and postmodernity a strange ideological consistency in their aversion to the central principles of classical Marxism:
“The idea of the postmodern, as it took hold in this conjuncture, was in one way or another an appanage of the Right. Hassan, lauding play and indeterminacy as hallmarks of the postmodern, made no secret of his aversion to the sensibility that was their antithesis: the iron yoke of the Left. Jencks celebrated the passing of the modern as the liberation of consumer choice, a quietus to planning in a world where painters could trade as freely and globally as bankers. For Lyotard the very parameters of the new condition were set by the discrediting of socialism as the last grand narrative—ultimate version of an emancipation that no longer held meaning. Habermas, resisting allegiance to the postmodern, from a position still on the Left, nevertheless conceded the idea to the Right, construing it as a figure of neo-conservatism. Common to all was a subscription to the principles of what Lyotard—once the most radical—called liberal democracy, as the unsurpassable horizon of the time. There could be nothing but capitalism. The postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions” (45–46).
GR might very well be caught up in some of this same anticommunist Cold War zeitgeist, but it is not as fundamentally opposed to Marxism as are the theorists cited by Anderson; it is, though, built on a vision of history that is much messier than the Marxist vision. Thomas Schaub suggests that GR resembles Tolstoy’s War and Peace in that both are massive novels built on a specific vision of history. In Tolstoy’s case, according to Schaub, this vision involves a fundamental Christian faith that history ultimately makes sense because it conforms to a divine plan; in Pynchon’s case, that plan is missing, leading to a much more chaotic and dangerous situation (Pynchon 76). This same distinction might be made between Pynchon and Marx/Lukács, which means that GR necessarily deviates from Lukács’s notion of the conventional realist historical novel. In fact, it does so in at least three basic ways. For one thing, Pynchon undermines the usual model of history as the story of the actions of important leaders of powerful nations, often focusing instead on the stories of the marginal and the downtrodden, with the difference often couched in terms of the Puritan notion Predestination, according to which all humans are born as members of either the Elite (favored by God and fated for salvation) or the Preterite (fated for damnation). Pynchon frequently uses this distinction as a metaphor for what we might more generally term the fortunate and the unfortunate, or the haves and the have-nots. In addition, Pynchon’s “theoretical” model of what drives history often pictures history in GR as driven by giant, conspiratorial forces (often corporate in nature); in its emphasis on the workings of capitalism, this model has some points of contact with the Marxist model of history, but it puts its emphasis on shadowy corporate agents (such as America’s General Electric and Germany’s IG Farben) rather than class conflict. There is also a strong Freudian strain that runs through Pynchon’s characterization of history and society that gives his historical vision a somewhat different slant than either the Marxist or the mainstream bourgeois models of history. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the narrative of GR is related in a complex, nonlinear form that tends to undermine usual notions of cause and effect. This same observation also goes for his narration of historical events, which also tends to occur in a fragmented and nonlinear way that differs substantially from the elegant metanarratives that govern history according to Marx and to most mainstream bourgeois historians.
1. Emphasis on the marginal. Even when GR is dealing with major historical events, such as World War II, it tends to emphasize relatively marginal aspects of those events. As a war novel, for example, GR is certainly unconventional. There are no battles in the novel, and the leaders of both sides are present only as ghostly figures in the background. As far as anything approaching actual combat is concerned, the novel’s only emphasis is on the German V-1 and (especially) V-2 (or A4) rockets that reigned terror on London during the final years of the war, representing a genuine innovation in high-tech weaponry. Overall, the emphasis is more on the anarchic situation that prevails in Europe as the war winds down and immediately afterward, featuring numerous displaced populations that attempt to make their way across the war-torn landscape, trying to get back home. To complicate matters still more, though, the Holocaust is essentially missing from the text, other than a few vague references to Jews as outsiders and to one fairly marginal motif involving the liberation of the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp, an especially brutal place whose inmates had been forced to work on the rocket program. But Jews are not a major force among the text’s outsiders. Instead, the most important of the outsider populations in GR is probably the population of African Hereros that had been brought to Europe in the wake of the Herero massacre in German Southwest Africa in 1904 and that ultimately play a role in the rocket program as “Schwarzkommandos.”[8]
However, numerous historians of the Herero Genocide have identified that horrific event as an obvious precursor to the Holocaust. Not only did the Germans attempt to exterminate the Herero in Africa, employing concentration camps as part of their genocidal campaign, but they also conducted scientific experiments designed to prove the racial superiority of white Germans to black Africans, experiments that directly anticipated the use of a variety of bizarre scientific experiments in a failed attempt to provide legitimacy to their white Supremacist arguments. Moreover, the link between the Herero Genocide and the Holocaust was sometimes quite direct, going beyond an indication of general inclinations. For example, as Tom Sanders details, the prominent German scientist Eugen Fischer, who was quite central to the scientific research conducted as part of the Herero Genocide, wrote a book on his results that was later read by Adolf Hitler and apparently had an important influence on the development of Hitler’s racist ideas.
Racist ideas, of course, are not restricted to German Nazis. For example, many aspects of the Herero Genocide echo British activities in the Boer War, just a short distance away in South Africa and only a few years earlier. Concentration camps, for example, seem to have been invented by the British in the Boer War, so that the Germans apparently got the idea for them from the British. Meanwhile, Western readers were not terribly familiar with colonial and postcolonial histories in 1973 (and were even less familiar a decade earlier, when Pynchon first drew attention to the story of the Herero in V.). Even now, Pynchon’s American readers are probably much more familiar with British than with German operations in Africa, and the single best-known novel about European colonialism in Africa is probably Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a British novel about Belgian rule in the Congo, a rule the notorious cruelty of which obviously paralleled German strategies in Southwest Africa quite extensively.
In short, the atrocities committed by the Germans in Southwest Africa were the rule, rather than the exception, when it came to the European colonization of Africa, though GR admittedly does fairly little to call attention to this fact. Neither the Boer War nor Heart of Darkness are directly referenced in GR, though Bové has suggested Conrad’s novella as a gloss on GR, noting, in particular, that a scene in which the Herero camp outside the range of gunfire from the German train tracks (315) echoes the famous scene in Heart of Darkness in which a French ship fires its guns pointlessly into the African jungle against targets that are surely out of range. Whether or not this allusion was intended (and whether or not the Russian sailor who fathers both Enzian and Tchitcherine in Africa is related to the Russian sailor of Heart of Darkness, and so on) the affinities between Conrad’s story and the African part of Pynchon’s story are clear[9].
In addition, there are other suggestions in GR that the Germans and the Allies were perhaps not quite as radically different in their ideas as the Allies would have liked to think. For example, many of the experiments being carried out in the White Visitation resemble the notorious experiments carried out by German Nazi scientists during the war. GR also contains numerous reminders of the fact that so many prominent Nazi scientists were scarfed up by the Americans (in competition with the British and the Soviets, who were doing the same thing) for use in American research projects after the war. The most prominent of these was probably Wernher von Braun, head of the German rocket program that plays such a big role in GR. But von Braun, carried off to America with 1,600 other Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip, also later became the chief scientific face of NASA’s space program, heading the project that designed the Saturn V rocket that propelled American Apollo spacecraft to the moon. Von Braun does not directly appear as a character in GR, but heis mentioned numerous times in the book and is even suggested as a sort of Prussian aristocratic Other to the more working-class German scientist Hans Pökler, who plays an important role in the text, functioning at times as a sort of German counterpart to the American Slothrop (402). In addition, von Braun’s recruitment by the Americans is mentioned at least twice in the novel (273, 456), though he is probably most importantly foregrounded via the fact that the epigraph to the first major section of the novel is a quote from him that suggests a belief in the supernatural, despite his devotion to science, a suggestion that is key to the texture of GR.
2. History as Conspiracy. GR suggests in a number of ways that history is driven largely by the machinations of large, mysterious entities, possibly including secret organizations such as the Masonic Order but more centrally including large corporations, such as America’s General Electric or Germany’s IG Farben. The prevailing motif of Pynchon’s model of history is connection, and to that extent his work would seem to deviate substantially from the kinds of postmodern visions that see history as random and fragmented. On the other hand, Pynchon does not seem to view history as governed by any sort of prevailing metanarrative; instead it is governed by the actions of secretive organizations that seize upon whatever opportunities that come their way.
Pynchon also seems fascinated by the sheer strangeness of many historical events. Near the end of the first section of the book, for example, he offers one of his many offbeat history lessons, here delivered primarily via a séance in which a group of Weimar leftist activists (including Leni Pökler) contact the deceased Walther Rathenau, the Jewish architect of the cartelized post-World War I capitalist system in Germany. Rathenau had been assassinated in 1922 by right-wing fanatics shoe suspected him of leftist leanings and resented his Jewishness. His killers, in short, were the ideological forerunners of the Nazis, and it is no accident that, after the Nazis took power in Germany, any positive memorializations of Rathenau, whom many had viewed as a hero and a martryr, were forbidden. Via this unusual séance mechanism, Pynchon is able to deliver a great deal of background concerning German history leading to the Nazis, as well as making clear that the past, seemingly dead and gone, can still exert an influence on the present. (One might compare here the use of the ghost motif in Tony Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, which is used to indicate the way in which the legacy of slavery has continued to haunt American society ever since.)
This episode also makes it clear that fascism is not an alternative to capitalism but an extreme form of it. In particular, Pynchon relates the 1859 discovery by the German-trained English chemist William Henry Perkin of the synthetic dye that he labeled “mauve,” the first aniline dye. This dye became a key to the subsequent growth of the synthetic dye industry, which itself was a key to the rise of of a German chemical industry that eventually came to be dominated by IG Farben, which occupied a position of immense power and influence under the Nazis. The complicity between IG Farben and the Nazis is, in fact, a key theme of GR, though it is also part of a much larger and more important theme concerning the role played by global capitalism in World War II, which resulted in huge profits for megacorporations and propelled them into the beginning of today’s late capitalist system. Historians are still unraveling how central German cartel capitalism was to the rise of fascism, with which it was thoroughly in league, while GR suggests that, however tragic fascism and the war were for so many people, they were both quite good for business in many ways.
Indeed, one might see World War II as a key turning point that helped to open the way for new developments in capitalism that would eventually lead to today’s globalized, neo-liberal world. During its period of peak power under the Nazis, IG Farben was the largest company in Europe and the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world. It both supplied numerous products to the Nazi regime (such as the poison gas used to kill concentration camp inmates) and profited from that regime, using over a hundred thousand concentration camp inmates as slave labor. Due to its close and obvious complicity with the Nazis, IG Farben was seized and liquidated by the Allies after the war, its constituent components divided back into the six separate smaller companies (including the well-known Bayer pharmaceutical company) that had merged to form it officially in 1925. But these constituents, of course, continued to operate as part of the global capitalist system and to exercise their close contacts with American companies such as General Electric. Indeed, Pynchon’s most telling indictment of the capitalist system in GR is not his portrayal of IG Farben, whose pro-Nazi activities are now well known, but his suggestion of the way GE and other American companies cooperated with the German company up to (and possibly during) the war.
General Electric, incidentally, features prominently in GR at a variety of points. It occupies the very center, for example, of a giant conspiracy of light-bulb manufacturers and power providers that is related to the attempt to stamp out Byron the Bulb, the immortal light bulb that threatens to upset the economic balance of both the power industry and the light-bulb industry. Founded by Thomas Edison and J. P. Morgan, General Electric is a signature American corporate conglomerate that can be read as a sort of stand-in for American capitalism in general, though General Electric (which employed a young Kurt Vonnegut as a technical writer soon after World War II) has certainly been involved in its own specific share of nefarious activities, including having extensive links with German companies during the 1930s, as did General Motors and Ford, whose founder Henry Ford was a notorious Nazi sympathizer during that time.
If World War II was a key turning point in the history of capitalism, it was a key turning point in world history in other ways as well, including the many weapons-related technological innovations that were developed as part of the war effort on both sides. The most obvious (and ominous) of these were the nuclear weapons that were used by the United States against Japan at the end of the war, developed in the Manhattan Project (in which General Electric played a key role). These weapons do not directly play a role in GR, but they do add some oblique poignancy when, in the wake of Germany’s surrender but before the atomic bombing of Japan, Slothrop runs into the Japanese Ensign Morituri when Morituri, who is looking forward to the end of the war in the Pacific as well, so that he can return to his wife and daughters in Japan, where he imagines they can resume life in their lovely and peaceful hometown of … Hiroshima, very soon to be made famous by a weapon that makes the German V-2s look like toys.
Of course, there were many other technological advances made directly as a result of the war, including the German rockets that are so prominent in GR. In his discussion of GR, Cowart emphasizes that World War II was a key turning point in history because “World War II saw technology’s coming of age. Promising humanity complete control of its environment and its destiny, technology offers something very like transcendence—or it offers annihilation. … Will the rocket enable humanity to go to the stars—or to destroy itself” Cowart (Dark Passages 12). GR, of course, suggests that the latter seemed more likelyby 1973, though it does leave open some hope for a better outcome.
3. Nonlinear narrative. One of the most striking images in GR is that of the supersonic German V-2 rockets that rained terror on London during World War II. The fact that these rockets travel faster than the speed of sound means that they arrive at their destinations before anyone can hear them coming, which makes them all the more terrifying. In addition, the notion that the rocket arrives first, followed by the sound of its approach disrupts our normal sense of sequence and makes these rockets a perfect metaphor for GR’s disruption in the natural flow of time and narrative.And, of course, the suggested link between Slothrop’s erections and the locations of the rocket strikes participates in this same motif, given that Slothrop’s erections seem possibly to occur as a result of the rocket strikes—except that they occur before the strikes, violating the usual laws of cause and effect, unless his erections are actually guiding the rockets and controlling their paths.
The narrative flow of GR violates the laws of cause-and-effect as well. After all, the narrative of GR is radically nonlinear, skipping freely about from scenes set in the “present” time of the book’s action at the end of World War II, to the distant colonial past (either in Puritan New England or Dutch Mauritius), to the early twentieth century (including more recent colonial adventures), to the present time of the book’s publication in the early 1970s. Its relation of specific historical events is also presented in a highly fragmented, nonchronological manner. To this extent, GR resembles any number of both modernist and postmodernist texts, all of which challenge the orderly chronological narratives of classic literary realism. Those narratives, of course, are deeply implicated in the linear models of history (pioneered in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the philosophy of Hegel) that arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As J. Hillis Miller points out, “[t]he notions of narrative, of character, and of formal unity in fiction are all congruent with the system of concepts making up the Western idea of history” (“Narrative” 461). In particular, Miller argues that our view of how fictional plots should proceed is thoroughly informed by the Hegelian model of rational history:
“The assumptions about history which have been transferred to the traditional conception of the form of fiction . . . include the notions of origin and end (“archeology” and “teleology”); of unity and totality or “totalization”; of underlying “reason” or “ground” of selfhood, consciousness, or “human nature”; of the homogeneity, linearity, and continuity of time; of necessary progress; of “fate,” “destiny,” or “Providence”; of causality; of gradually emerging “meaning”; of representation and truth” (459-60).
By the time of GR, of course, readers were accustomed to encountering texts whose narrative structures refused to conform to such models of history. And, of course, many historians had begun to challenge nineteenth-century models of linear history. Indeed, by 1973, when GR was published, the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory showed a new tendency, influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and imported French poststructuralism, to figure the narrative of history itself as somewhat more complex and metaphorical than had been envisioned in the high realist days of the nineteenth century. White argued that historical narratives are far more than simple objective accounts of events from the past. They are, he argues, constructed as narratives, much in the way that literary narratives are constructed. In short, he largely reverses Miller’s earlier argument that literary narratives are modeled on historical narratives, seeing instead as the other way around.
To this extent, the historical vision of GR can be seen as typical of revised ways of thinking about history in the 1970s—though it might also be seen as indicative of the postmodern tendency, indicated by Jameson, to be unable to maintain a genuine narrative vision of history—and thus to be unable to imagine that history might proceed beyond our current predicament and eventually emerge on the other side of the capitalist era.
Part of the lack of discernible narrative direction in GR can be attributed to the fact that GR seems to be informed, to a certain extent, by a vision of history that is less materialist (in the Marxist mode) and more metaphysical, based on Pynchon’s clear fascination with the Calvinist/Puritan opposition between the Elect and the Preterite. Marx is not a major presence in GR: indeed, Groucho Marx is mentioned in the text quite a bit more often than is Karl Marx, which perhaps says a great deal about the m anarchistic, carnivalesque texture of GR and of the extent to which it draws on pre-World War II film for material[10].The difference between Pynchon and Karl Marx in terms of their views of history is perhaps most explicitly captured in GR in a moment in which the narrator is discussing the genocidal extermination of the Herero in Southwest Africa. This riff on the part of the narrator, like so much in GR, is based on historical reality. Many of the German colonists in Southwest Africa were, in fact, opposed to the absolute extermination of the Herero, largely because they felt that the Herero might be needed for cheap labor (Gewald 169). Pynchon’s narrator, however, suggests a less economic and more psychological/metaphysical reason why the Europeans would want to have black colonial subjects, and in a mode that dismisses Marx’s view of the issue as simplistic (and even racist):
“wait a minute there, yes it’s Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it’s nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. … Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit” (317).
This turn to the excremental, of course, is one that occurs quite frequently in GR—and is one of the motifs that identifies the novel most closely with the carnivalesque properties of Menippean satire. In one early scene (one of the most striking in the novel), Tyrone Slothrop, drugged and interrogated in the White Visitation as part of their ongoing sinister experiments, experiences a combination of memories and fantasies from his youthful days in Boston, where his interactions with African Americans (including a young Malcolm Little) possibly exacerbated his racist tendencies. The most memorable part of the scene, of course, is Slothrop’s fantasized experience of dropping his mouth harp in a toilet, then diving in after it and subsequently swimming through sewage pipes looking for it. It has been established that this sequence was the inspiration for the hilarious scene in the film version of Trainspotting in which Ewan MacGregor dives down the worst toilet in Scotland (a scene that does not appear in Irvine Welsh’s novel). If film has greatly influenced Pynchon, then the reverse has also been true, to some extent. Pynchon describes Slothrop’s trip as only Pynchon can, beginning with Tyrone’s concern as he goes into the drain, ass still up, that he might be ass raped by “Negroes,” including Malcolm/Red (working as a shoeshine boy in the bathroom) and including his racist but inimitable description of a “dingleberry” that gets lodged in his nostril and that he concludes must have come from a Negro because it is “stubborn as a wintertime booger.” Slothrop is not the most admirable of protagonists, but Pynchon pulls no punches about making it clear that he, scion of an old (but declining) New England family, is a pretty typical white American, manipulated and conditioned since early childhood, as are we all.
Just as Slothrop gets going, of course someone has to flush: “there comes this godawful surge from up the line, noise growing like a tidal wave, a jam-packed wavefront of shit, vomit, toilet paper and dingleberries in mind-boggling mosaic, rushing down on panicky Slothrop like an MTA subway train on its own hapless victim. Nowhere to run. Paralyzed, he stares back over his shoulder. A looming wall stringing long tendrils of shitpaper behind, the shockwave is on him—GAAHHH! he tries a feeble frog kick at the very last moment but already the cylinder of waste has wiped him out, dark as cold beef gelatin along his upper backbone, the paper snapping up, wrapping across his lips, his nostrils, everything gone and shit-stinking now as he has to keep batting micro-turds out of his eyelashes, it’s worse than being torpedoed by Japs!” (66). As gross and obscene and silly as this whole scene (like this whole novel) is, it still serves a serious purpose, allegorically making the contents of the sewage pipes stand in for all the things that America has attempted to repress and keep out of sight in its history.
Later, near the end of the novel, Pynchon again elaborates on this toilet motif (though there are a number of toilet references in between, as well), having his narrator explain why toilets are usually white: “Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman’s warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what that white toilet’s for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain’s the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death” (688).
This opposition between forces of life and death has much in common with the Marxist notion of class conflict, especially as Pynchon, in GR, essentially equates the Elect with what Marxists would call the ruling class, here typically described as a mysterious “Them,” who are the movers and shakers that drive history. However, a closer look shows that the model of history suggested by GR differs from the Marxist model in important ways. In particular, Pynchon ultimately seems to endorse the messiness and multiplicity of history, making it much more fundamentally complex than any model based on direct oppositions between competing forces could ever be, even if those oppositions (as in the case of Marxism) are dialectical and not based on a simple binary structure. In fact, Pynchon seems to suggest in GR that the notion of a simple linear, teleological historical timeline whose direction is driven by binary conflicts between opposed forces is a description, not of inherent notion of history but of the model of history preferred by the Elect, who seek to impose this well-behaved form on history as a way of making it easier to control and manipulate. As Bové puts it, “For the elect, the telos of history is its own transcendence and the transfiguration of the elect—a transfiguration achieved by turning humans and human institutions into transcendent, nonorganic, plastic death-dealing creatures” (664).
Enzian is perhaps the most obvious force of direct resistance to the power of Them in GR. He has never heard of Audre Lorde, of course, so perhaps he cannot be faulted for trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Enzian, in a desperate move, attempts to conscript the disruptive force of the rocket for his own purposes, using it to wrest control of the fate of the remaining Hereros from the European forces that have destroyed the traditional Herero way of life, exterminated most of the Herero people, and dragged the survivors back to Europe for purposes that are surely not meant to benefit the Herero themselves. Given this dark history, it is not surprising that another faction of the surviving Hereros, led by one Ombindi and known as the “Empty Ones,” have succumbed to despair and are dedicated to finishing the job begin in 1904 by the German forces in Africa that sought the genocidal extermination of the Herero people and their culture.
This split among the surviving Herero undermines any attempt to see GR as informed by a polar opposition between white Germans and black Africans as historical forces, given that the novel’s Africans are not presented as a monolithic group. In addition, the nonlinear history of GR would seem to be more radical than the restructuring of narrative forms described by White and enacted by writers such as Joyce. In particular, Pynchon at times seems to want to suggest that time itself proceeds in ways that are far more complex than might be dreamt of in Hegel’s—or even Nietzsche’s—philosophy. For example, a little more than a third of the way through GR, we are treated to a near-encounter between an American warship, the U.S.S. John E. Badass and a German U-boat that has been hijacked by Argentine anarchists fleeing the right-wing government that came to power there in the “Uriburu Revolution” of 1930. It seems that the two ships are about to engage in battle, but the coffee urn aboard the Badass has been laced (by crewman Pig Bodine, of course) with the drug Oneirine, an invention of the sinister scientist Laszlo Jamf, one of the properties of which is “time-modulation.” As a result, the Badass is sent into a different timeline and what the anarchists launch their torpedo against is a long-abandoned rusted derelict (389).
This moment doesn’t necessarily make sense, and perhaps that is the point. In any case, this moment anticipates the famous ending of the book, in which the German 00000 rocket, seemingly launched in 1945, is about to strike a Los Angeles movie theater in 1973, having apparently also jumped into a new timeline. It also anticipates a later moment in Pynchon’s massive novel Against the Day (2006), in which an attack on New York at the beginning of the twentieth century is somehow linked to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Here, Pynchon even provides an explanation for the connection through a theory of “bilocation” involving the duplication of historical events and even provides the multi-dimensional math to back up the theory.
Pynchon’s eccentric view of time and history also shows up in GR when Slothrop, wandering through the detritus of the German V-2 rocket program, suddenly emerges into a gleaming city of the future that seems to exist in an alternate timeline, perhaps showing what the technology of the rocket program might have led to if it had not been contaminated by fascism and war. This Raketen-Stadt vision is presented as a sort of amusement park, which Slothrop is invited to tour, finding images of a future that is perhaps contaminated by its Nazi origins, thus setting it at odds with the kinds of utopian futures that were so central to science fiction in the 1930s. The narrator notes the contrast:
“Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries of the official vision at all. … No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror (from the Preamble to the Articles of Immachination)— (297).
This Raketen-Stadt would seem to be a classic example of what has come to be known as “retrofuturism,” defined by Rob Latham in a review of the resurgence of interest in the concept in the early twenty-first century (using, in fact, Pynchon’s Raketen-Stadt to introduce it) as an “ambivalent fascination for … ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows.’” Weirdly, though, this Raketen-Stadt is not simply a representation of the future as it might have been imagined in the 1930s or 1940s (thus making it “retro” relative to the 1973 publication of GR). It exists, we later learn, not only in an alternative future, but also in an alternative past. Late in the novel, we are asked to imagine a vision of the Raketen-Stadt that was apparently captured in the middle of the nineteenth century, long before rockets existed in our world. In particular, we are presented with a view of the futuristic city that “resembles a Daguerreotype taken of the early Raketen-Stadt by a forgotten photographer in 1856: this is the picture, in fact, that killed him—he died a week later from mercury poisoning after inhaling fumes of the heated metal in his studio . . . well, he was a habitué of mercury fumes in moderate doses, he felt it did his brain some good, and that may account for pictures like “Der Raketen-Stadt”: it shows, from a height that is topographically impossible in Germany, the ceremonial City, fourfold as expected, an eerie precision to all lines and shadings architectural and human, built in mandalic form like a Herero village” (725).
This eccentric view of time—in which events can occur along multiple timelines, happen simultaneously in different periods, or be replicated or exert influence from one time period to another—is consistent with the fragmented, nonlinear nature of the narrative as a whole, though it certainly complicates any attempt to assess the implications of GR as a historical novel. At a bare minimum, this suggestion that time does not flow in the simple, linear, unidirectional way typically assumed in historical accounts implies that history is perhaps much more complicated than we have generally assumed or than official historical narratives have encouraged us to believe.
One of the most widely discussed critical concepts in relation to postmodern fiction is the idea of “historiographic metafiction,” as put forth by Linda Hutcheon, who sees this mode of writing as perhaps the most representative form of postmodern writing. Reacting to the tendency of many postmodern historical novels to play fast and loose with accepted historical accounts, Hutcheon has argued that postmodern novels are thereby performing the subversive function of challenging official accounts of history and reminding us that all historical narratives are, in fact, narratives that have been constructed, generally in ways that benefit those in power. In so doing, such novels, according to Hutcheon, remind us of the inherent plurality of historical accounts, of the fact that there is always more than one “truth” about the meaning of events in the historical past.
In this sense, Hutcheon’s theorization of historiographic metafiction is itself an example of precisely the kind of resistance to totalizing thought that Jameson associates with postmodernism itself. It should come as no surprise, then, that the implications of Hutcheon’s theory here are almost the exact opposite of the implications of Jameson’s characterization of postmodern literature as lacking the kind of historical sense that would enable it to engage with history in an effectively subversive way. Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction is, in fact, first and foremost, a rejection of totalizing metanarratives of a kind of which the Marxist model of history is the ultimate example. Her work, then, would seem to verify Anderson’s Jameson-aligned argument that most of the leading early theorists of postmodernism as anti-authoritarian and subversive have, in fact, been conducting subtle assaults on Marxism.
Hutcheon mentions GR several times as an exemplary postmodern text—and the engagement with history that informs GR would certainly seem to be informed by an anti-authoritarian impulse similar to the one identified by Hutcheon with historiographic metafiction—but she oddly does not put GR forth as a key example of historiographic metafiction. One of her favorite examples, though, is E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, which was published in 1975 and is thus nearly contemporaneous with GR. Hutcheon delineates some of the political implications of the play with history in Ragtime noting, for example, its “extended critique of American democratic ideals through the presentation of class conflict rooted in capitalist property and moneyed power” (62).
Hutcheon’s reading of Ragtime is perhaps especially interesting because it is the only one of her readings of historiographic metafiction to which Jameson has directly responded, as far as I know. Jameson, who sees postmodern fiction as far less effectively subversive than does Hutcheon, notes Hutcheon’s analysis of Ragtime and responds that “Hutcheon is, of course, absolutely right, and this is what the novel would have meant had it not been a postmodern artifact” (Postmodernism 22). But, for Jameson, the meaning of Ragtime is far more complex than Hutcheon indicates, due to the fact that the postmodern character of the text undermines any attempt at simple and straightforward interpretation. Jameson further says of Ragtime that“this historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes ‘pop history’)” (25). In short, we have already seen so many representations of the historical material contained within Ragtime that Doctorow cannot possibly bring that past to us except as mediated through those previous representations.
In addition, Jameson argues that the intermixture of characters from different ontological levels creates an interpretive instability that makes it impossible to come up with a reliable interpretation of the text as a whole. All of this, for Jameson, is an intentional strategy designed to express in the only way available the historical experience of the defeat of the Left in America, due to what Jameson calls the “disappearance of the historical referent,” which is a direct result of the triumph of capitalism and the defeat of the Left (25).
In any case, Doctorow does not simply disavow coherent narratives of history. On the contrary, he evokes (in poignant and painful detail) the historical processes that have made such narratives inaccessible to us. Thus, Jameson, giving the screw of interpretation an extra turn, finds the historical vision of the book entirely “authentic,” in that it corresponds directly to the “existential fact of life that there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from our schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life” (Postmodernism 22). Calling Doctorow “one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists at work in the United States today,” Jameson describes Doctorow’s work as a marker of the “postmodern fate” of the “real history” that formed the materia poetica of the classic historical novel.
GR is not as overtly concerned with the failure of the American Left as is Ragtime, but it is certainly a novel about missed opportunities for Western civilization to go in different and less repressive (in both the political and the Freudian sense) directions. But, because this alternative history has thus far failed to materialize, Pynchon has nothing concrete to narrate—in the sense that the classic realist historical novelists (such as Scott and Balzac) were, in fact, building on the real historical narrative of the rise to dominance of the European bourgeoisie. Pynchon’s alternative history, then, must remain a phantom, and his subversive play with history can only suggest the dark, hidden story of the past, while providing cautionary hints that things might be about to get much, much worse, if we cannot change our historical direction. Pynchon himself does not provide much guidance about what might be a better historical direction for the future, but we can extract a number of important cautionary lessons from his treatment of the historical past. One of these lessons has to do with climate change and the possible environmental collapse of our entire planet, which a bit of reading between the lines of GR can be identified as an almost inevitable consequence of the dark historical forces Pynchon describes in the novel, this providing perhaps the best reason of all to start looking for alternatives as quickly as possible.
Gravity’s Rainbow as Environmentalist Novel
Many aspects of GR suggest a fundamentally ecological consciousness. Most obviously, the paranoid sense that everything is connected that runs through the text refers to more than the intricate, high-level, corporate-driven conspiracies that Pynchon sees as fundamental to the texture of modernity. It also suggests an understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of various aspects of the global ecology, which means that the irresponsible quest for profit that seems to drive everything in the world of GR can have profound (and possibly unforeseeable) consequences far beyond the realm of its obvious sphere of influence. Thus, Lawrence Buell, one of America’s leading eco-critics, has declared that GR resembles Moby-Dick in that both have “strongly ecological thrusts” (429). Bové, meanwhile, has argued that “Gravity’s Rainbow should be seen as a celebration of love, but not merely human love, which quickly becomes masculinist games, but of love of creation, a deeply ecological sense of the location of human fate in that of the universe” (677). And Victoria Addis sees the novel’s treatment of ecological themes as closely connected to its treatment of gender, with the pursuit of new forms of masculinity linked with the pursuit of a more viable environmental consciousness. “Through a focus on extreme interconnectivity, Pynchon’s novel dismantles the binarisms of traditional Western thought, represented in the novel through a plethora of disturbing father figures, and in so doing lays the groundwork for a new form of ecomasculinity; one built on a sense of equality with the rest of the natural world, and more radically, a complete embeddedness within it” (83).
Thomas Schaub was one of the first to recognize that GR can be read as a strong warning against the possibility of catastrophic climate change. Schaub argues that “the environmental frame is one of the most explicit openings through which we can see GR as a text from a specific historical period” (“Environmental” 60). In particular, he notes that GR was written during the decade after Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1962) inspired the birth of the modern the environmentalist movement. Moreover, Carson’s work is quite consistent with many points made by Pynchon; she locates the sources of environmental destruction in chemical corporations, and especially to developments in the chemical industry that began in World War II. For Schaub, “Pynchon’s representations of cartelized capital, chemistry, and rocket technology in the prewar decades and wartime years are deeply influenced by the discourse of environmental dissent from which they emerge” (63).
Building on the work of Schaub, Magda Majewska notes that GR seems to gesture toward the annihilation of all life on earth, suggesting that the novel leaves open the possibility that“this may happen in a nuclear Holocaust or it may be the ultimate outcome of a much slower process that increasingly transforms life into dead matter, organic substance into plastic waste” (225). In particular, for Majewska, GR can be read as an anticipatory allegory about the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change and she approaches this reading in two ways. First,Majewska sees in GR a critique of the instrumental rationality that informs modernity that is similar to the famous analysis found in Horkeimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). According to Majewska, GR depicts the systems that drive humanity as self-destructive, but also as driven by a greed and need for control that is destructive to everything else they encounter. Pynchon himself makes this clear in passages such as the following:
“Taking and not giving back, demanding that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with time, the System [is] removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The system may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the world can supply, dragging with it innocent souls along the chain of life. Living inside the system is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . (Pynchon 412; first ellipsis is Majewska’s).
Further, Majewska notes the novel’s emphasis on plastic (especially the fictional Imipolex G), which is perhaps the quintessential example of a product that has been immensely profitable to the capitalist system but also immensely damaging to earth’s environment (226–27). In addition, she notes that concerns over plastic and concerns over nuclear annihilation are not entirely unrelated. Citing Jeffrey Meikle’s American Plastic, she notes that Cold War nuclear fears led to a growing awareness of the fragility of life on earth, which in turn led to a greater recognition of the threat to the environment posed by plastic.
Majewska also notes the frequent interactions in GR between human and nonhuman life forms. Indeed, at times, GR even seems to counsel specific environmentalist activism through such encounters. As Slothrop moves through the latter portion of the novel, “feeling natural” and gradually being absorbed by the environment, he becomes increasing attuned to the terrible things that humans, including his own family, have done to nature in the course of capitalist modernization.
“Trees, now—Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. ‘That’s really insane.’ He shakes his head. ‘There’s insanity in my family.’ He looks up. The trees are still. They know he’s there. They probably also know what he’s thinking. ‘I’m sorry,’ he tells them. ‘I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of my reach. What can I do?’ A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, ‘Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do’” (552-53).
The story of Tyrone’s ancestor William Slothrop provides a key insight into the environmentalist politics of GR. Having arrived in America on the Arbella with other Puritans, William soon finds himself at odds with their ideology[11]. Having already bolted from the main Puritan settlement in Boston, he heads into the Berkshires and develops his own view of what constitutes proper Christian behavior. Working as a pig farmer, he finds the pigs and other lowly “outsiders” very congenial to his way of seeing the world. He experiences sadness after taking his pigs to market to be slaughtered, but he enjoys the trip itself: “He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the day—Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people—and most of all just being with those pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day—pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn’t” (555). Eventually, William produces a tract on preterition arguing that the Preterite are just as worthy of love and respect as the Elect. In fact, he argues that all of God’s creation should be treated with love and respect.
This story serves as a key example of Pynchon’s own sympathies with the Preterite, but William’s affection and respect for his pigs might be the most important part of his story. Challenging the Christian notion that animals and all of nature were created for the benefit of humanity and thus can essentially be treated however humans see fit (pigs are treated especially badly in the Bible), William’s attitude suggests that, instead, humans are obligated to show respect for animals and, by extension, for all of nature. William publishes his views in the pamphlet On Preterition, which is both banned and burned in Boston. There could be no Elect, he argues, without the Preterite—just as there could be no Christ without Judas (555).His attitudes, of course, make him an outcast among the Puritans in New England, and he is eventually driven back home to England. But Pynchon clearly presents William as a sympathetic character, and his attitudes suggest an early version of environmentalist thinking that stands in stark contrast to mainstream Puritan-founded American thought. William also serves as one of Pynchon’s key examples in GR of the way in which American history might have gone in a different direction, providing an alternative that his Puritan fellows chose to reject: “Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from?” (556). Indeed, Tyrone Slothrop wonders, thinking back on the story of his ancestor, if the anarchy ruling in the Zone of immediate postwar Europe might somehow provide a second opportunity, a way back to the alternative road pointed out by his ancestor William.
In addition, at least one of GR’s stories related to colonialism has overt environmentalist implications. Perhaps the central treatment of colonialism in GR is the whole narrative involving the Hereros/Schwarzkommandos, which certainly gets to the heart of the violence wrought by Europe in colonial Africa. But an associated story involves the Dutch colonization of Mauritius in the seventeenth century (the same century in which William was running afoul of his fellows in Puritan New England), a phenomenon that we learn included the fact that Katje’s ancestor Frans van der Groov, who concluded that the dodoes on the island would have to be minions of Satan to be so ugly, so he hunted down and killed dodoes with such vigor and dedication that the birds were driven to extinction on the island[12]. What van der Groov apparently did not know was that these were the only dodoes in existence and that he was helping to exterminate a race, making the dodoes a species best known in our own time precisely for being extinct. This mass slaughter was, we are told “the purest form of European adventuring” (111); in this way, Pynchon reminds us that the destructive colonizing impulse has historically been directed not just at other humans but also at the natural world, which has suffered shocking amounts of damage as part of the Western determination to establish dominion over it.
As far as I have been able to determine, van der Groov is a fictional character, though this story of the extermination of the dodoes seems to be another example of an unlikely Pynchon historical narrative that turns out to be based on authentic facts. Among other things, van der Groov’s dedication to killing to dodoes indicates the cruelty and extremity of European “adventures” in the colonial world, driven and justified by religious fanaticism. And, lest the notion of regarding the dodoes as creatures of Satan, rather than God seem unlikely, we should recall that the genocidal extermination of Native Americans in North America had similar roots in the ideas of Tyrone Slothrop’s (and Thomas Pynchon’s) Puritan ancestors. As Ronald Takaki has demonstrated, the racist roots of this genocide go back to the conclusion by the New England Puritans (also in the seventeenth century) that the Native Americans they encountered must be creatures of Satan, rather than God.
Takaki notes that “Indians came to personify the Devil and everything the Puritans feared—the body, sexuality, laziness, sin, and the loss of self-control. They had no place in a “new England” (43). This notion, of course, meant that the extermination of Native Americans was not just acceptable: it was a sacred duty for good Christians. In addition, the religious nature of van der Groov’s vendetta against the dodoes has very mainstream Judaeo-Christian roots going back to the book of Genesis, in which God has generally been interpreted to grant to humans dominion over all of nature, a dominion that has often been used as justification (sometimes no doubt unconsciously) for the exploitation and even destruction of the natural environment in the interest of various human projects.
Gravity’s Rainbow as Cautionary Tale
The seemingly apocalyptic ending of GR would appear to be the perfect illustration of Jameson’s suggestion that the recent popularity of postapocalyptic narratives comes from the fact that so many people sense the injustice of the capitalist system but are unable to imagine any way a viable alternative to it might arise. So, lacking the ability to envision the end of capitalism and the rise of something better via any sort of normal historical process, we become fascinated by visions of the destruction of civilization itself as the only way to end capitalism. As Jameson ultimately puts it, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (“Future City” 76).
At the same time, this ending could also be taken as a cautionary tale, suggesting that doom awaits if we do not change certain characteristic habits of thinking and behaving. This suggestion could clearly have environmentalist implications, as I have indicated above, though Pynchon does not overtly couch it in those terms[13]. His focus is more on the ways in which the quest for power and profit leads us into destruction modes of behavior, modes that very well might have been changed by a disruption as major as World War II, but seem, according to GR, not to have been. Indeed, perhaps the most dispiriting implication of GR is that, now that the war is over, things are in the process of returning to the pre-war status quo rather than to moving on toward some sort of astonishing utopian brave new world.
“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” (Tanner 79).
One of the ways in which this dire conclusion is enacted in GR is in the ongoing sado-masochistic tendencies of characters such as Weissmann/Blicero, von Göll, or Margherita Erdmann. But perhaps the most cogent presentation of this idea occurs within a complex of images and motifs that have to do with the work of the pioneering German sociologist Max Weber, whose landmark book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (first published in German in 1904 and 1905 and first translated into English in 1930), provided a sort of alternative history of the modern era that had much in common with Marxism in its emphasis on the central role played by capitalism in that history. However, Weber’s account differs in his emphasis on ideological/superstructural aspects of capitalism, rather than economics. Weber notes that, while medieval Catholicism encouraged a rejection of the lures of the secular world, certain characteristics of early Protestantism (especially Puritanism and even more especially the Calvinist form of Puritanism) encouraged its adherents to go forth into that secular world seeking wealth and success. The emergence of Protestantism thus formed an important part of an ideological climate that enabled the early growth of capitalism, and Protestantism and capitalism then moved forward hand-in-hand, each reinforcing the other, despite their seeming (but superficial) incompatibilities.
The individualist emphasis of Protestantism as a whole (which emphasizes a direct, personal relationship with God, unmediated by the apparatus of the Church) provides one of the most important ideological underpinnings for the capitalist system, which so strongly relies on a spirit of competition among individuals. Meanwhile, for Weber, the crucial aspect of Calvinism that lends itself especially well to the kind of action in the world that facilitates capitalism is precisely the doctrine of “predestination” that is so important to Pynchon. According to this doctrine, there is absolutely nothing one can do—through faith, good deeds, or appeals to the Church or to God—to change one’s categorical destiny. The faithful, however, are obligated to act as if they are members of the Elect and to go forth seeking material success in the world, which can then serve as evidence that they are among God’s favored Elect. There are two key characteristics of Calvinist doctrine that directly support capitalism. First is the so-called “Protestant work ethic,” the notion that work is a noble end in itself, not merely an unpleasant means to secure survival. Second is the notion that the acquisition of wealth is also a noble undertaking, accompanied by the asceticist insistence that this wealth should not be used simply to secure material pleasures. Rather, it should be reinvested with the end of accumulating still more wealth, and stimulating still more action in the world, and so on.
A key result of all of this emphasis on secular action is the gradual enlistment of all of the resources of the world in the interest of the generation of wealth, thus converting all aspects of life in the world into economic assets. This development, for Weber, is the culmination of a long historical process of “elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the Hebrew prophets, and in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin” (Weber 105). But this Calvinist removal of magic from everyday life, while originally driven by individualist entrepreneurial zeal, and while breaking the stranglehold of the medieval Catholic Church on the minds of Europe, did not simply lead to a breakdown in all forms of institutional control:
“The Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced” (36). And, ultimately, this new, more pervasive form of regulation would extend far beyond religion to include the growth of complex corporate structures that dominate the economy and complex modes of social control that extend into virtually every aspect of modern life[2].
In particular, the removal of all vestiges of magic, or “charisma,” from the world that accompanied the historical evolution of capitalism, leads, for Weber, to a “rationalization” or “routinization” of all aspects of modern life in which everything is administered and controlled in the interest of economic efficiency. All of this is particularly relevant to American history, in which the New England Pilgrims (who were, in fact, Calvinist Puritans as well as the ancestors of Tyrone Slothrop) have played such an important role. It is no accident, for example, that Weber (who visited the United States in 1904 when he was still writing The Protestant Ethic) was fascinated with America—or that he used Benjamin Franklin as his central example of a thinker whose ideas embodied what Weber calls the “spirit of capitalism.”
Pynchon shows a clear awareness of the work of Weber in GR. In one scene, the Herero leader Enzian has a conversation with his rival Ombindi about the situation that has evolved in Europe since Weissman first brought the young Enzian to Europe decades earlier. “Then, says Ombindi, “what’s happened, since your first days in Europe, could be described, in Max Weber’s phrase, almost as a ‘routinization of charisma’” (325). Enzian dismisses the comment with a Herero expletive, but Ombindi clearly has a point. Later, when Slothrop encounters Miklos Thanatz, the latter suggests that the V-2 rocket (aka the A4 rocket) possesses certain magical/spiritual qualities that resist capitalist routinization: “I think of the A4,” sez he, “as a baby Jesus, with endless committees of Herods out to destroy it in infancy—Prussians, some of whom in their innermost hearts still felt artillery to be a dangerous innovation. If you’d been out there . . . inside the first minute, you saw, you grew docile under its . . . it really did possess a Max Weber charisma . . . some joyful—and deeply irrational—force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could not prevail” (464).
The rocket, in this sense, becomes a sort of allegorical embodiment of the opportunity represented by the war, which, however horrific in many ways, seemed to have the potential to completely disrupt the flow of history, setting it on a new course and away from the self-destructive tendencies of Western culture to that time. Unfortunately, this disruption does not come to pass, and the traditional corporate-dominated powers-that-be emerge on the other end of World War II fully in control of the rocket and its technology—and of the world. Thus, by the end of GR, the disruption represented by the war has been weathered by the juggernaut that is capitalist modernity: after massive material destruction, tens of millions of deaths, and hundreds of millions of lives interrupted, the chaotic Zone that is postwar Europe seems to be returning to its prewar force, making the rocket a purely destructive force. Thus, in a clear nod toward the return of prewar routine, we are told, late in the text, that there is a “closer adherence now to the paperwork” (727). Or, a bit later,we learn that, in the postwar world, “reverences are dying,” suggesting the ongoing extermination of magic and charisma, as originally described by Weber (730).
Read from an eco-critical perspective, the ending of GR suggests the possibility of apocalyptic climate change if we continue going the way we are going. The book as a whole, meanwhile, suggests that this course is very difficult to change, just as the destructive impulses of Western society in general are hard to overcome. Thus, efforts to oppose official power in GR tend to be rather ineffectual, as when the Counterforce that emerges at the end of the book seems to have very limited resources for opposing “Them.”[14] Thus, Buell (as part of his extensive consideration of GR for the title of the Great American Novel) notes that, late in the novel “the narrative consciousness itself fragments, insinuating that ever to have taken Slothrop’s fate as the novel’s central interest to begin with, and ever to have supposed that a Counterforce could take form, was wishful thinking” (435).
There is a certainly a great deal of transgressive behavior in GR, which features a particularly large amount of sexual conduct that might be deemed “deviant” by the morals of mainstream Western society, with a special emphasis on scenes of sadomasochism and pedophilia. Indeed, the kind of sexual behavior that is represented in GR renders rather amusing the early reactions to Ulysses, which saw its relatively mild sexual conduct as shocking and pornographic, leading to the book being banned in both Ireland and the United States upon its initial publication. And, while it is certainly the case that the sexual content of both Ulysses and GR has a clearly political dimension that positions transgressive sexual behavior as a potential subversion of repressive political and religious power, it is arguable that Pynchon’s use of the motif is somewhat more complex and sophisticated than is Joyce’s. For one thing, Pynchon was writing in a much different sexual climate, when a series of court cases (involving Ulysses, among other texts)had struck down most sexual censorship of literature in the United States and when the youth-led counterculture of the 1960s, however much it might have failed in other ways, had clearly succeeded in liberalizing American attitudes toward sexuality in general. As a result, Pynchon could simply get away with more than could Joyce—though he also had to go further than had Joyce if he wanted to make the sexual content of his text truly shocking. And, while the example of Pynchon’s Puritan ancestors might not be particularly more repressive than the example of Joyce’s Irish Catholic background, Pynchon also has available to him as material the uniquely striking example of the German Nazis, whose hypocritical revulsion at the sexual permissiveness of their Weimar predecessors was rendered ludicrous by the unprecedented sadistic obscenity of their own policies.
In GR Pynchon uses the German Nazis to subversive effect in two basic ways. First, he suggests in numerous ways throughout the novel that British and (especially) American attitudes toward sexuality (and most other things) are not so fundamentally different from those of the Nazis as we would like to believe. Second, and perhaps more obviously, he often deploys “transgressive” sexuality less as a carnivalesque means of resistance to repression than as a tool of official power, making the very Foucauldian point that even the most marginal of sexual practices, such as sadomasochism and pedophilia can also be deployed as tools of power in their own right[15].
The latter, of course, occurs more in the parts of GR that take place during the war, when the powers-that-be can, for example, use the sexual services of the alluring Katje Borgesius to control both Slothrop (via rather conventional sex) and Brigadier Pudding (through sadomasochistic/coprophagic practices so extreme that they have been suggested as a key reason why GR did not win a Pulitzer Prize). For their part, Weissmann and the German authorities use a possibly ersatz version of engineer Franz Pökler’s daughter Ilse as a sexual lure to secure his cooperation with their work on the rocket program. Slothrop, of course, is perhaps the key example of administered sexuality in the entire novel, with his sexual responses having been programmed since infancy through the work of the ubiquitous Jamf, though he apparently breaks free of his programming during the period of relative anarchy in the postwar Zone. Indeed, Slothrop’s sexual behavior can be a bit problematic—including the fact that he is “vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls,” including the twelve-year-old Bianca, with whom he has graphic sex after having possibly been aroused by watching her as the M half of an S&M show with her mother, Margherita Erdmann (463). But it is also possible that Slothrop is literally not responsible for his sexual proclivities because of the way he has been programmed—with implications that are perhaps quite broad in terms of the official control of even seemingly forbidden sexual behavior in general.
At the same time, GR does not entirely dismiss the possibility of all attempts to subvert the death-oriented mainstream course of Western civilization. However, the possibility of resistance to the dominant trend of global history lies not in projects such as Enzian’s grim attempt to challenge that trend head-on so much as in the trickster-like, carnivalesque antics of characters such as Pig Bodine. And there are moments, especially in the postwar Zone, when carnivalesque resistance does have its minor successes. Some of these are relatively small, local victories, such as the late scene in which a pretentious dinner party is verbally disrupted by Bodine and Roger Mexico (possibly inspired by the ghost of Brigadier Pudding, who is now a member of the Counterforce) in ways that drive some attendees to regurgitation, while encouraging others to join in. The carnivalesque strategy consists of imagining disgusting, alliterative alternative dishes. For example:
“We could plan a better meal than this,” Roger waving the menu. “Start off with afterbirth appetizers, perhaps some clever little scab sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off of course . . . o-or booger biscuits! Mmm, yes, spread with mucus mayonnaise? and topped with a succulent bit of slime sausage. . . .” (715).
And it gets worse, driving many of the diners to paroxysm of vomiting. This result, of course, strikes no real blow against the system, but it does allegorically suggest, as do many other aspects of GR that anti-authoritarian culture can, in fact, strike important blows against “Their” power, if it can find ways to avoid being merely absorbed and conscripted by “Them.” Thus, McHugh argues that GR is largely “organized around the question of countercultural politics.” In particular, he notes that the various plots and subplots in the novel, however zany or slapstick, involve questions of power and of the shaping of material reality by “cultural practice” (3).
One of the most carnivalesque images in all of GR involves the substantial portion of the novel during which Slothrop goes about dressed in a costume as Plechazunga the Pig Hero, elevating that traditionally lowly animal to premier status. Then, perhaps the single most striking carnivalesque blow against patriarchal authority in GR occurs in the moment when the vile American Major Marvy, surely as racist as any Nazi, is mistaken for Slothrop (because he is wearing Slothrop’s Plechazunga costume) and taken into custody. Still believed to be Slothrop, Marvy is then castrated (on the orders of Pointsman back at the White Visitation) in an attempt to sever Slothrop’s genital connection to the rocket. The scene is a bit cringe-inducing, if hilarious. At the same time, A hundred pages earlier, the narrator had identified Adolf Hitler as someone who was really into Schadenfreude. It’s hard not to feel a bit of that on our own in this scene, given Marvy’s inclinations.
Ultimately, for a novel that draws so much energy from the counterculture of the 1960s—a counterculture whose project had largely collapsed as the novel was being completed, GR remains remarkably optimistic. Thus, while the ending of the novel might be taken to suggest the inevitable destruction of civilization as we know it, GR’s messy model of history does seem to suggest that nothing is truly inevitable and that history contains a lot of different strains that could ultimately take us in a lot of different directions. Thus, while GR might not end on the affirmative note of a Ulysses, closing as the audience at a Los Angeles movie theater run by a suspiciously Nixon-like manager, it does suggest in numerous ways that other endings might be possible.
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NOTES
[1] Jon Simons provides an opposed voice, arguing that Jameson’s work does not do a good job of describing Gravity’s Rainbow and concluding that this failure points toward certain shortcomings in Jameson’s theory itself. However, Simons’ essay is largely an attack on Marxist theory and on totalizing theories in general and inadvertently serves, I think, as a verification of Jameson’s comments on the desperation within which many in the postmodern idea attempt to avoid the implications of totalizing thought.
[2] On Pynchon’s use of real Weimar films (especially those directed by Fritz Lang) in GR, see Cowart (Dark Passages 65–73).
[3] See Clerc for an extensive discussion of Pynchon’s use of film.
[4] See also my own essay “The Rats of God” for an argument that both Pynchon and Joyce conduct radical assaults on established authority, which contradicts the notion that modernism is aligned with authority and postmodernism against it.
[5] Note that Swift’s lists are likewise often open-ended, concluding with phrases such as “and the like” (Rawson 101).
[6] Molly Hite suggests that Pynchon’s use of Murphy’s Law has important implications for his vision of history: “By using Murphy’s law to undermine all claims to ultimate authority, Pynchon provides the theoretical underpinning for a vision of history as a layering of heresies, without the possibility of an orthodoxy that can reconcile them, select among them, or rule them out” (140-41).
[7] Gödel’s Theorem became quite widely known because of its prominence in the best-selling book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), by Douglas Hofstadter. When GR was published, however, the theorem was still relatively obscure outside the world of mathematics, so Pynchon’s deft use of it can be taken as a demonstration of his ability to use mathematical concepts in his writing, an ability that except that of virtually any other novelist.
[8] Interestingly, these Schwarzkommandos first appear in the text as a fiction created by the allies as propaganda to disrupt the German rocket program by creating rumors that black Africans are involved in the program. To this end, the “White Visitation” facility in London employs exiled German filmmaker Gerhardt von Göll to make a film about the Schwarzkommandos, who then turn out to be a reality. One could take this as a commentary on the fact that, in Pynchon, the motifs that seem most farfetched often turn out to have been based on reality.
[9] Other critics have noted affinities between Conrad and Pynchon as well. Martin Green, for example, has detailed what he sees as numerous parallels between The Crying of Lot 49 and Heart of Darkness. Meanwhile, Tony Tanner argued earlier on that Conrad joins Henry James and James Joyce as writers who are “more or less audible” in Pynchon’s work (91).
[10] One reference in the text appears to point to both Groucho and Karl. The reference is to a “Gaucho Marx,” which would appear to refer to Groucho, but the context points to Karl as well, given that this Marx is contrasted with Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a key rival to Marx for influence in the leftist forces that led to the 1882 Second International.
[11] The Arbella was, in fact, the flagship of the fleet that brought the Puritan colonists led by John Winthrop to Massachusetts in 1630. Aboard that ship was Pynchon’s ancestor William Pynchon, who was clearly the model for William Slothrop. William Pynchon, for example, authored a religious tract that was banned and burned in the New World, while he himself returned to England and lived out his life there.
[12] Pynchon potentially links the story of the dodoes to the story of William Slothrop when he has his narrator describe William as a “peculiar bird” (554).
[13] Jameson, though, did earlier couch his own observation about apocalypse and the failure of the postmodern imagination in environmentalist terms when he notes, soon after the postmodernism book, that “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” (Seeds xii).
[14] For Cowart, the Counterforce is a transformed version of the 1960s counterculture (Dark Passages 86). If that is the case, then the inefficacy of the Counterforce can be related to the political failures of the counterculture.
[15] See Marie Franco, though, for an argument for the complexity of Pynchon’s representation of “queer” sexualities that sees considerable subversive potential in that representation, where she defines “queer” as “erotic practices that fall outside the dominant hetero-/homo- binary, like s/m” (89).