Pynchon’s Gravity

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, by THOMAS PYNCHON, Viking Press.

Gravity’s Rainbow, despite its occasional genuflections to Borges, is an “impure” novel, passionately concerned with the way we live now. But because it is a book about the nature and consequence of origins it takes place not in the present but at the end of the Second World War. The book’s totem is the V2 rocket, which until the very end of the book appears either before its flight, in the process of design and construction, or at the dead end of its trajectory, in the wreckage it has visited on London. Only as the book closes—and a more terrifying and skillful conclusion to a novel has rarely been written—is the rocket seen in flight. It “rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape,” yet when its engine shuts off, its “ascent will be betrayed to Gravity.” The first moments of the flight determine its entire course. The shape of the parabolic arch of the rocket’s trajectory—gravity’s rainbow—is fixed by its brief first moments of origination and possibility. Pynchon’s novel of the modern condition dwells on the initial moments of ascent, when the important alternatives were considered, when the means of control were set in operation, when the direction we were to follow was chosen once and for all. The Potsdam conference occurs near the middle of the novel. Yet this is not a despairing book: it is instead a deeply moral one. Pynchon knows that it is only the inanimate rocket that is fully and irrevocably determined—the rocket and anything or anyone else that yields to the systems of control, who refuses to make the continuous effort demanded by freedom. As in Pynchon’s earlier books the possibilities for freedom, responsibility, and love are rare and difficult, yet the possibilities are real. Gravity’s Rainbow is a tragic, not a pessimistic, novel. It is perhaps the most extensive and profound synthesis yet written of the ways in which the contemporary world lives with and accepts the obstacles to freedom, yet with all its knowledge of the obstacles and barriers it insists on the necessity and possibility of freedom.

Each of Pynchon’s books glosses a single historical theory, a single historical intelligence. V. exfoliates from the chapter on “The Dynamo and the Virgin” in The Education of Henry Adams. The woman V., the Virgin who becomes the Dynamo, embodies the transfer of allegiance from the power that resides in the human and the living to the power of the inanimate machine. The Crying of Lot 49 dramatizes Mircea Eliade’s discussion of “hierophany,” the manifestation of the sacred. The thesis illustrated continuously in Gravity’s Rainbow is Max Weber’s account of the “routinization of charisma.” The V2 rocket, one character reports, “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.” For Weber charisma in its pure form exists only in the process of originating. It cannot remain stable, but yields to economic and psychological pressure to become traditionalized or rationalized, to develop an attendant bureaucracy. Gravity’s Rainbow culminates in a social history of the rocket’s rationalization into systems and ideologies, its transformation into the traditions of sacred texts and holy centers. “Heretics [also] there will be: Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to the chambers of the Rocket-throne…Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah…Manichaeans who see two Rockets, good and evil.” But the systems spawned by the rocket are only the most recent, the most appalling of the novel’s bureaucracies. Cartels, interlocking governments, even the bureaucracies of the dead, all find their place in the book.

Most of these bureaucracies take special interest in the book’s central character, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop of the U. S. Army, stationed in London. As an infant Slothrop had been used by one Laszlo Jamf as the subject of a Pavlovian experiment—its exact nature is never revealed—and Slothrop’s activities have been kept under surveillance ever since by American, German, and English cartels. A few months after the V2 rockets begin to fall on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map kept by Slothrop of his sex life—either real or fantasized—corresponds point by point to a map of V2 impact sites. The stars on Slothrop’s map appear two or three days before a corresponding rocket lands on the point indicated. The relation between Slothrop and the rocket is mysterious to everyone, and Slothrop himself is unaware of it, but whatever it is, it lies outside the familiar and comfortable parameters of cause and effect. Slothrop’s case is assigned to a psychological warfare office, a decidedly strange collection of Pavlovians, spiritualists, Skinnerites, Ouspenskians and cranks and maniacs of every kind. To the Pavlovians and the behaviorists, intent on demonstrating “the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul,” intent also on allowing “precious little room for any hope at all,” the extraordinary communication, control, connection, or relationship between Slothrop and the rocket is an object of terror and bewilderment. Slothrop’s primary observer, the Pavlovian Dr. Edward Pointsman (“the man who throws the switches”) insists that “We must never lose control. The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish.” Slothrop takes on a charismatic power he never understands, and the bureaucracies fear and despise him for it.

At first Slothrop has no idea that he is the center of such frantic activity. But when he discovers that he is the object of an elaborate conspiracy he manages to escape into occupied Germany, into the chaos Pynchon calls simply “the Zone.” Outside the Zone is the world intertwined by the impersonal networks of international politics and industry, joined together through the connections between Shell, Harvard, IG Farben, ICI, and just about every other possible co-conspirator. Inside the Zone is an analogous network of black marketeers and dope peddlers with “connections,” Verbindungsmänner, of their own. Earlier, under the eyes of Pointsman’s agents, Slothrop had learned about an unusual—and eventually charismatic—version of the V2, a mysterious example numbered 00000 which contained a unique and unidentified apparatus. A major component of that apparatus was made of a plastic devised by the man who had once experimented on Slothrop, Laszlo Jamf. As Slothrop tries to learn more about the 00000, and moves through hundreds of pages of other adventures, he begins to develop different varieties of charisma. At one point he dresses in the costume of a Wagnerian tenor (there is an implied debate throughout the book between enthusiasts of Rossini and Wagner) complete with a pointed helmet reminiscent of the nose of the rocket. He immediately finds himself referred to as Rocketman and is expected by the rather strange crew he is with at this moment to have the charismatic powers of any respectable comic-book hero: “No job is too tough for Rocketman.” Later Slothrop adopts a different sort of charisma when, at a festival in a North German town, he is asked to take the part of the town’s legendary deliverer and hero: a pig, with appropriate costume.

But Slothrop’s escape into freedom is insufficient to earn him anything more than a temporary, assumed charisma. Eventually he is defeated. With all the bureaucracies around the Zone out to capture him, a group of his old colleagues organize a plan to find him and save him, a “We-System” in opposition to all the malevolent “They-Systems” that are after Slothrop. This Counterforce fails at its first goal—Slothrop disappears irrevocably into the chaos of the Zone—but it apparently rationalizes itself into other purposes. Slothrop himself is betrayed, his original importance denied: “‘We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop.’” The events of Slothrop’s history, the origin of his special relation with the rocket, are explained away by psychiatry: “‘There never was a Dr. Jamf,’ opines [a] world-renowned analyst…‘Jamf was only a fiction, to help [Slothrop] explain what he felt so terribly.’” Slothrop himself, separated from the bureaucracies that both victimized him and provided him with a context and a history, begins to disintegrate, to scatter. A character in the book postulates a law: “Personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth,” that is, “the more you dwell in the past and in the future…the more solid your persona.” Deprived through his own escape and his own freedom from an originating past or a future to which he could be responsible, Slothrop is gradually reduced to his final emblem: the Fool in the Tarot deck, the only card without a number, lacking a place in the systems of the world.

The Counterforce fails, but so do some of the agents of the They-System it opposes. The only character whose life after 1945 is described in the book itself (some appear “later” in history in Pynchon’s earlier books, and V. describes the early life of some of the characters as well) is Pointsman: “he’s an ex-scientist now…he’ll be left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium.” Pynchon’s account of Pointsman’s decline is, in effect, a celebration of a world in which the knowledge achieved by a behaviorist is not worth knowing.

This bald summary ignores at least four-fifths of Gravity’s Rainbow, but for the moment it will have to do. The book contains about five other important plots, all closely interconnected, and each the length and density of most ordinary novels. There are at least three hundred characters in the book as a whole—readers are advised to keep an index of first appearances—and Pynchon justifies the book’s length, and its insistent vision of coherence, by the elaborately developed relationships he establishes among this enormous population. A persistent theme in the book is Preterition, the Calvinist doctrine that, after choosing the elect, God passed over all the rest. Every page of this novel is informed by sympathy with the preterite of the earth—the powerless, all those excluded from knowledge of the “terrible structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise.” None of the characters is left out of the book’s large structure, none is subject to the author’s preterition. (The rocket’s trajectory is perhaps a visible representation of the act of passing over, of preterition.)

Pynchon’s use of the techniques and assumptions of film have been discussed elsewhere in some detail, but it is worth mentioning that Pynchon is consistently ingenious where the opportunities for fashionable cliché are so numerous and varied. One or two examples out of a score of possibilities must suffice. Pynchon traces the germ of cinema to Leibniz’s invention of the calculus, in which motion in time and space is divided into an infinite number of motionless “frames.” The calculus is also, of course, the means of calculating the trajectory of the rocket. Where the calculus uses an infinite number of frames to counterfeit motion, and film uses twenty-four every second, Captain Blicero of the SS, the novel’s central embodiment of evil, extends this technique “past images on film, to human lives.” Blicero permits an engineer under his command, whom Blicero needs for the eventual modification of the unique rocket 00000, to visit his daughter for only a few weeks out of every year. The engineer, aware that the frames of a film only give the illusion of continuous motion, is never certain that he is visiting the same girl. (The daughter is herself the “product” of a film: she had been conceived after her father was sexually aroused by a film in which another daughter was also conceived. Yes, I know this sounds complicated; it is even more elaborate in the book.) At the farthest end of this scale is one character’s reference to the consciousness of rock: “We’re talking frames per century.” Pynchon occasionally refers to the book itself in terms of old movies, and the continuous present tense in which it is written attempts to imitate the sequential immediacy of film. All this culminates in a final passage of stunning virtuosity and power: “we” are sitting in an old theatre, the film has just broken, and we are facing an empty screen. In another moment a much greater catastrophe will occur, but in the fraction of a second that remains we are invited to sing a hymn written by Slothrop’s Puritan ancestor. The hymn not only gathers the book’s major themes into eight lines, but also concludes the novel with an intimation of a more distant ending: the end of history, the parousia.

The end of the book does not solve all its mysteries. By the last page, hundreds of relationships have been established or revealed, the connectedness of the world has been asserted, but many issues raised in the book have deliberately been left unresolved. For Pynchon a knowledge of relationships does not lead immediately to a knowledge of obligations—as it does, for example, in Dickens, at the end of whose novels every character has learned exactly whom he must love and whom he must reject. When Pynchon’s characters become aware of patterns and relations, choices become available to them, but their decision remains their own. By the end of The Crying of Lot 49 the heroine has become almost saturated by her knowledge of coincidence and cohesiveness, but this knowledge only leaves her with the “binary choice” of either the One of transcendent meaning or the Zero of chaos and paranoia. In Gravity’s Rainbow the choices available at the end of the book involve not only belief, but action. In the final chapters one group of rocket engineers in the Zone has built a second example of Captain Blicero’s special V2, an example numbered 00001, but to complete this rocket and fire it off involves a serious ethical decision. The apparatus that went into the 00000 (since Pynchon does not describe the apparatus until the end of the book I shall honor his secrecy) cannot be repeated in the 00001 without making a decision of extraordinary difficulty. Yet Pynchon does not say how the problem is resolved, does not reveal which alternative is chosen. This is only the most striking example among many.

When a book is proclaimed a masterpiece within days of its publication it is usually a sign that the book has merely confirmed the reviewers’ theories and prejudices. But Gravity’s Rainbow, which by now has received every conceivable adjective of praise, is far too complex and disturbing, and demands far too extreme an adjustment in its readers’ conception of the scope of the novel, to give much comfort to anyone. Few books in this century have achieved the range and depth of this one, and even fewer have held so large a vision of the world in a structure so skillfully and elaborately conceived. This is certainly the most important novel to be published in English in the past thirty years, and it bears all the lineaments of greatness.

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