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History and resistance in the early novels of Thomas Pynchon

Davis, Robert Lawrence, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1994

Copyright ©1994 by Davis, Robert Lawrence. Ali rights reserved.

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106

HISTORY AND RESISTANCE IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF THOMAS PYNCHON

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State U n iv ersity

By

Robert Lawrence Davis, B.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University

1994

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

W.A. Davis

J. Prinz Adviser H.L. Ulman Department of English Copyright by Robert Lawrence Davis 1994 To Cindy

11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the help of my dissertation committee, Mac Davis,

Jessica Prinz and Louie Ulman; for the friendship of my office mates,

Claudia Barnett, Theresa Doerfler, Andy Evans, David Hogsette, Beth Ina,

Susan Meyer, Mike Ritchie and Eric Walbom; and for the love and guidance of my parents, Marlene and Lawrence Davis. My greatest thanks is expressed in the dedication.

Ill VITA

March 2,1965 ...... Bora - Cleveland, Ohio 1987 ...... B.A., Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio 1987-1993 ...... Teaching and Administrative Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1989 ...... M.A., Department of English, The Ohio State University 1993-1994 ...... Lecturer, Department of English, The Ohio State University

FIELD OF STUDY English

IV TABLE OF œNTEhfrS

DEDICATION...... ü ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iü VITA...... iv INTRODUCTION: NOW SHOWING...... 1 CHAPTER PAGE I. THOMAS PYNCHON. EUROPEAN NOVELIST...... 8 n. THE EVACUATION OF THE HUMAN...... 44 HI. OEDIPA’S SEDUCTION...... 109 IV. THE NIGHT’S MAD CARNIVAL...... 167

CONCLUSION...... 260 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 271 INTRODUCTION NOW SHOWING

The last scene of Gravity's Rainbow takes place in the Orpheus Theatre, a Los Angeles establishment managed by Nixon stand-in Richard

M. Zhiubb. The crowd is impatient: "The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start the Show! Come-on! Start-the-Show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent." The film we were watching has broken, or the projector bulb has burned out: "It was difficult even for us, old fans who have always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in" (760). The movie is that of histoiy. It began, let us say, as a glossy, big- budget romance, incorporating elements of German "health" films (lots of mountain climbing and rhetoric about "destiny") with those of Indiana Jones (madcap adventure, clumsy villains, a beautiful woman).

The hero, a handsome young man, experiences many perils. There is a great deal of "tension" and "suspense." We know, however, that in the end, he will triumph. We await the scene in which he scales the Highest Peak, recovers the Lost Ark and rescues the Bountiful Babe, all hopefully simultaneously. The scene, however, does not come; another logic creeps in. The movie becomes increasingly dark, pre-occupied with death— really not the sort of thing we came to see. The hero has lost his edge. 1 He is still active, his energy impressive, but an aura of futility grows about him. We begin to sense that none of his actions matter, that his

fate, and history's, has already been set, recorded in a last reel we may be about to see—or were about to see before the screen went blank:

The last image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the first star. But it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see... it is now a closeup of a face, a face we all know—

Whose face is it: In ch o n 's? Nixon's? The Angel's? Our own? This being

Gravity's Rainbow, we might expect to see Mickey Rooney, Elvis crooning "Blue Hawaii"—or Tyrone Slothrop, the novel's erstwhile anti-, non-(or at

least not-veiy-good-at-being-)hero blowing harmonica. Now, however, it is too late for such diversions. The time for games has passed. The second film coincides with another version of history—one we can see only when we are free of nostalgia, when we have shed our romantic pretensions at last:

And it is here, just at this dark and silent fimne, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of the old theatre, the last del ta-1 (760).

One wonders if this rocket is necessary. Perhaps Absolute Zero is also nostalgic, something we came to expect when history turned tragic— a way of holding onto the pattern we had given histoiy, a way of clinging to the myth of ascent, if only in an ironic, reversed form. Early in Gravity's Rainbow, British operative Pirate Prentice stands on the roof of his Chelsea Maisonette and watches a fine example of the new German terror weapon, the V-2 rocket, fly toward him. The terror of the V-2 is precisely opposite that of its predecessor, the V-1 "buzz bomb":

He won't hear the thing come in. It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the sound of it coming in. What if it should hit exactly—aah, no, for a split second you'd have to feel the very point of it, with the terrible mass above, strike the top of the skull (7).

Pynchon supposes that the rocket does hit: his work traces the workings of the rocket-struck Mind. It is, in fact, the Mind's attempt to look back at its own history, to see how and why things went wrong. This historical retelling entails an act of gradual erasure—the slow movement away from the myth of deliverance. History was to be our secular salvation, the story of struggle, progress and ascent, resulting in the making of heaven on earth. There were even a few moments when we believed we made it: One thinks of the end of Hegel's Phenomenology, the hymn to Absolute Reason, finished just before Napoleon, in Hegel's mind the world spirit embodied, made his triumphant entry into Jena^

1 Napoleon may not have actually come into Jena (he is thought to have sent in only a small contingent to secure the town). Hegel may not have completed the Phenomenology during a cannonade the night before the battle (the night before the battle, no one thought Napoleon would attack for a few days). Still, Hegel's supposed glimpse of Napoleon, "the world- spirit astride a horse," is one of the traie Faustian moments of Modernity. Power and thought brought together we haven't gotten over it yet. In the wake of the moment, Pynchon asks: when power produces only death, what does thought become? 4 There are other such moments: the fall of the Berlin wall, the ascendance of Reagan to the throne (absolute reason becomes market economics), the end of World War H (tempered a bit, as Pynchon suggests, by cosmic bombs, rockets, and the coming joining of the two). There are even texts one can point to that say that the game is over and that we (Westerners, Americans, Kuwaitis, mutual fund owners) have won. (One thinks

especially here of Frances Fukuyama's infamous The End o f Histoiy and the Last Man.2 Rush Limbaugh's The Way Things Should Be would be another example—although here we have a declaration not of victory, but resentful defeat: The Way Things Wouid Be If It Wasn't For "Them”). Pynchonic history would subvert such conceptions, would counter the myth of ascent with a fallen angel. In Inchon, the salvation-effect works its way down, moving through a series of weakening simulations— if we can't have ascent, then how about reversal (let's get the curve going up again)? If not reversal, then resistance (let's build a dike against histoiy right here); if not resistance, then escape (can we find a place where history cannot find us?). In the end, however, there is only historical entrapment. At the end of Gravity's Rainbow, we look back on redemptive history and see only a transparent simulation. It flashes

2Fukuyama argues that the rise of liberal democracy signals the end of history. Although this form of government has not yet been achieved everywhere (or anywhere, one is tempted to say), the ideal of liberal democracy cannot be improved on—it is a form without contradictions even if our practice of it sometimes falls short. Fukuyama answers his critics by stressing that they typically do not understand that post- Hegelian concept of history he is using—a conception that allows us to indeed speak of history's end, even while events continue to occur. My own work, which can be read, in part, as an implicit critique of Fukuyama, offers a version of the end of history that is directly opposite the heralding of freedom found The End o f History and the Last Man. My intent is to write the photo negative of Fukuyama. once more across the screen—colorful, but without effect. Meanwhile, a second film is showing—it has been all along. It is the record of histoiy-as-implosion, of the West's collapse into the death at its core. We sought to cover this death with abstractions—with "inherent meaning," and "divine purpose," as well as "historical progression." We explained that we were to receive transcendent, unshadowed life, that it had been prom ised In Pynchon, we have instead the following scene: At the end of a dream which may prove all too real. Pirate waits at a terminal hotel for a doom from which there is no appeal. A voice finds him there: "'You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow (4). While we awaited our heaven the shadow never ceased to encroach. Or did we come, willingly, to it? Despite all the weaponiy we created mouthing our illusions of peace—we need this gun, bomb, rocket, death ray, to bring the killing to an end—death did not need force to draw us in. It relied instead on the power of seduction, on our own fascination, and on the secret knowledge we hold within that death cannot be denied. The rocket above the Orpheus may be the same one Pirate saw. It may even be much olden One imagines a single rocket falling throughout history, launched at a point too far back to be seen. There may, however, have been no rocket at all. Pynchon also speaks of debts we must repay, messages we have been expecting, a Word we feared would one day be spoken—a familiar face appearing on a screen. Each metaphor suggests a moment of recognition, each evokes familiarity, each tells us something we already know. It is as if histoiy has been nothing more than an awareness already within us, making its way toward the front of the mind. Alone now with death (even in the midst of the movie-watching crowd), we understand that nothing has changed. We remain the poor and crippled thing we have always been: propagating death wherever we can, knowing that for us, it has in some sense already come.3

in the Orpheus, however, we are toid it is not too iate: "There is stiil time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs... or, if a song must find you, here's one..." The hymn, "centuries forgotten and long out of print," was written by Siothrop's forefather Wiiiiam. it is a Preterite hymn, suggesting an unlikely triumph, it speaks of a humanized world, a perfected reflection, a soui in every stone. "Now everybody—" the novel ends (760), and with the rocket failing, why not sing along? One can do so even while grabbing the nearest body and/or corpse. There is also, however, time for another look at Pynchon's historical retelling.

Fukuyama is right: history, as we have so far known it, have wanted it to be, has run its course: we live in the time after. Conversely, however, he couldn't be more wrong: for the "life" at the end of history is not the free and rational subjecthood he proclaims.

3What it means to have historically died is a central question of Pynchon's work, it is linked to other questions: What is the nature of history in Pynchon? Are there forms of life which history cannot touch, or ways of existing in history in which "life" is still possible? The introduction begins to explore such questions, and they become the focus of the study below. If immediate answers are needed, please turn to the conclusion. In Pynchon, the historical process that was to bring us freedom and reason falls away, leaving us an existence stripped of what we have so far called "life." Despite his own remarkable disappearance, there may be no way to execute an escape, except perhaps to drop for a time into a Purgatory or empty space, until we are needed again. There is no real freedom, no capacity for refusal. In lynchonic paranoia, even our desires are manufactured to give death the subjects it wants.

To die or continue as the product of a system that still needs a

"human" front—these are the options that Pynchon finaliy comes to, the choices that await at the end of his text—the possibilities that arise from his autopsy of the West. These options arise, however, only at the end of a progression: after games are quit, lies shed, denials denied. This study will follow the movement of the Pynchonic text; it will trace the end of resistance and the coming of historical death. My hope is to avoid writing another diversionary song. It may not matter— whatever we do, we may be filling dead time. In my mind, however, knowledge does make a difference; enlightenment is worthwhile—even if it shows us things we would rather not see; especially then. Enlightenment may be the only resistence left us, the adversarial relationship of the entraped. This, at least, is my premise—and perhaps also my nostalgia... CHAPTER I THOMAS PYNCHON, EUROPEAN NOVEUST

In his essay "The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes," Milan Kundera casts the modem European novel as a form of inquiry. He follows Hermann Broch in insisting "The sole raison d'etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral." 1 "Knowledge," Kundera writes, "is the novel's only morality" (5-6).

As a form of inquiry, Kundera sees the novel as one of the prime artifacts of modernity—the era in which, in the words of Edmund Husserl, "the passion to know had gripped mankind." While Husserl sees this passion, detached from any practical need, as the cause of a reduction of Western thought to abstract speculation, Kundera recognizes the passion for knowledge enacted by the novel as a corrective countermeasure.

Modem science may have plunged the West into what Husserl's student

Heidegger was to call "the forgetting of being," but since Cervantes, the novel has been at work reclaiming being in its various manifestations. "Indeed," Kundera writes, "all the great existential themes Heidegger

1 Broch voices this understanding most clealy in a 1933 essay, "The World Picture of the Novel." As Michael P. Steinberg points out in his introduction to Broch's Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his Time, Broch asserts, "The proper naturalistic goal of the novel is the truthful elaboration of human experience: an exploration into realms of which it alone is capable" (18). 8 9 analyzes in Being and Time—considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy—have been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the novel (four centuries of the European reincarnation of the novel)." Kundera provides a catalog of the novel as inquiry-into-being:

In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine "what happens inside," to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man's rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the roles of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera (5).

We can imagine the novel as an imperial army, taking control of more and more of experience—or as a grotesque body, consuming, eventually, all of the world. There is, however, opposition to this apparently unstoppable expansion; a reductive force is at work within the novel's own tradition. Kundera contrasts Cervantes with those who follow in his wake. He writes, "Don Qjiixote set off into a world that opened wide before him. He could go freely and come home as he pleased" (7). In Diderot, this openness holds. The heroes of Jacques ie Fataliste "exist in a time without beginning or end, in a space without frontiers, in the midst of a Europe whose future wiii never end" (8). By Balzac's time, however, the distant horizon has vanished, "disappeared like a landscape behind those modem structures, the social institutions: the police, the law, the world of money and crime, the army. 10 the state." The enclosure of space is not the only alteration: "In Balzac's world, time no longer idles happily as it does for Cervantes and Diderot. It has set forth on a train called History." History, however, is not yet threatening; "it promises adventure to every passenger, and with it fame and fortune" (8). For Emma Bovary, Kundera writes, "the horizon has shrunk to the point of becoming a barrier. Adventure lies beyond it, and the longing becomes intolerable." Inner experience now becomes central: "the lost infinity of the outside world is replaced by the infinity of the soul" (8).^ Eventually, however, histoiy will deny this as well. Kundera writes: "The dream of the soul's infinity loses its magic when History (or what remains of it: the suprahuman force of an omnipotent society) takes hold of man" (8). He ends this part of his essay with a meditation on Kafka:

In the face of the Court of the Castle, what can K. do? Not much. Can't he at least dream as Emma Bovaiy used to do? No, the situation's trap is too terrible, and like a vacuum cleaner it sucks up all this thoughts and feelings: all he can think of is his trial, his surveying job. The infinity of the soul—if it ever existed—has become a nearly useless appendage (9).

It may seem strange to begin a study of the American writer Thomas Inchon with an invocation of the modem European novel, the tradition leading from Cervantes to Kafka (and to Kundera's own novelistic enterprise). And yet, the parameters Kundera sets for this tradition would allow for Pynchon's inclusion. Kundera defines the European novel as a supranational tradition. There is no reason, he tells

2por another perspective on the same progression, relying, however, on different texts, see Erich Kahler, The Inward Turn o f Narrative. 11 us, that Kafka cannot be mentioned alongside Joyce, no reason to keep

Hasek and Rabelais apart, no reason not to include both Flaubert and Kafka in a description of the enterprise in which both take part. Further, Kundera sees no reason to separate Europe from America; they are, after all, linked by history. Kundera thus joins a list of Continentals recognizing America as the heir of the West, even the fulfillment of long-standing Western desires.3 Obviously, this is not the only way to see America, but it is a way to which the Pynchonic text is particularly amenable. Despite its exaggerated American-ness— the chase scenes and zoot suits, the fern bars and suburban sprawl, the hippies. Young Republicans, and Navy grunts—Pynchon's work is a meditation on the Western tradition, the phenomenology of a bombed-out, anaesthesized (yet maniacally laughing) greater. Western mind. 1 began with the selection from Kundera, however, not only because the Pynchonic text can be viewed as a late representative of the tradition of the modem European novel, but also because seeing Pynchon in this way provides at least an initial answer to a long-standing question among Pynchon's readers: the question of what Pynchon's texts are.

3 For some, this fulfillment is highly ironic. Baudrillard, for instance, sees America as the end point of European longing: the Utopia Achieved. The achievement comes, however, only at the sacrifice of the real. America is the land of signs without reference, pure simulation, the never-ending smile. It is on the basis of fiction, Baudrillard writes, that America dominates the world (29). 12 It has become a commonplace to speak of bewilderment caused by reading I^ncbon: the inescapable, in-your-face awareness that Something Odd is going on. We have George Levine:

Inchon's novels disorient. They offer us a world we think we recognize, assimilate it to worlds that seem unreal, imply coherences and significances we can't quite hold onto. Invariably, as the surreal takes on the immediacy of experience, they make us feel the inadequacy of conventional modes of making sense—of analysis, causM explanation and logic . . . (113).

Molly Hite:

The novels all celebrate diversity, multiplying situations, interrelationships, characters, voices and attitudes with such abandon that they perplex understanding (13).

Richard Poirier

There is, obviously, no simple way to characterize Pynchon's prose, and no selection of passages can begin to account for its varieties. It is deliberately unstable, parodie, various, encyclopedic, fragmented (what are all those ellipses doing in Gravity's Bainbowl Why does the narrator, in and later out of Siothrop's consciousness, stutter on "a-and"7) (60).

W.T. Lhamon, Jr.;

Pynchon's verbal complexities astound and confound, amaze and bewilder, because his mixed modes concern the ultimate formlessness of a world that for a decade now has urged on as much as described (69).

And John O. Stark: 13 The traditional method of dividing literature into plot, character, structure, style, and other elements does not suffice with I^nchon's work because he uses these elements in nontraditional ways (2).

We also have similar sentiment directed toward a single work.

Tony Tanner:

Gravity's Rainbow is a novel of such vastness and range that it defies—with a determination unusual even in the age of "difficult" books—any summary. It defies quite a lot of other things as well [Tanner goes on to discuss the novel's "defiance" of the normal use of the elements of fiction: character, plot, etc.] ( ).

After describing the disorientation caused by Pynchon's work, the

critic's next move, as we might expect, is to enact a reorientation. Within the passage cited above Lhamon suggests that l^nchon's "mixed mode" may be necessary in the chaotic world Pynchon both recognizes and calls into being. Poirier similarly notes that Pynchon's prose reflects and participates in a violent and broken world and is designed to remind us that this world is our own. Hite finds that Pynchon's texts are rather explicitly about the making of order, the search for a through-line that will hold together the various discourses within. Tanner asserts that the true movement of Gravity's Rainbow takes place beyond the realm of character, plot, and even conventional understandings of theme. Instead of inscribing a "man vs. himself' conflict or "the fimities of the human heart," Inchon's text seeks to capture a broad movement in history: the collapse of the bourgeois order and the coming of the global structure Pynchon christens the System. 14 This disorientation/reorientation process often cuts to the level of genre. A number of IVnchon's readers have suggested that Pynchon's text are not novels but something else. They have been called Menippean satires (Speer Morgan, John O. Stark, Theodore D. Kharpertian), postmodernist allegories (Deborah L Madsen, Maureen

Qpilllgan), post-structuralist escrits (Alec McHoul and David Wills), allusive parables of power (John Dugdale), and mythic cosmoi (Kathryn Hume). Individual works have also been re-laheled. Gravity’s Rainbow has been called an encyclopedic narrative (Edward Mendelson), a modern-day Jeremiad (Marcus Smith and Khachig Toloyan), a twentieth century gospel (David Marriot), a gothic thriller (Douglas Fowler), and a dualistic melodrama (David Leverenz). VI has been termed a parody of modernism (Christine Brooke-Rose) and a stylization (Brian McHale). The Crying o f Lot 49 has been described as a schizo-text (John Johnston), a detective story (Tani Stefano), a metaphor-making engine (N. Katherine Hayles), and a Borgesian game (Debra A. Castillo). In the midst of this generic innovation, I raise again the spectre of the novel. After the work on genre cited above, however, it is not possible to apply the term "novel" to Pynchon's works without consideration—not only of the works themselves, but also of the term

"novel." We need to develop an understanding of the novel that will fit the texts in question. We need to ask what a "novel" is in Pynchon's case. We can begin this process by adopting Kundera's concept of the novel as inquiry. Pynchon's work inquires first into the nature of history; after Hegel, after 1900, after the V-2, after Hiroshima—and then into the fleeting possibility of reversal or at least resistance: what can 15 be done against history? What are the prospects for finding a new manner of being: something which history cannot (or so far, has not) taken away? finally, however, the prospects are slim, or none. In the end, Pynchon's inquiry is into the death of resistance: how did it look, he asks, when all that had sought to stand against histoiy went streaming into the absence at history's core? To understand Pynchon's novels, we also need to add several elements to Kundera's formulation. The first is multiplicity. In Pynchon, the novel is a master text, or at least a text tending in this direction. The novel as I^nchon conceives it is a system for taking everything into account. As Pynchon's early work progresses, it takes in more and more of experience: more viewpoints and mind sets, more knowledge and interpretations, more modes of discourse and sets of linguistic conventions. In Gravity’s Rainbow, we read of a giant Adenoid, big as St. Paul's and growing by the hour, that threatens London, all of England, anything in its path. The novel Pynchon works toward, is itself such a beast. It is Menippean satire and encyclopedic narrative, escrit and mythic cosmos, allegory and parable. It is comic books and angst- filled tableau, testament from the underground and postcard from the

Other Side, musical comedy and Rilkean meditation, advertisement for the black market and proof that the only market is the White. It is paranoid, schizo, manic, depressed: all this and more. 1 take the concept of multiplicity in the novel largely from Mikhail Bakhtin. As Michael Holquist has noted, Bakhtin envisioned "an almost Manichean sense of opposition and struggle at the heart of existence, a ceaseless battle between centrifugal forces that seek to keep 16 things apart and centripetal forces that strive to make things cohere" (xviii). This understanding is illustrated by his vision of the novel. In his classic essay "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin casts the novel as a multi-logue in which different textualities speak and respond, cohere and come apart, co-exist peacefully and go to war—all within a discursive structure Bakhtin terms, paradoxically but accurately, an "open unity." He asserts that "the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ’languages'" (262). He writes, "The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types" (263). Thus, where some see the novel as "an extra-artistic medium, a discourse that is not worked into any special or unique style" (260), Bakhtin describes "a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice" (261), what Holquist calls, after Bakhtin, both a supergenre and not a genre at all (xxx). The term "multiplicity" comes from the title of Italo Calvino’s fifth "memo to the next milfennium.” In the "memo," Cal vino conceives of the novel as "vast net" stretched over experience (124). Like Kundera, he sees the net as primarily devoted to inquiry. Kundera, however, casts the history of the novel as a series of inquires, each responding to others but also separated by the particular areas of their investigation, the various themes of existence. Calvino stresses instead the ultimate ambition of the novel—omniscience, he suggests, is the novel’s only goal. The novel thus inquires into ali areas at once: it aims to reverse the forgetting of Being by grasping Being as a whole. "Overambitious projects," he writes, "may be objectionable in many fields, but not in 17 literature. literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond the hope of achievement" (112).

While Kundera, citing Husserl, sees the novel as a corrective to modem thought, Calvino casts literature as a countermeasure to modem science:

Since science has begun to distmst general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world (112).

Calvino sees the novel as the best example of this multifaceted discourse:

It is a mode of inquiry designed to break through disciplinary boundaries and bring together knowledge in its many forms. Calvino evokes an ideal or transcendent novel able to contain the entire universe—a novel which would tell us all there is to know. He refers to Goethe, who confîded to Charlotte von Stein that he was planning a "'novel about the universe'"; to Novalis, "who sets out to write the

'ultimate book,' which at one moment is a sort of encyclopedia and at others a Bible"; and to Humboldt, "who with his Kosmos actually achieved his aim of writing a 'description of the physical universe'" (113). I^nchon's works can also be said to reflect the ambition of omniscience. As Richard Poirer has said:

The perspectives—literary, analytic, pop cultural, philosophical, scientific—from which Pynchon operates are considerably more numerous than any writer to whom he might be compared, and it is therefore especially impressive that F^chon insists not on keeping these perspectives discrete but upon the functioning, the tributary, the literally grotesque relationship among them. All systems and technologies, in his view, partake of one another (23). 18

Charles Clerc makes a similar statement about Gravity's Rainbow:

It would be unreasonable to expect that any single novel could provide sufficient materials for a liberal education, but certainly Gravity's Rainbow comes closer to that goal than any other work of fiction produced in America (9).

A great deal of critical work has been devoted to highlighting the various strands of I^nchon's vast erudition. We have explications of

Pynchon's knowledge (and use) of physics (Alan J. Friedman and Manfred Puetz, Richard Wasson), history and historical thought (Josephine Hendin, Manfred Puetz, Steven Weisenburger, David Marriott,

among others) the history of warfare (Khachig Toloyan), "militaiy memory" (Paul Fussel), African colonialism (Weisenburger and David

Seed), theories of entropy and information flow (Anne Mangel and Peter Abernathy), Weberian charisma and its routinization (Mendelson, Roger Henkle, Walter Pater, Joseph Slade), the historical psychology of Norman Brown (Lawrence Wolfley), Puritan spirituality (Smith and Toloyan, Joseph Slade, Scott Sanders), scripture (Marriott), Christian allusions

(Victoria H. Price), IG Farben and the cartel state (Robert McLaughlin),

the origins of manned-space flight (George Schmundt—Thomas), paranoia (Sanders, Louis Mackey, Mark Richard Siegel, among others), garbage (Tanner), the Oedipus myth (Debra Moddelmog), the White Goddess (Henkle), painting and music (David Cowart), cinema (Scott Simmon, Charles Clerc, Donald Foss Larsson, among others), even J.

Perelman's scripts for Marx Brother movies (Henkle). A number of literary sources have also been identified, among them James Joyce 19 (Craig Hansen Werner), T.S. Eliot (James Norhnberg), Rainer Maria Rilke (Charles Hohman), Joseph Conrad (Martin Green), Henry Adams (Richard Pearce), the American literaiy tradition (Pierre-Yves Petillon), and counter-realist tendencies within this tradition (Peter Cooper). We also have Stark's effort to reorient us to Pynchon by separating his erudition

into its various strands (literature, history, science, etc.) then examining each in turn. Of particular note is the effort to see Gravity's Rainbow as an encyclopedia. Mendelson calls encyclopedic narrative "the most important single genre in Western literature of the Renaissance and after" (29). Examples of the genre include Dante's Commedia, Rabelais'

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes's Don Qpixote, Goethe's Faust, Melville's Moby Dick and Joyce's Ulysses. Mendelson writes, "Encyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that cuiture shapes and interprets its knowledge" (30). Such narratives thus provide not only a catalog or data base of cultural holdings but also a shared cultural self-consciousness.

Mendelson tells us, in fact, that encyclopedic narratives are written when a culture becomes conscious of itself, of its existence as a culture. Encyclopedic narratives from all cultures have certain qualities in common. Etch includes an account of at least one technology or science. (Gravity's Rainbow reviews the rise of organic chemistiy and rocket science.) Each is an anthology of literaiy styles. (Gravity's Rainbow 's stylistic register runs a technical manual to hit parade song.) Each metastasizes its own monstrousness by including giants or grotesque 20 bodies. (Beside the Adenoid, Gravity's Rainbow offers titans living under the earth; a huge angel in the air over fire-bombed Lübeck; a moss giant; an erectile nose; an archway in Berlin that become a giant mouth, tongue, and gullet; and many references to King Kong. There is also, of course the all-encompassing, entrapping System, which swallows all experience and, especially, all prospects for resistance.) For Calvino, the perfect novel would be an encyclopedia tracing the relationship between Everything and Nothing. He cites Mallarmé— who, after providing "a uniquely crystalline form to nothingness" in his poems, spent his last years writing "an Absolute book, as the ultimate goal of the universe: a mysterious work of which he destroyed every trace." He refers also to Flaubert, who said that he wished to write a book about nothing, then proceeded to write Bouvard and Pécuchet, "the most encyclopedic novel ever written" (113).^ Pynchon's works also hear a special relation to Nothing. Their erudition is targeted toward describing Nothing in its many forms. We see this in Gravity's Rainbow—where Nothing takes the form of a multi­ dimensional death wish, a discipline-spanning collective desire that propels the West (and with it the world) toward its end—and we see it also

^Calvino calls the two heroes of Flaubert's novel "Don Qpixotes of nineteenth-century scientism whose vo>^ge toward ever-fleeting knowledge turns out to be a series of shipwrecks." He writes, "For these two self-taught irmocents, each book throws open a new world, but the worlds are mutually exclusive or least so contradictory as to destroy any hope of certainty" (114). In the end, however, Calvino follows Raymond Quesneau in seeing in the novel not a statement of the vanity of knowledge but a product of an active skepticism. He writes, "Flaubert's skepticism and his endless curiousity about the human knowledge accumulated over the centuries are the very qualities that were destined to be claimed for their own by the greatest writers of the twentieth centuiy" (115-16). 21 in Pynchon's earlier work. "How pleasant to watch Nothing," says the lady V., sitting in the drawing room of her villa in Valletta (487). Reading the novel V., we wonder if we have been doing anything but. V. reads as re-inscription of Western history from the perspective of an inanimance into which humanity is gradually sinking—despite our constant and often cruel attempts to leave our mark on the world. The

C tying o f Lot 49 reveals Nothing in the ivory-towered existence of Osdipa Maas—an existence shut off from anything that might touch her, anything for which she might too much care or in which she might believe. As the novel goes on, Oedipa is called out of the tower by a

Something she cannot quite reach, which may also be Nothing in another form. Near the end of the novel, she sits for hours, beyond help,

"too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breath in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void" (171).

Inchon's works, then, illustrate the concept of multiplicity, fulfilling even Calvino's conception of the novel as the intersection of Everything and Nothing. However, while Calvino's ideal novel floats freely in space—its Everything connected to Nothing in an eerie, almost mystical relationship—in Pynchon the relationship between Everything and Nothing is concretely realized. Nothing is grafted onto everything by history. Pynchon records the gradual totalization of Nothing, the coming of historical death, and the acccompanying denial of all that would stand in history's way. Reversal, resistance, alternative order-all are revealed as nostalgia; all are pared away. 22 History is the next element in our description of the IVnchonic novel. Histoiy is not only one of the prime subjects of Pynchon's inquiry, it also holds together his multiplicity. Pynchon sees the plural world moving as one through time. Nothing is exempt: all disciplines, all

discourses and all mindsets mutate and develop together. Omniscience goes historical: the key to knowledge is the interpretation of the process by which change is made. Pynchon's vision of histoiy is post-Hegelian, but it is anti-Hegelian as well. While Hegel cast history as the means to freedom and fully realized life, Pynchon sees it as a trap in which terms such as "freedom" and perhaps even "life" no longer apply. From the

perspective of historical death, Hegelian history takes on the appearance of a grand illusion, a con game we were playing to keep from admitting

that no one—and nothing—could save us. We also understand that it was because we believed in salvation and sought to ascend that we ended up where we are now. Every attempt at transcendence moved us deeper into death, while eveiy downward drop leads to a greater and more desperate desire to transcend. Pynchon reveals the workings of history, but this revelation comes too late—it comes after the fact. Like Tanner, Mendelson is among the critics assigning I^nchon a special place in the histoiy of the West. Melville, Mendelson tells us, served as the encyclopedicist of North American culture—a role we might have expected Pynchon to play. Instead, Mendelson asserts, Pynchon's is the encyclopedic narrative of a global culture "created by the technologies of instant communication and the economy of Western markets." This is the first global culture "since medieval Latin Europe separated into the national cultures of the Renaissance" (32). 23 Kundera also heralds the arrival of this culture: "The Modem Era," he writes, "has nurtured a dream in which mankind, divided into its separate civilizations, would someday come together in unity and everlasting peace" (10). Now the dream has come true, but in an ironic, even nightmarish, way:

Today the history of the planet has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war, ambulant and everlasting war, that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere (11).

The passages from Husserl that Kundera quotes come from lectures given in Vienna and Prague on the future of European humanity. Kundera finds a deep significance in the fact that the lectures were given in two Central European capitals. "For it was in the selfsame Central Europe," he writes, "that for the first time in modem history the

West could see the death of the West, or, more exactly, the amputation of a part of itself (11). Kundera refers to the swallowing of Central Europe by the Russian empire—an event (or, rather, a process) engendered by World War 1, and reflected in the novels of the Central European pleiad of Kafka, Hasek, Musil and Broch. These writers saw history as fully permeating, inscribing even supposedly inner space:

The time was past when man had only the monster of his own soul to grapple with, the peaceful time of Joyce and Proust. In the novels of Kafka, Hasek, Musil, and Broch, the monster comes from the outside and is called History; it no longer has anything to do with the train the adventurers used to ride; it is impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible—and it is inescapable (11). 24 When Kundera looks back on the modem novel, the path of its development looks strangely limited and short. Isn't that Don Qpixote, he asks, trying to land a land suneyor's job? "Once he had set out to seek adventures of his own choosing, but now in the village below the Castle he has not choice, the adventure is imposed on him: a petty squabble with the administration over a mistake in his file" (9). This reduction of the novelistic enterprise, "the depreciated legacy of Cervantes," reflects and is reflected by the course of modem history. The depreciated novel is above all a response to a reduced and entrapped culture. Kundera writes, "The unification of the planet's histoiy, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come tme, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction." He acknowledges that such reduction may have always been at work, but maintains that "the character of modem society hideously exacerbates this curse." He cites a chain of examples: human life, in the modem era, has been reduced to a social function (If K. can't be a land surveyor, who is he?); social life has been reduced to a political struggle, politics has shrunk to war (and beyond this, to mere personal vendetta); war has become the confrontation of two global powers (and has now been further reduced to the terrorist activities of tribes, packs, and cults, or, still further, to random killing for killing’s own sake); history is now a small set of events broadcast worldwide and argued over endlessly by pundits paid to keep the argument going. "Man is caught," Kundera writes, "in a veritable whirlpool of reduction" (17). Despite the scope and richness of Inchon's novels, we can see this reduction at work here as well, and again, histoiy is the cause. 25 While Joseph K. is besieged on a timeless plane by a universe gone mad, the madness in Pynchon is realized on earth. Rockets are built, Rondels beaten, a counter-culture presents itself but may also be an illusion. Whether the incident in question stems from actual data or is one of Pynchon's imaginative projections makes little difference. In each case, the true subject is history—history that seduces and entraps.

V. gives us Cairo cabby Gebrail's vision of the desert encroaching on the humanized world, eventually erasing all evidence that humans had ever been there. We read of the futile actions of those who would be in Control—Foreign Service operatives, the race of wealthy tourists criss­ crossing the globe, the white masters in the Südwest. There is also the story told by the shipmaster Mehemet on the passage from Sicily to Malta.

In the story, a sailor paints the side of a sinking ship—a futile action but not unlike all others. "The only change is toward death,' repeated Mehemet cheerfully. 'Early and late we are in decay'" (181).

In The Crying o f Lot 49, Oedipa sees her choices reduced to a single perilous either/or. Ether she is witness to an alternative America, or there is only one: "She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it happened here with the chances once so good for diversity?" She imagines herself inside a digital computer, "the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic street there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth" (181). She can pick, however, neither the one nor the zero. She is stuck on the postage stamp between options, her world further reduced. 26 Gravity's Rainbow inscribes a control that is out of control.

Pynchon writes:

living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide... though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker, "Good morning folks, this is Heidelberg we're coming into now, you know the old refbain 'I lost my heart in Heidelberg,' well I have a friend who lost both his ears here! Don't get me wrong, it's really a nice town, the people are warm and wonderful when they're not dueling. Seriously, though, they treat you just fine, they don't give you the key to the city, the give you the bung- starter!" u.s.w. On you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing—castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of the morning, for reasons that are not announced and: you get out to stretch in lime-lie courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalpytus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swonls and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting—passengers will now reclaim their seats and much as you'd like to stay right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform. Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight... (412-413).

The bus rolls on, toward avalanche, cliff, head-on collision: or perhaps

Pirate Prentice's terminal hotel. Mendelson notes that the characters of Gravity's Rainbow "live in their work, and in their relation to large social and economic forces"

(42). Moreover, working, in Gravity's Rainbow, means taking part in systematic slaughter: everyone is an employee of the War. London becomes "Death's antechamber, where all the paperwork's done, the contracts signed, the days numbered" (40). The War is one, indivisible: one of Pynchon's great paranoid insights is to see the two sides, Allied and Axis, as functioning together, collaborating on the project of 27 accelerated death. When peace is declared, the death rate slows, but only somewhat. The flows of power continue, the System goes on.

This leads to a number of paranoid moments: Oberst Enzian, the leader of the Schwarzkomraando, a band of Herero rocketeers, comes upon the wreckage of an oil refinery in the anarchic Zone of post-war

Germany. He sees, however, that the refinery is not wrecked at all: "It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, tq be switched on." The refinery has been "modified, precisely, deiiberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—sides? had always agreed on" (520). Enzian's half-brother, Soviet operative Vaslev Tchitcherine has a similar revelation. Looking at a ruined V-2 battery he sees a "A Rocket Cartel. A structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it" (566). More chilling is the suggestion that the System is operating on its own volition—an insane driver is bad enough, but no driver at all? In one of the novel's seances, the spirit voice says, '"A market needed no longer nm by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itseif—its own logic, momentum, style, from fnside"'(30). As Sir Marcus Scammony tells

Clive Mossmoon as they lounge at the club: '"We're all going to fail. . . but the Operation won't'" (616).

Entrapment is the end game of Pynchon's vision, but it is also, ironically, a starting point. Pynchon spends much time and energy in search of alternatives to entrapment, resistance to reduction, methods for springing history's trap. In Pynchon, however, each site of potential resistance becomes another occupied territory, another locale under 28 history's increasingly comprehensive control. Worse, however, is the possibility that we are seeing only the memory of resistance, the tracing of a process long since over, the movie of an irreversible and fatal progression, now at an end. Resistance is the last term to be added to the description of the I^nchonic novel, but it can be added only as a term in the midst of cancellation, as Derrida might have it, written crossed out. Pynchon stands at the end of the era of the novel set against the times. As Salman Rushdie has pointed out, the strongest sense of the world "novel" is to make anew, to break through the old.5 In the past, the novel could be seen as cooperating with histoiy, aiding in the unfolding of humanized time. One recalls Bakhtin's vision of Rabelais destroying the medieval "world-picture" and helping to usher in a modernity freed of superstition, scholasticism and corruption—a new age generous and comedic, christened with barrels of wine.

As Kundera points out, however, times have changed. He charges the modem novel not only with voiding the status quo, but standing against history, reversing the whirlpool of reduction. He writes, "If [the novel] is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on 'progressing' as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world" (19).

The task is monumental, probably impossible. Rushdie looks with wonder and consternation at the phrase "revolt against history"—a description of the Iranian revolution by one if its main ideologues:

SRushdie writes this in regard to The Satanic Verses. His point is that his work must be taken for what it is—a novel, a piece of fiction, but also intended to reflect a new situation: the hybrid culture between the Islamic and secular worlds. He writes, "TTie Satanic Verses is for change- by-fusion, change-by-cojoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves" (394). 29 "What a phrase! In these three unforgettable words, history is characterized as a colossal error, and the revolution sets out quite literally to turn back the clock" (383). We might expect this attempt to fail, but Rushdie's point is that it is not even really being made. Instead, he sees the slogan as part of a rhetoric of unity that while nodding to the past is actually aimed at progression into the future—the development of a strong and repressive Iranian state. For the résistent novel, Kundera has something else in mind. Instead of providing a new reduction—an attempt to escape histoiy through simplification—he calls for the complication of histoiy, the search for a way of being outside the limits of entrapment. The spirit of the novel, he tells us, is that of complexity: "eveiy novel says to the reader: Things are not as simple as you think'" (18). This spirit provides the novel's justification, now more than even "If the novel's raison d'être is to keep 'the world of life' under a permanent light and to protect us from 'the forgetting of being,' is it not more than ever necessaiy today that the novel should exist? " He answers, "Yes, so it seems to me"

(17). The problem becomes putting the novel's potential to use, writing novels that re-introduce complexity. Sheer exuberance helps. Rushdie asserts that those who charge his novel Midnight's Children with unmitigated pessimism have followed too closely the stoiy of the narrator, Saleem, and have failed to examine the way in which the stoiy is told. They have missed the importance of the story's imaginative energy, the fact that it teems. As Rushdie puts it: 30 What I tried to do was set up a tension in the text, a paradoxical opposition between the form and content of the narrative. The story of Saleem does Indeed lead him to despair. But the story is designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it "teems." The form - multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country— is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem's personal tragedy. I do not think that a book written in such a manner can be called a despairing work (16).

The exuberance of In c h o n 's work is well known. V”. gives us the rollicking of the Whole Sick Crew and the drunken frenzy of Suck Hour, where beer is gulped directly from taps covered with foam rubber breasts. It is here that we hear of the legendary Father Fairing, a human sewer dweller, who, "in an hour of apocalyptic well-being," gave up on the mission and bread lines of urban life above and went below to work at converting the rats. Further, V. has the imaginative power to allow Herbert Stencil to create V. herself—an entity who may be a woman, may be a machine, may be the prime mover behind an apocalyptic centuiy or a witness caught in the century's momentum, or may not exist at all. In The Crying o f Lot 49, we see a rift in Western history arising from the possible existence of an age-old alternative mail system. The

Trystero offers a connecting principle for the dispossessed and disinherited, as well as a wild collection of splinter groups: Inamorati Anonymous, whose members would do without love; the Peter Pinguid

Society, which stands against both capitalism and communism: "industrial everything," the loose confederation of Southern Californians interested in Jacobean revenge plays. Seeing these people now connected, Oedipa thinks she may be witnessing what the Mexican 31 anarchist Jesûs Arrabel describes as his version of a miracle: "Another world's intrusion into this one'" (120). It is a world that danngles before

her, just out of reach. In Gravity's Rainbow, Inchon's imaginative energy comes fully into its own. This is the site of the Disgusting English Candy Drill, an

orgy of confectionery consumption featuring cheny-quinine petite fours. Marmalade Surprises, and pepsin-flavored nougats shaped like Mills hand grenades. There is also the Fire of Paradise—"that famous

confection of high price and Protean taste, 'salted plum' to one, 'artificial cherry,' to another... 'sugared violets'... 'Worcestershire sauce'. . . —which Mrs. Qpoad, the hostess, decides, no doubt wisely, to save until later (119). Even grosser is the Body Fluid Banquet, a truly vile episode which ends with most of the guests in considerable gastric distress. We are also privy to what must rank among the veiy best

drinking game sequences in any of the World's Great Books. The game is Prince, a deceptively simple number meant to test the (very) short-term memory —just the faculty you want to rely upon when downing tankards of champagne. The result is predictably chaotic: the game degenerates; vulgar songs are sung; heads become balloons. Gravity's Rainbow can be seen as a party, the celebration of a holiday as yet unnamed. Many of the guests come in costume—Wagnerian capes and helmets, Pig suits and slick Zoots, even an Ugly American get- up complete with Hawaiian shirt and (yeech) hand-painted tie. There is indeed someone dressed as Mickey Rooney (unless that really is Mickey himself) and a crew of people in tuxedos from a boat out for a summer circulation through the novel’s anarchic Zone. 32 The story line also teems. We read the life history of a German rocket scientist, hear a Kirghiz Aqyn sing of a miraculous light, follow the halting and recursive progress, and witness the several costume and name changes of the former American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop. We sit in at a midnight meeting of behaviorists and enter the sacred circle of the Schwarzkommando. We are chased by troops reciting dirty limericks, listen to a harmonica serenade and hear an argument about the worth of atonality. Hell here is cast as a terminal hotel and a fantastic museum

(unless it is an empty landscape or a corrugated shack), while the ultimate seat of power is a computer room. Pan is mentioned, as is FDR, i ruman, Dillinger, and Malcolm X. Toward the end we get a discussion of the phrase "Ass Backwards," juxtaposed with a letter from Mom Slothrop to Joe Kennedy and a song, "My Doper's Cadenza." Further, the world itself seems to have come to life. In VI, we read of an inanimate landscape—the encroaching desert, a harbor dredged during the day and filling with silt at night, the single inanimate Street encircling the globe. Humanity has been eclipsed by the machine. Animals are mentioned several times, but they too are part of the same dead scene. The novel's most haunting sound may be the cry of a strand wolf in the South-West African fog: a cry devoid of any human meaning, except to suggest our own emptiness, inadequacy, despair. In The C iying o f Lot 49, the world takes on an animate aura. Low- range transmissions emanate: Oedipa looks at the Southern California grid and thinks it has something to say. Further, as the Trystero opens before her, she moves through a landscape increasingly alive, rich with signs, fertile as a dream. She moves toward what she thinks may be some 33 kind of transcendence or spiritual awakening, Life writ large, beyond what she has so far known. In Gravity’s Rainbow, life is all around: spirits talk from beyond the grave, laboratory mice break out of their cages and dance, even stones have souls. The world is seen as a single, connected organism. In one scene, Pynchon takes us back to the Green World before humans: the vegetation is disturbingly dense, it is a "clangorous and mad" "overspeaking of life" (720). Even the agents of death seem oddly alive. The War is thought to have a consciousness of its own: it moves troops and raw materials to meet its enigmatic needs, even controls the killing and destruction with a higher end in mind. The rocket itself is seen as a baby Jesus, fragile angel, Weberian charismatic. It breaths, feels, responds, cums. For some, the imaginative richness of Pynchon's work suggests a need for generic innovation. 1 am thinking in particular of the Menippean satiie, a form explicated by Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, and Northrop Frye and brought to Pynchon's work by Speer Morgan, John O.

Stark, and, especially, Theordore D. Kharpertian. Kharpertian sees in

Menippean satire not only a set of specific conventions—a loose-jointed narrative, odd juxtapositions, great variety, vast erudition, parody and attack, grotesque images—but also specific functions. He traces the roots of Menippean satire to the fertility rites of the ancient Greeks. The rites were aimed at driving out the spirit of death, insuring the continuity and continued abundance of life. The modem day Menippean satire has similar aims. When they attack, Menippean satires never solely tear down. Instead, they seek to 34 bring a fertile richness to the word and enliven the reader's mind.

Kharpertian asserts that the Menippean satire's parody, comedy, and

fantasy "serve, inter alia, to entertain or delight, and in doing so they moderate and make receptible the more negative impact of the attack" (39). These elements also call for new ways of reading. Khapertian writes, "the multiplicity of visions represented by parody, comedy, and fantasy suggests the resistance of experience to the imposition of patterns that reduce and simplify its complexity" (40). If Pynchon's work are Menippean satires, however, they are

Menippean satires under siege. From the beginning, the exuberance of the Pynchonic text is checked by a spreading darkness, a chill, the threat of a judgment without appeal. The text may attempt to fertilize and renew history, but it is also a product of history: despite itself, a part of the System it would forestall. A primordial energy may be at the root of Pynchon's works but it is this energy that history desires to ensnare and snuff out. Pynchon's Menippean satires are those at the genre's end. If resistance here is already a memory, post-Menippean satire may be a more accurate term. The death of Menippean energy is perhaps the most extreme example of the fate of resistance in Pynchon. Pynchon's works not only generate resistance, but also undermine and reject it—eventually revealing it as doomed from the start. Pynchon writes what J.G. Ballard might call a "retinal history."^ His works trace the events, moods, and movements of the past as they play themselves out once more—flashing

6see especially The Atrocity Exhibition and also "The Gioconda of the Terminal Moon." The Terminal Beach. 194-203. 35 across the battered Western eye, or the Orpheus' screen. Resistance may be the hero of the movie, but heroes don't always win. As the audience claps their hands, impatient for the show, one wonders if they are even rooting the right way. In this movie, the villain may be more appealling. "Wait 'til they get a load of me," the Rocket says, admiring its nose cone. Of course, one can also argue that the audience simply likes a winner, and the Rocket has in the case already won. In Pynchon, the mind trails after the rocket, picking through the debris, trying to understand, to piece together what it can. How did the disaster happen, the text wants to know. The answer, I^nchon suggests, is because we wanted it to—and because nothing stood it its way. In V., resistance entails reclaiming one's humanity—something that may be possible only after one has first sunk into a nearly inanimate state. Resistance here remains half-realized, even sloganistic: the watchwords penned by sax man McClintic Sphere, "'Be cool, but care,"' go largely unfulfilled. In The Crying o f Lot 49, resistance comes in the form of the Trystero, which Oedipa may or may not be seeing. (How much worse the reduction would be if she saw no alternative, faced no either/or, if America maintained the form of an incontrovertible, digital "one.") In the end, however, Oedipa cannot give herself to the alternative, cannot bring herself to believe. She needs proof, and there is none. Gravity’s Rainbow, finally, cannot be called a party. It is more properly a wake. Mourned here is not only the world before the human, before the Kabbalistic vessels were broken, before the killing began, but 36 also the notion of the redemptive return. At one point, Slothrop imagines "that there might be a route back:" "maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up" (556). Throughout the novel, however, the idea of a return is undermined. We have the flight and landing of a V-2—"Each firebloom, followed by blast, followed by sound of arrival, is a mockeiy (how can it not be deliberate?) of the reversible process" (139)—and then by the continuing saga of technologic escalation, the coming of "the new cosmic bombs." There is also, of course, the problem of the System that brings such weapons into being. If we are truly trapped in the cartel state, the multinational enterprise bringing—as the actor Tim Robbins once put it, mocking the GE slogan— "good things to death,"^ what resistance can remain?

Perhaps resistence in the form of knowledge. Inchon's work provides an adversarial awareness of entrapment: a reading of history and an understanding of the System that the System would keep to itself. This brings us back not only to Kundera ("Knowledge is the novel's only morality") but also to Mendelson. Encyclopedic narrative, he tells us, provides alternative cultural history. Operating out of a spirit of "positive illegality," it enters the cultural scene at a moment of distress, a

^Robbins said this during a mock-commercial on Saturday Night Live in 1993. The joke is rendered especially poignant by the fact that GE owns NBC. When he told it, Robbins was in GE"s employ. 37 point at which traditional cultural definitions no longer hold. It then seeks to provide a new definition, to locate the old culture within a new frame of reference, or to discover a new culture emerging from the old.

One would think that the knowledge offered by such a narrative would yield an oppositional, even terroristic power. In Pynchon, however, the opposite is the case. The "new definition" or "frame of

reference" his work enacts is that of historical entrapment: the I^chonic text may take omniscience as its ideal, but each piece of knowledge gleaned along the way points out how powerless we are. In

VI, the signs point to inanimance: the reclamation of the human is a suspect proposition. In The Crying o f Lot 49, Oeidipa cannot embrace resistance. She remains on the outside. In Gravity's Rainbow ... In Gravity's Rainbow, we find "The Story of Byron the Bulb," the famous set piece which Harold Bloom includes in his list of modern-day sublimities, "experiences that matter most" (1). Byron is a special bulb, a rare Immortal. He is also a would-be subversive. He hopes to organize the other bulbs, get them to strobe in sync with human alpha patterns,

triggering epileptic fits. "Attention, humans," he will announce, "this has been a warning to you. Next time, a few of us will explode. Ha-ha. Yes we'll unleash our Kamikaze squads\" (649). As other bulbs his age bum out, Byron begins to attract attention. Phoebus, the international

light bulb cartel, is very interested, would like to meet Byron, have a talk with him . . . . Byron, meanwhile, has learned to keep his trap shut. He imagines there are other Immortals, spaced across the Grid, all laying low. They maintain silence, "but it is a silence with much, perhaps everything in it" (650). 38 Increasingly concerned with Byron's failure to bum out on his own like any decent Bulb, Phoebus decides to make a hit on Byron and have his remains melted down. Byron, currently illuminating the glass shop where the melting-down would take place, thinks this may not be a bad thing: "Here in the shop he's watched enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool from which all glass forms spring and re-spring, and wouldn't mind going through it himself." The meltdown, however, is not meant to be; "There's no escape for Byron, he's doomed to an infinite regress of sockets and bulbsnatchers" (651). In this case, the snatcher is a Weimer street urchin who zips in on cue, swipes Byron, and heads for Hamburg, stopping only to trade the bulb for morphine. So begins a remarkable adventure: Byron is passed from prostitute to priest to transsectite ("a Lutheran named Mausmacher who likes to dress up in Roman regalia"). At one point, he floats for days on the North Sea, at another, he lays on the ground at a torchlight Nazi rally, waiting for someone to step on him or pick him up. Throughout the long passage, Byron stays a step ahead of Phoebus. Eventually, the cartel stops looking. Byron is written out of stock, considered lost, broken, whatever. Phoebus has other bulbs to worry about. Legally dead, Byron takes on the perspective of one transfigured. Wherever he goes, he instructs the bulbs around him, telling them about the evil of Phoebus and the need to resist. He has achieved a new awareness of bulb-hood:

He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of light energy alone. Phoebus has restricted Bulb to this one identity. "But there are other frequencies, above and below the visible band. Bulbs can give heat. Bulbs can provide 39 energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of men" (653).

Over time, Byron comes to understand more and more of the workings of the Grid. He notes Phoebus' need to maximize profits by balancing electrical output with the life-span of the Bulb. He witnesses its agreement with the meat cartel to channel extra tallow into soap production, thus cracking down on "those criminal souls" who still use candles. He sees the price-fixing in the tungsten market. He also discovers how to contact electrical appliances: "Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul" (654). Unfortunately, however, there is nothing Byron can do with his knowledge, no alternative world to call into being, no foundation from which a revolt can spring. Byron is on his way to a most ironic omniscience: "Someday he wili know everything, and still be as impotent as before" (654). He is destined to remain screwed into the Grid, and the Grid is not to be trusted: "[It] is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line." "Prophets," the narrative notes, "traditionally don't last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think." For Byron, however, a different fate has been reserved: "He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it " (655). 40 If this is closure, then of what kind? What "ironic omniscience" do Pynchon's novels provide: what truth do they aiiow us to know? i take it to be the hidden truth of history—namely, that history, the great Western contract, is at an end. in Inchon, we enter the time after history, where the only phenomenology is that of entrapment realized, dialectic snapped shut. As Arthur Kroker and David Cook write in The Postmodern Scene: " ... we are living in a waiting period, a dead space, which wiii be characterized by random outbursts of political violence, schizoid behaviors, and the implosion of all communication as Western cuiture runs down toward the brilliant illumination of a final burnout" (iii).

Perhaps there will not even be a brilliant illumination. One imagines a screen going blank without even a rocket to fall on our heads. Communication, however, may still be possible: there may be time to say what went wrong. Kroker and Cook trace the implosion of history as far back as Augustine. They note however, that it can be seen later—in Baudrillard and Nietzsche, and the abandonment of reason in Kant's third critique—and also earlier, as early as "the Lucretian theory of the physical world that Serres calls the simulacrum" (8).

Pynchon traces it back even further, to the Green Uprising and the coming of the human. We were brought in to keep the overspeaking of life from blowing apart. We are the spoilers, "Counter­ revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death." It doesn't have to be this way: a few defect every day, "out, and through, and down under the net, down to the uprising" (720). The section ends, however, with an abrupt change in tone: "Don't walk home at night through the empty 41 country. Don't go into the forest when the light is too low, even too late

in the afternoon—it will get you" (721). We soon find ourselves entering the realm of Dominus Blicero, the spirit of Death the Dominant. The SS man Weissmann, Blicero's current medium, tells his lover, the boy Gottfried, that he, Weissmann, wants to break out of the cycle of death and destruction, a cycle he has aided in countless way. This "escape," we will discover, has nothing to do with the Green Uprising. It instead entails another death. With Weissmann reverting to some terrible, ancestral self, Gottfried is strapped into a mechanical womb, a specially-modified V-2, and launched. In Pynchon, there is no age of innocence—from the beginning, at least we Westerners have been propagating death. History has been the process of coming to this realization: stripping away illusion, working toward the bare fact. From this perspective, Kundera begins to look nostalgic. Rewrites:

In the course of the Modem Era, Cartesian rationality has corroded, one after the other, aU the values inherited from the Middle Ages. But just when reason wins a total victory, pure irrationality (force willing only its will) seizes the world stage, because there is no longer any generally accepted value system to block its path (10).

The passage surveys the modem era but also looks back, a bit longingly, to the shared values of Middle Ages. After Nietzsche, however, shared values seem a collective lie: he takes us beyond morality to the power that he sees at history's core. Pynchon resides on Nietzsche's far side. Here, it is power that is the lie. At another of the seances in Gravity's Rainbow, the spirit of 42 Walter Rathenau, founder of the cartel state, Is summoned to speak to fascist yuppies, "the corporate Nazi crowd." It hardly matters what he says: "Whatever comes through the medium tonight they will warp, they will edit, into a blessing. It is a contempt of a rare order." Still, Rathenau tries:

"You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? 1 don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn" (165).

He tells them to think about mauve, the first human-made color. He talks of coal-tar and pain killers, the fruits of organic chemistry. It is possible

to believe, while arranging molecules, that you are re-animating the dark pitch of earth, creating something living from "the very substance

of death." This is not the case:

"But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you can do is polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not resurrection" (166).

The resurrection-effect, however, will continue. Colors will be made; fuels fabricated. Germany will rise like the Phoenix. Then, just as death appears again imminent, the rocket will be ready. As Blicero

teaches Bizian: "Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature" (324). The rocket, however, will not be the last such system. In Gravity's Rainbow, we hear 43 rumors of a new kind of bomb. It is mentioned in hepcat-to-hepcat exchanges, referred to in tom headlines, evidenced by sunsets that seem unnaturally vivid. We also have an emissary from Hiroshima, an Ensign Morituri, more ghost than man. He wants to go home. It is the time of the plum rains. Other forms of death also advance. Blicero tells Gottfried that

America was Europe's second chance, a chance to move away from its obsessions and addictions, a chance to return; '"But Europe refused it. It wasn't Europe's Original Sin—the latest name for that is Modem Analysis— but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for'" (722). Instead of atonement, Europe deepens the transgression: America becomes the Kingdom of Death that Europe has always wanted, that all colonial properties were designed to become. This Kingdom now mles the world, but does not end the progression. Beyond this comes the virtual world: the realm of simulacra without reference, in which information and money circulate without end. At the ruined rocket battery, a giant Finger appears to Tchitcherine. "Its Rngemail is beautifully manicured: as it rotates for him, it slowly reveals a Hngerprint that might will be an aerial view of the City Dactylic, that city of the future where every soul is known and there is no place to hide" (566). It is into this City Pynchon's novels send us: the realm of perfected entrapment has already arrived. CHAPTER II

THE EVACUATION OF THE HUMAN

In an episode of V. set in Florence in 1899, a painting is to be stolen: Botticelli's Birth o f Venus. It hangs on the western wall of the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco in the Uffîzi. The Gaucho, a man of action and follower of Machiavelli, has been hired to help with the theft. He comes to the Uffizi to case the place and check out the prize. He does not care for most of what he sees:

She was standing in half of what looked like a scungille shell; fat and blond, and the Gaucho, being a tedesco in spirit, appreciated this. But he didn't understand what was going on in the rest of the picture. There seemed to be some dispute over whether or not she should be nude or draped: on the right a glassy-eyed lady built like a pear tried to cover her up with a blanket and on the left an irritated young man with wings tried to blow the blanket away while a girl wearing hardly anything twined around him, perhaps trying to coax him back to bed. While this crew wrangled, Venus stood gazing off into God knows where, covering up with her long tresses. No one was looking at anyone else. A confusing picture (178).

The Gaucho's description is in contrast to the historical role commonly associated with the painting. As David Cowart notes, "The world has always recognized in the Birth o f Venus a double perfection— the ideally beautiful representation of ideal beauty itself." In the novel, this view is best expressed by Raphael Mantissa, a world traveler and

44 45 freelance political operative who is, in this case, the Gaucho's empioyer.

Mantissa, Cowart notes, "admires the painting in a particularly intense way, seeking in a Renaissance work of art something he finds missing in his life, something transcendent or absolute" (14). The Gaucho, however, sees nothing transcendent; he cannot sustain even the illusion of perspective that would allow the painting to represent three-dimensional space. This flattening of vision is typical of his entire world-view. For the Gaucho, the world is a place for action, a proving ground for the will. He aims not for higher emotions, but to overcome obstacles: his goal is to accomplish the task at hand. He is, therefore, disgusted with Mantissa's plan. It is too subtle, too complex. There is so much that can go wrong that it cannot possibly all go right. Mantissa then tells him that their escape will involve taking a lift. It is too much, the final affront:

"A lift," the Gaucho sneered. "About what I'd expect from you." He leaned forward, baring his teeth. '"You already propose to commit an act of supreme idiocy by walking all the way down one corridor, along another, halfway up a third, down one more into a cul-de-sac and then out again the same way you came in. A distance of—" he measured rapidly—"some six hundred meters, with guards ready to jump out at you every time you pass a gallery or turn a comer. But even this isn't confining enough for you. You must take a lift" (163-64).

There is also the matter of disguising the painting so that it can be removed from the gallery without attracting attention. The Botticelli is large, 175 by 279 centimeters. To get it out. Mantissa proposes to remove it from its frame, roil it up, and hide the roll in the hollowed trunk of a Judas tree. Mantissa and his accomplice Cesare will be dressed as 46 workmen; the Uffizi is being redecorated—they should be able to come and go as they please. They have already approached a florist about obtaining the tree... "'Florist,'" the Gaucho says. "'Florist: you've already let a florist into your confidence. Wouldn't you be happier to publish your intentions in the evening newspapers?"' (164). The Gaucho prefers a direct approach: he will blow the bars off a window in the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco with a small bomb. They can then escape through the window. "'Anyone who tries to interfere will be disposed of by force'" (165). Mantissa, however, seems to want the subtlety, the potential for failure. Perhaps it is even failure itself he wants. This episode would then match the rest of his record. He may be a political operative, but his operations seem to have had no effect: "There was hardly even a dossier on him wherever in the world his tiny nimble feet should happen to walk." Mantissa is a representative of an exhausted culture, an embodiment of catholic despair: "He belonged to that inner circle of deracinated seers whose eyesight clouded over with occasional tears, whose outer rim was tangent to the rims enclosing the Decadents of England and France, the Generation of '98 in Spain, for whom the continent of Europe was like a gallery one is familiar with but long weary of, useful now only as shelter from rain, or some obscure pestilence" (160). His most notable feature are his eyes—

... they reflected a free-floating sadness, unfocused, indeterminate: a woman, the casual tourist might think at first, be almost convinced until some more catholic light moving in and out of a web of capillaries would make him not so sure. What then? 47 Politics, perhaps. Thinking of gentle-eyed Mazzini with his lambent dreams, the observer would sense frailness, a poet-liberal. But if he kept watching long enough the plasma behind those eyes would soon run through every fashionable permutation of grief- financial trouble, declining health, destroyed faith, betrayal, impotence, loss—until eventually it would dawn on our tourist that he had been attending no wake after all: rather a street long festival of sorrow with no booth the same, no exhibit offering anything solid enough to merit lingering at (159-160).

Cowart connects Mantissa's eyes to the Birth o f Venus. He follows Walter Pater in noting that the painting's most prominent trait is its air of melancholy. Botticelli, Pater tells us, depicted "'men and women . . . saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.' Of the Birth of Venus , he says: 'What is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depositoiy of a great power over the lives of men'"

(Pater, 62; Cowart, 15). The night of the theft. Mantissa meets an old acquaintance, the English explorer Hugh Godolphin. Godolphin believes he is being followed by English and Italian authorities who want to question him about something called Vheissu. He talks of Vheissu obsessively, first to the English ex-patriot and wouid-be father-confessor Victoria Wren—this chapter's version of V.—and then to Mantissa, whom he regards as a kindred soul. Vheissu is a place. It may also, however, be a dream, "'a gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annhilation'" (206). Whether dream or reality, he is now returning, remembering to the point of reliving, caught in an extended deja vu. He was there, fifteen years before, as part of an engineering expedition. Reaching Vheissu entailed a perilous journey through a 48 fantastic landscape. First came a camel ride over tundra. Then, a boat passage down a river choked with vegetation. A swamp was crossed, then

a lake. On the lake's far side rose the foothills of the mountains ringing Vheissu. The moutains were made of granite and covered in blue ice. The native guides would go only a short distance in. Vheissu was a two-

week's climb. Despite its remote location, however, Vheissu should have been no place special. It was just another potential colonial property, with another population to exploit. As Godolphin tells V., '"The English have been jaunting in and out of places like Vheissu for centuries. Except...'" Except there was something strange about Vheissu:

"The colors. So many colors." [Godolphin's] eyes were tightly closed, forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. "The trees outside the head shaman's house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color in the sunlight. Everything changes. The mountains, the lowlands are never the same day to day. As if you lived inside a madman's kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape" ( 170).

As to what happened to the engineering party, we know only a few details. Only two beside Godolphin had made it out. One was now in a hospital, retired. Godolphin had lost track of the othen he seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. It was the memory of Vheissu that drove Godolphin to the South

Pole—a suicidal run in the dead of winter from which he has only recently returned. The attempt has earned him a degree of acclaim. It would have been greater except for one thing: when the rescue party 49 found him they believed he had not reached the Pole, had given up, perhaps realizing the futility of the attempt. He was labeled a brave failure. He did not contradict it. To Mantissa, however, he tells the truth. He made the Pole. And found Vheissu: "'Nothing,' Godolphin whispered. 'It was Nothing I saw'" (204). The Nothing came in the form of a spider monkey, its body perfectly preserved in the ice. It was "'a mockery, you see: a mockery of life, planted where everything but Hugh Godolphin was inanimate. With of course the implication... '" (206)—the implication that he might be next to pass into inanimance? Or somehow already had? In the end. Mantissa shrinks from the theft. Watching Cesare prepare to cut down the painting, he experiences an effect straight out of Vheissu:

light, shining in from the street, reflected from the blade, flickering from the lantern they had brought, danced over the painting's gorgeous surface. Signor Mantissa watched its movement, a slow horror growing in him. In that instant, he was reminded of Hugh Godolphin's spider monkey, still shimmering through crystal ice at the bottom of the world. The whole surface of the painting now seemed to move, to be flooded with color and motion (209).

Mantissa had a mistress in Lyons: "She would drink absinthe at night and torture herself for it in the afternoon. God hated her, she said" (209). She dreamed of going to Paris, to sing on the stage. "Countless mornings, in the hours when passion's inertia of motion had carried them along faster than sleep could overtake them, she had poured out to him schemes, despairs, all tiny, relevant loves." Now, he thinks of Venus in similar terms: 50

What sort of mistress, then, would Venus be? What outlying worlds would he conquer in their three-in-the-moming excursions away from the world of sleep? What of her God, her voice, her dreams? She was already goddess. She had no voice he could ever hear. And she herself (perhaps even her native demesne?) was only.

Godolphin's words come back:

A gaudy dream, a dream of annihilation (210).

What transcendence can Venus then offer? It may be that there is nothing capable of restoring to him what he has lost, of making the tired Western gallery animate again. He tells Cesare to stop. On the way out. Mantissa notices that the paintings in the "Ritratti Diversi" have been removed due to the redecorating. The grenade (the Gaucho has had some impact on the plan after all) had not harmed them. If not for a brief firefight between the Gaucho and the guards and some damage to the Botticelli or its frame—if Cesare had gotten this far—only a Judas tree left behind would indicate that the thieves had been there at all. And this may be only part of the redecorating. It was another cipher on

Mantissa's non-record. The conspirators part. Mantissa makes his escape aboard a barge also carrying Godolphin and Godolphin's son Evan. Cesare disappears into the city. The Gaucho, however, has other business to attend to. He is also working for a group of Venezuelan dissidents, the Figli di Machiavelli. The Italian government knows of the Figli and has pledged to defend the Venezuelan Consulate. Troops are being sent. It may be 51 only a matter of time before the rebel leaders are rounded up. The Gaucho has already been questioned. If the Figli is to act, it must act now. The Figli moves on the Consulate with horses stolen from the cavalry. The Gaucho rides in front, "wearing a red shirt and a wide grin." At the Consulate, the Figli dismounts, yelling and singing, and

proceeds to bombard the building with rotten fruit and vegetables. The

army arrives. A clash ensues: "The square had erupted suddenly into a great whirling confusion." (207). When the Gaucho returns from the aborted heist, the battle is still in progress. His attitude, however, has changed: "He stood for a moment watching the carnage. 'But don't they look like apes, now fighting over a female? Even if the female is named Liberty'" (211).

He is a man of action; this is his kind of scene. He should already be in the center of the fray. Instead, he hesitates:

"There are nights," he mused, "nights, alone, when 1 think we are apes in a circus, mocking the ways of men. Perhaps it is all a mockery, and the only condition we can ever bring to men a mockery of liberty, of dignity. But that cannot be. Or else I have lived . . . " (21D.1

The Gaucho's sudden loss of purpose, his questioning of the meaning, or lack of meaning, behind what he is doing, joins Godolphin's

1 Despite the seductive appeal of the Gaucho's "bluff heartiness," Cowart is suspicious. He writes: "We sense that although the Gaucho wears the Garibaldian red shirt here, he will change it for a black shirt within a couple of decades. When he cites with approval Machiavelli's call for 'a lion, an embodiment of power, to arise in Italy and run all foxes to earth forever' (VI, 163), we know that he will respond positively to the advent of Mussolini" (16). Fascism, would, in fact, provide the Gaucho with what he most lacks: a reason for action, an interpretive principle that would provide the justification for the exercise of his will. 52 frozen monkey and Mantissa's decision not to steal the Botticelli as emblems of collective emptiness, a shared futility. This holds as well for the theft plan—its absurd complexity, its near-parodic effect (one imagines the Three Stooges trying to swipe a famous painting, or inspector Cluscoe turned criminal)—and for the action of the Figli of Machiavelli. In the end, the revolt will have no effect, the Venezuelan government will remain in power. And even if it were to fall, would this matter? One thinks again of the words of Mehement—politics is paint on the side of a sinking ship: "The only change is toward death. Early and late we are in decay'" (460).

The parts of the Florence episode 1 have not discussed also evoke this feeling of hopelessness, this despairing world-view. Sidney Stencil is also in Florence, heading a Foreign Service team which, together with the Italian police, propagate confusion in the name of keeping order: is it Vheissu from which the latest apocalyptic threat emanates? Or is

Vheissu a code name for Venezuela? Or Vesuvius? Is it the Gaucho they are after, Godolphin, or the florist Gadrulfi? Stencil recognizes this tangle of intelligence as further (and hardly needed) proof backing his theory of the Situation. "He had decided long ago," we are told, "that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at a specific moment" (189). And the minds in question rarely agreed. (A few years later, he will author an article,

"The Situation as N-Dimensional Mishmash." It is rejected by Punch.) Meanwhile, Evan Godolphin, in Florence to meet his father, strikes up a romance with Victoria Wren. This may or may not have anything to do with his impending disaster he will be disfigured in a plane crash in 53 World War I. Later, we will encounter him again, this time as V.'s driver and servant—his whole life, it seems, devoted to her. Above all, however, we see the novel's despair in the Birth o f Venus as it appears in the Gaucho's reductive and draining gaze. V. is

the story of the making of the Gaucho's Venus, the flattening of transcendence, the reversal of history's perceived progression—and it is also the story of the making of the Gaucho, of the creation of mindsets such as this one—and Mantissa's, and Godolphin's and Mehemet's and Stencil's (father and son), even V.'s. The novel is a re-inscription of history, a catalogue of mindsets, a search for the perfect expression of inanimance in what we used to call life. V. is a novel in which Nothing happens. I mean this in the strongest sense. Nothing provides the novel's unity; Nothing is at it core. We can describe V as a series of incidents, characters, and images revolving around an empty space. We might think that the stuff of the novel would cover this inner absence, but the opposite is the case. We can see V as a prolonged gaze upon nothing, 57 years spent in V.'s drawing room. It is also, however. Nothing's gaze upon us.

It is a gaze which saps the world of meaning. It leaves us a desolate scene in which all events seem determined by chance. The novel opens on Christmas Eve, 1955, when Benny Profane happens to show up in Norfolk. Having once served on the USS Scaffold, a tin can in the Atlantic fleet, he has been there before. This may, however, have nothing to do with him being there now. There may be no reason. It may have just happened. It is as if the Street, the single nameless Street he has followed for years, has brought Profane here, as if something 54 beside him, or nothing at all, is in control. Profane is a schlemihl, less than human. He doesn't need reasons. He does what Nothing tells him, which is, mainly, to move. We follow Profane to New York City, where he eventually runs into Rachel Owlglass, an old acquaintance he may or may not have come to see. Through Rachel, he meets the Whole Sick Crew: a band of non­ productive, non-creative, would-be Bohemians who hold an endless barrage of parties and rollick through the city, yo-yoing uptown, downtown, and back again on the subway (an activity Profane partakes in even before joining). The Crew also has an intellectual bent, but here again diy futility reigns. Members engage in exhausting arguments in which the same positions are repeatedly voiced and the same proper names (Freud, Sartre, de Kooning, etc.) are repeatedly dropped. No original ideas are conceived, no progress is made: it amounts to a continual rearrangement of inanimate blocks. Rachel would break with the Crew, start again, perhaps with Profane. Profane, however, has a hard time caring. He becomes a full-fledged Crew member, smoking marijuana, experiencing rather than living, reading existential westerns. But this also may mean nothing—Crew status rests shallow in

Profane. He has joined because it came along. He could as easily drop it. Meanwhile, the "world adventurer" Herbert Stencil, Sidney's son, has taken up temporary residence on the periphery of the Crew. Like

Profane, he may have no reason for being there. Stencil would like to think he has a reason, but he cannot be sure. He has spent the last ten years of his life searching for the mysterious V., an entity who may be a woman, may be a machine, or may not exist at all. He first heard of "her" 55 just after World War II. He was leafing through his father's Florence journal at a cafe in Oran when he came upon the following passage: "'There is more behind and Inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report'" (53). With this, the search is afoot. Stencil's motivation is unclear. Is he after the truth about his father (Sidney, we are told, died under mysterious circumstances while in Malta investigating the June Disturbances of 1909.)? Is he looking for the mother he never knew, or a substitute? Does he believe V. to hold the key to history; was she the prime mover behind a century gone wrong? (Stencil may have a vested interest: he was bom in 1901, a year too late to be the century's child, but only a year too late.) Or is he searching simply for the sake of searching, because he has nothing else to do?

While Profane resides in the desolate and futureiess Street, Stencii retreats to the hothouse of the past. The novel's historical sections provide selected results of his search for V. These sections take us to various settings: Egypt during the "Fashoda" crisis; the decadent Paris of 1919; Valletta, Malta, during the June Disturbances; South-West Africa during a post-coloniai retrenchment; and Florence during the Vheissu episode. Each section, however, also takes place within Stencil's mind. Stencii scours the globe in search of V.; he is always tracing down one clue or another. When pressed, however, he admits that he knows almost nothing for certain, that she has granted him only the thinnest of dossiers, that all the "evidence" adds up "only to the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects" (445). The historical sections are thus in 56 the main mere fictions, stenciled creations sprung from an obsessive and straining imagination. However, it is also possible that Stencil is on to something—if not the actual cause of history's downfall, then at least a means of expressing it. V. may not be to blame for all that has gone wrong. She may not be a god-term gone wrong. She may not have even been a witness. She may not exist at all. She does, however, make a handy symbol, a kind of catch-all. Her inner corruption and advancing mechanization make her the perfect subject of her time, the citizen of a world in which the human is collapsing and inanimance is on the rise. We have come a long away from Hegel, and not in the direction we might have hoped. Instead of the daylight of the mind, we enter V.'s darkened drawing room; instead of the humanized world, we find a world which profoundly doesn't care. At times, in VI, history is seen as cyclic.

It may be that we are simply in the midst of a decadence, drawn close to the inanimate for a moment. A spirit of re-animation will soon arise. The cycle will reverse itself—being a cycle, it must. At other points in V., however, the century begins to look like one long decadence: Egypt,

Vheissu, Africa, Florence, Malta, New York, 1899 to 1955—What happened to the re-animation? Did it get lost on the way? And what of the centuries before our own? Were they any different? It may that inanimance has always been with us, gradually working its way to the surface, subverting all in its path. In its most radical reaches, V. suggests that history is a vast illusion, a lie meant to disguise the fact that human actions are without meaning, that nothing we do makes any difference to a non-human world. History did not occur: Nothing happened. The "movement" of history was that of the mind settling into 57 an awareness of its inadequacy, coming to see its irrevelevance to a world that remains unchanged.

Hegel saw the mind "developing," reaching toward its highest potential—transcendent reason, logical speech. In V., the process is reversed. The mind drops through the bottom of history, into a realm closer to death than life. V. offers a holistic re-inscription of Western experience from the perspective of a consciousness "settling in" to its inner lack. All efforts to grant meaning and purpose to the world are subverted. All categories are caught in the mind's collapse.

In the visual arts, we are given not only the Gaucho's Venus and Mantissa's failed ideal, but also a print of Di Chirico's Street hanging in a New York apartment. We can imagine it depicting a moment from the novel's Egyptian episode in which a plaza in Alexandria serves as the empty backdrop for a conversation between political operatives who could be displaced and moved, "like minor chess pieces, anywhere across

Europe's board" (65). We also have selections from the school of Catatonic Expressionism, the doctrine of the would-be Dadaists of the post-War New York scene. These include the works of Fergus Mixolydian, who "laid claim to being the laziest living being in Nueva York." Besides writing a western in blank verse, Fergus has taken a stall from the men's room at Penn Station, called it a ready-made and entered it in an exhibition. It was rejected. He likes to generate hydrogen by fiddling with dry cells, retorts, alembics and salt solutions. He uses the gas to fill a balloon with a "Z" printed on it and hung the balloon from his bedpost before going to sleep: "this being the only way for visitors to tell which side of consciousness Fergus was on." Besides sleeping and making hydrogen. 58 Fergus' other amusement is watching television. Here again, he put his talent to work:

He'd devised an ingenious sleep switch, receiving its signal from two electrodes placed on the inner skin of his forearm. When Fergus dropped below a certain level of awareness, the skin resistance increased over a preset value to operate the switch. Fergus thus became an extension of the TV set (56).

Music is simiiarly symptomatic. We see Godolphin again at Fdppl's

Siege Party, a gathering of European colonials riding out the native uprising in South-West Africa. Here, he will tell Vera Meroving, the V. of this episode, that his memories of Vheissu have faded. Vheissu was an apocalyptic romance, a dream of annihilation, gaudy and indulgent. It may have been real, may have been imagined. In either case, it was the kind of luxury one could afford only before the first World War— before the mass murder of people other than subjugated populations, before the coming of a death from which whiteness offered no exemption. As the

Party continues, however, V. takes him back. As the rest of the party relives 1904, the days of von Trotha and the purest form of colonial death, Godolphin receives again Vheissu—or perhaps Vheissu with 1904 mixed in. We see Godolphin's regression in the two versions he sings of the old favorite, "Down by the Summertime Sea." The first, sung early in the party, is sentimental, nostalgic, the invocation of a friendlier world. The second, however, shows how brutal nostalgia can be. Godolphin sings while beating a native, one of the few of Foppl's servants not already killed. Godolphin dances around the body, using the sjambok to keep time. V. watches him. They appear to have exchanged clothing. 59 We also have the work of Vladimir Porcépic, a Russian immigrant in Paris. His composition for the black masque is striking and dissonant.

His collaboration with the choreographer Satin, the ballet L'Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises (The Rape of the Chinese Virgins), is to be the sensation of the season. In the second act, the music descends into the furthest reaches of atonality—"'orchestral barbarity,'" a newspaper critic terms it. Meanwhile, on stage, the rape is enacted. The prima ballerina is raised aloft on a pole, while around her dance the rest of the cast and a group of robots who are her handmaids—automata made to look Chinese.

On opening night, the crowd turns barbaric. The ballet has become a political flashpoint. Some among the Parisian elite believe there to be a conspiracy afoot to overthrow Western civilization. Bolshevik Rtissia is in league with the Chinese! The ballet itself enacts the alliance. The audience divides into factions. Some disrupt the performance, yelling and catcalling. Others heckle the hecklers. A few call for silence, so that the music can be heard. When the ballerina is raised on the pole, a sudden hush falls: something is wrong. The rape is real, horrifying, deadly. The ballerina, turned into a fetish by V.—in this episode a patron of the arts—has forgotten, or deliberately left off, the protective device, something like a chastity belt, that was to keep the pole from her body.

The expression on her normally dead face was one which would disturb for years the dreams of those in the front rows. Porcépic's music was now almost deafening: all tonal location had been lost, notes screamed out simultaneous and random like fragments of a bomb: winds, strings, brass and percussion were indistinguishable as blood ran down the pole, the impaled girl went limp, the last chord blasted out, filled the theater, echoed. 60 hung, subsided. Someone cut all the stage lights, someone else ran to close the curtain (414).

Savage violence is not the only malady set to music in V. There is also a coolness which may be too cool, a musical inanimance flopped like a corpse over post-Bird New York. It provides the background music for the Crew's studied pose of detachment, its penchant for remaining on the outer edge of life. Sax man McClintic Sphere would rebel against the cool. He plays hard, fast, and discordant, hitting the few notes Bird

missed. Trouble is, no one seems to dig: not the white college kids, who are only slumming; or the musicians from other groups, who remain uncommitted, thinking. The crowd at the bar looked like they might dig, but you can never tell about people who choose to stand at a bar. Worse, however, McClintic himself isn't sure. Could it be that in turning the cool scene on its ear, his music has flipped into violence? It is the summer of '56. The city is overheating. Tempers are short; fever touches everyone. McClintic figures he'll leave for a while, go to Lennox, play up there. The question is whether playing out of town will take him out of the cool/hot flipflop. Maybe he needs a bigger change __

In New York, we also meet Gouverneur "Roony" Winsome, part- time Crew member and President of Outlandish Records. Winsome has altered the lyrics of the theme song from the Davy Crockett TV show to reflect his own absurd existence. '"Roony, Roony Winsome," the chorus goes, "king of the decky-dance" (220). He has done the dance wherever he's been, propelling himself through life on a rebel yell, leaving 61 disgruntled people in his wake. He left Winston-Salem after impregnating his girlfriend, scammed his way to a cushy assignment during the war, and married a woman named Mafia who doesn't think he measures up to her rather fascistic ideal of Heroic Love. As for Outlandish, it is what is says: its offerings include Volkswagens in Hi-Fi and The Leavenworth Glee Club Sings Old Favorites. Roony has smuggled a tape recorder disguised as a Kotex machine into the ladies' room at Penn Station. He has skulked in a false beard, microphone in hand, around Washington Square Fountain. He has sneaked along the bullpen at

Yankee Stadium on opening day, has been thrown out of a whorehouse on 125th—in short: "Roony was everywhere and irrepressible."

His closest scrape had come the morning two CIA agents, armed to the teeth, came storming into the office to destroy Winsome's great and secret dream: the version to end all versions of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. What he planned to use for bells, brass band or orchestra God and Winsome only knew; these were of no concern to the CIA. It was the cannon shots they had come to find out about. It seemed Winsome had been putting out feelers among higher echelon-personnel in the Strategic Air Command. "Why," said the CIA man in the gray suit. "Why not," said Winsome. "Why," said the CIA man in the blue suit. Winsome told them. "My God," they said, blanching in unison. "It would have to be the one dropped on Moscow, naturally," Roony said. "We want historical accuracy" (124).

The novel as an art form is also re-inscribed—in particular the novel in its early twentieth century form. As Brian McHale points out, the historical sections of V. read like imitations of the masters of modernism. While some readers have seen V. as a parody of modernism, McHale prefers the term "stylization." To explain the difference, he 62 draws from Bakhtin: "Parody, for [Bakhtin], reverses the evaluative 'direction' or 'orientation' of the parodied model, while stylization retains the original 'orientation,' taking care, however, to keep the original and its stylization distinct" (McHale, 21). Stylization draws attention to strategies, but as strategies, mere strategies, to be toyed with then abandoned. V. strips modernism of its claims to provide meaning and structure for the world. Modernism is retained but as another failure in a history composed of nothing but. McHale calls the story of Foppl's Siege Party—told by Stencil, but from the stencilled perspective of German scientist Kurt Mondaugen—"a tale of imperialist savagery from the heart of African darkness, employing a Conradian unreliable narration at two removes." He terms "The Confession of F^usto Majistral," one of the episodes set in Malta, "a Proustian first-person memoir displaying the vagaries and instability of selfhood, studded with self-conscious allusions to Eliot's high modernist poetry" (22). Of even greater note is the section set in Egypt. Here, McHale writes:

[Pynchon] defracts his espionage melodrama through the extremely limited perspectives of no fewer than seven supernumerary characters, climaxing with the limit-case of perspectivism, the so-called 'camera eye' (a favorite of typologists of point-of-view, but rare almost to the point of nonexistence in actual practice) (21).

It is as if Pynchon was purposely seeing if he could cover all cases. This point is driven home, McHale asserts, by the fact that the Egyptian episode is a reworking of one of lynchon's short stories, "The Name of tlie Rose" ( 1961). The short story is told by a single, omniscient narrator. 63 For V., Inchon recasts it "using this perversely overelaborate perspectivist technique" (21). Stencil himself is also a pastiche of modernist methods. As the novel itself suggests, his penchant for calling himself "Stencil" is reminiscent of Henry Adams. Further, McHale asserts, "Stencil as third- person center of consciousness is tmmistakably a personification or literization of a typical modernist strategy of discourse—used extensively by James, Woolf and Joyce, among others—namely style indirect libre or free indirect discourse" (22). Stencil's search "takes the form of an epistemological quest, a detective story like those of Conrad, James, or Faulkner, but blown up to gargantuan proportions" (21). The modernist novel, the Gaucho's Botticelli, Porcépic's defiation of tone. .. in V. all artistic categories experience the same fiattening, the same draining of mysticism, failure of transcendence, surfacing of lack. Jasper Johns would be at home here, asserting that painting is paint on canvas. Francis Bacon would insist on the brutality of fact. John Cage could reveal that music is sound and/or silence.

Art is not alone in undergoing this diminishment. Politics, in V., is an absurdist non-drama, an exercise in apocalyptic worry. European operatives rush from crisis to crisis, but there is nothing, finally, that they can do. History proceeds as of its own volition, or according to the actions of those not part of the Western crowd. As German foreign service man van Wijk tells Kurt Mondaugen: "Histoiy, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night.

What waits in his In basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it" (233). Marxism is 64 seen, by turns, as another example of political futility, and as a fancy dressing for mob violence: the Street's own condition. The clasS'Struggle—and, especially, the mystical faith that sometimes accompanies it—are also comically undercut in an incident. While in New York, Profane gets a job killing alligators. Originally, the gators had been bought as babies, a trendy pet. They were flushed by their owners when they got too large. In the sewers, however, they have grown to full size and are thus perceived as a Threat. A Patrol is set up to squelch revolution, to put the gators in their place: the grave. The Patrol's chief, however, a would-be union organizer named Zeitsuss, sees matters differently. His men are the noble and unacknowledged proletariat, those who give their all for little recognition. He is their champion, fighting the unending battle for the funds to secure personnel, guns, and ammo. Stencil sees even more revolutionary potential in the Patrol. He thinks they may be a guerrilla army. He puts them under surveillance. They might be V.'s own.

Profane enlists not out of any proletariat ambition, but because he needs the money and is intrigued by the idea of working underground. Perhaps under the Street he will see something of the Street's own nature—some secret the Street has been hiding. Perhaps there is something that he can learn. It turns, out, however, that under the Street there is simply more Street, populated by alligators instead of schlemihls. His most memorable kill comes in Fairing's Parish, now supposedly abandoned. He chases a gator through miles of pipe and ends up in a strange, potentially mystical place: "a wide space like the nave of a church, an arched roof overhead, a phosphorescent light coming off 65 walls whose exact arrangement was indistinct." The gator turns to face him: "It was a clear, easy shot." Profane, however, does not shoot, not immediately. He waits.

He was waiting for something to happen. Something otherworldly, of course. He was sentimental and superstitious. Surely the alligator would receive the gift of tongues, the body of Father Fairing be resurrected, the sexy V. [in Fairing's world, the rat Veronica] tempt him away from murder. He felt about to leviate and at a loss to say where, really, he was. In a bonecellar, a sepulchre (122).

In the end, no insight comes, no blinding illumination, no unearthly Sign. He thinks of letting the gator go, as a statement of brotherhood, an act of mercy, something. The alligator, however, does not want to go. It sits on its haunches and waits to be shot. Eventually,

Profane can only oblige, telling the alligator he is sony even as he pulls the trigger. The bullet kills the alligator and continues on, hitting the snooping Stencil in the butt. Stencil calls Rachel Owlglass, who would care for the world: another day in the life of the Crew.

Philosophy is found in V. not only in the names dropped by the Crew, but also in the haunting line from Wittgenstein the novel echoes several times: "The world is all that the case is." Medicine is represented by the plastic surgeon Shale Schoenmaker. Shocked by an incident in World War 1 (the disfigurement of Evan Godolphin, whom he loves), Schoenmaker is called to the profession of Tagliacozzi. "If alignment with the inanimate is the mark of a bad guy," we are told, "Schoenmaker at least made a sympathetic beginning" (101). He ends up, however, practicing on the East Side, spreading inanimance to whoever can pay. 66 The world of science is also represented—not only by the condition of entropy now affecting all of Western culture—but also by the work of Anthroresearch Associates. A subsidiary of the famed Pynchonic multinational Yoyodyne, AA builds and runs tests on crash-test dummies and other simulated humans. SHROUD (Synthetic Human, Radiation Output Determined) is one of AA's prized creations. It absorbs radiation.

For AA foreman Oley Bergomask, this makes it the perfect (artificial) subject for our time:

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a heat- engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons (284).

After the alligator patrol runs out of prey, Rachel gets Profane a job as a night watchman at AA. He develops a rapport with SHROUD:

"What's it like," [Profane] said. Better than you have it. "Wha." Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK [another AA product— Synthetic Human Object, Casualty Kinematics] are what you and everybody will be someday __ "What do you mean, we'll be like you and SHOCK someday? You mean dead?" Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean. "If you aren't then what are you?" Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go (286).

The list of reductions could go on: there are still, for instance, the

Crew's parties and the rite of Suck Hour, which show what celebrations 67 have become. There are yo-yoing and touristry, the novel's réinscriptions of adventure. Even law enforcement has taken a tumble:

besides the CIA men, and the Shore Patrol, we have flatfeet Jones and Ten Eyck, who offer a weak simulation of D ragnet "They'd cultivated dead pan expressions, unsyncopated speech rhythms, monotone voices. One

was tall and skinny, the other short and fat. They walked in step" (364). One category, however, stands out: the category of consciousness, the various possibilties for existence in the shadow of Nothing. One thinks again of Mantissa's catholic despair and the Gaucho's emphasis on

action that may be without result or purpose, apes standing in for men. One thinks also of the Crew, and the race of tourists sampling only the surface of life. We might also point to the eclipse of Schoenmaker's good

intentions, to Winsome's decky-dance, even to SHROUD. We might also turn to Profane. There is reason to do so. Profane, after all, absorbs much of the novel's attention. It is one more thing for him to take. Profane is well on his way to the fate that SHROUD has assigned him. He claims that he and inanimate objects cannot live in peace, and indeed objects consistently get the better of him: he has trouble dressing; he trips a lot; tools are beyond him—"Everyone else was at peace with some machine or another. Not even a pick and shovel had been safe for Profane" (215). He has worked on road crews and traveled the Street, but he has learned nothing at all: "he couldn't work a transit, crane, payloader, couldn't lay bricks, stretch a tape, hold an elevation rod still, hadn't even learned to drive a car" (37). On alligator patrol, he figures it is only a matter of time before he shoots himself in the foot. He loses his job at AA because an alarm clock fails to go off. He sees his lone victory 68 as the refusal to get too involved with those he deems too connected to the inanimate world. In the case of Rachel, he thinks of the red MG she drove the summer they met. She loved the car, perhaps a little too much. He had come upon her washing it in the middle of the night:

"You beautiful stud," he heard her say, "1 love to touch you." Wha, he thought. "Do you know what I feel when we're out on the road? Alone, just us?" She was tunning the sponge caressingly over its front bumper. "Your funny responses, darling, that I know so well. The way your brakes pull a little to the left, the way you start to shudder around 5000 rpm when you're excited. And you bum oil when you're mad at me, don't you, 1 know." There was none of your madness in her voice; it might have been a schoolgirl's game, though still, he admitted, quaint. "We'll always be together," running a Chamois over the hood, "and you needn't worry about that black Buick we passed on the road today. Ugh: fat, greasy Mafia car. I expected to see a body come flying out of the back door, didn't you? Besides, you're so angular and proper-English and tweedy—and, oh, so Ivy that I couldn't ever leave you, dear" (29).

Profane thought he might vomit. When he left she was fondling the gear shaft. Despite his revulsion, however, it is all too clear that Profane is enacting his own version of inanimance. He imagines himself walking through life as if it were a gigantic and brightly lit supermarket: "his only function to want" (37). When it comes to relationships, his function is to take. In New York, Rachel gives him a place to bunk, feeds him, and gets him the AA job. She would go further. She would awaken the emotions she knows are within him: empathy, even love. Profane, however, insists on his schlemihl-hood. His heart, he says, is hollow as a scungille shell. "'Let me warn you, is all,"' he says, "That 1 don't love 69 anything, not even you. Whenever I say that—and I will—it will be a lie. Even what I'm saying now is half a play for sympathy'" (370). So why has he come to New York? Are his movements really random? Maybe not, and yet there may also be no conscious reason for showing up, no reason suggesting that he has a mind of his own. He is drawn to Rachel, this much is true, but not by any force he would call love, nor hope, nor even curiosity. He hardly seems interested in discovering what side of the inanimate she really is on. Instead, he has a more mechanistic "motivation": he had no choice but to come. He is a yo­ yo; she holds the string. In Norfolk, the string had run out, reached the farthest point from her hand; there was nowhere to go but back. Once in the city, however, he does not go to Rachel, at least not at first. There are two other women—the one he came with, Paola Majistral, and Hna Mendoza, whose brothers enlist Profane in the alligator patrol. He gets rid of them both. He sends Paola to see Rachel, tells her Rachel will look after her. One night, he finds Pina naked in an empty bathtub. She is a virgin and wants him to be the first. He turns her down. Fina ends up being raped by a gang. Profane wonders if he could have prevented iL Guilt is new for him; it doesn't last long.

He runs into Rachel through another random act. When the patrol runs out of prey. Profane needs a job. He decides to try an employment agency. He finds a series of ads in the Classifieds, closes his eyes and points. The agency Rachel works for happens to come up. It isn't because he wanted it to. We are not told if he knows she works there. Besides, any of the others could as easily have come up. 70 The assertion that this act is not random at all—that Profane does know where Rachel works, and that even if he thinks he hadn't intended to point there his unconscious knows better— would be lost on Profane. His life bears no explanation: things are as they are. In V., however, we also find minds that would try to explain—would explain not only their own reality, but Profane's and everyone else's. V. enacts a reverse phenomenology: we move from consiousness to consciousness, shedding shelters and nostalgias, edging ever closer to the inanimate. In the end, we circle back toward Profane—the attempt to say What Went Wrong yields an understanding of the death-in-life the schlemihl enacts. We begin with a reversed diminishment—or at least something close:

For those who keep an eye on such things, bright little flags had begun to appear toward the end of EserJiower's first term, fluttering bravely in history's gray turbulence, signaling that a new and unlikely profession was gaining moral ascendancy. Back around the turn of the century, psychoanalysis had usurped from the priesthood the role of father-confessor. Now, it seemed, the analyst in his turn was about to be deposed by, of all people, the dentist.

The transition is not as difficult as we might expect:

It appeared to actually have been little more than a change in nomenclature. Appointments became sessions, profound statements about oneself came to be prefaced by "My dentist says ., ." Psychodontia, like its predecessors, developed a jargon: you called neurosis "maloclussion," oral, anal, and genital stages "deciduous dentition," id "pulp" and superego "enamel." The pulp is soft and laced with little blood vessels and nerves. The enamal, mostly calcium, is inanimate. They were the it and I psychodontia had to deal with. The hard, lifeless I covered up the warm, pulsing, protecting and sheltering (153). 71 Dudley Egenvalue, D.D.S., "psychodentist" to the Whole Sick Crew, picks up a new patient when Stencil comes to New York. Stencil, in fact, becomes a regular in the dentist's chair. He thinks Egenvalue is keeping from him some intelligence on V.; he wants the dentist to come clean. Egenvalue offers no formal diagnosis. He may suspect, however, that Stencil has paranoid peridonitis:

Cavities in the teeth occur for good reason, Egenvalue reflected. But even if there are several per tooth, there’s no conscious organization there against the life of the pulp, no conspiracy. Yet we have men like Stencil, who must go about grouping the world's random caries into cabals (153).

Egenvalue projects a calcified historical mind. There is an element of "Profanity" and/or Wittgenstein—things are as they are, the world is all that the case is. Stencil, however, will not be put off. One afternoon, he barges in without an appointment. He will tell Egenvalue what he knows of V. if Egenvalue will speak in return. '"You must talk,"' he demands, '"You must both drop pretense'" (153). To a certain extent, Egenvalue does. He shows Stencil a set of false teeth, each tooth made of a different precious metal. Stencil says it is something V. might have worn. Egenvalue knows that this can't be. He made the dentures himself, after seeing the sponge at a foundry. Still, he is intrigued, if only from a professional perspective, if only in seeing what Stencil might reveal. He asks, '"Who then is V.?'" (155). Stencil admits that he does not know, that most of what he has is inference. He describes his tour of Florence. He found no proof of V., but imagined her "swallowed in the airy Renaissance spaces of that city. 72 assumed into the fabric of any of a thousand Great Paintings" (155). He will soon begin to spin a yam —of V. and of Venus, as well as Mantissa, the

Gaucho, and Godolphin. Before he begins, however, Egenvalue reflects:

Perhaps history this century... is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof pattern, or anything else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather, it assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny looking automobiles of the '30’s, the curious fashions of the '20's, the pecWiar moral habits of our parents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see (155-56).

For Egenvalue, this may be only a passing thought, a bit of transference from therapy. For the novel as a whole, however, it takes on a certain prominence. Seeing history as a folded fabric rather than a single Alp is an important innovation, a necessary stage in the revision of the historical mind. History as Egenvalue presents it, however, remains tied to the idea of the crest. It exhibits a longing for the summit, a nostalgia for the time when "we could at least see." If we were to strip history of the concept of ascent, the fold also would disappear. We would instead have a flattened fabric with Nothing moving irresistibly across. Godolphin projects history as Nothing totalizing over time. It is

Nothing he sees in Vheissu, Nothing in the Antarctic, Nothing in Horence, Nothing in the first World War. Nothing is at the center of experience; Nothing is life's non-foundation. Nothing not only cannot 73 be forgotten, it expands to ever greater proportions, consuming, eventually, all the world. Godolphin's rediscovery of Vheissu at Foppl's may actually shield him from Nothing, or at least promise to. Vheissu offers a romanticized Nothing, a Nothing rendered seductive and exotic, a Nothing retaining at least the illusion of value. It is also, however, a Nothing from an era now gone. In the end, Vheissu cannot stand in the way of the present, nor can the collective appeal to 1904. As Godolphin beats the Bondel, he may be seeing some hybrid between Vheissu and von Trotha, but his actions occur in the here and now, as part of Nothing in its current form. In Stencil, Godolphin's nostalgia is both shed and maintained. By casting V. as a human in the midst of corruption, or a machine gradually revealing (and perhaps also realizing) that she is not a human but Something Else, Stencil undercuts the humanization of history. He sees that the true subject of our times cannot be human at all. Stencil also, however, wants to retain V. as a woman—perhaps even his mother, a lover, or a wife. He wants his history in human form.

Stencil's paranoia runs in the right direction. He comes to understand that it may not be "history" as we have so far known it that V. reveals, "but something far more appalling" (450). Through V., he witnesses a conspiracy against life, at least as old as the century and perhaps older. The conspiracy leads to the insistent and deepening awareness that there is nothing we can do against the inaninimate, no way to fill the Nothing at life's core. There are obvious limits to looking exclusively for V., great potential for illusion in seeing her hand in all apocalyptic schemes. Stencil thinks that he might be better off 74 investigating World War II or the rise of Communism. However, these also are just symptoms. The real malady lies deepen the key is finding a route down. Stencil has V. We see her first as a debutante in Egypt, on a world tour, the daughter of Sir Alastair Wren (Later, however. Stencil will wonder out loud to Profane if she was Wren's lover). Victoria's upbringing was

Catholic. She had wanted to become a nun, had "considered the Son of

God as a young lady will consider any eligible bachelor." She had gone as far as entering the novitiate, but left after only a few weeks. She had realized that Christ was no bachelor, "but maintained instead a great harem clad in black, decked only in rosaries" (72). She didn't want the competition. She still, however, maintains a keen interest in religion. She speaks in the confessional mode. But now her view of the Almighty is mixed with her regard for an Australian uncle: "So it came about that God wore a wideawake hat and fought skirmishes with an aboriginal Satan out at the antipodes of the firmament, in the name and for the safekeeping of any Victoria" (73). In Egypt she takes her first lover, Goodfellow, a British spy. She also has her first taste of political intrigue and unrest—the "Fashoda" crisis is running its course. When Sir Alastair hears about her deflowering, they have an awful spat: "At length Victoria had ended it with a glacial good-bye and a vow never to return to England" (166). By the time she comes to Florence, she considers herself a citizen of the world. Since Goodfellow, there have been three others. She didn't see this as sin: 75

It was not that her private, outré brand of Roman Catholicism merely condoned what the Church as a whole regarded as sin: this was more than simple sanction, it was implicit acceptance of the four episodes as outward and visible signs of an outward and visible signs of an inward and visible grace belonging to Victoria alone.

She had never fully realized that Christ was not to be her mate:

Whether she had taken the veil or not, it was as if she felt Christ were her husband and that the marriage's physical consummation must be achieved through imperfect, mortal versions of himself— of which there had been to date, four. And he would continue to perform his duties through as many more such agents as he deemed fit. It is easy enough to see where such an attitude might lead... U67).

For V., it leads to Foppl's Siege Party, where she is given her 1904; then to Paris, where she is among the crowd at the Black Mass and a practitioner of a sterile and destructive fetish love; and then to Malta, where she takes on the identity of the Bad Priest—a half-mechanized being preaching a gospel of Death. She progresses toward an absence of humanity, a perfect mechanization, the Something Else. Stencil cannot take V. beyond the human; he may see past V. to the inanimance at the bottom of history, but his focus remains V, "herself." Perhaps the problem is the intimacy of their connection. Stencil tells himself that V. had nothing to do with his father's death, but he cannot believe it. He has tried to stay off Malta, is scared of the place, scared that once there, he would link Sidney's death to V. Eventually, however, he understands that the trip must be made, he has to find out if there is a coimection. Similarly, he cannot admit that he may be searching for his 76 mother: "The question is absurd" (54)—and yet it has come up, appeared in his mind without being asked by someone else. When Stencil goes to Valletta, he does so '"like a nervous groom to matrimony'" (389). It will be a joyless wedding. Stencil has feared that one day he and V. would be all alone "in a world that somehow had lost sight of them both" (55). Now, his fears seem to be coming true. Despite a broadening historical vision—his taking of more and more apocalyptic scenarios into account—Stencil is heading deeper into his hothouse, toward the airless chamber where "she" awaits. The novel, however, would bypass the hothouse. It would reach below Stencil's preoccupation with V. "the person" to the evacuation of the human which her "life" reveals. The next manifestation of the historical mind is in some ways not a mind at all. When histoiy falls beyond the realm of the human, the voice of history must be non-human itself. But how to write such a voice? In V., it comes as the voice of authority, the bottom-line recorder of the passage into inanimance. The first time the voice comes, it echoes Egenvalue: it suggests the inadequacy of historical thought, at least as practiced in the manner of Stencil. Mafia Winsome puts the moves on Profane. They are interrputed by elements of the Crew. A party breaks out, as if by accident. The voice begins:

That night, April 15, David Ben-Gurion warned his country in an Independence Day speech that %ypt planned to slaughter Israel. A Mideast crisis had been growing since winter. April 19, a cease­ fire between the two countries went into effect. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco the same day. The spring thus wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws. 77 In New York alone there were at a rough estimate five million different rathouses. God knew what was going on in the minds of cabinet ministers, heads of state and civil servants in the capitals of the world. Doubtless their private versions of histoiy showed up in action. If a normal distribution of types prevailed they did (225).

When the voice comes again, it presents its own "non-human" history, a history below all rathouse versions. It reports the brutal facts of "life" in this world:

Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began. "Die world started to run more afoul of the inanimate. Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico on 1 July. The next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid. 4 July a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers were drowned. T h i^- nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in the Central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed after take off from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five. An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July a bus ran off a ferryboat in Kuopia, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four petroleum tanks blew up in Dumas, Texas, 29 July killing nineteen. . . . (290)

In the novel, this section goes on quite a bit further. The point, of course is that it could go on forever. Here we have history's true text, "a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world that simply doesn't care" (290), the bottom-line textual presence of a race of schlemihls. The data comes from an Almanac, under the heading "Disasters." As the narrative says, you could look it up: "The business is transacted month after month after month" (291). 78 V. , however, is more than this: more than the Almanac's recitation, more than the proceeding evacuation, more than the description of inanimance. It is also an inquiry into the prospect of resistance. In the midst of V. 's progression into Nothing, its stripping of the mind's buffer against inanimance, it might seem that the best method of resistance would be to resist this movement, to hold one's ground against Nothing, or, at least to strike a pose of detachment. V., however, works to undermine such positions. It collapses attempts to resist Nothing and suggests that detachment may enact a Nothing of its own. Stencil would keep off Malta, would disguise, even from himself, the true motives of his search, would even call himself "Stencil," as if he were a character in a stoiy. In the end, however, he is drawn to Malta by

"The Confession of Rtusto Majistal." The Confession seems to provide independent verification ofV.'s existence. Fausto writes of the death of the Bad Priest. She was struck during an Italian air raid in World War 11 and partly disassembled by a band of children. I^usto himself administered Extreme Unction. In Malta, however, Fausto tells Stencil that he would not be able to find the cellar in which the body lay. Even if he could, it would have been rebuilt: "'Your confirmation would lie deep'" (445). Stencil spends his time in Valletta scouring the inventories of curio merchants, pawn brokers, and rag men. He is looking, as usual, for some sign of V.: an artificial eye, the star sapphire she wore in her navel, the ivory comb he believes her to have secured at a Cairo bazaar, with the images of five crucified Biglish soldiers carved into it. All the 79 while, however, he is thinking of a more desperate strategy. He confides in Fausto:

"Did you know, he's devised a prayer. Walking about this city, to be said in rhythm to his footsteps. Fortune, may Stencil be steady enough not to fasten on one of these poor ruins at his own random or at any least hint firom Majistral. Let him not roam out all Gothic some night with lantern and shovel to exhume an hallucination, and be found by the authorities mud-streaked and mad, and tossing meaningless clay about" (447).

Stencil interviews a priest. Father Avalanche. Stencil asks him about the June Disturbances, but he was only a boy in 1919. Avalanche says Stencil would have to ask an older priest who left years before for

America: a Father Fairing. Stencil spends the day walking through Valletta in a daze. At midnight, he returns to Avalanche's (and Fairing's) church. "'Clinches it,' he muttered. If it were the same Fairing. Even if it were not could it matter?" He proceeds to an enact a scene which predates The Shining:

A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: 'Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.' It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis of different words—'events seem'; 'seem to be ordeied'; 'ominous logic'—pronouncing them differently, changing the 'tone of voice' from sepulchre to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces. Profane lurched in on him thus (449).

It is madness, perhaps temporary but also recurring, that is the worst potential of the search for V. However, is the search itself any 80 more sane? Stencil might, after all, be discovering only his own

projection, merely leaving bits and pieces of himself all over the w o rld .2 If Stencil had not gone to Malta, had suspended the search, or not searched at all—if he had read nothing into his father's passage on V., or

had never seen it—the spectre of madness might not have been raised.

This detachment, however, would have had dangers of its own. Before the war, we are told. Stencil's life had been a sleepwalk. He had bounced around the globe, sometimes working, sometimes gambling, sometimes sponging off his father's many contacts. He had no purpose in mind. He had found his purpose in the cafe in Oran. He had decided there that it

was better to search than to sleep, that this way he was at least simulating

being alive—even if there was no V., no mother, no Sidney, to be found. Rachel Owlglass is also stuck between two less than attractive possibilities—in her case, the Crew and Profane. The Crew drives her crazy. When she had first come to the city, it seemed intriguing, exotic, as it had some secret knowledge. Now, however, she sees that despite its feigned intellectualism, the Crew doesn't know much. It postures rather

than caring, pulls back when it ought to commit, has lost the ability to

strive, create, or love. Further, the Crew has set Rachel up as the one

charged with maintaining human emotions, the one who cares so that no one else has to. It is Rachel who must attempt to head off their plastic surgeries (or chew out Schoenmaker after the fact), chase them to the airport when they are on their way to a Cuban abortion, take them in

20ne recalls here a line from Richard Patterson: " V. is in a sense a vast hall of mirrors in which Stencil may discover an indefinite number of variations on his own fears and uncertainties but no way out of his dilemma" (25). 81 when they are drunk, or despairing, or in any way in need. She is nurse, cook, and mother to them all—and analyst too when Egenvalue is booked. It gets old. The problem is, the alternative mode of living she favors depends on a schlemihl becoming something else. Rachel would reclaim Profane, teach him that he is human after all, make a life for them both. When Profane shows up in her office, she goes to work. She tells him to bunk at Winsome's, which the Crew uses as a flophouse, to eat at her place, and to see Bergomask about a job. Eventually, Profane moves in with Rachel: a big step, especially for Profane. Rachel's plan appears to be working. She seems about to break with the Crew. The Crew, however, keeps dragging her back in, and, despite herself, she complies. She begins to conceive of Profane as a helper, a partner in parenting; she tells him that he has always felt a great empathy for the wayward and dispossessed. Just before leaving for Idiewild to try to prevent the abortion, she is told that Winsome, who has been acting crazy lately, is passed out in her bed. "'Profane, Profane,"' she says, '"dear; we've got so many of them to take care of now'" (359).

For Profane, this might easily be construed as very bad news. He has purposefully tried to avoid dependents. Now he has Rachel and how many more? One could say, of course, that in the case of Profane and Rachel, Profane is the dependent, but Profane knows only that his life is getting more complex. He would have to be human to pull it off. When the schlemihl's curse kicks in again, Rachel attempts to contain

Profane's reaction. The alarm fails. He gets fired. It was only a matter of time. He proceeds to tell Rachel that he is incapable of love, or even actual life. If, like the Crew, he ever appeared to her to hold the key to 82 some mystery, she was wrong and he was a lian '"Can't you see,"' he says,

"'that whenever I, any schlemihl lets a girl think there is a past, or a secret dream that can't be talked about, why Rachel that's a con job. Is all it is.'" He talks on a bit further, until he has said all he wants to say, his voice sounding more and more phony. He then lays back in the bed "to feei traditionally sad." Rachel responds:

"You have to grow up," she finally said. "That's aii: my unlucky boy, didn't you ever think maybe ours is an act too? We're older than you, we lived inside you once: the fifth rib, closest to the heart. We learned all about it then. After that it had to become our game to nourish a heart you all believe is hollow though we know different Now you all live inside us, for nine months, and whenever you decide to come back after that" (370).

Profane isn't listening. He is already asleep. It is as if he is Fergus

Mixolydian and has simply flipped his switch. The discussion, however, will go on, if not tonight, then in the days to come. It will deepen into an argum ent Things previously unstated will be said: Rachel will accuse Profane of being scared of love. Profane will bring up the matter of a red MG and say that, for him, this is where love went wrong. No progress will be made, no new positions taken. It will be as if we are listening to

yet another of the debates so common in New York that summer, at least among members of the Whole Sick Crew. V.'s most striking case of failed detachment, however, may be that of Kurt Mondaugen—or at least the stencilled Mondaugen we receive. Mondaugen is sent to South-West Africa to measure atmospheric radio disturbances, "sferics." Despite the Bondel uprising, he intends to do his job. He heads to Foppl's for safety and finds there a European collective. 83 a League of Nations in miniature. The guests act out the most decadent and cruel of Western fantasies—the feasting is unending, the sex uninhibited and running toward sado-masochism. Natives are tortured and killed as punishment for their "sins." It is 1904 again, von Trotha lives. Mondaugen would stay away from these people, would simply track sferics. He spends his time in a turret, "a little enclave of scientific endeavor." He accesses the roof, where his antennae are mounted, "through a stained-glass window portraying an early Christian martyr being devoured by wild beasts" (237). In the end, the turret provides no shelter from the Party. The beasts come for him. Almost as soon as he arrives, he meets Vera Meroving. She enlists him in what he immediately regards as a secret conspiracy, suggesting that they may already know one another, that they may have met one Inching. Meroving is currently attached to a Nazi named Weissmann. He will show up in Gravity's Rainbow as an SS Man and an embodiment of the Spirit of Death. Here, he snoops into Mondaugen's business and tries to recruit him for the Nazi cause. The antennae,

Weissmann suspects, are instruments for espionage: who is Mondaugen working for? Mondaugen knows that the question is absurd; he's no spy. He also thinks that he has never met Vera Meroving—or at least he tells himself so. Then, he has a dream of Fasching. It is set in Munich during the Weimar inflation. Celebrations, we are told, "had followed since the war a rising curve, taking human depravity as ordinate. The chief reason being that no one in the city knew if he'd be alive or well come next 84 Fasching" (243). In the first scene, Mondaugen weaves in a chain of students singing a death-song. He comes upon a young couple, coupling in the icy wind. He covers them with his jacket, and begins to cry: "His tears fell and froze in mid-air, and rattled like sleet on the couple, who'd turned to stone." The second scene is in a beer hall: "Young, old, students, workmen, grandfathers, adolescent girls drank, sang, cried, fondled blindly after same and different sexes alike." A cat is roasting in the fire place. Girls sit on Mondaugen's lap. Spilled beer rushes down a table. Fire from the fireplace spreads to several tables and is doused with more beer. The cat is snatched from its cook and tossed about like a football until it disintegrates amidst roars of laughter. Smoke hangs in the air, "changing the massed weaving of bodies to more a writhing of damned in some underworld. Faces all had the same curious whiteness: concave cheeks, highlighted temples, bone of the starved corpse there just under the skin" (244). Vera Meroving appears. She is dressed in a black sweater, black tights, a black mask. He can't see her face, but he knows it is she.

"Come," she whispered; led him by the hand through narrow streets, hardly lit but thronged with celebrants who sang and cheered in tubercular voices. White faces, like diseased blooms, bobbed along in the dark as if moved by other forces toward some graveyard, to pay homage at an important burial (244).

At dawn, Meroving comes through the stained-glass window to tell him that another Bondel has been executed. She wants him to come and see. Mondaugen refuses. His refusal, however, cannot last forever. 85 Mondaugen wants to protect Godolphin, but in the end the old man receives his Vheissu. Mondaugen experiences a similar retrogression. In this case, however, the history is not his own. He believes it to be Foppl's, or that of someone like Foppl. It is also possible, however, that the history is Mondaugen's even if it never actually happened. He may only be dreaming again, or living out a fantasy or projection—a desire he can no longer deny to himself. In any case, his attempt to remain aloof from the Party has failed. He is given his 1904. It comes on when he contracts a fever. Earlier, Foppl had said of von Trotha; "'I loved the m an He taught us not to fear. It's impossible to describe the sudden release; the comfort, the luxury; when you knew you could forget all the rote-lessons you’d learned about the value and dignity of human life."’ Under von Trotha, killing became the ultimate seduction. "Till we've done it,"' Foppl maintained, "'we're taught that it's evil. Having done it, then that's the struggle: to admit to yourself that it's not really evil. That like forbidden sex it's enjoyable" (253). Now, Mondaugen is shown the truth of these words. In the savage past as he relives it, men discover not only the joy of killing, but the inherent naturalness of it. It is as if both killer and victim are joined in a spirit of willing collaboration, both fulfilling the terms of an unstated contract, both understanding that this is the way things must be. One incident in particular sticks in the mind of whoever visits

Mondaugen. He (the trooper—Foppl, Mondaugen, or another) was leading a consignment of Hottentot prisoners from Warmbad to Keetmanshoop. The captives were chained together. If one died, or otherwise had to be released, the whole line had to stop. After only an hour, one black had 86 begun to complain about his feet. He was told to be silent, but he continued to complain. The trooper had struck the black with his sjambok- Another trooper, Fleische, had begun to use his sjambok too. Then came a freak occurrence: Fleische's sjambok caught in the chain. He was puUed from his horse and under the feet of the prisoners. Before anyone could come to Fleische's aid, the Hottentot leapt on him, trying to choke him with the chain. Luckily for Fleische, the other blacks did not join in: he managed to get away. The Hottentot was removed from the chain and taken to the side. What happened next was predictable: "After Fleische, with the tip of his sjambok, had had the obligatory sport with the biack's genitals, they ciubbed him to death with the butts of their rifles and tossed what was left behind a rock for the vultures and flies" (263). There was, however, something different about this killing. There came over the troopers "an odd sort of peace, perhaps like what the black was feeling when he gave up the ghost" (263). Usually, killing a Bondel felt like killing a fly. It was done with a sense of miid annoyance, knowing that it would do no real good, that even after this one, there were stiil so many that one could hardly make a difference.

This time it wasn't like that. Things seemed all at once to fall into a pattern: a great cosmic fluttering in the blank, bright sky and each grain of sand, each cactus spine, each feather of the circling vulture above them and invisible molecule of heated air seemed to shift imperceptibly, so that this black and he, and he and every other black he would henceforth have to kill slid into alignment, assumed a set symmetry, a dancelike poise (264). 87 This strange symmetry continues as the war goes on. The trooper recounts an especially good day:

Returning from the Waterburg with von Trotha and his staff, they came upon an old woman digging wild onions on the side of the road. A trooper named Konig jumped from his horse and shot her dead: but before he pulled the trigger he put the muzzle against her forehead and said, "I am going to kill you." She looked up and said, "1 thank you." Later, toward dusk there was one Herero girl, sixteen or seventeen years old, for the platoon; and Rrefly's rider [the unnamed trooper rides a sorrel mare named Firefly] was last. After he'd had her he must have hesitated a moment between side- arm and bayonet. She actually smiled then; pointed to both, and began to shift her hips lazily in the dust. He used both (264).

At this point, Mondaugen comes to. Another of the guests, Hedwig Vogelsang, comes into his room. She is riding a Bondel, who crawls on all fours. She is wearing black tights and nothing else. The Bondel takes her as far as the bed. "’You may go. Firefly. 1 call it Firefly,' she smiled at Mondaugen, 'because of its sorrel skin'" (265). She slithers out of her tights: ’"1 made up only my eyes,' she told him in a decadent whisper: 'my lips can redden with your blood as we kiss'" (265). She makes love to him for what seems to Mondaugen to be days: "They seemed wound into a cocoon of blond hair and ubiquitous, dry kisses: once or twice she may have brought in a Bondel girl to assist" (265). All the while, Mondaugen tries to stay neutral. Sometimes he is impotent. Sometimes, despite himself, aroused. Never, however, does he enter in. Eventually, she grows frustrated and stops. "'But I have to recuperate,"' he says (265). First, however, he must live through more of the trooper's life: he is soon under the fever's spell again. After 1904, things went to hell. The rebellion had been suppressed, with a loss of 80 per cent of the Native 88 population. Von Trotha and his men were responsible for the death of an estimated 60,000 people. As the narrative states: "This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good" (245). Kill enough flies, it seems, and the species will be made extinct after all—or at least you will come close.

The trooper headed for the coast. He found it desolate: The arid soil and salt wind prevented vegetation. "There was a constant battle between the fog, which wanted to freeze your marrow, and the sun; which once having biumed off the fog, sought you." The sun and fog could also be seen working together, the fog diffracting the light until it filled the whole sky, "a luminous gray turning to yellow, that hurt the eyes." "If you stayed long enough" we are told, "you came to feel that it was almost an affront for humans to be living there at all" (266). He worked on a crew dredging a harbor: "Having legitimized their presence in the territories the colonists were now obliged to improve what they had taken." What blacks could be found did the heavy work. They were mostly women. Here, the blacks mattered even less than they did during the uprising. They were the means to an end, non-human tools no more alive than the landscape: "if they complained, or had to cry out for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide" (268). Even those pulled aside, meant to provide the overseers with sexual release, were just objects. They fulfilled a purpose, nothing more— although the sharing of them did imply a kind of community, at least among the colonials—community being, we are told, the only assertion of life possible against the inanimance of the coast. 89 There was one woman who reminded the trooper of old times. She allowed him to again experience the joy of cruelty and perhaps even inspired in him some modicum of love. Her name was Sarah. Clouds moved across her eyes, "whether reflected or transmitted he'd never

know" (270). She did not live among the women held for sex. She worked the harbor. This made little difference; he had only to tell her to come to him. At first, however, she did not come. He had to break her of her pride. He whipped and raped her, had other women hold her down. When he was done, however, he discovered that the women had left, that she needed no holding. That night, she slid into his bed. He had done it:

"She was his" (272). He wanted her, however, to be his alone. He began to picture her as his wife, o r what he imagined a wife to be—someone who would cook for him, clean for him, comfort him. During the day, he manacled her to his bed. At night, he continued to use the pool of women. He did not want to arouse suspicion. In the end, however, it was all for naught. The man in the next cottage discovered Sarah and wanted a turn. The trooper tried to put him off, but it did not work. The man came to the house during the day, when the trooper was at the harbor. He found Sarah chained to the bed, and had his way. He then shared her with the men under his command: "Between noon and suppertime, as the fog's glare shifted in the sky, they

took out an abnormal number of sexual preferences on her, poor Sarah,

'his' Sarah only in a way that poisonous strand could never support" (272). When the trooper returned, Sarah was drooling and mad, "her

eyes drained for good of all weather" (272). He unlocked her from the bed and tried to embrace her, p>erhaps hoping to bring her back to life. 90 She broke free and ran out the door. The next day, he found her washed up on the shore: "She had perished in a sea they would perhaps never succeed in calming any part of. Jackals had eaten her breasts" (272-73). The trooper realized then that he had experienced the only human upsurge the shore would allow. From that moment on there would be only the sun, the fog, the silt in the harbor, the cry of the strand wolf, the death of more Bondels. It was the same condition, he now saw, that had been bulding from his arrival in a troop ship, it seemed like centuries ago. It was a condition which Sarah, von Trotha, the sjambok, and even the joy of murder could keep hidden only for so long. Against the backdrop of sand and sun, 1904 takes on a new appearance; it may not be an ironically vicious upsurge of the human—a revelation of the twin human essences of killer and killed—as much as the final vestige of an illusion, the last-stand of an embittered humanity imploding into the lack at its core. In 1904, the West had acted out its resentments, with cruelty serving both as a way of asserting that it was yet alive and the cutting edge of the awareness that it is not. Now, von Trotha is gone. The party is a hothouse, a nostalgic hanging-on. Meanwhile, death progresses. Just after Mondaugen's fever breaks, a battle begins outside the house. Champagne is popped, cigars passed out: this is what the guests have been waiting for. It is dusk, but they have just woken: eyes puffy, hair disheveled, lips blackened from the nicotine, wine and meat of the night before. Now, however, they are coming to what they might call life. They grip their goblets tightly, the cords on their neck stand out, aging women shift their legs, old makeup 91 clinging in blotches to their pore-ridden skin. They lean forward on the rampart, trying to get as close as they can to the battle below.

This is not a battle In the style of 1904. There is no "operational sympathy," no complicity between the parties, no romantic gloss covering the act of murder. There is not even human contact. A band of

Bondels huddle among rocks: men, women, children, goats. A ragged noose of whites surround them. The whites are shooting. The Bondels have few guns. "Doubtless," we are told, "there were human voices down there, uttering cries of command, triumph, pain; but at this distance only the tiny pop-pop of gunshots could be heard." This apparent absence is exceeded by the new favored technology of killing: "To one side was a singed area, streaked with the gray of pulverized rock and littered with bodies and parts of bodies that once were Bondels: "'Bombs,' Foppl commented. 'That's what woke us up'" (275).

Two bi-planes come over the horizon, "flying low and hazy, like birds wandered away from a flock" (276). They hang in the air, apparently motionless. It looks for a moment like they will never arrive. The Bondels, however, are not fooled, perhaps they are not even privy to the illusion. They know that there is no hope for them now. One of the men, mad as Sarah, charges the attackers. The whites fire, pop after pop. He falls just before he reaches them, before he could use his spear. The bombs are dropped. Time again seems to slow. They take centuries to fall, but they do reach the ground: "two bracketing the rocks, two among the Bondels and two in the area where the corpses lay, there bloomed at least six explosions, sending earth, stone and flesh cascading toward the nearly black sky." It takes the sound a few seconds 92 to reach Foppl's rampart, but then: "How the watchers cheered" (276). The whites on the ground now move in quckly. They kiii the stiil-active and the wounded. They fire into the corpses. They kiii the women and children, even the goats. The "battie" is over, if a battle it was. Later, standing on the roof, Mondaugen wonders "if he would ever escape a curse that seemed to have been put on him one Fasching: to become surrounded by decadence no matter what exotic reason, north or south, he wandered into." Escape seems unlikely. The curse may be everywhere, and aimed not at Mondaugen alone: "This was a soul depression which must surely infest Europe as surely as it infests this house" (277). Not even the sferics can comfort him. Early on,

Mondaugen had gotten the idea that the sferics were tiying to tell him something, that their outbreaks had order. He had taken to studying the oscillograph readings as if trying to break a code. After the fever, he takes up where he left off, getting nowhere. One night, Weissmann comes to him. Mondaugen had given him a set of readings. Now, he, Weissmann, claims he knows what they say. Using Mondaugen's letter- substitution pattern, he began with

"DIGEWOELDTIMSTEALALENSWTASNDEURFUALRUKST." Taking just every third letter yielded "GODMEANTNUURK," which, rearranged, is "Kurt Mondaugen." "The remainder of the message,'" Weissmann continues, '"now reads: DIEWELTISTALLESWASDERFAIXIST'" (278): "The world is all that the case is."

The next morning, Mondaugen sees Godolphin beating the Bondel.

He leaves the Siege Party the same day, bound he knows not where. We 93 are, however, shown the beginning of his journey. At a fork in the road, two miles from Foppl's, he meets a Bondel riding a donkey:

The Bondel had lost his right arm. "All over," he said. "Many Bondels dead, baases dead, van Wijk dead. My woman, younkers dead." He let Mondaugen ride behind him. At that point Mondaugen didn't know where they were going. As the sun climbed he dozed on and off, his cheek against the Bondel's scarred back. They seemed the only three animate objects on the yellow road, which led, he knew, sooner or later, to the Atlantic. The sunlight was immense, the plateau country wide, and Mondaugen felt little and lost in the dun-colored waste. Soon as they trotted along the Bondel began to sing, in a small voice which was lost before it reached the nearest Ganna bush. The song was in the Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn't understand it (279).

Inanimance drags Mondaugen in. Detachment proves

unworkable. In this passage, however, we see another possibility: a briefly glimpsed upsurge of life that does not take part in the vicious logic of 1904. Here, a pair of humans comes together without falling under the jurisdiction of advancing death. Mondaugen, the Bondel, and the donkey may be the only three animate forms in the dead landscape, but they are at least alive. It is as if Mondaugen has come back from

Nothing, passed through to the other side, or at least gotten close enough to see himself set in relief against it. Mondaugen shows up again in Gravity's Rainbow. We are told that he lived three years with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, the poorest of Hereros.3 He still tracked sferics, but he also picked up their language and their ways. One imagines him beginning with the Bondel's song.

Over time, he would sing it again and again, each time finding in it more

3See Gravity's Rainbow, 405-406. Mondaugen becomes a confidant of Franz Pokier, the German rocket scientist featured there. 94 meaning. At the end of his stay, perhaps he would have made his own trip to the coast. One would like to believe that he found the landscape fully animate, profoundly alive. The sunlight would diffract, the fog roll roll in. He would hear something intelligible in the strand wolfs cry. We can position the image of Mondaugen and the Bondel among a

series of such moments offered by V., snapshots of human life. We can

imagine the novel as a camera in search of such moments, finding them, always, despite the times. In addition to Mondaugen and the Bondel, we have Rachel and Profane, in a parking garage, surrounded by cars. We are not told if there are any MGs, but McClintic's Triumph is here, and, as an

inaninimate object of devotion, it will do. This time, however, it is

Profane Rachel wants: "[She] now only wanted to hold him, feel the top of his beer belly flattening her bra-less breasts, already evolving schemes to make him lose weight, exercise more" (359). Profane himself is in the grip of human emotion, or at least some fascimile thereof. He seems almost willing to call it love:

You ask too many questions, he told himself. Stop asking, take. Give. Whatever she wants to call i t Whether the bulge is in your skivvies or your brain do something. She doesn't know, you don't know. Only that the nipples which came to make a warm diamond with his navel and padded cusp of his ribcage, the girl's ass one hand moved to automatic, the recently fluffed hairs tickling his nostrils had nothing, for once, to do with this black garage or the car-shadows which accidentally did include the t^vo of them (359).

They end up dancing, motionless and close. McClin tic finds them, "holding together until now and again one or the other lost balance and 95 made tiny staggers to compensate. Underground garage for a dancing floor. So they dance all over the cities" (359). McClin tic is the cameraman here, but he is one of the subjects of another shot. We see him in the Triumph, driving along the Hudson, heading upriver, away from the city. Paola Majistral is with him, but McClin tic thinks she is a prostitute named Ruby. While in New York, she has been splitting time between the two identities. It is as if she is at least part way to abandoning Paola, as if she thinks that she is not worth being anything beside Ruby. We are not told why she feels this way. Perhaps it is marital trouble. She is married to Profane's former shipmate Pappy Hod, but she is not with him now. There are rumors of abuse. We cannot be sure. Then, she is rejected by Profane. Perhaps she feels that she is made to be used and tossed aside.

When she goes to a bar to hear McClintic play, she goes as Paola. In between sets, however, he meets her as Ruby. It is as if she makes the switch right there: to justify sleeping with McClintic? Because she thinks a prostitute is all he wants? Or is the switch inspired by his fevered playing, perhaps by the flipflop logic of his signature tune "Set/Reset"? Or is it just a whim? There is not enough information to tell. One thing for sure: McClintic knows her as Ruby, but thinks of her as something closer to Paola. He sees her as a person, not the object she wants to become. When he tells her to come with him to Lennox, she at first refuses: '"What business does a whore have going anywhere? A whore isn't human'" (291). McClintic keeps cool, tries to be convincing.

He insists that she is human, at least when she is with him. They aren't playing games here; what's between them is real. Eventually, it seems. 96 Ruby starts to listen. On the way upriver, she tells him she is Paola. McClintic listens, and thinks:

While she told him about who she was, about Stencil and I^usto— even a homesick travelogue of Malta—there came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted (365-366).

Keep cool but care. It is something he has hardly ever done. It sounds simple, but it is hard. Heading into the Berkshires, he tells hen

"Paola, did you know I have been blowing a silly line all this time. Mister Flab the original, is me. Lazy and taking for granted some wonder drug someplace to cure that town, to cure me. Now there isn't and never will be. Nobody is going to step down from heaven and square away Roony and his woman, or Alabama, or South Africa or us and Russia. There's no magic words. Not even 1 love you is magic enough. Can you see Eisenhower telling Malenkov or Khrushchev that? Ho Ho" (366).

Paola does not stay in Lennox. We see her again in Valletta, in the center of another snapshot, flanked by Pappy Hod and Profane. She has come to see her father, Fausto, whom she fears may have flipped.

Pappy's ship, the Scaffold, is docked at Valletta Pappy, we see, is sony to have lost her. He goes to the bar where they had first met. He is drunk when he gets there and only gets worse. When he gets back to the Scaffold, he sees Profane. '"You came back,"’ Pappy says, "'I thought you would.' '"1 didn't,' Profane says. 'But she did'" (442): Paola 97 Al first, there is awkwardness. Paola and Pappy both try to talk at

once. Then, Paola takes charge. She says that she is coming back, that tomorrow, he will be hung over and wonder if he had really seen her, but that when he gets back to Norfolk, she will be there. She tells him: '"You sailed a week after 1 left you. So a week is all we've lost. All that's gone on since then is only a sea-story. 1 will sit home in Norfolk, faithful, and spin. Spin a yam for your coming-home present'" (443).

We do not know why she is returning. Was it something McClintic said, or the fact that she can't have Profane? Or is it simply a desire to start again? McClintic has cared for her, helped restore her to life. Profane has accompanied her here. The real action, however, has been her own. She has moved from Norfolk to New York to Valletta, from Paola to Ruby and back again. She has gone from believing she had no right to live to being able to say to her husband that the second time "'It will be better and more like the way it should have been'" (443). So that he will know that this was not a dream, Paola gives him the comb from her hair. It is a comb we have seen before. It is V.'s prize possession: "Five crucified Limeys—five KUroy's—stared briefly at Valletta's sky till he pocketed it."

"'Don't lose it in a poker game,"' she says. '"I've had it a long time'" (443).

Paola may have been among the chidren dissassembling the Bad Priest; she may have got the comb there. She would have been the right age. In giving the comb away, it may be that she is shedding what all the while has been V.'s influence. Taking the comb fmm her hair can be seen as a liberating gesture, a way of proclaiming her return to life. Or, 98 it may be that the comb never had any power, was always just an object.

Stencil may have been wrong all along. Another reading, however, is also possible. Paola, we note, does not get rid of the comb. She gives it to Pappy and stresses that he is to take care of it, that it is not to get lost. It is a threatening gift. Being in close proximity to the comb has never done anyone any good, V. included. Has the Bad Priest found a way to reach beyond the grave, to continue to shadow those who now cannot even see and meet her, who have no way of knowing that she is around? Even worse, however, is the possibility that Paola is consciously aware of the comb's corruptive power. She may have picked up the comb innocently—at least with as much innocence as is possible in such a strange and grisly scene. Over the years, however, as the comb did its work, Paola may have become another version of V. Could this be the true story behind the switch to

"Ruby"? In a truly paranoid reading, her recent upsurge may be no more than an illusion, or, worse, a conscious ruse: V. may have turned to subterfuge. Pappy may be in for it—and also Paola: if V. lives on, she will not. Hello Ruby. The other "snapshots" are also undercut. Mondaugen becomes a tranquil guru in the German rocket-building program in World War 11. He has returned to life only to be again co-opted by the spirit of death.

Profane does not stay with Rachel. He goes to Malta with Stencil and Paola. He could see no reason not to go: Malta, New York, or somewhere else, it was all the same. At the end of the novel, he meets another woman, and pulls, perhaps unconsciously, his usual schlemihl's con. 99 Her name is Brenda Wigglesworth. She is on the grand tour. Her

friends had gone back weeks ago, but she stayed on. It is as if she feels

that Europe is holding back, that it still has something to show her, something it reserves only for those willing to wait. She sees in Profane a romantic knower, familiar with the secrets of the world. '"You've had all these fabulous experiences,"' she says. '"1 wish mine would show me something.'" Why, Profane wants to know. "'The experience, the experience. Haven't you learned?'" "Profane didn't have to think long. 'No,' he said, 'offhand I'd say 1

haven’t learned a goddamn thing'" (454). Rachel, one suspects, will end up nursing Roony, or someone else: whoever needs to be nursed. McClintic's fate is harder to determine. Will he stay in Lennox? Will he go back to New York? Does he really mean to stay away from musicians? Or can "Keep Cool but Care" be put to use as well, or forgotten as quickly, at the V-Note as anywhere? There is also the case of Fausto Majistral. Like Mondaugen, Fausto passes close to the inanimate then rises again. The upswing, however, has an ironic beginning. At the edge of inanimance, Fausto is shown something that makes it possible to claim human life again: he is shown the necessity of illusion.

Fausto comes to this awareness gradually, beginning on the Day of the 13 Raids, when his wife was killed and he gave the last rites to the Bad Priest. This is also the day, however, in which he sank closer to the inanimate than ever before. It may not be until after the writing of the Confession—a document that is part memory of the fall into inanimance. 100 part exploration of the odd fact that Fausto now finds himself alive—that he could see that his reclamation began with a lie. Everything hinges on the Extreme Unction. He does not know why he gave it. He was not qualified. It was part of a faith he thought he had lost—or at least was well into the process of losing. One can see the progression in his journals. As the war and the bombings go on, Fausto becomes more and more like Malta itself, the hunk of rock that is his home. He stops recording "higher" thoughts, drops the references to allies bound by divine communion, stops mentioning even the great

Maltese legend, the Knights of St. John. He concentrates on sensations, the bare facts of life. When he is not writing, he is working, repairing an airfield the ItaUans repeatedly destroy. Religion? He has neither the time nor the inclination. Once he had believed, had thought even of becoming a Priest, but that was long ago. He was another Fausto then. On the day of the 13 Raids, the old Fausto comes back. When he finds out that Elena is dead, he drops his shovel and walks away from the airfield. He comes to himself on the outskirts of the city, where the children are already at work on the Bad Priest. They remove her hat and discover she is a woman. They remove the comb; a little girl takes it. The hair is not real; it comes off. The shoes are removed; a foot comes with them. They take false teeth, a glass eye, the sapphire from her navel. Fausto writes:

I wondered if the dissassembly of the Bad Priest might not go on, and on, into evening. Surely her arms and breasts could be detached; the skin on her legs be peeled away to reveal some intricate understructure of silver openwork. Perhaps the trunk itself contained other wonders: intestines of parti-coloured silk, gay balloon-lungs, a rococco heart" (343). 101

The dissassembly, however, Is cut short by sirens. The chidren disperse. lausto goes down to the ruined cellar to have a closer look at the Priest. He kneels over her and asks if she is alive: "At the first bomb-bursts, she moaned." He tells her he will pray for her. She begins to cry: "Tearless, half-nasal, more a curious succession of drawn-out wails. All through the raid she cried" (344). Fausto gives her the iast rite, at least what he remembers of it. He does not hear her confession: "her teeth were gone and she must have been past speech." The cries, continue: "so unlike human or even animal sound that they might have been only the wind blowing past any dead reed." Fausto is able to hear in them, however, human qualities: despair and desire for redemption. He writes, "i detected a sincere hatred for all her sins which must have been countless; a profound sorrow at having hurt God by sinning; a fear of losing Him which was worse than the fear of death" (344). The bombing goes on. There is no sign of the Bad Priest's redemption. No lightning bolt comes. She is not iit by an unearthiy glow. She simply dies. Fausto touches her iips. They are terribiy cold:

Though 1 saw and handled many corpses in the course of siege, to this day I cannot live with that cold. Often, when I fall asleep at my desk, the blood supply to an arm is cut off. 1 wake and touch it and am no further from nightmare, for it is night's cold, object's cold, nothing human, nothing of me about it at ali (344). it couid be that the last rites had no effect. She may not have heard it. Fausto, however, remains convinced. The cries are his proof. He did not 102 hear in them only what he wanted to hear; he has been over it and over it. It would be easy to say that he has simply regressed, that in the face of trauma, sorrow, and danger, he had fallen back on religion, the king abstraction of all. Fausto cannot say: "At the time 1 only knew that a dying human must be prepared" (344). He knows little more now. When he left the Bad Priest, he went back toward the center city and found waiting for him an existence closer to the inanimate than any he had known before. Then, eventually, the curve began to rise. Again, he does not know why. It would be possible, however, to see Fausto's re-animation beginning in the last rites itself. One could say, for instance, that this was not a retreat to abstraction, but the refusal of abstraction: a last rite for religion and Fausto's priestly self. If so, the rites marks Fausto's initiation into a world of things as they are. At first, he experiences this as a world fallen away from life, beyond the reach of the human. Then, however, he sees, and before seeing, begins to enact, a way of regaining humanity, of leaving his trace upon the world. He lies. The young Fausto was to be a poet as well as a priest. He and his friends considered themselves a cadre of Maltese poetry. They were raised on English verse, spoiled by the likes of Eliot and Shakespeare. One among them, Dnubietna wrote the following satire on Ash

Wednesday, 1942:

Because I do Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to survive Injustice from the P^ace, death from the air. Because I do. Only do. 103 I continue... (308).

As the bombing goes on, they shed such pretensions. Through his journal entries, Fausto begins to forge a new poetic style. He states its credo: "Poetry is not communication with the angels or with the

'subconscious. ' It is communication with the guts, genitals and five portals of sense. Nothing more" (318). Even poetry concerned with the world around us remains confined to the portals of sense. The gap between ourselves and the world is finally unbridgeable, or, rather, it can be "bridged" only through deception. Fausto calls this deception metaphor. Metaphor is the trick by which humanity keeps from itself the fact that despite centuries of being here, we remain strangers on the earth. Only poets know the truth, for it is they who tell the lie. Fausto writes:

So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking the innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they (326).

"It is the 'role' of the poet, this 20th Century. To lie"—and maybe not just this century:

Poets have been at this for centuries. It is the only useful purpose they do serve in society: and if every poet were to vanish tomorrow, society would live no longer than the quick memories and dead books of their poetry (326). 104

Fausto sees the lie as inescapable and necessary. There is no talk here of a non-metaphoric language, a language for apprehending things as they are. Language by necessity is a lie, a lie we need if we are to live in the world. The foundation of illusion gives us a strange freedom. If we are stuck with lying, we can pick the lies we like. We take another set of "snapshots" for an alternative album/novel, a sequel to V. Paola and Pappy could live in a bubble of love (our alternative novel would not be far from a Harlequin). The sailor would return to shore, find his doting wife waiting. The comb would be a gift she has never before seen, an exotic trifle, bought at the straw market of an island far away. Rachel would find someone capable of giving: a young man not of the Crew, or salvaged from it, or a shaggy dog, or another nice car. Each, she would find, would require the same illusion, so what difference did it make? As for Fausto, let us say that the rites was no retreat, but a strange and sudden advancement, in which for a moment he took back all at once eveiything he had lost. A period of reaction sets in. The world looks dead and Fausto also. Then, the curve is felt to rise a little at a time. Eventually, Fausto fills in the frame. When Avalanche immigrates to

America, father Fausto takes his place. As for the world, it is a fully humanized place. The races live in peace. The strand wolf sings a Disney song. We look at the sun and see a smiley-face. At some point, however, there will come again the awareness: this is only a lie, something we have made up. The world as it is contradicts it. History goes on. 105 The Scaffold is the only US boat docked at Valletta, but Brits are ali around. They are about to embark for Egypt, where Nasser is calling for Jihad and oil refineries are on fire. It is the Suez Crisis, another Situation, this year's apocalyptic tremor. The sides are chosen. The English are in. It may only be a m atter of time before the rest of the world commits. As Stencil says, rather melodramatically, ""The Middle

East, cradle of civilization may yet be its grave'" (387). Stencil has his own business to attend to, his own hardly animating illusion to advance. Dissatisfied with what he finds (or fails to find) in Malta, he departs for Stockholm, chasing the frayed end of another clue. He has intelligence from a shipfitter named Aquilina of a Mme. Viola, oneiromancer and hypnotist, who left Valletta for Stockholm in 1944. V., it seems, may not have died in the bombing. He leaves a note for I^usto, telling him to dispose of Profane as he will. '"Stencil has no further need of any of you,"' Stencil writes (451). Profane needs no disposing. He thinks he'll stay in Malta awhile. Why not? The last time we see him, he is running hand-in-hand with Brenda past buildings not yet rebuilt from the war. "The street, however, was level and clear," and this is what matters. "Presently," we are told, "sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streedight, was extinguished." They run on, "through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone canying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond" (455). V.'s epilogue recounts the death of Sidney Stencil. We imagine it as another Stenciled story, told to a Swedish version of Egenvalue. Sidney, the story goes, spent much of his last days with V., luxuriating in 106 Nothing, reliving Florence, while outside, the Situation deteriorated.

Sidney's end comes when he is on his way out of Malta. A waterspout sinks Mehemet's xebec. The boat disappears below the surface, leaving no trace. No one sees it go down. Perhaps, however, the incident is in some way sensed by V., or by her chauffeur Evan Godolphin. When the ship set sail, Godolphin had appeared on the shore in V.'s can "After a moment he raised his hand; waved with a curiously sentimental, feminine motion of the wrist. He called something in English, which none of the observers understood. He was crying" (492). Profane and young Stencil do not change; one remains in the Hothouse, the other on the Street. History takes no kinder turn. After the Suez, we are likely to have a period of inaction and then violence again. Human life continues to run afoul of the Inanimate. The Almanac keeps track. None of these facts, however, can completely erase the image of Mondaugen with the mule, or of Profane and Rachel slow dancing, or the fact that McClintic cares for Paola. Fausto does not become a priest.

Instead, the curve rises slowly; the sky remains empty. He seems on his way toward gaining an enigmatic inner warmth which, one day, might be enough to offest the meraoiy of V.'s cold lips. He seems to be reclaiming a human life based perhaps on something more than a lie. We can imagine McClintic Sphere as an oil tycoon, or the President of the United States. We could also, just as easily, say he got murdered in Texas in 1975 or that he found a second Ruby to reclaim and lived a rather pleasant life, there in Lennox. This would be to ignore, however, an option that McClintic himself presents. The type of jam session he 107 prefers, we are told, does not partake in his own solo style. Instead, it is one of the only good products of the cool scene, an intimate collaboration, a "quiet feeling-together" (299). One thinks of Miles Davis' Kind o f Blue, or of "Keep Cool But Care," a McClintic Sphere number written, let us say, after V, ends. What makes such music different, more alive than others—than the rest of the cool scene or Porcepic's barbarity or the decky-dance—we cannot say. Still, we cannot call the difference an illusion. From the perspective of Fausto's necessary lie, V. itself emerges as a human construct. Despite its evacuation of the human and progression into inanimance, the novel is another metaphoric fabric, a human trace on the world. The Almanac is especially human-centric: the non­ human world is reduced to the background for a body count. We can say that at least metaphor has been reversed, that metaphor in V. casts the human in non-human terms. However, by seeing the non-human as the active party, we have, despite ourselves, humanized the world.

V. runs aground against a contradiction. For a mind such as lynchon's, however, contradiction is opportunity. The Crying o f Lot 49 reconsitutes Inchon's dialectic. Here, the truth/illusion dichotomy gives way to the possibility of competing truths, alternative orders, possibilities for existence that history has so far overlooked or attempted to hide. Resistance resides not in the slow climb toward animation, but within the alternative world: all we must do is find the way inside. With the Trystero blooming all around her, Oedipa supplants Fausto's definition of metaphor: "The act of metaphor, then, was a thrust at truth 108 and a lie, depending on where you are, inside, safe, or outside, lost" (129). Oedipa, however, cannot get in. She also cannot back away. She is stuck in the middle, on metaphor's seam, the ground disappearing beneath her feet___ CHAPTER III

OEDIPA’S SEDUCTION

Pierce Inverarity collected postage stamps. They were for him: thousands of little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time: savannahs teeming with elands and gazelles, galleons, sailing west into the void. Hitler heads, sunsets, cedars of Lebanon, allegorical faces that never were, he could spend hours peering into each one (45).

Oedipa Maas, Pierce's lover, had never seen the fascination. For her, Pierce's staring at stamps meant that he was ignoring her. In the Crying o f Lot 49, however, Oedipa finds her own object of fascination, her own stamp made for staring. This stamp reveals an alternative order, a second manner of being, that may be Pierce's legacy—to her and to the world. If the resistance to history offered by VI remains half-realized and embryonic, that presented in The Crying o f Lot 49 stretches out all around: the longer Oedipa looks, the more she sees. The problem, however, is that Oedipa can do no more than look- The stamp offers only a vista, not a way of entry; it is a window, not a door. If The Crying o f Lot 49 is to be read as a work of resistance, it must be not as a resistance achieved. Instead, the novel suggests a resistance shimmering just beyond tis, a resistance we can never quite reach.

109 1 1 0 Just before driving her rented Impala into San Narciso, California, Oedipa stops at the crest of a slope. The city is laid out below. Squinting into the sunlight, she sees "a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth." A second metaphor also comes to mind: "she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit" (24). This metaphor the narrative extends: "Though she knew even less about radios than the average Southern Californian, there were to both outward patterns [that of the city and the circuit] a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate." She remembers that

"there seemed to be no end to what the printed circuit could have told her." So it is with the houses and streets: "In her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding" (24). Oedipa and her Chevy are "parked at the centre of an odd religious instant." It is "as if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken" (25). The Crying o f Lot 49 marks the elaboration of such an instant, a moment of possible transcendence, a point at which existence would find new possibilities and history's dialectic would spring open again. But Pynchon's novel is also the story of the absence of such a moment, the lack of a viable method for renewal, the failure of possibility to present itself as something more than conjecture—the loss, even, of faith. As Mendelson suggests in his classic essay, "The Sacred, the Profane, and Ill The Crying o f Lot 49, " the dominant metaphoric pattern of Pynchon's novel may be the religious. Mendelson provides many examples, from Oedipa's near revelation on the slope above San Narciso, to the "promise of hierophany" given off by a television commercial for a housing development Inverarity owns. Mendelson quotes a passage in which Oedipa sees the possible existence of the Trystero as presenting her with a stark either/on Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth Ones and zeroes... Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Trystero .... (The Crying o f Lot 49 182; Mendelson, 119).

Mendelson writes, "As in all religious choices, no proof is possible: the choice of ones or zeroes presents itself 'ahead ... maybe endless,' and the watcher is left alone" (119). Religious metaphors are not, however, the only ones present in

Inchon's novel. Another common strain are metaphors of performance. Oedipa thinks that she may only be at the theater, watching a masque put on for her benefit, or, perhaps, bad burlesque. As the Tiystero begins to reveal itself, she thinks of the night's last show, prolonged, "something a little extra for whoever'd stayed this late . . . as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Trystero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness" (54). But would this revelation, if it were to come, be of the Trystero itself, or of some drag queen playing a part? Is there indeed a Trystero behind the appearance of America or is Oedipa taking a show perhaps too much to heart? 1 1 2 She first hears the world "Tiystero" at a performance of The Courier's Tragedy, a gory Jacobean revenge play written by Richard

Wharfinger. The production is directed by one Randolph Driblette. After the play, Oedipa goes backstage. '"You came to talk about the play,'" Driblette tells her. "'Let me discourage you.'" He says that it was written to entertain: "'It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare'" (78). In fact, Driblette won't provide any details about the "historical" Wharfinger. He is also hesitant to discuss the text— except, that is, for what he has brought and added to it, the way in which he has given it life. Driblette says: "That's what I'm here for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor's memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in die circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also" (79).

Oedipa is stuck between alternatives, between theater and reality, simulation and fact. She searches for the truth about the Trystero, but, after Driblette, comes increasingly to see that this truth depends on her own involvement, her will and faith. Oedipa, however, wants to see only what is already there: no visions, no illusions, no spirited improvisation. She would like to stick to the script: "Shall 1 project a world?" Oedipa writes in the notebook. In her case, the answer may be that she cannot. Even her husband, Mucho, who isn't a model for much, is ahead of Oedipa when it comes to belief. Belief, in fact, is Mucho's central theme, his near obsession. Embedded like many Pynchonic characters in the world of work, the site of Mucho's faith (or despairing lack thereof) is his job. Mucho had once sold used cars. The selling itself made him 113 nervous. He took great pains to counter the car seller’s shifty image, using only water on his hair, compulsively shaving his upper lip, having his suits altered to narrow the lapels. "The sight of sawdust, even pencil shavings, made him wince, his own kind being known to use it for hushing sick transmissions... He walked out of a party one night because somebody used the word 'creampuff,' it seemed maliciously, in his hearing" (13). Mucho's faith was in the cars themselves, and in their connection to the downtrodden humanity that was the lot's customer base. He witnessed a daily parade: Negro, Mexican, cracker. . . bringing the most godawful of trade- ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometime three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust—and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of their lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what has simply (perhaps tragically) been lost... (13-14).!

Mucho's theology offers no hope of transcendence, redemption, or even escape. It does, however, provide the knowledge that what he is seeing is real: there is no denying the five-cent coupons and want ads he finds under the seats, nor the "rags of old underwear or dresses that were already period costumes"—nor the "endless rituals of trade-in," an unbreakable cycle Mucho compares to "endless, convoluted incest" (14).

! Among Inchon critics, it is Tony Tanner who is perhaps best attuned to Pynchon's' predilection for waste. Pynchon is, Taimer tells us, "the great writer of the overlooked, the left-out, and thus offers a challenge to our often unexamined assumptions about the valuable and valueless, the estimable and the dismissable" (21). The rise of the Tiystero, it seems to me, presents an extended example of such a challenge. 114 On the slope above San Narciso, on the verge of a religious experience, Oedipa thinks of Mucho, but the Mucho she pictures is post- car lot. When the lot has become too much for him, when the belief had gotten too intense, Mucho had changed jobs. He is now a radio disc jockey. It is an occupation in which he cannot believe:

Was it something like this he felt, looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might be for a holy man, yet really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to; did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in, knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn't believe in it? (25).

Oedipa also cannot believe, not quite. She plays the part of detective, yet shelters herself from the mystery—or, as she feels it, is sheltered by an invisible barrier she cannot find a way to breach.

Inchon's novel can thus be said to constitute a second kind of performance—not only that of the enigmatic alternative, but also of our refusal to accept the alternative, our failure to grasp possibility, our shunning of the revelation which will bring history back to life. Oedipa is on stage, acting out the familiar story of the secularization of the spirit. Belief in the likes of the Trystero, Oedipa comes to think, is for the mystic, the true paranoid, the deep dreamer capable of unearthing the pure Word. However, it may also be for the simply insane, the lost, those who have left the real world behind. Stick to the facts, she tells herself, get it right. You don't want to be of this kind. It may be, however, that performance of the baudy Trystero and that of the agnostic Oedipa are best seen together. Perhaps both are 115 collaborating in a greater production: the theatre of resistance gone wrong. Oedipa cannot believe. The Trystero does not quite appear. The play is but a series of suggestions and promises, glances and nods. In the end, however, the world is not changed, only Oedipa's reading of it. She ends up both dreading and longing for an alternative order, an order she cannot call into being and which refuses to come on its own. As the novel closes, she is waiting for a Sign, something indisputable which will tell her what is really going on. Perhaps it will come in the scene after the novel's end, when bidding opens on Inveracity's Tiystero stamps, when the auctioneer cries lot 49. It is also possible, however, and in my mind more likely, that the Sign will not come then, or at all. The addenda 1 imagine offers only more ambiguity. 1 picture a scene from a television sitcom, in which the high bidder is bidding only to raise the price, or, even better, never meant to bid at all, but was simply scratching his or her nose. "Miss Maas," the person stuck with the goods would say: "I would love to help you but I simply don't know a thing about it. I came for the pearl-handed pinking shears." Meanwhile, a shadowy personage would slip out the back, tipping a wide-brimmed Italian hat, maybe at Oedipa, maybe not.

I imagine Oedipa's final revelation deferred once again because 1 find The Crying o f Lot 49 to be a system of deferrals. It is a potentially endless text, the logic of which need never change. Oedipa wUl never know the Truth of the Trystero, nor will she be able to say with certainty that any of her conjectures are lies. Oedipa is caught in something beyond truth and lie, performance and belief, hallucination and joke, even reason and insanity. But what is this Other, this thing beyond? 116

I take it to be seduction. I employ the term in the sense proposed by Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, seduction is an oppositional strategy. It opposes the dictates of Law with the gaming spirit, counters the masculine Order with a feminine absence, subverts the analysis of the Real through the play of appearances. "There is an alternative to sex and to power," Baudrillard writes— One may catch a glimpse of another, parallel universe .... A universe that can no longer be interpreted in terms of psychic or psychological relations, nor those of repression and the unconscious, but must be interpreted in terms of play, challenges, the strategy of appearances—that is, the terms of seduction (7).

"Freud was right," he asserts, “There is but one sexuality, one libido—and it is masculine. Sexuality has a strong, discriminative structure centered on the phallus, castration, the Name-of-the-Father, and repression." "There is no use," he tells us, "in dreaming of some non- phallic, unlocked, unmarked sexuality." There is no use seeking a way to reverse the sexual order, at least not from within the order itself. For Baudrillard, however, the feminine is not of this order: 'The feminine... is, and has always been somewhere else. That is the secret of its strength"(6). This "somewhere else" is the sphere of seduction. Seduction is what Baudrillard calls a game of "superficial abysses." It relies on suggestive appearances, the ability of the enigmatic other to suggest with a glance that is has something to tell us, some secret to share. Seduction offers us not only an apparent void, but also the promise that the void will have a bottom, that we will be shown something magical 117 that we have always wanted to see, for which we have always been in the

midst of searching. In The Crying o f Lot 49, seduction lies between theater and belief, between the recovery of the real and the viewing of a performance. It

flipflops one into the other, tantalizing us with the promise of revealing something true, then mocking us with the knowledge that what we have witnessed may only be acting. It is in the next scene, we are told, that seduction will end; it will be the scene we have been waiting for all

along. However, when we get to the next scene, we find only absence, frustration, and the promise restated.

At some point, the seduced catches on—sees that its own advancement leads only to the other's retreat. This awareness allows the seduced to fully engage the game, to flip, even, the roles of seducer and seduced. Instead of advancing, the "seduced" retreats, it becomes the "seducer’s" turn. The "seducer" and "seduced," in effect, change roles. Seduction can be countered only by more seduction. In the case of rape, or even sex, power reasserts itself, but the spirit of seduction is not present in either scene. Seduction instead calls us to join a game of feints and starts, advances and retreats. It is a game of potentially infinite duration.

As Debra A. Castillo has suggested. The Crying o f Lot 49 can be seen as a true text of the quantum universe. Castillo quotes Stephen Hawking: " The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularity at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: T he boundary condition 118 of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created or destroyed. It would just BE" (Hawking, 136; Castillo, 24). She responds: The disturbing and seductive corollary for fiction is clear. No longer is the fictional universe bounded by the classical rules of verisimilitude and plausibility; instead, it is conceived, in a fiction paiullel to quantum physics as a self-contained game with the sole responsibility of maintaining consistency within its own rules (24).

Castillo also turns to Jorge Luis Borges, whose "surprisingly apt recognition is that all rules—generally mythologized in common practice as unchanging, eternal, handed down from God or his avatars—are in fact as entirely arbitrary as the rules governing more recognizably fictive games" (25). She notes that Inchon's characters, like Borges', must not only follow the rules, but also discover them: "Often the instruction sheet is missing or incomplete. . . [the characters] can never be certain that the rules they do manage to deduce are any more than the peculiar constructions of their own minds" (26). While 1 find Castillo's formulations compelling—all the more so since she sees the construction and deconstruction of metaphor as the name of the game, at ieast as far as Oedipa is co n cern ed ^ —I also see in

2fn Castillo's game, Oedipa is aware both of her need for "a metaphor of God knew how many parts" (The Crying o f Lot 49, 109), and the fact that metaphors are artifacts, in the end, only arbitrary words, nothing but sounds. Metaphor is both "a thrust at truth and a lie" (The Crying o f Lot 4 9129), , but it is also an hallucination. It is a "desiring/desired machine" (Castillo, 37), and as such is given to frustration. For other views of I^nchon's use of metaphor, see Frank Palmeri, "Neither literally Nor as Metaphor Pynchon's The Crying o f Lot 49 and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and N. Katherine Hayles' '"A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts': The Engine that Drives The Crying o f Lot 49." 119 Oedipa and in The Crying o f Lot 49 a longing to break out of the game, to restore Euclidean space-time and the rule of Law. The novel exhibits a certain nostalgia for the Truth; for the Word capable of redeeming: for an alternative, truly just Law; for a World that is real even if also not our own. The novel also suggests, however, the absence of such a World, such a Word, such a Law—the failure of the Second Order, finally, to come into being. In the Ttystero, Oedipa is offered the prospect of resistance, an apparent network of the dispossessed awaiting the chance to subvert history. Despite the dull luminescence and low-range transmissions which lead Oedipa toward it, however, the Trystero can light up for her— reveal itself as the truly alternative grid—only when experienced from within. Oedipa, however, remains on the outside—despite the odd religious moment, she is held at bay. Early on, she imagines herself as Rapunzel, "somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret [Kinneret, California, her home town], looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair." Pierce had called to her, and, hair in hand, begun to scale the wall.

However "when [he] had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorceiy, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell on his ass." Eventually, he did manage to reach the top, but he could not set her free: "all that had gone on between them had never really escaped the confinement of that tower" (20).

In Mexico City, they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedies Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit 1 2 0 Windows and into a void; for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried (21).

Even her tears, however, are self

She looks down and realizes that "what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape." But what was the nature of the tower, "what did she so desire escape from?" She already knows: Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realzes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all (21). What to do in the face of this magic? Oedipa thinks of various possibilities, none too promising: fall back on superstition, take up a useful hobby (embroidery is mentioned), go mad, many a car salesman/disc jockey... the problem is: "if the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?" (22).

It may be that only a second magic can free her, a magic running counter to the first. In The Crying o f Lot 49, such a magic will arise. It will not only tempt Oedipa to leave her tower, it will show her that the world around her is not what she has taken it to be. Seduced by the 1 2 1 Trystero, following its signs, Oedipa will catch glimpses of what she

comes to recognize as a possible second America, or at least the hidden missing half of the first: "For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act

of treason, nor possibly even deflance. But it was a calculated withdrawal from the life of Republic, from its machinery" (124). Oedipa cannot make this calculated withdrawal, this leap to

America's other side (an other side which may not exist, one cannot help noting, aping Oedipa's skepticism and illustrating her dilemma). However, if she cannot embrace the Trystero, she also cannot forget it:

its signs are imprinted on her mind. She may be caught in a loop, but a change has occurred, at least within. She has moved toward, if not into, a new and potentially subversive way of thinking. She concludes that if there is not Trystero, then there is just America, but "the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien,

unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia" (182). The America she has always known now appears as a conspiracy to

defraud and put down, to keep the Trystero in its place. This America, however, is not the sole object of her paranoia. There is also the Trystero itself, the possible existence of which has resulted in her loss of innocence, her alien status, her inability to return home. Oedipa is trapped, cut off from all aid, with threats emanating all around. There remains, however, the seductive promise—the promise that one day she will know the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. In the end, she has no choice but to continue walking a closed circuit, hoping one day to 1 2 2 make it out and into a world she knows to be real. Her mind is that of the seduced impatient with the game of seduction. And yet the game goes on.

The game opens with a disruption in Oedipa's rather banal life: One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work (9).

A letter, from the Los Angeles law firm of Warpe, Wistful, Kubitschek and McMingus, states that Pierce had died a few months

before but his will had just been found. Oedipa had been named executrix

in a codicil dated the year before. "She tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then" (10). She thinks as she goes about her day's itinerary. She travels through the familiar landscape of suburban America: to the market where she buys ricotta and iistens to Muzak "(today she came through

the bead-curtained entrance around bar four of the Fort Wayne

Settecento Ensemble's variorum recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist)" (10); home to her garden, where she picks herbs; inside the house where she reads the book reviews in Scientific American, makes lasagna and mixes whiskey sours. Already, however, Oedipa has been taken out of her usual routine. She is in the throes of a

thought, searching for a memory that will explain the letter—that will priovide if not a reason why Pierce chose her, then at least a verification 123 of the fact that he indeed did. She shuffles "back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be the first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to the trained eye" (11). It comes to her during Huntley and Brinkley: "last year at three or so one morning there had come this long-distance call, from where she would never know (unless he left a diary)." Pierce. Strangely, however, he seems not a singular presence, but a miscellany; he speaks with a collection of voices: heavy Slavic tones, inquiring about an escaped bat; "comic-Negro," "a hostile Pachuco dialect full of chingas and maricones; a Gestapo officer "asking her in shrieks if she had any relatives in Germany." The succession ends with Lamont Cranston: "'But Margo,' he said earnestly, "'I've just come from Commissioner Weston, and that old man in the fun house was murdered by the same blowgun that killed

Professor Quackenbush,' or something" (11). '"Why don't you just hang up on him,' Mucho suggested, sensibly"

( 11 ). Pierce responds: "'I think it's time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow." Perhaps Pierce's call had been an attempt to tell her something: that he had named her executrix? That he was going to die? That he had something special in store? Oedipa wonders if the shadow hasn't come for her. Execute a will? For a person as complex, and as wealthy, as Pierce? "She felt exposed, finessed, put down. She had never executed a will in her life, didn't know where to begin, didn't know how to tell the law firm in LA. that she didn't know where to begin" (12). 124 Her initial inclination is to look for help, but help is not

forthcoming. The universe of seduction has room only for two. Her first rejection comes from hubby: '"Mucho, baby,' she cried in an access of helplessness," as he comes in from work (12). But Mucho baby is in no mood: "Today was another defeat,"' he says. He proceeds to describe the latest station politics, a subject which obviously drags him down. As for the will: "He read the letter and

withdrew along a shy string of eyeblinks."

"'What am I going to do?"' Oedipa wants to know. "'Oh no,"' Mucho tells her, "'you got the wrong fella. Not me'" (16).

He suggests Roseman, their lawyer. The next morning, Oedipa goes. But not before another three-in-the-moming phone call. This time, it isn't Pierce, but another part of Oedipa's supposed support system,

another part which doesn't offer much support at all. It is her therapist.

Dr. Hilarious. He wants Oedipa to participate in an LSD test he is conducting. She puts him off. Has the world gone nuts? Roseman is a paranoid. When she walks into his office he is trying to stuff a wad of papers of different sizes and colors into a drawer. Oedipa knows what it is—his manuscript: The Profession vs. Perry Mason,

A Not-so-hypothetical Indictment

"'You didn't used to look so guilty,"' she tells him. '"You might have been one of Perry Mason's spies.'" "After

thinking a moment he added, 'Ha, ha'" (19). Oedipa tells Roseman she must execute a will. "'Oh, go ahead then,' said Roseman, 'don't let me stop you'" (19). 125 Roseman at least lets her know what she is in for—learning the books, going through probate, inventorying the assets, paying off claims, distributing legacies. "'Hey,' said Oedipa, 'can't I get somebody to do it for me?'

"'Me,' said Roseman, 'some of it, sure. But aren't you even interested?' "'In what?' "'In what you might find out?"' (20).

In San Narciso, Oedipa stays at the Echo Courts motel. We can see

the motel's sign as a prophetic mirror: A representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph holding a white blossom towered thirty feet into the air; the sign, lit up despite the sun, said “Brho Courts.” The face of the nymph was much like Oedipa’s, which didn’t startle her so much as a concealed blower system that kept the nymph’s gauze chiton in constant agitation, revealing enormous vermilion-tipped breasts and long pink thighs at each flap. She was smiling a lip-sticked and public smile, not quite a hooker’s but nowhere near that of any nymph pining away with love either (26-27).

At Echo Courts, the logic of Oedipa's seduction will take hold. Reality and performance will freely blend. Meanwhile, a second reality will present itself, shimmering, insisting that it is more real than the first. Oedipa will have sex with the handsome lawyer Metzger, but, in the

end, it is not Metzger that is doing the seducing, but this second, almost too real Reality, this fascinating Something Else.

Before Metzger, Oedipa meets another Paranoid, or at least the leader of a band bearing the name. The Paranoids are surf kids intent on acting like they are part of the British Invasion. Reality begins to give 126 way. The leader, Miles, Is also the manager of Echo Courts. He shows her to her room. Oedipa suggests that she send a Paranoid tape to Mucho. Miles takes the offer as a come on, or at least the initial offering in a transaction: '"In return for what?'" he says, after shutting the door. Oedipa holds him off with a rabbit ear antenna: '"1 have a smooth young body,' said Miles, 'I thought you older chicks went for that.'" Not Oedipa. Metzger, however, is a different case. He has been sent by the LA. law firm to help her with the will. He is good looking: “so good looking that Oedipa thought at first They, somebody up there, were putting her on. It had to be an actor” (28). She is in denim slacks and a black sweater; her Rapunzel hair is pulled all the way down: “She knew she looked pretty good" (28-29). Metzger has brought tequilla. Metzger exceeds Ferry Mason: He is not an actor playing a lawyer, but an actor who has actually become a lawyer—unless he is even now playing a part. Metzger, however, adds another twist: a TV pilot based on his life has been made, starring Manny Di Presso, an actor who once was a lawyer. "The film,"' Metzger says, '"is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can't fatigue it; it can be repeated endlessly'" (33), as, apparently, can this lawyer-actor flip-flop. Oedipa snaps on the TV and finds, strangely enough, a Baby Igor movie—"Baby Igor" being the stage name of Metzger the childhood star:

“'That’s me, that’s me,’ cried Metzger, staring, ‘good God’" (30). It is a war movie. Cashiered, the story of a man, his son and their St. Bernard. Unjustly drummed out of the British Army, the man builds a midget submarine and, with son and dog on board, proceeds to torpedo Turkish merchantmen in the Sea of Marmara. Metzger seems fascinated with his 127 own image. “‘listen,’" he tells Oedipa. “‘This Is where I sing.'” And so, we have Baby Igor, the dog, “and a merry old Greek fisherman who had appeared from nowhere with a zither" standing before a “phony- Dodecanese process footage of a seashore at sunset" (30). And we have the current Metzger, sitting on the floor In his suit, singing harmony for himself. Oedipa, slightly freaked, begins to lay out options: "Either he made the whole thing up... or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this." The second would make it "all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot. O Metzger" (31). But what Is the nature of the plot and Is Metzger Its sole agent? A commercial comes on for Fangoso Lagoons. It Is a real estate development with an aquatic flaln canals with boat landings, an artificial lake, a social hall on an Island. The lake’s bottom Is laden with curios: restored galleons, Atlantean ruins, giant clamshelis, even human bones. Metzger says It is one of Inverarity’s holdings. Oedipa Is reminded of her religious moment: "Some Immediacy was there again, some promise of hlerophany: printed circuits, gently curving streets, private access to the water. Book of the Dead" (31). So goes the evening: the playing of Cashiered dissolves the boundary between performance and fact ('"Wasn’t I there?'" Metzger says, to back his claim that the movie's plot is not true to life (32). There?

Where? At the filming of the movie? Or ruimlng through Dardenelles during World War II?). The commercials, meanwhile, evoke an enriched and Interconnected world that has a message It wants Oedipa to hear. 128 All the commercials point back to Pierce. One is for Beaconsfield

cigarettes, made with bone charcoal filters. According to Metzger, Pierce had owned 51% of the filter-making process. Another is for a Turkish Bath in downtown San Narciso: also Pierce's. Eventually, Oedipa notices

that Pierce seems to have had a stake in eveiything: "Now and then a commercial would come in, each time Metzger would say 'Inverarity's' or

'Big Block of Shares' and later just settled for nodding and smiling" (41). She also notices that time seems to be slowing: her watch has stopped. Oedipa seems headed for a moment of pure stillness. Perhaps it will be then that the message is revealed, the Word spoken. Seductions offers a point of clarity, a moment beyond time in which all things will come together as one. Whether this "moment" will prove to be unmediated Life, or a form of death, we cannot say. Thus, we have the ambivalence of seduction, the fascination and fear felt by the seduced. Metzger asks Oedipa to bet on the how the movie will end. It looks to her like a sure thing. The Turks may be closing in on the sub, but the family will be all right. It is a war movie, but sentimental—and a musical,

to boot All such movies had happy endings. "'All?'" Metzger asks. "'Most'" (34). This section can be read as an allegory for Oedipa's own

experience. Will her story have a happy ending? Will she make it out

unscathed? "'So,' she yelled, maybe a bit rattled. 'I bet a bottle of something. Tequilla, all right? That you didn't make it.' Feeling the words had been conned out of her" (34). Metzger wants the bet, but not for Tequilla: "'Another bottle tonight would put you to sleep'" (34). He 129 wants hen "Stubborn, they watched each other’s eyes for what seemed like five minutes. She heard commercials chasing one another into and out of the speaker of the TV. She grew more and more angry, perhaps juiced, perhaps only impatient for the movie to come back on" (35). Finally, however, she agrees: "It's a bet. Whatever you'd like.

That you don't make it. That you all turn to carrion for the fish at the bottom of the Dardenelles, your daddy, your doggy, and you" (35). Oedipa decides to hedge. She heads for the bathroom where she proceeds to put on all the clothes she has with hen brassieres, slips, slacks, skirts, sheaths, dresses, blouses, sweaters, a muu-muu. When she is finished, she can barely walk. She looks at herself in the mirror. She's a beach ball with feet. Then comes a startling incident: a spray can flies amok. Laughing hard at her mirrored image, Oedipa falls over. On the way down, she knocks her hair spray off the sink. The can takes off with "a great outsurge of pressure." It caroms around the bathroom, narrowly missing Metzger who comes to see what is wrong. Oedipa is "scared but nowhere near sober. The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have computed in advance the complex web of its travel" (37). Oedipa herself isn't so fast She moans for Metzger. The can breaks the mirror and then the glass shower door. It continues on, as if it wili never stops, but then does stop, falling in mid-flight, "a foot from Oedipa's nose" (38).

A caveat from Castillo: "Any categorical separation of the novel is as artificial as the object of analysis: the structure is inevitably disrupted by the tenuous and arbitrary interstices of irrationality" (27). 130 No doubt relieved not to have been killed, Oedipa and Metzger settle

into a game of Strip Botticelli. Oedipa asks questions about the movie's unfolding plot. For each answer she must remove one of her many pieces of clothing. The commercials continue to connect to the Inverarity estate. What should be random is now oddly ordered, as if they

are watching a video-enhanced printout from the digital machine.

Instead of moving at spray-can speed, however, this computer seems about to stop. The movie is endless, the reels out of order. "Things grew less and less clear. At some point, she went into the bathroom, tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn't. She had a moment of near pure terror. Then remembered the mirror had broken and fallen in the sink" (41). The Castillo caveat, part two: "the apparently arbitrary responds to a higher order" (27). In this case, the "higher order" ("alternative" may be more accurate) is that of seduction. The breaking of the mirror may have interrupted the game, but the mirror had to be broken for the game to go on. After failing to see her image, Oedipa heads straight for

Metzger. She falls on him with a ciy, begins kissing him to wake him from a light sleep. Eventually, he manages to take off all her clothes. On the screen. New Zealanders and Turks impale each other with bayonets. Outside, the Paranoids serenade, their equipment overloading the circuits: "Her climax and Metzger's, when it came, coincided with every light in the place, including the TV tube, suddenly going out, dead, black"

(42).

When the lights come back on, Oedipa and Metzger are lying entwined amidst booze and clothes. The movie is about to end. The sub is 131 filling with water. The dog and father drown. Baby Igor is electrocuted.

'"You bastard, 1 won,"' Oedipa says. "'You won me'" (43). Winning, however, is foreign to seduction. Seduction asks instead that the game go on. In the end, Metzger is not Oedipa's seducer, but the one she goes to ward off seduction, the body she grabs to ease the vertigo her life has become.

Finally, however, this vertigo cannot be calmed. Metzger can provide only sex. The scene of seduction has moved on. "'What did Inverarity tell you about me?' she asked finally.

'That you wouldn't be easy'" (43). Has this then been a set up? Oh Metzger, oh Pierce. What is going on?

It is up to Oedipa to discover. It is now her turn to take the initiative, to play the parts of both detective and prophet, searching for clues, reading signs. The subtext of the early stages of seduction, the initial reaching out of the Trystero, has been Oedipa's sensitization. She is gradually becoming aware of the traces of the Trystero, gradually conditioning herself (and being conditioned, since the Trystero cannot be said to be wholly inactive here) to recognize the hierophanies of her heightened world. As the move progresses, Oedipa will begin to understand that moving beyond fertile suggestion, bringing the Trystero truly to life, depends on her own activity and level of sensitivity, her ability to add a part of herself to what she is seeing, her capacity to

"project a world." 132 At first, she notices "almost off hand things," things she might not have noticed if the sensitization had not already begun. As her quest continues however—as what she is doing gradually becomes a quest—the discoveries and encounters of which she takes note become more and more pressing. They impress upon her what she comes to see as a conspiracy involving the mail. Pierce Inverarity, Western history, and a

Jacobean play. The search starts with a transposition on a postmark: "REPORT ALL OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POTSMASTER" (46). "’So they make misprints,' Metzger said, 'Let them. As long as they're careful about not pressing the wrong buttons, you know?"' (47) Oedipa might also have shrugged the matter off if it weren't for the other incidents. In a bar called The Scope, near the Galactronics Division of that favorite Pynchonic multinational, Yoyodyne^, she and Metzger meet Mike Fallopian. He slides into a seat opposite Oedipa and Metzger and "[begins] proselytizing for an organization known as the Peter Pinguid Society" (48). Pinguid, it turns out, had been the commander of a Confederate man-of-war which may or may not have had a shooting encounter with a Russian ship off the coast of California in 1863. If shots were fired, the incident marked the true opening of hostilities between Russia and America. For the likes of Fallopian, however, the truly noteworthy aspect of the incident is that the Russian

3In V., Yoyodyne owns Anthroresearch Associates. It is also Mondaugen's employer when Stencil finds him. In Gravity's Rainbow, Yoyodyne is a toy company. Slothrop encounters its owner. Bloody Chiclitz (what a great name), in the Zone. For an explanation of Yoyodyne's "transformation" from toy company to maker of, let us say, more adult toys, see V,, 227. 133 ship was there, defending Yankee property, at all. It is suggestive of a collusion between the two powers, a collusion which continues. Doesn't industrial capitalism. Fallopian asks, lead inevitably to Marxism? '"Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror" (51).

Fallopian's exposition is interrupted by a shout near the doorway. A harassed and nervous Yoyodyne worker comes in, carrying a leather mail bag. It is a mail call, "just like in the army" (52). The carrier climbs on the bar and begins to pass out the letters. Fallopian excuses himself and joins the crowd. An inter-office mail run, Oedipa guesses. But at this

time of night—and at a bar—even if it is the favored Yoyodyne haunt? In the bathroom, Oedipa sees her first muted posthom, although

she doesn't yet know what to call it ("a loop, triangle and trapezoid"). Above the posthom, Oedipa sees a message: '"Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only. Box 7391, LA." (52). She copies the message

and the hieroglyph into the notebook she has already started to carry. Fallopian admits that the Pinguid Society, given to secrecy, is using the Yoyodyne mail, at least until caught. He himself has received a

letter asking about his book. Fallopian is writing a history of private mail delivery in the United States. He wants to links the postal reform movement to the Civil Wan "He found it beyond coincidence that in of all

years 1861 the federal government should have set out on a vigorous suppression of those independent mail routes still surviving the various

Acts of '45, '47, '51, and '55, Acts all designed to drive any private competition into financial ruin" (54). We can add our own entry to 134 Oedipa's notebook: Government monopoly meets "industrial anything" as

entities that Fallopian, and those like him, would oppose. Now for the bones — on a field trip to Fangoso Lagoons, Paranoids in tow, she and Metzger meet up with Manny Di Presso, lawyer-tumed- actor, now turned lawyer again. EH Presso and his mobster client are suing the Inverarity estate. The issue is the ownership of, and rightful payment for, bones. The bones in question came from the bottom of the

Lago di Pietra, in Italy, and are the remains of a company of G.L's killed by Germans during World War II. They were pulled out of the lake by Di Presso's client and sold to Inverarity. Some are now at the bottom of the lake at Fangoso. The others were used to make Beaconsfield filters. '"You know Blokes,"' quoth a Paranoid, '"This all has a most bizarre resemblance to that ill, ill Jacobean Revenge play we went to last week.'" "'The Courier’s Tragedy,' said Miles, 'she's right'" (63). A few nights later, Oedipa attends the play. It is indeed sick- It depicts toe amputations, tongue removals, castrations, tortures with aqua regia, and a priest made to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his blood to

Satan. "Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, [and] a trained falcon with envenom'd

claws, is employed" (75): a mass stabbing begins to look "refreshingly simple" (73). This time, the bones come from the Lost Guard of Faggio, ordered killed by Angelo, the evil duke of neighboring Squamuglia. The dead bodies were thrown in a lake, but the bones were later salvaged and made into charcoal and the charcoal, in turn, into ink. Angelo, possessed of a sick sense of humor, now uses this ink for all communications with Faggio, a land over which he hopes to consolidate his control. 135 To do so, he must kill Nlccolô, the rightful heir to the Faggio throne. This was supposed to have been done long ago (Nlccolô was to have been shot out of a cannon), but it turns out that he is still alive, hanging around Angelo's court, posing as a mail carrier for the Thum and Taxis system. This time, the job must be done right. Angelo knows who to hire, but who this is is not exactly clean "It is about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep among the words." A new mode of expression has taken oven "It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance. Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage" (71). Angelo and his courtiers exchange significant looks. They know what is going on, as would, presumably, the audience of the day. The script, however, is decidedly, apparently purposefully, vague; Angelo says, "Enlist the poniards swift of Those who, sworn/ To punctual vendetta never sleep" (72). A few scenes later, Nlccolô, tired from plotting his restoration, rests by a lake. It is the same shore, he realizes, where the Lost Guard was last seen. Hearing footfalls, he leaps to his feet:

He trembles, and cannot speak, only stutter, in what may be the shortest line ever written in blank verse: "T-t-t-t-t " As if breaking out of some dream's paralysis, he begins, each step an effort to retreat. Suddenly, in lithe and terrible silence, with dancers' grace, three figures, long-limbed, effeminate, dressed in black tights, leotards and gloves, black silk hose pulled down over their faces, come capering on stage and stop, gazing at him. Their faces behind the stockings are shadowy and deformed. They wait. The lights all go out (73). 136 At the end of the act, the summoned enigma, the power in black, is named: "No hallowed skein o f stars can ward, I trow,/ Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero" (75). Backstage, Driblette tells her the script did not call for the black figures to appear. This was his idea, one of his projections. He says it is up to the director to think beyond the text as it is, to enact his or her own sense of the text's spirit, to bring words to life, if only in one's head and on a stage. Eventually, Oedipa will begin to heed his words, going as far as the Berkeley apartment of John Nefastis—inventor of a supposed perpetual motion machine—to test her own abilitj^ to project, her talent for, if not illumination, then workless sorting: her ability to reverse entropy and create order. It is her failure to successfully operate the Nefastis machine, however, that signals the end of Oedipa's "turn" in the game of seduction. She has gone too far, moved outside the rules. She has attempted to bring forth the Tiystero as a real presence, beyond black figures in a play. Oedipa first hears of Nefastis from Stanley Koteks, a disgruntled

engineer stuck at Yoyodyne. He decries the corporate structure in terms reminiscent of Fallopian's indictments: "Teamwork,"' Koteks snarled, 'is

one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symbol of the gutlessness of the whole society'" (85). But there are still solitaiy inventors, Nefastis being one. The Nefastis machine is designed to put into action the theory of perpetual

motion proposed by James Clerk Maxwell, who had once postulated a "tiny intelligence " now known as Maxwell's Demon: 137 The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all difierent random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules had more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature to drive a heat engine. Since the demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn't have to put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing... .(86).

'"Sorting isn't work?"' Oedipa wants to know.

Not in the thermodynamic sense. Koteks tells her that the Nefastis machine contains a Maxwell's Demon. "All you had to do was stare at the photo of Clerk Maxwell, and concentrate on which cylinder, right or left, you wanted the Demon to raise the temperature in. The air would expand and push a piston." Only certain people, however, are capable of working the machine. Nefastis calls them "sensitives" (87).

Oedipa, skeptical behind her sunglasses, has her doubts—doubts about Nefastis, Clerk Maxwell and his demon, "sensitives," and even Stanley Koteks:

[She] looked around carefully, trying not to move her head. Nobody paid any attention to them: the air-conditioning hummed on, IBM typewriters chiggered away, swivel chairs squeaked, fat reference manuals were slammed shut, rattling blueprints folded and refolded, while high overhead the long silent fluorescent bulbs glared merrily; all with Yoyodyne was normal. Except right here, where Oedipa Maas, with a thousand other people to choose from, had had to walk uncoerced into the presence of madness" (86-87).

Eventually, however, Oedipa will entertain, even seek to enact, this madness. She will find herself staring at a photo of Clerk Maxwell, trying to choose between cylinders, waiting for the Demon to do his number, hoping that she will soon see a piston jump. 138 The change in her position may be in part attributed to what has gone before, the building fascination that began with the receipt of the letter naming her executrix. However, we can also cite later events. On a return trip to Fangoso Lagoons, Oedipa notices a historical marker. It recounts an incident from 1853, in which a dozen Wells Fargo men were killed by a band of marauders in black. The plaque says that, besides the account of a single living witness, now dead, "The only other clue was a cross, traced by one o f the victims in the dust" "A cross? Or the initial

T7" (89). She hears of another such event from a Mr. Toth, resident of a senior citizens home owned by Inverarity. He tells of a dream in which a story of his grandfather, a Pony Express rider, blends with the traces of a Porky Pig cartoon. The cartoon is one in which Porky meets an anarchist: "The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes.'" The Indians in the dream wore black feathers. This corresponds to an occurrence in his grandfather's life, in which he had been attacked by a band of false Indians. The "Indians" had taken white feathers and used boneblack to darken them. They wanted to be invisible at night. Toth says: "That was how the old man, bless him, knew they weren't Indians. No Indian ever attacked at night. If he got killed his soul would wander in the dark forever. Heathen" (92). Toth's grandfather had cut a ring from the finger of one of the attackers. The device of the ring, as we might by now expect, is the sign of the Trystero. "Oedipa looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal, and said, 'My God,"' (92). 139 As well as this connection concerning Trystero attacks, there is

also the matter of bogus stamps. Genghis Cohen, philatelist, discovers some ""irregularities'" while inventorying Inverarity's collection. He shows Oedipa a muted posthom watermark on a stamp commemorating the Pony Express and then a stamp showing a Pony Express galloping out of a fort, headed in the direction of some shrubbery. From the shrubbery protrudes "a single, painstakingly engraved black feather."

He has found eight forgeries so far, each obvious: "'There's even a transposition—U.S. Potsage of all things'" (97). "'Why put in a deliberate mistake?"' Cohen wonders. For Oedipa, of course, the answer is clear. They were meant to be found. By her. Her last step on the way to Nefastis begins with an outbreak of the condition Driblette had warned her about: an undue concern with the sanctity of texts. She has found a copy of The Courier's Tragedy in a paperback, Jacobean Revenge Plays. She wants, however, the most reliable edition. The copyright page notes that the original hardback had been called Plays o f Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger,

published in 1957 by the Lectern Press of Berkeley. She tries the San

Narciso library, but it doesn't have it. Instead of inter-library loan, Oedipa decides to go to Berkeley herself. While there she could visit

Nefastis. She is beginning to turn the idea over in her mind.

It is the hardback edition, however, that convinces her. It is missing the reference to Trystero. The last lines of the fourth act instead read: "No hallowed skein o f stars can ward, I trow, / Who once has crossed the lusts of Angeld' (101-02). "'No,' she protested aloud. '"Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero'" (102). 140 There is a footnote. It cites, among other variances, that of "the

doubtful 'Whitechapel' version": ""'The tryst or odious awry, O Niccolô.'""

Besides introducing "'a quite graceless Alexandrine,"' the line is a syntactic tangle—"'unless we accept the rather unorthodox though persuasive argument of J.-K. Sale that the line is really a pun on ""'This trystero dies ira e . . The corruption, however, would remain, due to the lack of a meaning for "trystero": "unless it be a pseudo-ltalianate

variant on triste (= wretched, depraved)" (102). In any case, we are told,

the "Whitechapel" version is not to be trusted. Many questions now come to mind: where had the paperback come from? It was supposed to be a direct reprint of the hardback but that couldn't be true. Had Driblette known that his wasn't the only

version? Would he have even cared? Would he have mentioned the Trystero anyway? Was it another of his projections? Further, is this what the Trystero demands—that we have the faith to call it into presence? To choose the right variance or make our own if we have to? Is it only through those willing to believe in it that the Tiystero exists? And, is Oedipa capable of such belief? Is she a clairvoyant, a witness to revelation, a "sensitive" in the Nefastisian/Maxwellian sense? The hardback's editor is listed as Emoiy Bortz, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. At the department office, she is told that he has long since moved on. He now teaches at (where else?) San Narciso College, San Narciso, California. She will see him when she gets back. There is nothing left for her in Berkeley, except Nefastis. 141 She finds him watching kids dance a Watusi on TV. "I like to watch young stuff,' he explained. 'There’s something about a little chick that age'" (105). The line could be a come on, but Oedipa strikes a motherly pose: "'So does my husband, ' she said. 'I imderstand'" (105). Her scene of seduction lies elsewhere, with the Trystero, and, for the moment, with the Nefastis machine.

The inventor offers a further explanation of what the machine is designed to do: "He began then, bewilderingly, to talk about something called entropy. The word bothered him as much as 'Trystero' bothered Oedipm." There are, he reports, two kinds of entropy: One has to do with heat-engines, the other with communication. The equation for each looked alike. "It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell's Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where" (105). "'Communication is the key,' cried Nefastis. 'The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind'" (105). Nefastis' machine is designed to respond to this kind of communication— if the right operator, a true sensitive, should come along. '"Entropy,"' Nefastis says, "'is a figure of speech . . . a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow.... It makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true'" (106).^

4por a thorough explanation of Pynchon's use of the concepts of entropy and Maxwell's Demon and information flow, see Anne Mangel, "Maxwell's 142 Oedipa feels like a heretic: '"But what,'" she asks, "'if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?"' (106). Nefastis, a true believer, simply smiles and points out that the Demon existed for its inventor, James Clerk Maxwell, "'long before the days of the metaphor'" (106). Oedipa, however, isn't so sure: But had Clerk Maxwell been such a fanatic about his Demon's reality? She looked at the picture on the outside of the box. Clerk Maxwell was in profile and would not meet her eyes. The forehead was round and smooth, and there was a curious bump at the back of his head, covered by curling hair. His visible eye seemed mild and noncommittal, but Oedipa wondered what hangups, crises, spookings in the middle of the night might be developed from the shadowed subtleties of his mouth, hidden under a full beard (106).

Nefastis tells her to concentrate on the picture and pick a cylinder: "'Don't worry. If you're a sensitive you'll know which one'" (106) He goes back to his TV. Oedipa is left alone with the machine: "Are you there, little fellow, Oedipa asked the Demon, or is Nefastis putting me on. Unless a piston moved, she'd never know." She concentrates on the picture. Is she seeing things or has Clerk Maxwell started to smile? "And there. At the top edge of what she could see: hadn't the right hand

Piston moved, a fraction?" (107). She can't look directly at the piston. Her instructions were to keep her eyes on Clerk Maxwell. Was that all there was? "Did the true sensitive see more?" Had she, in fact, seen anything at all? "In her colon now she was afraid, growing more so, that nothing would happen."

Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying o f Lot 49." Other works on the entropy theme include John P. Leland, "Pynchon's linguistic Demon" and Peter L Abernathy, "Entropy in The Crying of Lot 49." 143 She tells herself not to worry: "Why wony, she worried; Nefastis is a nut, forget it, a sincere nut. The true sensitive is the one that can share that man's hallucinations, that's all." These "hallucinations," however, cannot be easily dismissed, for "how wonderful they might be to share." She stares at the machine for fifteen more minutes, repeating, "if you are there, whatever you are, show yourself to me, 1 need you, show yourself (107). '"It's okay,"' Nefastis says when she finally gives up. He invites her into the TV room to watch the news. "'We can do it in there,"' he says (107). Nefastis likes to have sex during the news, especially during stories from China. ""You think about all those Chinese. Teeming. That profusion of life. It makes it sexier, right?"' (108). Wrong, at least as far as Oedipa is concerned. Freaked, she makes a

fast exit, out the door and down the steps, stopping only to drape a

babushka over her license plate before screeching away. When she comes back to herself, regains an awareness of what she is doing, she is in traffic on a freeway, headed for the Bay Bridge and San Francisco.

Now comes the reversal. As the seduced retreats, departing, at least for the moment, from his or her efforts to make the seducer come

forth, the seducer again takes the lead. As Oedipa discovers, however, the

reversal also leads to a raising of stakes, a heightening of suggestion, a more direct glance. In the episode that follows, Oedipa witnesses the Trystero's Big Show. The night is luminous, dreamlike and rich, and the sign of the Trystero is everywhere she looks. Oedipa herself is simply 144 drifting, without a destination in mind, letting the muted posthom imprint itself on her mind. The first sighting comes in a gay bar, into which Oedipa is channeled while caught up in a crowd of tourists. Oedipa ends up drink in hand pressed against a tall man in a suede jacket. The man isn't gay, nor does he, as he puts it, swing Oedipa's way. The pin represents membership in Inamorati Anonymous, an organization started by a Yoyodyne executive automated out of a job (more creeping industrialism) and spumed by love. The executive had considered suicide. Due to

previous training, however (Koteks' comments revisited), "he could not make the decision without first hearing from a committee" (113). He decided, therefore, to take out a personal ad asking for those who had been in a similar position to send him reasons not to do himself in: "His shrewd assumption being that no suicides would reply, thus leaving him

automatically with only valid inputs" (113-114). At first, however, he gets no response. Then, late on a Sunday

afternoon, he is "jolted out of a boozy, black-and-white dream of jumping off The Stack into rush-hour traffic, by an insistent banging at his door":

He opened his door and found an aged bum with a knitted watch cap on his head and a hook for a hand, who presented him with a bundle of letters and loped away without a word. Most of the letters were from suicides who had failed, either through clumsiness or last-minute cowardice. None of them, however, could offer any compelling reasons for staying alive (114).

Later, the executive douses himself in gasoline after seeing the famous photograph of a Buddhist monk who had set himself on fire. The 145 executive is planning to engage his own Zippo when he sees something that makes him change his mind:

The stamps of some of the letters in his suit pocket had turned almost white. He realized that the gasoline must have dissolved the printing ink. Idly, he peeled off a stamp and saw suddenly the image of the muted post horn, the sign of his hand showing clearly through the watermark (115).

He takes it as a Sign: "If he'd been a religious man he would have fallen to his knees." "With great solemnity" he declares: '"My big mistake was love. From this day I swear to stay off of love: hetero, homo, bi, dog or

cat, car, every kind there is'" (116). He will found, contradictory as it

sounds, a society of isolates, lA, with the muted horn as its emblem: dedicated to loveless existence, to breaking the strongest of addictions. "Think of it,' says the man at the bar. 'A whole underworld of suicides who failed. All keeping in touch through that secret delivery

system. What do they tell each other?"' (116). He leaves the question

open, stumbles off to urinate and does not return. His words, however, remain in the air, heavy as a summons, the opening incantation of the masque of failed suicides, the Night of the Muted Horn. Oedipa wanders as in a trance through a city left to the isolates of the Trystero. The darkness is their own. It is as if theirs has become for at least this magical passage the dominant order—if the

sudden blossoming of a single sign can be said to constitute an order.

In Chinatown, Oedipa thinks she sees the Trystero horn in the dark window of an herbalisL On a sidewalk, she sees two horns drawn in chalk arranged on either end of an array of boxes with numbers and letters in them. Is it meant to be a map, the encoding of a secret history. 146 a children's game? In Golden Gate Park, she comes on "a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering The night was empty of ali terror for them, they had inside their circle an imaginary fire, and needed nothing more than their own sense of community" (118). They know nothing of the sidewalk game. They jump rope: "you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang:

Tristoe, Tristoe one, two, three. Turning Taxi from across the sea (119).

This night, Oedipa also meets an old acquaintance, the anarchist

Jesus Arrabal. They had first met on the beach in Mazatlan, when she was with Pierce. Jesus had spoken to her of his version of a miracle:

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like the Church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself (120).

For Jesus, Pierce had constituted his own sort of miracle: '"He is too exactly the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed—one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend, unless he is joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian'" (120). Now, however, Oedipa begins to think that Jesus' own politics are dependent on Pierce's visitation, that "without the miracie of Pierce to reassure him," Jesus would have abandoned his anarchy and gone 147 mainstream (120). Further, who but Pierce has arranged this meeting, has allowed Oedipa to find Jesus again? It could have been just a wild coincidence, but tonight it seems there may be no such thing as chance. "The dead man, like Maxwell's Demon, was the linking feature in coincidence. Without him neither she nor Jesus would be exactly here, exactly now" (120-21). And what of the broader miracle of the advancing night? If the Trystero was Pierce's legacy, his easy oligarchy may have indeed been a joke, or a clever disguise—or perhaps Pierce was himself the meeting place of worlds, as, it seems, Oedipa has become... Jesus has in his possession an anarcho-syndicalist newspaper.

The issue is dated 1904, but it has been received much more recently. '"They arrive,' said Arrabal. 'Have they been in that mails that long? Has my name been substituted for that of a member who's died? Has it really taken sixty years? Is it a reprint?"' (121). Who could provide the answer to the questions? Who is he, finally, even to ask? At the city beach, she sees the muted horn stitched on gang jackets "in thread that looked pure silver in what moonlight there was" (121).

She sees it again scratched in the seat of a bus and tacked to the bulletin board of a laundromat. At the airport, "feeling invisible," Oedipa eavesdrops on a poker game "whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside with scrawled post horns" (122). She sees another horn and a box number in the bathroom, next to an advertisement for the Alameda County Death Cult:

"Once a month they were to choose some victim among the innocent, the virtuous, the socially integrated and well-adjusted, using him sexually, then sacrificing him. Oedipa did not copy the number" (122-23). She also 148 sees a boy catching a flight to Miami who plans to slip into aquariums and open negotiations with dolphins, "who would succeed man." His mother advises him to write by WASTE "The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad'" (123). Throughout the exhibition, Oedipa plays the parts of voyeur and listener. She has the feeling that the muted horn is showing itself for her benefit, that she has been granted safe passage to the city's "far blood's branchings" in order to be a witness (117):

Nothing of the night's could touch hen nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she m i^ t the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts at the zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it, that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight (118).

At the edge of the field, at the point of fulfillment, there remains, however, doubt. The sad possibility is that not even this heirophanic suggestion will be enough, that she will never access the inner chamber, that her safe passage will not extend this far. The "gemlike 'clues'" around her may be no more than compensation: "To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that would dissolve the

Night" (118). Her sense of loss, or at least of the inability to regain, growing,

Oedipa eventually finds the clues oppressive, even abusive. All detectives get jumped, and this is Oedipa's time: "This night's profusions of post horns, this malignant, deliberate replication, was their way of beating 149 up. They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and, one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her" (124). In the early morning, she comes upon an old man, huddled on the stairs of a rooming house, "shaking with grief she couldn't hear." His hands cover his face; on the back of the left one, there is a post horn, "tattooed in old ink now beginning to blur and spread." I^cinated, she moves toward him. When she is three steps away, his hands fly apart: she is stopped by his face, "the terror of eyes gloried in burst veins" (125). Terribly tired, also shaking, Oedipa asks if she can help.

He tells her his wife is in Fresno: "I left her. So long ago, 1 don't remember. Now this is for her" He hands Oedipa a rumpled letter. It looks like he has been carrying it with him for years. "'Drop it in the,' and he held up the tattoo and stared into her eyes, 'you know. I can't go out there. It's too far now, I had a bad night.'" "I know,* she said. 'But I'm new in town. I don't know where it is"’

(125).

He tells her she can find the box under a freeway overpass. He closes his eyes.

For Oedipa, the old man is an object of fascination, his life an open question: Cammed each night out of the safe furrow the bulk of this city's waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What voices overhead, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end the insatiable stuffing of a mattress 150 that could keep vestiges of eveiy nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? (125-26).

Oedipa wants to share his experience, know what he knows, enter his world. She is overcome by the need to touch him, "as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it." And so,

"exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing," she climbs the last three steps and takes him in her arms. "She felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. 'I can't help it,' she whispered, rocking him, 'I can't help it.' It was already too many miles to Fresno" (126). With this the spell begins to break, the possibility of true contact,

spiritual transfer, starts to vanish. The opportunity is past—the sphere of

belief fading. Oedipa is left to meditate on her loss: "She let go of him for a moment, reluctant as if he were her own child, and he looked up at her." Hand-in-hand, they climb the stairs. His room is bare. She gets him to his mattress. She imagines it flaring into flames: She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive destructions of information. The stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their Uves had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor tiiat the world would bear no further trace of (128).

In the end, Oedipa will mail the letter and wait under the freeway

for the box to be emptied, the mail picked up. She will follow the carrier as far as Oakland, "along streets whose names she never knew, across artcrials that even with the afternoon's lull nearly murdered her." The 151 streets, however, no longer have anything to tell her, the windows of the

houses crammed against hillsides give "blankly back only the sun" (130).

She will end up again outside the home of John Nefastis, but this repetition, this circling back, will signal closure rather than renewed hlerophany, the erasure of the night's commitments rather than their deepening. Back at her hotel, she Is caught up In a convention of deaf mutes. They are dancing. "She tried to struggle out of the silent,

gesturing swarm, but was too weak." She becomes the partner of a

handsome young man. He sweeps her through the ballroom, "through

the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier." The collective dance takes on an unusual non-pattem:

Each couple on the floor danced whatever was In the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could It go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreograph In which each couple meshed easy, predestined" (131).

The random path of the spray can seems to have given way to its magically plotted other; the digital machine has kicked In. "Jesus Arrabal would have called It an anarchist miracle" (132-33). Oedipa, unable to believe. Is "only demoralized" (133). When by mysterious consensus the group decides to take a break, she curtsies and flees.

Castillo asserts that what Is often forgotten In a novel's "ecstasy of plotting" Is Its "hyperredundancy," "the way In which the game, assiduously played, masks Its own tedium" (40). "Any game invented by humans," she writes, can never be more than apparently open-ended. In 152 the more radical sense, all games are by definition repetitious, total, uncontaminated, and closed: in short, tedious" (26). The final step to seduction is precisely this tedium. Tedium is the method by which the game is fully engaged, the point of its acceptance as a game, with both players agreeing to follow the logic of alternating turns. Oedipa, however, makes a troublesome player. Her desire is no longer for the Trystero to reveal itself, for the alternative Real to finally make itself known. Instead, she now wants the Tiystero to simply vanish; she wants not only to quit the game but to forget that it ever occured. Still, however, the game goes on. There is in the end no way for her to quit it and no sign that it is nearing its end. We see again now the initial steps to seduction, isolation and disruption.^ However, rather than leading into fascination, toward the shimmering promise of epiphany, these principles now evoke a deepening dread. As Oedipa turns again to her others, to her men, she is not looking for a partner for adventure, or even the voice of experience— she is after a restored sense of normalcy, the reemergence of a reality on which she can counL She finds, however, that no one can help her—not Mucho, not Metzger, not Driblette, not anyone. She is caught in a game without exit, a potentially infinite seduction. The game, however, does progress. In the next round of partial revelation, the Tystero's scope again widens, even as its past continues to unfold. The

5Castillo cites Georgianna Colville, who notes the sy m m e ^ of Pynchon's novel. The end of tiie book throws us back to the beginning, when were awaiting, quite literally, The Crying o f Lot 49. It is my intent to suggest, however, that this symmetry can also be seen within the confines of the novel, that the novel begins again before it actually ends. 153 progress of the game begins to look like the consumption of history and of the world. After her experience in San Francisco, Oedipa heads for Kinneret. Her first stop is Hilarious' clinic. Her hope is that the Trystero will prove only a fantasy, a darkness that will vanish in the analytic light, a patch of infected mind easily cured. Hilarious is busy acting out his own delusions. He is holed up in the dark, firing shots into the p>arking lot. One bullet buzzes past Oedipa's ear. She manages to get inside, where she gets a partial scoop from Hilarious' receptionist: Hilarious believes that someone is out to get him. But who?: "Three men with submachine guns,"' she says, "Terrorists, fanatics, that was all I got'” (133). It turns out that Hilarious had been a "therapist" at Buchenwald.

'"I worked,' he tells Oedipa, 'on experimentally-induced insanity. A catatonic Jew was as good as a dead one. Liberal SS circles felt it would be more humane'" (137). He had been in charge of making faces. It is a special talent of his, the one slip from Freudian orthodoxy Oedipa had known him to make (at least until now). He is saving the most maddening face for his attackers and/or the "police" (quotation marks Hilarious'). He has made it only once before: "’perhaps today in central

Europe there still lives, in whatever vegetable ruin, the young man who saw it. He would be, now about your age. Hopelessly insane"'( 135). As for Oedipa's "fantasy," Hilarious tells her to cherish it. '"Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to 154 be" (138). The LSD tests have suggested to him that the self may Itself he a delusional construct, dependent on fantasy to set its border. When the drug kicks in, the edges soften, the difference between self and other begins to give way. Hilarious, however, has stayed off the drug: '"I choose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who 1 am and who the others are" (136). His belief that the "others" are about to attack undermines Hilarious* position—paranoia does not seem a particularly attractive option. Later, however, when Hilarious has given up and Oedipa meets Mucho in the parking lot, she begins to see that the shrink may have a point. Mucho has been taking LSD. '"He’s losing his identity, his program director whines, "'Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic. He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people, you know? He’s a walking assembly of man’"( 140). Mucho tries to explain. He can do spectrum analysis in his head. "’I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all their basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.’" In running each component though a different mental channel, Mucho believes he has uncovered an answer to the enigma of self, or the absence of a self. He has Oedipa say "’rich, chocolaty, goodness.’" "’Yes,’ said Mucho, and fell silent" (142). '"Well, what?’ Oedipa asked after a couple of minutes, with an edge to her voice'" It is something Mucho had noticed a few nights before: 155 “Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you’d have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus, saying 'rich chocolaty goodness’ together, and it would all be the same voice” (142).

Oedipa hopes it’s not too late to save him, that he hasn’t become addicted. He tells her she has it wrong: '"You don’t get addicted. It’s not like you’re some hophead. You take it because it’s good. Because you hear and see things even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby."' Apparently now believing in his job, Mucho uses a radio analogy: '"You’re an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives at night, and they're your lives too'" (143-44). He used to dream of the car lot. The dream was always the same.

Now he can finally talk about it. It was the sign that scared him: "'In the dream I’d be going about a normal day’s business and suddenly, with no warning, there’d be the sign. We were a member of the National Automobile Dealers’ Association, N.A.D.A. Just this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada, against the blue sky’ " (144). Now, he would never be spooked again. Now, he knew the world to be full—not Nada, but All. But this comfort had come, Oedipa thinks, at a terrible price: “She could not quite get it into her head that the day she’d left him for San Narciso was the day she’d seen Mucho for the last time. So much of him had already dissipated” (144). Hilarious mad, Mucho on drugs, Oedipa heads back to San Narciso and Metzger. She finds, however, that he is gone, run off to marry a 156 female Paranoid. He has left a note saying he has squared it with the firm; another lawyer will soon be dispatched: “No word to recall that Oedipa and Metzger had ever been more than co-executors. “Which must mean, Oedipa thought, that’s all we were" (148). Oedipa figures she ought to feel scorned, but she doesn't have the time. There is still the matter of suspect texts and how many variances Driblette was aware of. Driblette, however, is also gone. She rings him up but gets his mother, who says that she has nothing to say, that a statement will be issued in the morning. A statement? One of a group of graduate students drinking beer in Emory Bortz's backyard makes matters clear. Driblette is dead. He’d walked into the Pacific the night The Courier's Tragedy closed. At Bortz's, Oedipa discovers something that makes the loss of Driblette more troubling. His mention of the Tiystero had apparently been a conscious choice: he had not only known of the version Bortz himself favors, in which the last couplet is suppressed, but had actually used this version the night that Bortz and the students saw the play.

Oedipa begins to think that he used it every night, except, of course, the night she went. How had he known that she was there? When Oedipa shows Bortz the supposed reprint of his edition, with the "Trystero" couplet included, he claims he’s been bowdlerized and vows to write the publisher, K. de Chingado and Company. "He looked at the sun through a page or two. 'Offset. Brought his nose close to the text: '"Misprints. Gah. Corrupt' He dropped the book on the grass and looked at it with loathing" (151). The Trystero couplet does appear in a pornographic edition of The Courier's Tragedy, housed in the Vatican 157 Libraiy. Bortz has smuggled out a microfilm copy. The text is illustrated with crude woodcuts. The figure of Death hovers in the background. One of Bortz's colleagues thinks the pornographic edition was a Scurvhamite project. Robert Scurvham, we are told, was the founder of a sect of particularly pure Puritans. "Their central hangup had to do with predestination.'" They believed in two kinds, mirroring a dualistic universe:

Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident. Creation was a Vast, intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless: a brute automatism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one, the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like a ship's master, had been last to go (155).

If the Vatican edition is truly a Scurvhamite project, the Trystero would have been cast as the destructive Other. The last couplet would have suggested a power beyond all appeal and doom to all who would dare oppose it. Did Driblette have such a power in mind when he mentioned Tiystero? What was he thinking as he walked into the ocean? Was he playing the part of Scurvham, at last giving in to his seductive annihilation? Or did his death have another cause altogether? How would Oedipa ever find out? Later there is a wake atop Driblette's newly-filled grave. Oedipa hopes for a visitation, wants the living presence of Driblette to come to hen "She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity existed of protein 158 might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay, any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst..." She wants his memory of his last night—even the last five minutes might be enough. She wants to know if he was thinking of the Trystero. She gives him the rundown on her isolation, recites the mantra of her need: "If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarious and Mucho and Metzger—maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got" (162). It seems for a moment as if her incantation has worked: "she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart." She waits for the spirit to announce its arrival, but there is only silence.

Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Ether she could not communicate, or he did not exist (162).

With the help of Bortz and Genghis Cohen, Oedipa continues to piece together a history of the Trystero—its founding in Belgium in the late 1500's by Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera—an unstable would-be nobleman with a flair for the dramatic who claims to be the true heir to the Thum and Taxis Monopoly; the guerrilla campaign waged by Tristero y Calavera and his black-clad followers against Thum and Taxis couriers; the Trystero's occasional habit of allowing certain witnesses to live in order to spread the word of the inevitable fall of its enemies and the coming reclamation of what was rightfully its own. 159 Given to imaginative fancy, Bortz tries to fill in the spaces not recorded in any written histoiy. He pictures a scene in which the

Trystero actually consider joining forces with Thum and Taxis in order to control the flow of information across the Continent. In the end, however, this idea is rejected by conservative elements not about to commit what they must have considered treason. And so, the Trystero continues on, hinting at rebellion, but remaining underground, tormenting the powers-that-be, waiting for the moment of reversal, increasingly aware, perhaps, that this moment might not ever come. Those in the dominant order at fir^t see the Trystero as a force of nature, an unstoppable Other in the Scurvhamite sense. Over time, however, the interpretation is secularized. The Trystero comes to be considered a human enemy with typical motives: political and resentful. By 1795, it is even suggested that the Trystero has staged the French Revolution in order to end the Thum and Taxis monopoly in France and the Lowlands. Suggested by who, Oedipa wants to know. Had Bortz found a new source? "'Wouldn't somebody have brought it up?' he said. 'Maybe not'"

(165). Oedipa doesn't press the argument, "having begun to feel reluctant about following up anything." As she closes in on the Tiystero, she also pulls back. She hadn't asked Cohen for an update on a series of stamps he'd sent to a committee of ejqserts, nor had she again gone to visit Mr. Toth. She believed she would find him dead. She hadn't tracked down K. da Chingado or asked Bortz if he had. "Worst of all, she found herself going to absurd lengths to avoid talking about Randolph Driblette" (166). 160 She feels as if she is letting down Driblette and herself, but she cannot

seem to help it. One recalls Stencil's feelings about Malta: there was something there he did not want to know. Further, as with Stencil, there is also the possibility that there is nothing there, or at least not what she has imagined there to be. '"Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa,"' Fallopian tells her when she sees him again at The Scope, "'that somebody's putting you on? That this is all a

hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?"' (167).

Coming from Fallopian, who is now dressed in fatigues and sporting a three-day beard, skepticism seems a strange perspective. He looks to be sure about his own odd convictions, appears, in fact, about to lead some sort of coup. Oedipa reacts angrily, but she can't completely dismiss the question. The thought, admittedly, had occurred to her.

As if on cue, she also now receives new evidence of Pierce's

involvement. Cohen finds a Tiystero stamp listed in a supplement pasted into the back of a philatelic catalog. Oedipa discovers in the back of the book a sticker showing it had been bought at the same place where she had purchased the paperback Courier’s Tragedy—z book store which has now, conveniently, burned to the ground. She checks the local registry and finds that Pierce owned the building, and the gun shop next door

where Fallopian hints he may be purchasing weapons, as well at the theater where she saw Driblette's production. The mounting evidence is hardly comforting—Oedipa finds herself pacing the room, "waiting on something terrible" (170), remembering that Bortz taught at San Narciso college, an institution heavily endowed by Inverarity, of course. However, she cannot say for certain that Pierce 161 has arranged the Trystero, that it is all some sort of joke, or terrorization, or moral lesson meant to improve her. In fact, the odds stiii seem against it. There are too many people involved, too many to have been bought— even by Pierce (?)—too many to share his ideosyncratic ideas or sick sense of humor. Instead, the theory of Inverarity's involvement—at once wholly, perhaps overly, supportable and completely absurd—only reveals why Oedipa cannot make a decision, why she cannot say what is truly going on, why she must leave multiple paths open. Four possibilities are arrayed before her, the "symmetrical four": Hther you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream: onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of every American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are haliucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of the post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what all besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non- legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull (171).

These are the four, but how can she choose between them; how can she select one when the others keep cropping up? It is as if the possibilities are working together, collectively conspiring to prevent her from choosing, holding her captive in what has become an airless place: "That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breath in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was 162 nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead" (171). She begins to be physically affected. Her fillings hurt. Some nights she stares at the ceiling, sleepless—others, she sleeps for hours on end. She can't focus; she feels nauseous, suffers headaches, nightmares, menstrual pain. At one point, she suspects she may be pregnant. She even sees a doctor. When her second appointment comes, however, she does not go. The Trystero will not let her rest. "Genghis Cohen, once so shy, now seemed to come up with new goodies every other day." Bortz is developing a secret histoiy of the Trystero by observing the fluctuating fortunes of the Thum and Taxis system—figuring that when the post horn is down, its muted other is on the rise, and vice versa. A friend sends Cohen the transcription of an article from an 1865 issue of Bibliothèque des Timbrophiles of Jean-Baptiste Moens. It tells of a rift in the ranks of the Tiystero leading to a mass immigration to America. The article leads Bortz to write another of his imagined chapters. The Stoiy of the Tiystero in the New World. '"Well, it's interesting,"' Oedipa says, "'if the article's legitimate'"

(175). Bortz suggests she check it out. It ought to be easy enough. Oedipa doesn't do it. She just feels bad: The toothaches got worse, she dreamed of disembodied voices from whose malignance there was no appeal, the soft dusk of mirrors out of which something was about to walk, and empty rooms that waited for her. Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with (175). 163 Desperate, she calls the Inamorati Anonymous member. He is again at the San Francisco bar. She tells him he is all she has left. She doesn't want to know his name, only wants to know if it had been arranged: the lapel pin, the story about the group's founder, his bumping into her in the first place, or making sure she bumped into him. It may be a joke for him, but it has ceased being one for her. Before the call, she had been freeway driving without a purpose. ’"Next time,"' she says, "1 may be more deliberate. For the love of God, human life, whatever you respect, please. Help me'" (177).

The man tells her, however, that it is too late.

'"For me?'" she says. '"For me.'" He hangs up. She steps out of the phone booth, "her isolation complete." She tries to turn toward the sea, but doesn't know where it is. She can't find the mountains either. It is "as if there could be no barriers between herself and the rest of the land." At this moment, San Narciso loses its uniqueness for her. It "[is] assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle. Pierce Inverarity was really dead" (177).

She has reached the moment of maximum despair, has dropped deeper into the void than ever before. With Pierce truly dead, however, she is prepared for a new vision of the breadth of his estate. She walks down a railroad track parallel to the highway. Spurs for servicing factories branch off on either side. The factories are probably Pierce's, perhaps the railroad as well. But what did it matter? For San Narciso was just a name, "an incident among our climatic records." It was "a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher 164 continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence." On this greater, continental level, all labeled places are connected. San Narciso gives way to a vast, perhaps even boundless world. "[Oedipa] had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America" (178). She again reviews her options. A joke was still a possibility, although if this had all been arranged it would be more accurate to call it a mean-spirited attempt to harass her. Perhaps the plot was Pierce's way of cheating death. He would live on, cynically, as a paranoia, "a pure conspiracy against someone he loved." She knows, however, that there is also the other possibility—that it is all true, and that the Trystero could have as easily been discovered anywhere as in San Narciso, California, or the Inverarity estate. Memories, long buried, perhaps her own, perhaps part of some collective mind, now come to hen old Pullman cars left in Helds, occupied by squatters; kids riding in freight cars, singing along to pocket radios; people living in lean-to's behind freeway billboards, or in wrecked cars, or daring to sleep atop a lineman's pole. "She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in" (180). She thinks of walkers caught in the headlights of passing cars, too far away from anywhere to have a destination in mind, at least for that night. And she thinks of late night calls, like that of Pierce's, but from strangers looking for the magical Other, who will show them, finally, that they are 165 not alone. Are these the citizens of the Trystero, those who have withdrawn from Oedipa's America and now lie in wait in a republic of their own? There now appeared to be two Americas—two and no more. "She had heard about exciuded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided." And yet right here, where the chances were once so good for diversity, there exists no middle ground—unless it is the shaky patch she herself occupies, and even that is hardly tenable. It is here she that she imagines herself among the matrices of a digital machine, "the zeroes and ones twinned above." "Behind the hieroglyphic street, there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth" (181). Which will it be, then, one or zero? Richness or banality?

Meaning or lack? Again it has come down to a perilous either/or; again, it has become a matter of belief. However, as we might by now expect,

Oedipa remains caught between alternatives, unable to decide. In the tedium stage, players are charged with the game's continuation, "keeping it bouncing," as Pierce once said. There is room here for neither belief nor doubt. There is only the precarious position between the two, and the feints and reverses by which one flips into the other.

The last we see of Oedipa, she is at the auction, awaiting the calling of lot 49. She settles back in her chair, watching the crier, who smiles knowingly at her. It is up to Trystero to give her a wink. It is Trystero's turn.

In The Crying o f Lot 49, resistance is glimpsed only from the outside: Oedipa remains pressed against the glass, looking in. In 166 Pynchon's third novel, Gravity's Rainbow, resistance is enacted from within, liot only through the exploration of alternative orders of being and ways of seeing, but also through a method of writing: energetic and teeming, which takes on the daunting and finally impossible project of compensating for history and re-fertilizing the world. In the end, however, Gravity's Rainbow serves another purpose: it inscribes the death of resistance, enacts the murder of resistance and also its autopsy: it reveals resistance as from the beginning doomed. The novel also suggests, however, that the death we see is not real. From the beginning. Resistance was a game, an illusion, a wall-less shelter that could do nothing against the insistent End. Resistance, finally, was not our seducer, but a feined retreat, a pose struck in the midst of our seduction by death. This was a seduction of a different order, not a game but terminally, unmistakeably Real. Now, however, it too is over. The crowd in the Orpheus sits in a space beyond history, impatient for an end which has already come. CHAPTER IV

THE NIGHT'S MAD CARNIVAL

Gravity's Rainbow opens with the famous lines:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now " (3).

Gravity's Rainbow is Inchon’s scream of historical entrapment: a scream that not only carries across the sky, but empties the contents of the rocket-struck mind. For the emptying to occur, however, there must be a progression inward, an attempt to get to the bottom of the horror. There is also time for denials. Gravity's Rainbow is a rambunctious text. There is a sense of overdoing it here, tiying too hard to show that we are yet alive. The text's gambit is that it can unearth a living force strong enough to stave off the coming awareness, that energy alone can hold death off and force death back.

All the while, however, the energy of the text is cooperating with death; it is, in fact, the means for deepening our awareness of history's trap. Each new energetic display becomes the next site for historical enclosure. The awareness that there is no way out undercuts the denials and foils the attempts at escape.

167 168 Gravity's Rainbow is an inscription of manic energy entrapped. It proceeds through I^nchon's usual flipflop logic—in this case, damning knowledge-become-resistance-become-knowledge increased. We see this as early as the opening sequence. The novel opens with Pirate's dream of

terminal arrival. A screaming comes across the sky: "It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre" (3). He is in a carriage.

There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing (3).

It is a carriage of the dispossessed—in this novel's lexicon, the Preterite, the damned:

.. . feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children that it seems could belong to anyone, stacked out among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green- stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city (3).

Something is wrong. The carriage should carry them out of the city. The road should open onto a broad highway. Instead, however, the opposite occurs. 169 They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares to ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive kno ttin g in to —they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass ... certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out of the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero ... and it is poorer the deeper they g o ... ruinous secret cities of the poor, places whose names he has never heard . . . (3).

This road narrows and breaks down, "cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terrible. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal" (4). They are ordered out. They move slowly but do not resist. They are channeled into "some vast, very old and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery." Globular fixtures, painted dark green, hang from the eaves. They have not been lit for centuries and are not lit now, "The crowd moves without murmurs or coughing down corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles," their steps hushed by "velvet black surfaces.” They are in a place of death, a version of hell: "The smell is of old wood, of remote wings empty all this time just reopened to accommodate the rush of souls, of cold plaster where all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave-painting, fixed stubborn and luminous in the walls.. " (4) 170 They are directed into one of the invisible rooms: "Invisible, yes, what do the furnishings matter at this stage of things?" The floor is not a floor at all—it is history: "Underneath crunches the dirt of the city's oldest dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened, lied to its children" (4). Some wait alone, some share rooms. It does not matter. There is no communion, no chance for the borrowed cigarette or forced smile. There is only a voice, coolly rational, that may come from outside and may also come from their own minds. It is not the booming voice of judgment they have imagined. It simply tells them what they should already know, reminds them of the way things are:

"You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow __ " (4).

"'There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet.

Screaming holds across the sky." There is time to wonder what death will be like: "When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after? But it is already lighL How long has it been light?" (4). He has been dreaming:

All this while, light has come percolating in, along with the cold morning air flowing now across his nipples: it has begun to reveal an assortment of drunken wastrels, some in uniform and some not, clutching empty or near-empty bottles, here draped over a chair, there huddled into a cold fireplace, or sprawled on various divans, un-Hoovered rugs and chaise lounges down the different levels of the enormous room, snoring and wheezing at many rhythms, in self-renewing chorus, as London light, winter and elastic 171 light, grows between the faces of the mullioned windows, grows among the strata of last night's smoke still hung, fading, from the waxed beams of the ceiling. All these horizontal there, these comrades in arms, look just as rosy as a bunch of Dutch peasants dreaming of their own certain resurrection in the next few minutes (4-5).

Inchon's reader Mark Richard Siegel makes much of this scene. He notes that those who see in the novel's opening nightmare proof of its nihilistic intent tend to end textual quotations before the light, or to see

the light as the exploding of a V-2. Those who do admit that this is the light of morning believe the iine is meant ironically, that morning never truly comes, that this remains a novel of the night. Siegei instead sees the morning as a sign of l^nchon's hard-earned ambiguity: In Gravity's Rainbow, morning follows night, entrapment can yield to the

possibility of liberation. The crowd sleeping around Pirate, who one is tempted to connect to the damned in the dream, are actualiy about to be resurrected—at least for one day—by the light, and the smeli of breakfast. 1

Pirate is famous for his Banana Breakfasts:

Messmates throng here from ali over England, even some who are allergic or outright hostile to bananas, just to watch—for the politics of bacteria, the soil's stringing of rings and chains in nets

f Siegel, one of several readers (see also Cowart and Hume) looking for a positive message in Pynchon, sees Gravity's Rainbow as a novel of apocalypse, "not in the limited sense of predicting total annihilation, but in the more meaningful sense of chronicling the chaos from which a new culture may be bom." He cites Mircea Eliade's claim that myth and religion "symbolically re-create the universe, and that the ritual repetition of this cosmogony is generally preceded by a symbolic regression to chaos; the old world must be destroyed so that the new one may replace it" (4). My own reading suggests that Gravity's Rainbow indeed traces the birth of a new culture. But when this culture is that of perfected entrapment, the "message" is not "positive"—it is instead what Pirate initially experiences: a judgment against which there is no appeai. 172 only God can tell the meshes of have seen the fruit thrive often to lengths of a foot and a half, yes amazing but true (6).

With the wartime shortages, he grows the bananas himself—in a glass hothouse on the roof of his Chelsea maisonette. Pirate built the hothouse, but a rooftop garden was already there—as was its magical soil. The garden was begun by a previous owner who liked to cultivate "pharmaceutical plants." A few of the plants survived to harvest, but

most returned to the soil. They joined manure from a trio of Wessex Saddleback sows (owned by the same eccentric), leaves from decorative trees, "and the odd, unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive Epicurean." "All got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black top soil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas" (5).

Happy to be awake and alive. Pirate bounces over the ramparts to pick this morning's bunch: "His giant bananas cluster, radiant yellow, humid green. His companions below dream drooling of a Banana Breakfast. This well-scrubbed day ought to be no worse than any—" (6). It is here he sees the V-2. It flashes brightly in the pink sky: "A new star, nothing less noticeable." As he watches, the star turns into a short vertical line. It is a vapor trail, but not like one from an airplane; those are horizontal. This is something different—like nothing known before. This is the silent terror, defier of gravity, mystical machine faster than sound.

The white line, abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel cutoff, end of burning, what's their word. . . Brennschluss. We don't have one. Or else it's classified. The bottom of the line, the 173 original star, has already begun to vanish in the red daybreak. But the rocket will be here before Pirate sees the sun rise.

The rocket goes ballistic. It is invisible now as well. What should he do

now? What can he do? Not enough time to make it to Stanmore. The rocket is less than five minutes away: the time it takes to walk to the tea shop; the time it takes light to travel in from Venus. He could warn the others, but why upset their peace just so they can die? No, there is only

one thing to do: act natural. Pick bananas. He feels, however, like he is about to shit: "The missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on the peak of its trajectory by now... beginning its fall... n o w . .." (7). What wou/d happen if the rocket hit

you in the head? There is more ambiguity here than Siegel has bargained for—or less. The light doesn't end the dream. The second stage of the "dream" has been launched. But the Banana Breakfast goes on:

Across a blue tile patio, in through a door to the kitchen. Routine: plug in American blending machine won from some Yank last summer, some poker game, table stakes, B.O.Q, somewhere in the north, never remember now Chop several bananas into pieces. Make coffee in um . Get can of milk from the cooler. Puree ' nanas in milk. Lovely. I would coat all the booze-corroded stomachs in Bigland ...

Meanwhile, Pirate's messmates come to life. Osbie Feel offers a revelry.

Stroking one of the biggest of the bananas, which happens to be protruding from the fly of his pajamas, he sings: 174 Time to gather your arse up off the floor, (have a bana na) Brush your teeth and go toddling off to war. Wave your hand to sleepy land. Kiss those dreams away, Tell Miss Grable you're not able. Not till V-E Day, oh, Ev'iything'll be grand in Ciwie Street (have a bana na) Bubbly wine and girls wiv lips so sweet— But there's still a German or two to fight. So show us a smile that's shiny bright. And then, as we may have suggested once before— Gather yer blooming arse up off the floor! (8-9)

There is a second verse, but before Osbie can get to it, he is jumped and pummeled by the newly awake. We have gone from Apocalypse Now to Animal House, but the whole thing can be tied together by bringing in Bakhtin. Here is a classic case of camivalization: The rocket, the governing being in this Kingdom, has been supplanted by its comic other, the strokable banana. The new King is heralded; the herald is mauled—it is just what we always want to do to Imperial flacks, but, usually, can't. In the carnival, however, all things are possible, at least in a ritualized (albeit exuberant) play-acted form. The carnival is a special time, a time exem pt. It overturns hierarchies, reverses castes. It tells us to forget our surrender, put aside our training, drop the library quiet and funereal decorum the System prefers and proclaim a bit too loudly that we are alive. Despite the King. Despite Death. Have a banana. At Pirate's, however, the true sign of rebellion comes silently as the rocket;

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of 175 winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chain proves even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten our twenty generations ... so the same assertion- through'Structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open eveiy window, and let this kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects (10).

The Breakfast itself is hyper-abundant. Pirate has to compensate

for a new variety of death, the worst yet. The rollicking boys upend furniture and shell cases to get to the shores of his refectory table. They find an encyclopedic spread:

... walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded in the shape of the British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributable to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate has appropriated as his motto... tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead... banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio transmitter... (10).

Pirate doesn't get to eat. He has been thinking about the rocket- even calling headquarters to see if a pip from Holland had registered on the screen. It had, but they'd lost it. Premature Brennschluss, Pirate repeats to messmate Teddy Bloat. Cheer up. Bloat tells him, there will be more. 176 True, but it also turns out that this one is still active, at least as far as Pirate is concerned: "The phone call, when it comes, rips easily across the room, the hangovers, the grabassing, the clatter of dishes, the shoptalk, the bitter chuckles, like a rude metal double fart" (10). Pirate knows it is for him. Incoming mail, he'd thought, perhaps even said, when he saw the rocket. It turns out he was right:

"It came over in a rather delightful way," the voice high-pitched and sullen, "none of my friends are that clever. All my mail arrives by post. Do come collect it, won't you Prentice." Receiver hits cradle a violent whack, connection breaks, and now Pirate knows where this morning's rocket landed, and why there was no explosion (11).

Pirate is already gone—"again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat Breakfast" (11). He is driven east to zero longitude, to pick up a graphite cylinder that is the one remaining piece of a rocket that showered burning lumps for miles around. Then, he is gone again, perhaps to the White Visitation, an intelligence outpost with which he has lately been coordinating, and then back to the maisonette, to pack for a trip to Holland, no chance for sleep, or a cup or a smoke. He doesn't even know why They want him to go. He didn't ask. They know he doesn't need reasons. Pirate is an old employee. He's been Theirs since They discovered his secret talent. Pirate can absorb other people's fantasies. You can imagine how useful They would find that, with such a great need, these days, for balanced leaders, a controlled populace, a tranquil inner life. They sent Pirate to negotiate with the Giant Adenoid. By this time, it had thrown the country into a panic. It had started off blocking the 177 pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo, occupant of the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office—Novi Pazar, we are told, being an obscure Balkan Sanjak that had given the world one of its several chances to begin World War 11 a few years early. Osmo was of little help in warding off apocalypse, having been consumed, assimilated, by his Adenoid. The Adenoid didn't stop there: "before long, tophats are littering the squares of Mayfair, cheap perfume hanging ownerless in the pub lights of the East End as the Adenoid continues on its rampage" (15). It wasn't sucking people up at random; no, it had a master plan: "it's choosing only certain personalities useful to it—there is a new

election, a new preterition abroad in Bigland here that throws the Home Office into hysterical and painful episodes of indecision . . . no one knows w hat to do " Teams from Cavendish Laboratory showed up with huge magnets and electric-arc terminals to shock the Adenoid. The Army was dispatched with bombs of the newest poison gas. The Adenoid changed

color, developed fat nodes on its surface, but the assimilation went on: "a hideous green psuedopod crawls toward the cordon of troops and

suddenly sshhlop! wipes out an entire observation post with a deluge of some disgusting orange mucus in which the unfortunate men are digested—not screaming but actually laughing, enjoying themselves "

(15). We can't have that—or They can't. Pirate was told to see what the Adenoid wanted. He never found out. Communication was minimal: he developed a pidgin but wasn't adept at making the necessary nasal sounds. The Situation, however, was stabilized: the Adenoid stopped growing. Meanwhile, admirers of the early Freud were coating it with 178 cocaine: "bringing hods full of the white substance, In relays, up the ladders to smear on the throbbing gland-creature." No visible effects

were recorded, "(though who knows how that A denoid felt, eh?)" (16). Oh, the Firm knows Pirate through and through. These days, they

are allowing him "only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to

keep his defenses up, but not enough for It to poison him" (16). "Just hum that nitwit little tune they taught you, and try not to fuck up." Pirate has his own theme song; It lets him know just who he is—"Yes—Pm— the—/Fellow that's hav-lng other peop-le's fan-tasles,/Suffering what they ought to be themselves—. .." It ends with a hypothetical case that's

certain to happen someday: "I'll be out-one-day and never come back / Forget the bitter you owe me. Jack / Just piss on m' grave and car-ry on the show!" This Isn't the worst of it: "He will then actually skip to and fro, with his knees high and twirling a walking stick with W.C. Fields' head, nose, top hat, and all, for Its knob, and surely capable of magic, while the band plays a second chorus" (12). So now it is off to Holland where Pirate will bring out another old hand, Katje Borgeslus, who has lately been seeking the confidence of the commander of a V-2 battery, the SS man Weissmann. The sad part, truly pathetic. Is that Pirate asked for this. He wanted Their trust. Their tough love. By the time he knows for sure that it is not love They are giving, it is too late to get out He joins the Counterforce, the loose confederation of subversives against the ongoing War—the We-system that would oppose the They. But Pirate of all people should know that a Counterforce cannot occur, at least not in the way Its conspirators believe. If it exists, the 179 System is allowing it, operating it, with a whole other purpose in mind. Dear fellow, this is how things are; you've been told before. Before joining the Counterforce, Pirate was in Hell. He has actually been there all along, but has only now learned to recognize, to see It isn't as bad as he'd been told. No fire and brimstone, unless you request it. Pirate prefers what he's been given: a convention in an elaborate museum. Pastiy carts roll by; there are booths and displays,

and plenty of colleagues—people he might not like, but at least knows. . . . The bad part, downright hellish, is the knowledge: the knowledge that no rebellion is possible, that the chances for freedom are over for good. You can become a double-agent; hell, you can become a triple- or quadruple- agent. It doesn't matter. You will still be working for the same single Enterprise, more than ever, an Employee of the Rrm. Katje is here also. Of course, she has to be. She is the last of his illusions. Do what you will with me. Pirate thinks, but leave her alone. If you don't, why. I'll It's no use clenching your fists—no need for a cartoon Pirate here. It is too late. She is Theirs. She always was. And so:

He lifts his long, his guilty, his permanently enslaved face to the illusion of sky, to the reality of pressure and weight from overhead, the hardness and absolute cruelty of it, while she presses her own face into the easy lowland between his shoulder and pectoral, a look on her face of truce, of horror come to a détente with, as the sunset proceeds ... (548).

They dance, together in their Preterition, in this dead space of waiting. 180 Are any of those at the Banana Breakfast better off than Pirate? Osbie Feel, the young anarchist, still believes in a Counterforce. His innocence may be typical. But doesn't that painting of Dutch peasants have a shadow between the bodies and the frame? Isn't it only a matter of time before the shadow descends, snuffîng whatever strange light illuminates the sleepers? 1 know, I know—the light here is supposed to be eternal. But does it have to be? Can't the story be reversed? Shadows such as this never really disappear. In the daylight, they retreat a bit, hang up by the ceiling, but the night always comes again. Teddy Bloat knows. He is a real company man: someone who not only wants their trust but has apparently earned it. As the novel goes on, we are given the occasional privilege of watching him work. We see him snap illicit photos, give his official frown while others ar*e having fun, even arrange the tragic "death" of an old school chum suspected of Going Soft, Knowing Too Much, and Spilling the Beans. Personal ties, after all, have their limits. There's a War on. Death will come for all the messmates—if not that clever rocket falling on their heads, granting a close-up look at its nose, on which is mounted the picture from their own ID—then the sort of death Pirate cannot escape and Bloat has never thought of escaping, has in fact welcomed: corporate death, the System's own invention—that entity the official memos refer to as "career" and even "life." During the long years of his imprisonment. Pirate is shuttled from high moment to high moment. He is there at the meetings of the Elect; he witnesses a test of the new cosmic bomb. His condition is Byronic, an educated impotence: he knows what They are up to, but is helpless 181 against it. He cannot prevent even his own involvement, cannot say that

he didn't know or wasn't there. His tight-wound self is coming unraveled. "Pirate Prentice" the independent construct has never existed and even Their Pirate may not be around for long. His name is gradually moving up a list. Every day, a few at the top are scratched off. He does not know when the hit will come, but it will come, that much is

certain. Looking back at the whole sequence, we wonder: was it ever

ambiguous at all?

I've written a disproportionate introduction, spent too much time on a minor character. Statistically speaking, this is correct: Pirate's on only a few of the novel's (very) many pages. In Gravity's Rainbow, however, the viewpoint of the statistician is one that must be shed. The rockets falling on London follow a Poisson distribution, but those that they fall on still believe that their own rocket has come for them. Damned Calvinist insanity perhaps, and yet there is also a suggestion that more is going on than meets the statistician's trained, but reductive eye. For understanding the novel as a whole. Pirate is of great importance. He teaches us how to read the novel. He enters history at the ievel of truthful fantasy, which is where the novel remains.

Gravity's Rainbow is a compendium of secret thoughts, a grand surfacing of the desires and dark dreams that history has kept hidden. Characters here are historical constructs, textual devices that allow us to probe history's edifice and see the System going about its deadly work.

All the characters finally point back to a single comprehension. Near the bottom of his psyche, Slothrop discovers that there is only one of 182 each American archetype: one Westwardman, one Sidekick, one Indian. We can take the reduction further: in Gravity's Rainbow, the only character is the single, revolving Mind. The Mind disperses through many named tropes, spreads its energy across the novel's board. In the end, however, it is one. It is also close to being none. Gravity’s Rainbow inscribes the death of Western energy—at least "energy" in any human form. The active party here turns out to be the System itself, a cruel and coincidental resemblance to life. At times, the System is an apparent consciousness whose mind we can nearly read. At other times it seems not a consciousness at all, but a hegemonic and mindless progression into death. In either case, however, it is the System to which the human mind defers, the System which sets history’s direction and enacts history's movement, the System which gives Napoleon the monumental nod -----

This time, however, Napoleon screams in return, a full-body, engulfing scream. One pictures not only Munch's classic, but also the melting Nazi in Raiders o f the Lost Ark or Innocent X, the Francis Bacon version (or the Velasqeuz original as seen after Bacon, after the surfacing of the terrible knowledge, the judgment, deep in those eyes ...). In Gravity's Rainbow, human power is supplanted by something greater—not transcendent life, but entrapment by death. It is irresistible as God. With the trap sprung, there remains only the panicked fallout: the quest for resistance reveals a tightening encirclement. Energy becomes the historical scream. Then, there is not even this, just a sickly calm voice: a final recitation of the facts. 183 The novel's energy is hlsioiy's own. We see it on the celling of the

Sistine: God touches Adam and a rebellion is bom. Who needs a heaven

in the sky when you can build one right here? The gift of creation becomes Faustian desire. In Hegel, history becomes the story of desire's fulfillment, the night's journey toward Absolute Dawn, the world*spirit on a horse. But the Phenomenology can also be seen as the point at which the historical consciousness turned tragic. The folds of Hegel's text are deep.

Looking into them, we see a night without end, a long passage down.

Their are many ways to describe the passage, and the impending 3 a.m. arrival. Joyce spoke of a nightmare from which we cannot awaken. Faulkner wondered at a past that is not past. After Eliot, Inchon inscribes a wasteland without the requisite Fisher King. Pynchon also adds his own twist: corporate death in motion. Here Kafka meets a bitterly ironic Hegel. The System advances, sapping resources from the earth, draining life from its subjects, drinking funding like blood. Gradually, it erects its State: a Kingdom that knows no borders. Whence energy then? Only in oppostion. Pynchon inscribes an energy resistant and perverse. The energy of histoiy has always had its oppositional moments, the photo-negative through which stuff-shirted power is parodied and reversed. It's a destruction done with laughter the drunken hardhats at work here are having a great time, swinging sledgehammers, goosing each other, getting a little too close to the dynamite, then running when it is about to blow . . . . They are non-union workers, but they believe in what they're doing. They think—get this—that there is a mystical force all 184 around them, a cosmic blessing that will refertilize the cleared land and guarantee good Karma for whatever is built there next—at least for a time. We are talking here, of course, about camivalizcd discourse and the Menippean satire, and of Rushdie's charge that the novel write the passage of time. We are speaking of texts that overturn the dominant

conditions of the day. These workers are the friendly angels of dialectic— they burst through the limits of one age and clear a space for the next. The true image of the I^chonic text, then, may not be The Scream or the Pope Triptych, or even the Michelangelo. It may be a Laughing Mask. There is, however, something odd about this mask—it is laughing all right, but it looks, well, evil. Picture Nicholson’s Batman. In

Gravity's Rainbow, the carnival offers no Preterite redemption; the chances for this ended awhile back. Perhaps there never was a chance. Instead, we have a celebratory wake, the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a structure of death we began building years ago. If this is a carnival, it is the night's own. The movement it inscribes is a deepening of death—as Tanner would have it, the bourgeois order broken by the System's global advance. Meanwhile, the historical mind—that failed human construct, that grand illusion—enters a state of permanent eclipse. We meet up with it again at the Orpheus theatre, where there is still time, but not for much. Perhaps the best we can do is say what went wrong.

Gravity's Rainbow memorializes a rift in Western history, an opening in both space and time. However, it also remembers the closing of the rift, the coming of corporate death in its next and totalized round. The carnival can offer only a brief interregnum: "the true king dies 185 only a mock death" (131). In this case, paranoid clarity suggests that even the mock death was a set-up. The old King was in the shadows the

whole time, waiting to rise, and then beginning... The novel's post-war Zone is a dark and scary place. Displaced

populations are on the move, looking for food, cigarettes, sex, a bed. There is hunger, disease, sudden violence. However, there is also a strange liberty. For a while, all fences are down; the land is cleared; a new start seems possible. Argentinean dissidents see a chance to be gauchos. The Schwarzkommando talk of recapturing a lost center. Slothrop, in his Rocketman getup, slips through the security to dig up hashish buried in the yard of the Potsdam "Whitehouse." The house is filled with the rich and famous. Mickey Rooney watches Slothrop from the porch. Slothrop puts his finger to his lips. Mickey keeps mum. The mercantile system is thrown back to basics: these are bright days for the black market. Passages are arduous, transactions uncertain— there is danger, but also opportunity. Everything is for sale: food, drugs, sex, papers, death—death above all. The V-2 facility at Nordhausen has become a tourist attraction. For a small fee, you will be taken through the secret passage to Dora, the prison camp that supplied slave labor for the Mittelworke. Going in, you are warned:

"Remember they were always on the defensive here. When the Americans liberated Dora, the prisoners who were still alive went on a rampage after the materi:d—they looted, they ate and drank themselves sick. For others. Death came on like the American Army, and liberated them spiritually. So they're apt to be on a spiritual rampage now. Guard your thoughts. Use the natural balance of your mind against them. They'll be coming at you off- balance, remember" (296). 186 Unwholesome hustlers are also busy tracking the V-2: whole rockets, spare parts, information, rumors—all have their price. A special premium is placed on the rocket 00000, with its special modification, the SchwarzgerSt. No one knows what the Schwarzgerüt is, except maybe the Schwarzkommando, who are building a replica. Black marketeer

extraordinaire Der Springer says he can get the original for $10,000, but who has that kind of scratch—and can Springer come through? It may not matter. Word is that the V-2 is already out of date. The

System is cranking up for the next round of production. It is here that we can drop in those paranoid moments already cited—Enzian and Tchticherine coming on ruins that aren't and thinking p lo t It is a bad moment for each man. Enzian, flirting with a tribal rocket, a rocket that would take the people back, knows now that he has a rival for the rocket's affections. And maybe there is not a rivaliy at all. Maybe they are all working on the same project, pursuing a common destiny. He has contemplated the question before: is he free or acting on orders from above (so far above he cannot see from whom the orders have come)? Have the Schwarzkommando been passed over or selected for a mission the nature of which they will not know, at least not until it is too late? It is also possible that the rocket is a red herring. Enzian is experiencing amphetamine thinking here, making rapid connections.

All this time he has assumed that the rocket was the central text. But now If a bombing fits into an ongoing higher plan, is not destruction but planned alteration, wouldn't the rocket be part of the plan? And wouldn't the plan be beyond any rocket? He is thinking here of a Systematic Mind orchestrating technology, politics, money, people ___ 187 Tchticherine believed himself to be an employee of the Soviet

state, and these days hardly even that. He is in the Zone on personal business. He wants to track down not only what traces of the rocket he can, but also Enzian. who is his half-brother. Tchticherine wants to kill him. It is a ^ Ic a l white reaction to black, a color so suggestive of death. Having a black half-brother is a little too close for comfort, like having a second black self: he needs to get rid of it and/or him. It turns out, however, that Tchitcherine's whiteness may have been just a cover. Staring at the ruined rocket battery, thinking of a single State of which

we are all employees, he's got to wonder if death has already come. It's like feeling blackness rising from within. We can hear the terminal voice coming to him as well: really, Vaslev, you should have known ----- Yes, there's something stalking through the once-cleared Zone, building its labyrinths, walling people in. Who's to say the Zone isn't already the Orpheus? We can imagine the audience realizing that they are indeed at the movies, watching themselves in the tear-jerker N o t Who They Thought They Were. It is a sad, sad story, but at least they can see themselves for who they are. There grows among them that Byronic non-consolation. It is too late to bother thinking that they'd be better o ff not knowing—too late for innocence; they are beyond illusions. For better or worse, they are stuck watching a rocket cut through time.

Looking back, th ^ see history exposed. Much of the novel details the making of the V-2. Pynchon takes us to the rocket field in Berlin,

" here the club of "amateirrs," the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt, began its

^"•esome—AND A ll VERY HARMLESS-expIorations. We move to the "Search facility at Peenemünde, where the would-be mad scientists work 188 under SS control; and finally to Nordhausen where the V-2 00000 is

assembled under top security. The true story of the rocket, however,

begins earlier: with organic chemistry—the ability to arrange molecules after the patterns in our mind—and earlier still: at the first moment we looked longingly at the sky—the moment at which we began to conceive of God, the moment at which we began to believe we did not have to die. After the rocket comes the cosmic bomb. It is a fateful progression with a common justification: We must have the means for our species- wide suicide readily available. It is the only way to assure our

preservation, ward off invasion, prevent the Take-Over that would turn us into human automata. However, like "The United States," "The Soviet Union" and "Red China" were only fronts. While the Red Menace absorbed our anxiety, and the Commies worried that Coke was slipping into the commissary, the System went on, unheralded and unopposed. (There was, of course, the strange case of Esenhower—the System's own creation, and a pretty good gauge of our innocence — why sure, a general can be President, look at that George Washington! It doesn’t imply any sort of "connection," except that leadership skills can be universally applied Ike tried to warn us. Of course, his comments came as he began to assume that "elder statesmen status," where you can make "philosophic statements" without inspiring any action. It is a nice safe place for unlikely, useless, and pre-arranged dissent.) There is also the Escape Excuse. German rocket scientist Franz Pokier tells his wife Leni: '"We'll all use it, someday, to leave the earth.

To transcend." She's laughing, but he goes on, honestly trying, '"Someday... they won't have to kill. Borders won't meaning anything. 189 We'll all have outer space.'" Leni isn't buying it: "'Oh, you're blind'" (400), but she knows that Franz truly wants to believe. He is just the type They want. They can use anyone, but especially him: Pisces, death- loving, one of the German youths who believed in Destiny, lay on their backs in meadows and mountains, masturbating, yearning... Destiny will betray you, crush you in the end, but this is what Destiny has chosen for you. Who are you to question it? Your is only to live, and to die -----

The salvation effect, however, goes beyond the rocket, and it appeals to people besides romantic German youth. We see the desire to cheat death in the Puritan splitting of Preterite and Elect, the white attempt to eliminate blackness—even the obsession with shit: the presence of death right up our own private assholes, which, as the novel suggests, is kind of close. In each case, however, the attempt to escape

drags us deeper in. We are wading in shit, riding the piss-current. It's pretty much one non-stop flush in here, but it is never quite enough. For the Dutch on Mauritius, the presence of dodoes is a daily affront. Dodoes are: a), funny-looking, flightless, slow and dumb (and thus an embarrassment to God, or a suggestion that the creation is not perfect, that some dark counterforce is at work); b). incapable of speech

and thus ignorant of scripture; and c). because of a.) and b.), doomed. The

dodoes are thus a constant reminder of death and an emblem of the settlers' own uncertainties ahout Election. The only way to ease the settlers' doubt, perfect the creation, resist the devil, is to get rid of the dodoes—kill them whenever possible. Since the dodoes are everywhere, trusting, and incapable of escape, this is pretty much all the time. 190 Katje Borgesius' ancestor Franz Van der Groov feels bad about this. He'd just assume not kill the birds if he could think of a reason to let them

live. He imagines them receiving the gift of speech, then waddling forward, pilgrims ranked in thousands, called from their nests and rookeries by a voice that might be his own;

Foras much as they are the creatures o f God, and have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in his Word is eternal life to be found ... And there are tears of happiness in the eyes of the dodoes. They are all brothers now, they and the humans who used to hunt them, brothers in Christ, the little baby they dream now of sitting near, roosting in his stable, feathers at peace, watching over him and his dear face all night long — ."(111).

It will never happen. Usually, Van der Groov hunts alone. When the isolation gets to him, he hears voices. They scold him in a language that sounds like Dutch but he can't understand any of the words. Once, he squatted for a full day with his gun aimed at an egg due to hatch. At the

end of the day, the egg was still there. He should have shot it, but he aidn't: "He got to his feet, knee and hip joints in agony, head gonging with instructions from his sleeptalkers droning by, overlapping, urgent, and only limped away, piece at right shoulder arms" (109). When he is feeling down, he joins a hunting party. Nothing like a little male bonding to help you get your head on straight:

A drunken, university hysteria would take hold of them all, out on night-rampages where they’d be presently firing at anything, treetops, clouds, leather demon bats screaming up beyond hearing. Tradewinds moving upslope to chill their night’s sweating, sky lit half-crimson by a volcano, rumblings under their feet as deep as the bats’ voices were high, aU these men were caught in the spectrum between, trapped among frequencies of their own voices and words (109-110). 191

The colonial enterprise is failing here, dying as sureiy as the dodoes: "The furious host were losers, impersonating a race chosen by God" (110). By 1681, the birds wiil be extinct. By 1710, the last settler will

have left. The whole bloody business will have been transacted in the space of a singie human lifetime. Oh weii. Singular efforts may fail, but the Operation goes on. The System is the fulfillment of colonial desires, the outcome of our quest for permanence, for life beyond death. To bring it into being required some sacrifice. We had to surrender our freedom, our seif-determination, all our so-called sovereign rights. We had to give up everything beyond a beating heart that lets us know we are alive. Certain iÜusîons, of course, are necessary. We must be convinced that we are thinking our own thoughts, living in an independent nation,

leading a healthy, active, fuifiiled life. There is a strategy of innocence at

work here: the System breeds a spirit of trust and cooperation. Even the myth of progress must be maintained. Things are getting better and better—or at least they are supposed to be. If things are getting worse—it must be someone's fauit: politicians, bankers, drug addicts, unmarried mothers. Or perhaps it is generational. Dartm kids don't know what it means to w o rk in my day, why... (Where are those pills?) The move beyond the human was inevitable. The flesh is fraii, the mind weak—not to mention, of course, the "mortality problem" which not even exercise and diet can (quite) solve. To manage the affairs of living death—shift the resources, direct the technoiogic escaiation—we need (no offense) a being without the buiit-in faiiings, not a life-form but a 192 perfected facsimile thereof, an intelligence dispersed across a permanent structure; steel and plastic, currency and data, complicit governments, entwined cartels, corporate smiles, the Panoptic Eye, the Word.

Yes, the Word. Let's not hold onto the illusion that those living the literary life are exempt. Gravity's Rainbow can be read, in fact, as the revocation of this exemption. In the Zone, Slothrop sleeps with the daughter of a German printer. The printer was in the union, the Buchdruckerverband. "They kept up the German wobbly traditions, they didn't go along with Hitler though all the unions were falling into line." When the War came, he'd been in his joumeymanship, "his wanderyears now stretched out to ten." His family had had no word of him since '42, when he'd sent a note from Neukôlln, where he’d stayed the night with a friend. "Always a friend, God knows how many back rooms, roundhouses, print shops he slept single nights in, shivering wrapped in back numbers of Die Welt am Montag, sure of at least shelter" (571).^ Gravity's Rainbow also holds out hope for the mystical Word, for the possibility that at certain moments, metaphor's gap can be bridged, words and things brought together. Names may have long ago lost their luster, but the act of naming. ..is it possible that there remains a magic here, some remnant of the power that God gave to Adam, a power not so distant from creation itself? Maybe, but even in the act of naming, we see a second side to the Word. Naming is the original capacity for leaving the human trace, for bringing the Green Uprising into an Order that is not its own—a

2As Steven Weisenburger notes. Die W elt am M ontag is a weekly news magazine published in Berlin (246). 193 subdivided repression that we can control. Before the War, Tchitcherine was stationed in central Asia, Seven Rivers Country, the Kirghiz "Republic." He was there as an emissary of Russian hegemony, bringing civilization to the colonial outback. He was the political eye of a cadre sent in to promote the New Turkic Alphabet, to bring an oral culture into

the inscripted fold, to replace speech, gesture and touch with the Imperial Word. He hated the place: "It was a land of drunken nostalgia for cities, silent Kirghiz riding, endless tremors of the earth." Because of the earthquakes, buildings had to be one story. The town he was in looked like the set of a Wild West movie: "a brown dirt street, lined with grandiose two-and-three story false fronts" (338). Empty land, phony town, earthquakes: every day felt like the end of the world. He was assigned to thelcommittee: a powerless committee, a lousy assignment. " ^seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never come to appreciate" (353). Even so, he was willing to fight to protect the ‘L

. Igor Blobadjian, party representative on the prestigious G committee, wanted to enact his own imperial conquest: replace the poor ^with his own mighty letter, using loan words as an entering wedge. "In the sunlit, sweltering commissary, the two men sneer at each other across trays of zapekanka and Georgian fruit soup" (353). The crisis came over the word "stenography." Blobadjian stole Tchitcherine's pencils—forcing him to borrow someone else's, or to use .. . a stenographer! Real sharp. The payback was hell: Tchitcherine and an unstable practical joker named Radnichny, who had been tossed off 194 the schwa committee, sneaked into Blobadjian's conference room and, using hacksaws, files, and torches, reformed the alphabet on Blobadjian's typewriter. "It is some fun in the morning. Blobadjian runs around in a prolonged screaming fit." The retribution, however, is already arranged. While Blobadjian runs and screams, Tchitcherine goes to a meeting. It is

called to order, then:

CRASH! two dozen linguists and bureaucrats go tumbling over on their ass. Noise echoes for a full two minutes. Tchitcherine, on his ass, notes that pieces of the leg have been sawed off, reattached with wax and varnished over again. A professional job, all right. Could Radnichny be a double agent? (353).

Tchitcherine doesn't take this lying down. "By midwatch lantern light, when the manipulations of letters are most likely to produce other kinds of illumination, [he] transliterates the opening sure of the holy Koran into the proposed NTA" (354). The false Koran was then circulated among the Arabists, under Blobadjian's name. It was an invitation to holy war. The NTA was doubly imperial: not just an alphabet, but the Officially Approved alphabet, a Latinate construct dreamed up by Moscow. It was "New Turkic" in the strongest sense—not Turkic at all. The Arabists wanted an NTA made up of Arabic letters. There were fistfights in the hallways, rumors of a boycott. The Blobadjian Koran was the final affront: "Blobadjian, accordingly, is pursued through the black end of Baku by a passel of screaming Arabists, waving scimitars and grinning horribly" (354). The Word here is inscripted into power relations, another object in the quest for dominance. The Kirghiz come in from the plains to stare at 195 the strange marks on slates. In the early days, we are told, the Russians hunted them like dodoes. Daily scores were kept: "It was a competition,

good-natured but more than play" (340). It was the serious, methodical elimination of the other. The adoption of the alphabet is another chapter in the story of their colonization. It is written in chalk instead of blood, but just as deadly.

The flip side of the desire to escape—the colonial exploitation, the violent attempts to remove evidence of mortality—is seduction. Death calls us to ride its suicidal process, follow the promise of love to come. Blobadjian was saved by mysterious strangers. They told him that it was time for his journey. He wasn't to be killed as a heretic of Islam.

He was to enter another Realm. "The first thing he leams is how to vary his index of refraction. He can choose anything between transparent and opaque. After the thrill of experimenting has worn off, he settles on a pale, banded onyx effect." He began to think beyond the NTA, noticing, for instance, that molecules are alphabetic too. A voice came to him:

"See: how they are taken out from the coarse flow—shaped, cleaned, rectified, just as you once redeemed your letters from the lawless, the mort^ streaming of human speech These are our letters, our words: they too can be modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined, co-polymerized one to the other in worldwide chains that will surface now and then over long modular silences, like the seen parts of a tapestry" (355).

Here is the preliminary System, its early taking hold. We see this not only in the polymerized chains, but also in the analogy between chemistry and language, the grafting of one discipline onto another, the conjoining that will eventually form a construct capable of encircling. 196 and absorbing, the world. Blobadjian, however, receives not a vision of the future, but a deep sense of the past:

[He] comes to see that the New Turkish Alphabet is only one version of a process that is really much older—and less unaware of itself—than he has ever had cause to dream. By and by, the frantic competition between *2 and G has faded away to trivial childhood memories. Dim anecdotes. He has gone beyond—once a sour bureaucrat with an upper lip as clearly demarcated as a chimpanzee's, now he is an adventurer, well off on a passage of his own, by underground current, without any anxiety about where it may be taking him. He has even lost, an indefinite distance upstream, his pride in feeling once a little sorry for Vaslev Tchitcherine, destined to never see the things Blobadjian is seeing . . . . ' (355).

After the firebombing of Lübeck, an angel appears in the sky. Has it come to charter souls or simply to mourn; is this Mary shedding a tear for more children lost? No, this is Pynchon's fallen angel, come to witness the next turn of death's game: "[Lübeck] was the next-to-last step

London took before her submission... the unmistakable long look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and screaming"

(215). The story of escalating death is that of desire in search of fulfillment. As Enzian's rival Joseph Ombindi suggests, it is suicide we are after, '"the non-repeatable act'" (319). Histoiy heads towards its climax, the mind-blowing fuck-to-end-all-fucks. If it comes for eveiyone at once then that will be a climax in the truest, historical sense. Ombindi himself has been employing less dramatic methods. He is leader of the Otukungurua, the Empty Ones, a faction of the Schwarzkommando who see suicide as the only freedom left. The mind­ set can be traced to the days of von Trotha. The Germans had nearly 197 finished their program of racial murder—nearly, but not quite. The Herero had decided to do it for them. They chose tribal death over the "life" now assigned them. The strategy was simple: they were after a negative birth rate, a slow dying-off. The Germans saw it as being bad sports:

Perhaps we weren't as fair as we might have been, perhaps we did take their cattle and their lands away... and then the work-camps of course, the barbed wire and the stockades ... Perhaps they feel it is a world they no longer want to live in. Typical of them, though, giving up, crawling away to die... why won't they even negotiate? We could work out a solution, some solution " (317- 18).

The Schwarzkommando can be seen as an attempt at solution.

Perhaps if we take a few of them under our wing, some of the young ones, the bucks, the handsome strong bucks—we could teach them, civilize them, give them our higher ways as a replacements for their own. Yes, they can leam, in a limited sense.... In the Zone, however, the work of suicide goes on: "These Otukungurua are prophets of masturbating, specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts oral and anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and zoophiliac." "There is no outright struggle for power. It is all seduction and counterseduction, advertising and pornography, and the histoiy of the Zone Herero is being decided in bed" (318). Now, there is to be another rocket. Enzian says it will allow them to reclaim the missing center. He has become nostalgic. But the rocket..

. couldn't it be used in the service of death... isn't kiliing its true talent.

.. can't the eternal center and the final zero be seen as one? Ombindi 198 waits and watches. He is not yet ready to take control, to rise up against

Enzian, but the day is com ing ----- "It was nice of Jung," Pynchon writes, "to give us the idea of an ancestral pool in which everybody shares the same dream material. But how is it we are each visited as individuals, each by exactly and only what

he or she needs? Doesn't that imply a switching-path of some kind, a bureaucracy?" (410). It’s the System playing Maxwell's Demon, making

each of us an offer we can't refuse. Enzian is given Weissmann. Other factors were involved in his co­ option. He was attracted by the audacity of the 1000-year Reich—the thought that one could create a permanence not of the tribal kind, but ripped by force and will and some strange notion of destiny from the very substance of death and defeat. Beyond this was the rocket itself, the masculine technology triumphant over nature, gravity, earth herself. There is also Enzian's bloodline: his father was a Russian sailor. Many of the Schwarzkommando are of mixed blood, but he is somehow whiter than the others. They call him Otyikondo, the half-breed, though not to his face: not yet, anyway. There may be something to it. Perhaps he felt a certain affinity for the European mindset, for imperialism and colonial death. Perhaps he wanted to side with the masters, needed only a White Father to show him the way. Or perhaps he wanted his own father back.

He'd never met the man. Weissmann was a dream father. Dizian says:

"Did you ever, in the street, see a man that you knew, in the instant, m ust be Jesus Christ—not hoped he was, or caught some resemblance—but knew. The Deliverer, returned and walking among the people, just the way the old stories 199 promised... as you approached you grew more and more certain—you could see nothing at all to contradict that first amazement... you drew near and passed, terrified that he would speak to you... your eyes grappled. . . it was confirmed. And most terrible of all, he knew. He saw into your soul: all your make-believe ceased to matter.... " (325).

If the rocket is Weissmann's life, it will be Enzian's as well. Under the mountain at Nordhausen, the guides will show you the cavern where the Schwarzkommando lived. The floor is still wet where Enzian had his illumination. He dreamed of coupling with a white slender rocket. The stain is dark. It is meant to smell like semen—"but it is really closer to soap or to bleach" (297). Weissmann took the name Blicero while in the Südwest—or, rather, the name took him. He imagined himself the spirit of white vengeance, bringer of death from the sky. He was full of romance— German mysticism, mirror-metaphysics, hidden symmetries only the rocket could fulfill. The resemblance between such pretensions and tribal beliefs had helped him hook the boy. The first time they fucked, Enzian said "Ndjambi Karunga," the name of God. It may only have been directed at the coupling itself: "God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including black and white, male and female" (100). Blicero, however, believed it was the boy's name for him. Still suffering from Christian instincts, Blicero considered it a blasphemy. The transgression, however, was also empowering and erotic: "Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for. The peril of buggering 200 the boy under the resonance of the sacred name fills him insanely with lust... (100).

In 1944, it no longer matters: "Those symmetries were all prewar luxury. Nothing's left him to prophesy" (102)—not even his death. Blicero is now the commander of a rocket battery in Holland, the same battery Katje has been charged with infiltrating. Katje, Blicero, and the boy Gottfried spend much of their time holed up in the house Blicero has requisitioned. They would like to believe that it is safe, but it is not.

The house lies west of the Diundigt racecourse, quite the other direction from London, but no bearing is exempt—often, the rockets, crazed, turn at random, whinnying terribly in the sky, turn about and fall according each to its madness so unreachable and, it is feared, incurable. When there's time to, their owners destroy them, by radio, in mid-convulsion (96).

There is not always time. In October, a misfiring rocket killed 12 of its ground crew and blew out windows all around, including one in the house's drawing room. Rumor had it only the fuel and oxidizer had gone off, but Blicero, "with a trembling—she must say nihilistic—pleasure," told Katje that the Amatol charge in the warhead had also blown: "making them as much target as launch site" (96).

In between launches, the English air raids bring a similar roulette:

Spitfires come roaring in low over the sea at suppertime, the searchlights in the city staggering on, the after-hum of sirens hangs in the sky high above the wet iron seats in the parks, the AA guns chug, searching, and the bombs fall in woodland, in polder, among flats thought to be billeting rocket troops (96). 201 They are just as likely to fall on the house as anywhere else. Is it any wonder that the occupants have reverted to a form of

death they can control? They enact the story of Hansel and Gretel: the strayed children, the wicked witch, the fattening, the oven. Among the players, there is a silent understanding: This Northern and ancient form "shall be their preserving routine, their shelter, against what outside none of them can bear—the War, the absolute rule of chance, their own pitiable contingency here in its midst..." (96). Later, Katje remembers Blicero's teeth: "the network of stained cracks, and back in his night breath, in the dark oven of himself, always the coiled whispers of decay." It was his teeth that would benefit most

directly from the oven, from what he had planned for her and Gottfried. Before dinner, however, one must work up an appetite. It can take

awhile. While serving as a pillow for an Italian with his cock in Gottfried's mouth—with Blicero plunging into the boy from behind—Katje saw a game as long as history:

(she thinks of a mathematical function that will expand for her bloom-like into a power series with no general term, endlessly, darkly though never completely by surprise)... [the Italian's] phrase Padre Ignacio unfolding into Spanish inquisitor, black robes, brown arching nose, the suffocating smell of incense + confessor/executioner + Katje and Gottfried both kneeling, side by side in dark confessional + children out of old Mârchen kneeling, knees cold and aching, before the Oven, whispering to it secrets they can tell noone else ... (94-95).

Blicero's kink is dominance—dominance and humiliation. He whips the children, forces them to exchange clothing. He contemplates cutting Katje's hair (she cannot remember if he actually did it). He wants 202 Gottfried's hair to grow. It would be good for the boy, being in the barracks with woman's hair, failing inspections yet saved each time by a Captain who would exercise his own kind of discipline... When the game is called for the night, Gottfried is locked in a cage. He might be wearing Katje's maid costume, but "Their Captain allows no doubt as to which, brother or sister, really is maidservant, and which fattening goose" (96). It is the witch, however, who must end up in the oven—that's how

the story goes. Katje knows that the game can't last forever. Someday, Blicero will lead Gottfried to the oven. It will then be up to her to get behind Blicero and shove. Blicero also knows that the day is coming. He is not opposed. The oven is what attracted him to the game in the first place. '"Want the Change, ' Rilke said, 'O be inspired by the flame.'" Lyrical death was a pretension he hadn't shed: "To laurel, to nightingale, to wind ... wanting it, to be taken, to embrace, to fall toward the flame growing to fill all the senses and... not to love because it was no longer possible to act... but to be helplessly in a condition of love ...." (97). The Reich is dying and he with it. There is nothing he can do, nothing anyone can do. The glory of the hero's death is lost to him, as is the dignity of dying as a soldier. "He only wants now to be out of the winter, inside the Oven's warmth, darkness, steel shelter, the door behind him in a narrowing rectangle of kitchen-light gonging shut, forever. The rest is foreplay" (99).

As for Katje, she is just playing at playing, trying not to get too involved—or at least this is what she tells herself. But she has had many chances to do her job, give Allied intelligence the exact location of the 203 battery—and the commandant's house. There is always some excuse.

Eventually, she will leave. Pirate will come for her. The location will be made known. By then, however, her insides will be ashes. Has she really left? Perhaps her assignment was to stay with Blicero as long as she did, to allow him to function, give him the game he needed. And perhaps his job was to bring her into the game, to suggest to her an oven, to identify

her own need, her deadly desire. The System not only gives us what we need, it tells us what we need—it creates desires as well as fulfilling them. Before the War, Greta Erdman’s image shone larger than life on the German screen. Her most memorable role was in Alpdriicken, a Gerhardt von Gôll horror/pomography film. Here she was not a character as much as a symbol of female passivity, languid and exhausted. She had been designed to help recreate the German male, to get his harassed Weimer dick pre-Nazi hard—not to mention the positive image Greta provided for the new German woman! The role in Alpdriicken was one of many career highlights.

It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be. Other girls of her generation grew up asking, "Who am I?" For them it was a question full of pain and struggle. For Gretel [her true name] it was hardly even a question. She had more identities than she knew what to do with (482).

In Weisse Sandwiiste von Neumexiko, she played a cowgirl. She'd never ridden a horse, but the horse was understanding. In Jegund

Heraufl, "a lighthearted pun, of course, on the then popular phrase— 'Juden heraus')," she played the dizzy debutante Lotte Lüstig, who. 204 disguised as a scrub woman, had boated downriver in a bathtub with the dashing Max Schlepzig: "Every girl's dream" (483). After a couple of movies set in a basement torture chamber {Alpdriicken included), von Gôll took her on a whirlwind tour. They filmed in Paris, Vienna, Herrenchiemsee in the Bavarian Alps. She was in Das Wiitend Reich, von Gôll's notorious send-up of the reign of crazy Ludwig II, which was, of course, suppressed by the authorities: "It was considered unpatriotic to say that a German ruler could also be a madman" (394). The life and conquests of Frederick the Great were considered more fitting subject matter.^

She was also in Good Society, the film von Gôll made to get back in good graces. It was a big hit. Goebbels saw it three times, "giggling and punching in the arm the fellow sitting next to him, who may have been

Adolph Hitler" (394). Greta was the lesbian in the cafe, '"the one with the monocle, who's whipped to death at the end by the transvestite, remember?"' (394-95). A rewarding personal life bled in and out of her colorful career. Her lovers included von Gôll, Schlepzig, and an Italian stunt man who actually played her in that bathtub, wearing a yellow wig. Greta would sleep with him only when he was wearing it. Too many hands have been laid on her, too many whips applied. In Alpdriicken , one scene ends when jackal men come in to ravage Greta. The ravaging, however, actually took place, von Gôll let the

3Pynchon's source here is probably Kracauer, Siegried. From Caligari to Hitler, a Psychological History o f the German him. 205 cameras run. It was during this gang rape that Greta conceived her own

daughter, Bianca. Ensign Morituri, citizen of Hiroshima and living ghost, also tells a disturbing story about Greta. Having been dismissed from Kamikaze school—"'1 just didn't have a good attitude'"—he was assigned to the Propaganda Ministry and sent to Germany. He met Greta and her latest companion, Sigmund, at Bad Karma. Bad Karma was a resort, famous for its healing mud. It was the summer before wartime, "the last reprise of the European thirties [Morituri] had never known" (477). There was still time for mud baths, but just barely. Preparations were underway, the Machine was cranking up. The summer was an extended farewell. Greta was a mess. She'd just come back from Hollywood, where she'd failed to make it. She was suicidal, fearful, paranoid. She'd gotten the idea that she was Jewish and had begun hearing the Gestapo in every puff of air. Then the symptoms began:

However psychogenic these pains, tics, hives and nauseas, her suffering was real. Acupuncturists came down by Zeppelin from Berlin, showing up in the middle of the night with little velvet cases full of gold needles. Viennese analysts, Indian holy men. Baptists from America trooped in and out of Sigmund's castle, stage-hypnotists and Colombian curanderos slept on the rug in front of the fireplace. Nothing worked (475).

They decided on the mud at Bad Karma. It was jet black, bubbly, full of radium. It was said to cure anything. But evil was afoot in Bad Karma. Children were disappearing. Morituri saw it in the newspapers. Then Sigmund told him of Greta's 206 frequent absences. The night before, she'd come in very late, her hands trembling, mud on her shoes. Morituri began to follow her. Eventually, she led him to the mud. "Twilight came down on Bad Karma that night pallid and violent: the horizon was a Biblical disaster. Greta had dressed all in black, a hat with a veil covering most of her hair" (477).

The offering was to be a boy who'd lingered too long by the mud. "The boy wasn’t afraid of her at first. He might not have recognized her from his dreams. It would have been his only hope. But they made that impossible, his German overseers" (478). Her voice began to rise. She said that he had been in exile too long. Come home, she said, come back to your people. "Now he was

trying to break away, but her hand, her gloved hand, her claw had flown out and seized his arm. 'Little piece of Jewish shit. Don't try to run away from me'" (478). She proceeded to enact a bad burlesque of the ritual by which the shards of the broken vessel of Israel are put back together.'* She was Israel. She wandered the diaspora searching for stray children. She had found one now. With a heavy T^ddish accent, "actressy and false," she said: "I am the Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God. And 1 will take you back, you fragment of smashed vessel, even if 1 must pull you by your nasty little penis—"' (478).

'^Weisenburger notes, "The Kabbalists regarded Israel not only as a historical community, but as an esoteric symbol, a container or vessel of the Shekinah. Members of the community are parts of it" (218). 207 Morituri saved the kid—his one and only act of heroism. Sigmund

hustled Greta out of town. Morituri didn't report her. It never occurred to him. ’"You may condemn me for it. But 1 saw what I'd be handing her over to, and it came to the same thing, in official custody or not, you see'" (487-79). The next day, Germany invaded Poland: "There was no longer any way for children to vanish mysteriously" (479). Greta's passivity in Alpdriicken seems distant from the murderous

action at Bad Karma, but the two states are linked in the progression into death. Submission becomes dominance, the languid doll is supplanted by the mistress of the mud. Finally, however, the process is one. It is the same process that turns escape to entrapment, renewal to deepening death. It is the same process that called a defeated nation to try war again. Greta acted out the desires of her times, as a movie icon should. Near the end of the war, Greta and her husband Miklos Thanatz were sent to raise morale at Blicero's rocket battery. It was a strange place: evil karma. They followed an old roadway through the woods. In the middle of it were giant turds. What could have left those? Suddenly, it dawned on them, with no outward clue, that they were walking through the ruin of a great city—not ancient, but ruined in their lifetime. Then, they knew there was something between them, "some monitor. Saying, 'Not one step farther. That's all. Not one. Go back now'" (485). When they returned to the battery, they found Blicero entering his final madness. He was reverting to some ancestral version of himself. He screamed at the sky, sat in a trance for hours, his eyes rolled back in his head. When he talked, it sounded like the captain in Wozzak, "'his voice breaking suddenly up into the higher registers of hysteria'" (465). 208 Blicero took Greta away from the battery—not to the ruined city but to another forbidden site—a petrochemical plant Greta saw as a Castle.

Blicero called her Katje, said that she wouldn't escape again. He had something special planned for her, another change of clothing. This time, she would wear a garment of a new material, the material that the boy would wear in the oven. It was Imipolex, material of the future—the world's first erectile

plastic, and the substance chosen for the inside of the Schwarzgerat. Pynchon provides technical data: "Under suitable stimuli, the chains grow cross links, which stiffen the molecule and increase molecular

attraction" (699). Greta only knows how it felt:

"The moment it touched them it brought my nipples up swollen and begging to be bitten. 1 wanted to feel it against my cunt. Nothing I ever wore, before or since, aroused me quite as much as Imipolex. They promised me brassieres, chemises, stockings, gowns of the same material."

One of the men present at the scene strapped on a penis made of the stuff: "I rubbed my face against it, it was so delicious" (488). Greta had reached the ultimate in submission. She surrendered all parts of herself, body and mind. It was a human evacuation. '"There was an abyss between my feet. Things, memories, no way to distinguish them any more, went tumbling downward through my head. A torrent. I was evacuating all these, out into some void... '" (488). She doesn't know how long they kept her there: "I slept, I woke. Men appeared and vanished. Time had lost meaning. One morning 1 was outside the factory, naked in the rain." She made her way back to the 209 rocket site. Everyone was gone. It was quiet. It was the same silence she felt in the woods with Thanatz. This time, no message came, but she understood that the silence was intended for her and her alone, "my own personal silence" (488), the silence at her core. If Greta's life can be seen as a progression into this silence, Franz Pôkler moves toward a single word: Theirs. He's another of the master's creations—and one of the truest ___ His daughter. Use, was conceived the night he saw Alpdriicken. (The connection to Use is obvious. One Westwardman, one Indian, one little girl.) Leni, for once, had been on the bottom. Pokier thrusted into her again and again, thinking ".. yes, bitch—yes, little bitch—poor helpless bitch you're coming can't stop yourself now I'll whip you again whip you till you bleed ..." (397). During the war, Use had been used to manipulate him, to keep him working on the V-2. Once a year, she was released from her work camp to accompany her father to Zwolfkinder, Disneyesque city of children. "In a corporate state," we are told, "a place must be made for innocence." ZwOlfkinder is the proof. "If you were an adult, you couldn't get inside the city limits without a child escort" (419). The mayor was a child, the city council children; children kept the place clean, gave the tours, busted adults for traveling childless. Surely there were adults, terribly cynical adults, who conducted the town's real business, but you saw only children.

pokier didn't know if it was the real Use. He couldn't even be sure that they sent the same lise from year to year. But he did know that he was stuck. They had given him something he could not stand to lose. In 210 moments of weakness he could almost believe that it would all be restored

to him, that his family could be put back together—the family that crumbled years ago, before the War—when having had enough of living with a collaborator, Leni took her child and a single suitcase and went to live with people who cared for more than rockets. And so here was Pokier, the classic paranoid, knowing that They were using him, but powerless to fight it. He cursed the name of Weissmann, whose was pulling the strings here like the professional he was. Pokier hated the man actively, but did his bidding, even working on the Schwargerdt. There was a bulb burning non-stop above POkler's bunk at Peenemünde. It was Weissmann's agent, monitoring his subject's sleep. We come to find out it was non other than Byron. When Pokier was sent to Nordhausen, lise was right next door at Dora. He tried to go over a couple of times. The guards were polite, very polite. But they were also insistent: he didn't have clearance. What could he do? If the System can hand us our desires, make us want to die, or drape ourselves in Imipolex, then can't it also manufacture a being without any desire—not a human at all, really, but some sort of flattened automata? Yes, it turns out such a being has come on line, perhaps still some kinks to work out, a little residual sentiment, a propensity to miss what it doesn't have, and, frankly, to whine, but for the most part, it's a good working model. The name is Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. Sir Stephen is the perfect neutral observer. He hasn't made love in years. He can't even masturbate half the time. He has nothing to look forward to but a report to write, perhaps a book—nothing too racy; They 211 see to that. '"Go ahead hit me, I'll only fall over and bounce right back up. Watch.'" He demonstrates (216). He had a son. He thinks They sent him to Indo-China. "They're very polite when I ask, very polite but, they won't let me find out where he is..." (215). The whole System is stocked with such fine chaps, they mean well and they can't be expected to know what it is like for him, to have to go through life this way... What troubles him is that fundamentally, when you get right down to it, no one cares. They aren't sadists. There's just no passion at all. Which, of course makes him Their kind of guy. Sing that idiot song They taught you. Don't fuck it up.

The Penis He Thought Was His Own (lead tenor): 'Twas the penis, he thought-was his own- just a big playful boy of a bone... With a stout purple head. Sticking up from the bed. Where the girlies all played Telephone— (bass): Te-le-phone ___ (inner voices): But They came through the hole in the night, (bass): And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight- (inner voices): Out of sight... (tenor): Now he sighs all alone. With a heartbroken moan. For the pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn! (inner voices): Was, his, own! (217)

Not bad on Sir Stephen's part to handle that harmony all on his own—unless some of us happened to join in. Who could blame us? It's such a catchy tune! There is also the case of Slothrop, who has been, for the most part, an obvious absence in this chapter. Perhaps this is because the novel 212 finds him in the midst of becoming an absence. He ends up as a crossroads after going native in the Zone, sending out invisible emanations, wanderers in search of a home. You may have seen one once, a stranger you seemed to know. But perhaps not. There is doubt,

you see, about whether Slothrop ever existed. He may not even be here

now. Conversely, however, Slothrop has been here all along. He saw Pirate, a big mean mother with a windbumed face, pick up the message left by the rocket. He set up a facsimile of domestic relations with Greta Erdman, whipping her because she needs the warmth, finding out that through some pre-arrangement he knows just what to do.... Greta tells

Slothrop about Imipolex; Ensign Morituri tells him about Greta; Pokier tells him about the Schwargerdt; Sir Stephen sings Slothrop his song. Each piece of informtation fits into a larger pattern, each is part of the puzzle he is trying to solve. The central question is his own identity. Is he another of their constructs? He cannot say. He believes, however, that long ago something was done to him. He remembers a darkened room, a certain smell.... It is still distant, but it is coming back. His own fate, however, is swallowed up in a larger issue: a historical rhythm in which everything takes part. He is headed toward an assemblage of his time. It's a long way down a darkened shaft, but he understands that this is the direction he ought to be moving—even if his mind is not ready, and distractions are all around — . Funny thing about Slothrop, the rocket seems attracted to him. It is a reversal of the terms of seduction, the clumsy rocket stumbling after 213 graceful Slothrop, who manages to keep two steps ahead. Yes, he's the pied piper of the V-2, its musical master he's got it completely trained now, domesticated, harmless. But Slothrop doesn't seem to realize his power. He's not just being

modest. He's actually scared to death of the rocket, just like everyone else—maybe even more so than most. Slothrop's become a bit obsessed. He's been thinking that there's a rocket with his name on it. Or maybe they all have his name on them, just to be sure. He's never actually seen what's written on the rockets, never seen one intact, never even recovered a rocket part. He's been investigating rocket hits for ACHTUNG (Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany). He finds only ruins and death. No one tells him anything. This Captain Prentice, for instance, picks up his message without saying a word. Slothrop will thus file, a bit wearily, his fifty- millionth interbranch request for information, and he will be summarily ignored. ACHTUNG is the poor step-child of Allied intelligence—it's made to be ignored. Prentice is from S.O.E; they ignore everybody. Slothrop isn't bitter; he's resigned. "Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, anyway. A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now." He remembers the first Blitz as a long string of good luck—the Luftwaffe dropping bombs, but not on him. "But this last summer they started in with those buzzbombs. You'd be walking on the street, in bed just dozing off suddenly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops." If the sound passed over you, the bomb was somebody else's worry. "But if the engine cuts off, look out Jackson—it's begun its dive, sloshing the fuel aft, away from the engine burner, and you've got ten 214 seconds to get under something" (21). After a while, though, he got used to it. He found himself making bets with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick at the next desk on where the next doodle would hit. The rockets were another story:

You couldn't get adjust to the bastards, no way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he'd been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn't supposed to keep on like this.... (21).

There are deep-seated emotions coming out here, Puritan feelings about judgment from the sky. "[Slothrop] hangs at the bottom of his blood's avalanche, and can't manage but some nervous truce with their Providence. A détente" (25). Lately, however, the truce has grown uneasy. It would only take one rocket, wouldn't it? The judgment would be total. You'd feel just the tip as it hit your... London, the secular city, instructs him at every turn. "Ruins he goes daiiy to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death ..." (25). He is also given reasons to hope—not as many as he'd like, but some. The day before Pirate's rocket, Slothrop and some others had found a child alive, "a little girl, half-suflbcated under a Morrison shelter." He held her hand, purple with cold, and waited for the stretcher.

When she opened her eyes and saw him her words were, "Any gum, chum?" Trapped there for two days, gumless—all he had for her was a Thayer's Slippeiy Hm. He felt like an idiot. Before they took her off she brought his hand over to kiss anyway, her mouth and cheek in the flare lamps cold as frost, the city around them at 215 once a big desolate ice box, stale-smelling and no surprises inside ever again. At which point she smiled, very faintly, and he knew that's what he'd been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they'd found her down in the middle of (24).

Like everything else about Slothrop, this encounter fits a larger pattern. He often meets adult versions of Shirley Temple—young English women who don't know many Americans and thus view him as exotic. He likes to tell them about fireflies, which they have never seen .... He plots each encounter on a map in his office, writing the name and date and marking the location—in an American school boy's impulse— with a stick-on star: "The stars he pastes up are colored only to go with how he feels that day, blue on up to golden. Never to rank a single one, how can he? Nobody sees the map but Tantivy, and Christ they're all beautiful" (22). "Boobishly conscientious" (23), Slothrop never lets the map get behind. Keeping it up is an odd, obsessive act—a compulsion in contrast to his otherwise entropie workspace. We can see it as a fraternity man's reflex, the map of an ego built on "conquests." For, Slothrop, however, this isn't the point at all. The map marks upsurges of life in the space of a great "Despite," a succession of moments against the major flow:

Jennifer's breasts inside cold sweater's wool held to warm a bit in a coal-smoke hallway he'll never know the daytime despondency of. .. cup of Bovril a fraction down from searing his bare knee as Irene, naked as he is in a block of glass sunlight, holds up precious nylons one by one to find a pair that hasn't laddered, each struck flashing by the light through the winter trellis outside... (23). 216 The map brings Slothrop to "Their" attention. It seems that each star falls in a rocket-struck sector, but is dated before the rocket actually

struck. Huh? What is going on here? The question is under study at PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender—as Pynchon puts it, "whose surrender is not clear") (34). PISCES is a catchall for oddball intelligence: a haven for those who belong nowhere else. It is housed at the White Visitation—an old (and in one wing, still) mental hospital and classic Jacobean "folly." It’s another l^chonic gargantua, an orgy of self-expression featuring triangular and spherical rooms; rooms walled into mazes; archways, grottos, and plaster floral arrangements; cracked pilasters, dangling Cupids, terra­ cotta facings on every floor. There are gargoyles designed to drain rain water through their mouths, but the pipes are out of repair—the worst storms bring only drool. Frescoes are all around. One ceiling offers a

Methodist version of Christ's Kingdom. Lions cuddle with lambs, swains and milkmaids become human cornucopia, fruit spills lushly into their arms and at their feet. It is an idyllic, Edenic scene—except for one fine point: "No one's expression is quite right. The wee creatures leer, the fiercer beasts have a drugged or sedated look, and none of the humans have any eye contact at all" (82). If we didn't know better, we'd say that some of this eerie incorrectness has rubbed off on PISCES. Of course, all possible means for "expediting surrender" must be explored, but what of the wild talents at the White Visitation—the clairvoyants and mad magicians, telekinetics and astral travelers, hypnotists and gatherers of light? The man in 217 charge here is Brigadier General Ernest Pudding, come out of retirement just for the war. World War I was the one that was really his. "His

greatest triumph on the battlefield came in 1917, in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man's land some 40 yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit" (77). He was pensioned off to an empty house in Devon to have a go at that favorite pastime of retired officers, combinatorial analysis. He embarked on a massive work. Things That Can Happen in European

Politics, but found it veiy dodgy going. Things kept happening-

including another war. When it came, he volunteered. Intelligence work was mentioned, but he hadn't imagined anything like this It had to have been treacheiy high inside staff. Oh, it's quite a crew here at PISCES: spiritualists, vaudevillians,

Coueists, Ouspenskians, Sinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts. Dale Carnegie zealots, statisticians. Yes, even statisticians, or a statistician: Roger Mexico. Mixed in with this crowd even his objective equations take on apocalyptic shadings. The rocket hits, he notes, follow a Poisson distribution, the order of randomness itself. This is just how things should be, have to be, it's a well known equation; you can look it up. His "colleagues," however, see only a map that matches Slothrop's, generated through mathematical voodoo. Roger is considered a prophet of death.

When it comes to Slothrop, everyone has a theory. Mexico thinks the map is a statistical oddity—a piece of dumb luck the random universe had to generate someday But that sounds like determinism—not

"random" at all, had to generate. That's odd. 218 He feels the foundations of [his] discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd—think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop—beyond the zero—and into the other realm. Of course you don't move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that's how you ought to be moving (85).

Could it be precognition; is Slothrop somehow able to predict where rockets will fall? How about psychokinesis, could he be using some secret force of mind to force the rockets to fall where they do? "He may not be physically highballing them about the sky: but maybe he is fooling with the electrical signals inside the rocket's guidance system" (85). The motivation is thought to be Freudian: Slothrop wants to eliminate the Sexual other; he wants his women dead. Is an interest in cinema noted in his file? Has he seen Alpdriicken? A more mechanistic explanation is also possible. Slothrop falls under the dominion of Edward Pointsman, Pavlovian behaviorist, torturer of dogs and stalker of children. Pointsman has been in search of a human subject, and then along comes Slothrop. Perfect. It seems that while on loan to Harvard from Darmstadt, the early Pavlovian Laszlo Jamf (who was to go on to have a splendid career in organic chemistiy, highlighted by the invention of Imipolex), got hold of a slim National Research Council grant to do a bit of conditioning on infant Tyrone S. Jamf chose the kid's sex organ as his target, figuring that a hardon was a hard response to miss.

No one knows what Jamf used for a stimulus. It's become a bit of an academic joke; "The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches per year on the subject, which ironically is the exact •219 mean length Jamf reported for infant T.’s erection" (84). Could it have had something to do with rockets, even this long before the development of the V-27 Or has the rocket merely brought it back? Is this the ultraparadoxical phase as Pavlov described it, a weakening of opposites, the tearing down of the wall that kept the stimulus at bay? The rocket must be the stimulus, but that would mean that the response came first.

Can Slothrop feel some hint of the rocket in the air before it comes, is the stimulus something that is there for everyone, but that the rest of us are put together too coarsely to recognize? When the research was over, Jamf was supposed to extinguish the refiex, leaving little Tyrone perfectly normal and adjusted. Maybe Jamf forgot. Maybe he pushed the instinct beyond the Pavlovian zero, allowing it to lay dormant for 20 or 30 years. Maybe it was triggered again by the rocket. Pointsman doesn't know, but he intends to find out. It is important work. If the cue is in the air and the rocket follows it without exception, finding it will mean removing the damnable contingency of life under the rocket. "We'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be" (86). Important to Science, yes, but also to Ned Pointsman. He has given his life to mechanical psychology, moved deeper and deeper into the Pavlovian labyrinth, searching for Truth, but also hoping, he is not ashamed to admit it, for a bit of personal glory. He believed that at the end of the maze was his own rather large chunk of cheese, a Nobel Prize. Lately, however, the labyrinth has seemed endless, the Prize a fading 220 dream. He can't go back; he has come too far; he wouldn't even know how

to go about it. No, it's too late; Pointsman is stuck in the Pavlovian maze. Meanwhile, a consuming dialectic works its way toward him. The other London Pavlovians, the clandestine society of seven, keepers of the sacred text, have begun to die. One by one the number decreases, the War taking them all.... But perhaps there is still time after all. Time to halt the dialectic, reverse his progression into oblivion, claim his rightful due. On to Stockholm! He has begun again rehearsing what to say, not only to the public, but to his dead colleagues: "here's to you then, chaps, it'll be all of us up there onstage tomorrow, Ned Pointsman only happened to survive that's all..." (142). Slothrop. Slothrop is the key... Some time ago, Slothrop was summoned from his tour of V-2 strikes and told to report to St. Veronica's Hospital. Eventually, he is to be taken to the Casino Hermann Goering, recently liberated from the Nazis. It's the kind of place where a footloose GI can have a real good time, and Slothrop is to be well sexed and given free drinks. He is to be brought to the casino, however, to study—to leam everything he can about the V-2.

When he is ready, he is to "escape," to be "accidentally" set loose, sent into the Zone and exposed to the rocket. The former War-state is to be the laboratory. This Pointsman has style. First, however, Slothrop is subjected to a battery of tests—including an injection of sodium amytal. Just a small injection. Nothing out of the ordinary. (Pointsman looks at the ceiling and whistles.) Under the amytal, Slothrop takes an excremental journey. He drops his harmonica down the toilet: aw, shit. He's in the men's room at 221 the Roseland Ballroom in New York, which is where the young Malcolm X shines shoes. Why that's "Red" right over there. He's buffed Slothrop's

black patents a bunch of times, "down on his knees jes poppin' dat rag to beat the band" (The Band, by the way, is Charlie Parker's, the still-living Bird; good shit). Now, Red is closing in on Slothrop's butt, which is sticking out of the toilet he is gradually working his way into, reaching for that harp. One of Malcolm's thick fingers, coated with jelly or cream, slides across Slothrop's buttock: '"Good golly he sure is all asshole, ain't he?'" Red says. Jeepers, what a position to be in. "Distant hands clutch after his calves and ankles, snap his garters and tug at the Argyle sox Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in, but these insulate so well, or he has progressed so far down the toilet by now, that he can hardly feel the hands at all..( 6 4 ) .

He shakes them off and finds himself in a tunnel. No harp in sight, just shit: "shit nothing can flush away, mixed with hardwater minerals into a deliberate brown bamacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic, these shapes loom and pass smoothly as he continues on down the long cloudy waste line" (65).

He finds that he can identify what shit is whose, at least the shit of his Harvard acquaintances: "Some of it too of course must be Negro shit, but that all looks alike." Here's a patch from "Gobbler" Biddle, "must've been the night we all ate chop suey at Fu's Folly in Cambridge cause there's bean sprouts around here someplace and even a hint of that wild plum sauce." Here's an offering from Dumpster Villard, "a black shit mean as resin that will someday clarify forever to dark amber." He'd 222 been constipated that night. Why, there is even shit from Jack Kennedy, the junbassador's boy. Where is Jack? If he’d been around he might have caught that harmonica or saved it from gravity somehow He's got Last Best Hope written all over that freckled face. Slothrop is working his way toward a vision of America. He will soon come upon Crutchfield the westwardman, his little pard' Whappo, and the other singular archetypes. He will even hear a new version of the perennial favorite "Red River Valley": "Down this toilet they say you are flushin'—" (68). At the bottom, he runs into an Organization Man. Okay, Slothrop says, if there's only one of each type the System needs, then what about all the others? "Boston. London. The ones who live in the cities. Are those people real, or what?" (70). Some are. Some aren't.

Q, Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary? A. It depends what you have in mind. Q, Shit. 1 don't have anything in mind. A. We do (70).

In the Zone, Slothrop is injected again, this time by Tchitcherine. Under the amytal, he speaks German—that stay at the casino must have really furthered his educationi Later, the session nags at the lining of Tchitcherine's brain as if the hangover was his own. "Deep, deep- further than politics or sex or infantile terrors.. a plunge into the nuclear blackness... " (390). The color black runs all through the transcript. Slothrop hadn't mentioned Enzian or the Schwarzkommando, but he did talk about the Schwarzgerdt. 223 And he also coupled "schwarz-" with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman. Blackrocket. Blackdream. The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone had probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear to flower separately? Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name- giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting the namer most hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words (391).

Again the act of naming is eclipsed, incorporated into death's grand progression; it has become the means for bringing the world into death's fold. Below the naming, however is that which has no name. Perhaps it is black. Perhaps it is white. Perhaps it has no color. Nothing. Our heart of darkness journey ends with Brigadier Pudding who enacts his own internalization of shit. It is the infamous, blasphemous scene that cost Inchon the Nobel. Pudding, we note, has been sinking for some time. His weekly briefings are given over to Titanic babble, "senile observations, office paranoia, gossip about the war that may or may not involve breaches of security, reminiscences of Flanders ...." He remembered the mud, how it choked the artillery pieces; "the mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied textures of human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked leagues of shit in all direction ..." (79). He also liked to share recipes, especially for dishes with "Surprise" in the title; "how he's chuckled, as unsuspecting dinner-guests go knifing into his notorious Toad-in-the-Hole, through the honest

Yorkshire batter into— ugh! what is it? a beet rissolé, a stu ffed beet rissole!” 224

Pudding has thousands of these recipes and no shame about sharing any of them with the lot at PISCES, along with, later in the weekly soliloquy, a line of two, eight bars, from "Would You Rather Be a Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder, or a Private with a Chicken on Your Knee?" then perhaps a lengthy recitation of all his funding difficulties ... (80).

Yes, the brigadier is failing, gone around the bend, and if the crew at PISCES aren't careful, he'll take them with him. No agency seeking funding past V-E day can afford weakness at the top. At this point. Pointsman is not convinced he can actually get rid of Pudding (that will come later). He just wants to keep Pudding occupied. He's studied the old man's conditioning and made the necessaiy (and frankly obvious) arrangements. The process has already begun. Pudding, "trembling, slips from his quarters down the back stairs, by a route only he knows," into a lumber room "whose stacks of junk and random blacknesses, even this far from childhood, are good for a chill," then down another flight. He is singing and hoping for courage.

Wash me in the water That you wash your dirty daughter. And 1 shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall.. (231).

He is entering D Wing, the psychiatric ward. "A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones: '1 am blessed Metatron. I am keeper of the secret. 1 am guardian of the Throne ....'" As Steven

Weisenburger points out, the night's progression is a satirical inversion 225 of the Kabbalistic ascent to the Merkabah, the throne of life.S Pudding's progress will instead be toward the throne of death.

Old Pudding must negotiate half a dozen offices or anterooms before reaching his destination. It hasn't yet been a fortnight, but there is already something of ritual to this, of iteration. Each room will hold a single unpleasantness for him; a test he must pass. He wonders if Pointsman hasn't set these up too. Of course, of course he must... how did the young bastard ever find out? Have I been talking in m' sleep? Have they been slipping in at night with their truth serums to— " ( Pynchon 231).

His thoughts are interrupted by the first test. A hypodermic set-up has been left on a table: "Yes mornings I felt terribly groggy, couldn't wake, after dreaming—were they dreams? I was talking.. .. But it's all he remembers, talking while someone else was there listening... . He is shivering with fear, and his face is whiter than whitewash" (232). So begins a progression past a succession of objects—a can of Saverin coffee, a file drawer left ajar, a Mallacca cane, a corpse in a burned uniform. Each "test" moves him deeper into his death-bound fears and memories: "But these are not malignant puns against an intended sufferer so much as a sympathetic magic" (232). Pudding is being given precisely what he needs.

In the seventh chamber waits Domina Noctuma, the eclipse of Metatron, played by Katje Borgesius, freshly back from Holland. Is she again playing at playing? Or was this a lie even with Blicero? Perhaps Katje is also being given something she needs—being told once again of her election by death, her specialness in the master's eyes.

^My source here is again Weisenburger (120-124). Pynchon's source was probably Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. 226 Her face is done up like a beauty from thirty or forty years before. She is naked except for a long sable cape and black boots. "Her only jewelry is a silver ring with an artificial ruby cut not to facets but still in the original boule, an arrogant gout of blood, extended now, waiting his kiss" (233). "His clipped mustache bristles, trembling, across her fingers. She has filed her nails to long points and polished them the same red as her ruby." She tells him to undress. He undresses. She asks him what he is thinking. He is thinking of the night they met.

The mud stank. The Archies were chugging in the darkness. His men, his poor sheep, had taken gas that morning. He was alone. Through the periscope, underneath a star shell that hung in the air, he saw h er... and though he was hidden, she saw Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in No Man's land, the machine guns raked patterns all around her, but she needed no protection. "They knew you mistress. They were your own" (233).

And so is Pudding. He is on his knees now, "bare as a baby." His skin is welted and scarred; "his penis stands at present arms" (235). At her command, he crawls forward to kiss her boots.

He is to be given his pain, but only if his offering pleases her.

Here is his worst moment. She has refused him before. His memories of the Salient do not interest her. She doesn't seem to care for mass slaughter as much as for myth, and personal terror. .. but please... please... please let her accept ----- "At Badajoz," whispering humbly, "during the war in Spain . .. a bandera of Franco's Legion advanced on the city, singing their regimental hymn. They sang of the bride they had taken. It was you. Mistress: they-they were proclaiming you as their bride" (234). 227 She waits, then smiles, the evil In It taking care of Itself, as usual.

"Yes. . . . Many of them did become my bridegrooms that day," she whispers, flexing the bright cane. . . . "1 took their brown Spanish bodies to mine. They were the color of the dust, and the twilight, and of meats roasted to a perfect texture... most of them were still so young. A summer day, a day of love: one of the most poignant 1 ever knew. Thank you. You shall have your pain tonight" (234).

Sometimes he Is tied by a gold-tassled fourragère or his own Sam Browne. Tonight, however, he Is bound only by his need—"for pain, for something real, for something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper Illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous face." He has been kept so long from her, the true owner of his body, sender of communiqués of vertigo, nausea, pain— "above all pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth...

. " (235). She stands over him, legs astride, pelvis cocked. "Her pubic hair has been died black for the occasion. He sighs, and lets escape a shameful groan" (235). He wants to kiss her cunt, but she won't let him. She has something else In mind: '"Kneel here and take what I give you."’ She begins to piss.

He opens his mouth to catch the stream, choking, trying to keep from swallowing, feeling warm urine dribble out of the comers of his mouth and down his neck and shoulders, submerged in the hissing storm. When she's done he licks the last few from her lips. More cling, golden clear, to the glossy hairs of her qulm. Her face, looming between her bare breasts, Is smooth as steel (235). 228 She tells him to hold up her fur. "Early in this game she was nervous, constipated, wondering if this was anything like male impotence." Pointsman had given her laxatives. Now she is ready. "Her intestines whine softly, and she feels shit begin to slide down and out.... A dark turd appears out the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks" (235). Pudding leans forward and take the shit into his mouth. He surrounds it with his lips, begins sucking on it tenderly, licking the bottom.

He is thinking, he’s sorry, he can’t help it, thinking of a Negro’s penis, yes he knows it abrogates part of the conditions set, but it will not be denied, the image of a brute African who will make him behave The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem (235).

He takes the turd down his gullet. He gags but clamps his teeth. He must go on. It is his evening bread: "Bread that would only have floated in porcelain waters somewhere, unseen, untasted—risen now, and baked in the bitter intestinal Oven to bread we know, bread that’s light as domestic comfort, secret as death in bed." His mouth spasms; the pain is terrible. "With his tongue he mashes shit against the roof of his mouth and begins to chew, thickly now, the only sound in the room " (236). This, then, is the heart of it: the shit-eating. Oven-baking, death- loving heart. The killing goes on because we desire it. We are the subjects the System wants. 229 ^ But do we have to be? Gravity's Rainbow is a directory of Alternatives Against History (AAH). As the name suggests, however, no alternative is enough. It's another case of I^chonic failed resistance. Revival techniques won't work. The patient is dead. Thomas Gwenhidwy works at St. Veronica's. He is a hale Welshman with a white Santa Claus beard and a gruff but happy manner. He likes to drink—concoctions that would kill the less hardy: grain alcohol mixed with whatever is at hand—"beef tea, grenadine, cough syrup, bitter belch-gathering infusions of blue scullcap, valerian root, motherwort, and lady's slipper." He also has a remarkable singing voice: "he loves to practice the bass part to 'Diadem' as the Flying Fortresses take off at full power, and even so you can hear him, bone-vibrating and pure above the bombers, all the way to Stoke Poges" (169). The wards of St. Veronica are full of the dispossessed: blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews: "they have been bombed out, frozen, starved, meanly sheltered, and their faces, even the chidren's, all possess some ancient intimacy with pain and reverse." Gwenhidwy strides among them, never off his feet: "he fusses endlessly pitch-and-roll avast you scum down the long rows of sick or dying faces" (170). It is all quite beyond Pointsman, who is familiar mainly with the genteel symptoms found in the West End. Gwenhidwy also has some theories never circulated on Harley Street. The Welsh, he contends, are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. It may be that everyone belongs to such a tribe, that we were once together, then scattered like seeds, "flying outward from the primal fist so long ago" (170). Pointsman is skeptical. 230 In our current dispersed state, hierarchy reigns. Gwenhidwy asks Pointsman if he wants to hear something really paranoid. It seems that there may be an order to the V-2 beyond the Poisson and perhaps even Slothrop's sexual wanderings. You see, the bulk of the rockets are falling on the East End.

So? In some cities, the rich live on a hill with the poor below. In others, the rich occupy the shoreline, forcing the poor inland. In London, the East End is the poorest—the gradient of wretchedness runs toward the sea. Why is this?

"Is it because of ship-ping? Is it in the pat-tems of land use, especially those relating to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an­ cient tribal tabu, surviving down all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly"

East Enders are meant to die first: "We're expendable: those in the West

End, and north of the river are not" (173). Why—this is a projection of a city paranoiac, not to mention the underlying assertion that a city can have a consciousness of any kind (which is itself highly suspect). And about this vague and menacing

"Threat"— Gwenhidwy cuts in:

"Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, floating across the sea to invade the es-tuaiy ___ or of waves of darkness .. waves of fire.... Perhaps of being swallowed again by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It's none of my business, city dream s.. . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always chang-ing, to meet exactly the chang­ ing shapes of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns. 231 the disgraced b!sh-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing" (173).

What can we do against such a Player? What rebellion remains? Gwenhidwy breaks out a bottle of Vat 69 and proposes a toast to the babies. Babies? "’Ah. I've been keeping my own map? Plot-ting data from the maternity wards. The ba-bies bom during the Blitz are al so fol-lowing a

Poisson distribution" (173). That night, when only the patients and night staff remain, several enormous water bugs munch through paper sacks left in Gwenhidwy's office. You can hear them, loud as mice, between the roar of the bombers and the rocket explosions. Piercing containers is their kind of work. They are agents of unification—Christmas bugs.

They were deep in the straw of the manger at Bethlehem, they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening red among a golden lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and downward ----- A tranquil world: the temperature and humidity staying nearly steady, the day's cycle damped only to a soft easy sway of light, gold to antique-gold to shadows and back again. The crying of the infant reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see (174).

It is The Myth of the Redemptive Baby, affecting even ancient bugs who, naturally, have seen it all. We shall see the myth again, most notably when Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake come upon a church. Roger and Jessica are in love. "It was what Hollywood likes to call a

'cute meet,"' Roger motoring in a vintage Jaguar (it would have to be vintage, wouldn't it, since this is World War 11?), "Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle, murky wool ATS skirt hiked up 232 on a handle bar, most nonregulation black slip and clear pearl thighs above the khaki stockings, well—" (38). A serious wartime affair quickly develops. It is an upsurge of life that touches those they meet: "They confuse everyone. They look so innocent. People immediately want to protect them: censoring themselves away from talk of death, business, duplicity when Roger and

Jessica are there. It's all shortages, songs and boy friends, films and blouses" (121). You know that you should know better, that this is all foolishness and illusion, another con job, but when you see them you can't help thinking that there still may be (ugh) hope. As for Jessica and Roger, well—it is remarkable: like suddenly discovering you can breathe when you haven't been doing it for years. To think that something so natural, so necessary to life, has been restored—and to think that you had gone so long without it.. . it gives you a sense of both wonder and desperation: if this should be taken away, if you should be deprived of it after knowing it Don't think. Be in love. Fuck the war. Jessica has someone else, an official govemment-issue boyfriend, a lieutenant, nicknamed, of all things, Beaver. Yeech. In their spare time, Beaver and Jess enjoy cuddling. She buys him pipes. It is enough to make Roger sick. Has Beaver ever done to her the things that he has? Has Beaver ever kissed her sweet labia. Has she ever taken her blouse off for him when they were out driving? Has he ever felt for her the way

Roger does? Has anyone ever felt this way? Roger has no one, no one besides Jessica. The day they met he said the war was his mother. Clever line, offbeat, intriguing: it also 233 happened to be true. Lately, he felt himself coming back to the womb, sinking deeper into her clutches. Even his old "I'm just a statistician" excuse has stopped working. Good show, Mexico, he could hear his "colleagues" saying, didn't know you had it in you, the predictions . . . 1 DIDN'T PREDICT ANYTHING, he'd say (Roger is given to hysterics, especially these days). Except no one dared to say much of anything to him. They avoided him. They were scared. He was too. Pointsman, however, sought him out. Pointsman wanted him in a way Roger did not want to understand. It was if they were all in secret complicity. Pointsman, Siothrop, the rocket, and Roger, too. Despite himself, he was getting in over his depth, edging closer to Mummy. With Jessica, however, he could leave it all behind. They were forming a joint being beyond both Individuals, and beyond the War's control. They found a house in the stay-away zone. "Jessica has bought an old doll, seashells, her aunt's grip filled with lack knickers and silk stockings. Roger's managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in an empty garage. Whenever they meet here, one ai ways remembers to bring a flower or two" (41). They are playing house, enacting a domestic bliss too far gone to even remember. They are vulnerable, it is easy to think of a rocket meant just for them—Cupid's arrow eclipsed. They should have stuck to hotels—even if it meant filling out forms, being frisked for cameras and binoculars, following regulations. But isn't the point to avoid the War's accounting, to slip out of its clutches, enter another world? The strange thing is, they don't feel danger. It is as if the War is allowing them this time, as if they've been given a reprieve—for now. 234 It may end at any time. The house isn't theirs. The time for homecoming is over, despite the V-E that appears to be on its way. Jessica says she can't remember what it was like before the war, at least not in the way she wants to remember. Roger would like to make a joke out of it, but he can't bring the pre-war daze to mind too well himself: "'.MI /remember is that it was silly. Just overwhelmingly silly. Nothing happened. Oh, Edward Vlll abdicated. He fell in love with—'" (59). Jessica knows that. She wants to know what it was like. She has only snippets: "Games, pinafores, girl friends, a black alley kitten with white little feet, holidays by the sea, brine, frying fish, donkey rides, peach taffeta, a boy named Robin " The memories are shallow, right at the surface. She was just a child. Does she want to know what it was like to live unshadowed by death? Jess, nobody gets to experience that, at least not for long. Perhaps she wants only a plateau of normality, a long stretch of years she could go back to, real enough to make the War seem a bad dream, an illusion, an exception. Roger's willing to help out, but the trouble is that in his mind life before the war was an illusion. That's okay, it may be what she is after: return to the illusion she never had the chance to share. And, when he speaks, he can almost believe it is possible, if not to relive the past, then to transport a little of its lightness, its blasphemous unseriousness and irrelevance here: "'One took lots of aspirin. One was drinking or drunk much of the time. One was concerned about getting one's lounge suits to fit properly. One despised the upper classes but tried desperately to be like them ... 235 'And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—'" (59). He begins to tickle her, reaching for all the right places, but...

But a Rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed—the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders (59).

Their hearts pound. They sit still and are unable to touch: "Death has come in the pantry doon stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me" (60). They come upon the church one night near Christmas. It is the War's canonical hour.

A scratch choir is singing-

all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose light shone nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the crosshatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there (128).

A black face is among them, a Jamaican corporal: "From palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the Anglo-American Empire (1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he'd hardly glimpsed in crossing." They are singing in

English, "forays now and then into polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, even a German macronic from the fifteenth century, attributed to Henry Suso." The Jamaican's baritone soars above the other voices, exotic—and erotic 236 He was bringing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set, Big and little Anita, Stiletto May Plongette who loves it in between her tits and will do it that way for free. The corporal's presence, the exotic voice, the fact that German is being sung in an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man's presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it is doing (129).

The War had ripped the world from its bearings, has created its own world to meet its unending demands. The War needs coal. The War needs electricity. The Electric Monopoly is playing a game.

In the night, the deepest concrete wells of the night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes—gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night's Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals (133).

Even Big Ben is running fast: "no one seems to understand or to care"—at least no one in Control. The official explanation is that high loads are expected:

. . . war-drains so vast the clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads daily do not come, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plo t, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are (133).

Tonight, however, remembering is possible. We are connected to the past. 237 There must have evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this o n e- something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw ... (135).

Could the birth really have been miraculous? Is there still a home for us to return to? Are there existences that are not the War's own? Is it possible that the criminal face on your ID card is not really you, that the soul "snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shudder fell" (134) can be returned? If these are not your exact hopes, then name them—and for a moment lay down all that stands in their way. For one night, let all questions be open. "Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it" (134). "Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening" (135). The night of the birth, the bets ran heavy against this Messiah being the real thing. "There's too much shit in the streets"—it's a cynical scene. Jewish collaborators are selling gossip to Imperial intelligence; hookers are handling the influx of business. Innkeepers are counting their coins, thinking that this Census thing was working out swell: "up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SFQK Record Keeping and Herod or Hitler..." Did we say The City Dactylic is a thing of the future? It's a hard old world and "for a baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 238 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined" (135). But tonight it is possible to believe. Jessica has never seen Roger's face like this. His skin is child-pink, "his eyes more glowing than the lamplight alone can account for—isn't it? or is that how she wants it to be?" (129). The question belongs alongside another, the question asked the night of the Birth: "Is the baby smiling or is it just gas?" Again: "Which do you want it to be?" (131). Those in attendance must decide. Tonight, they crowd the pews in their greatcoats—the War's populace, used to broken biscuits and

Household Milk, and menthol in the morning to take the taste of death away: the parents who want only the peacetime luxury of buying an electric train for their children, but will settle for salvaged Spam tins; the grandparents who will wait up, "beyond insomnia, watching for the yearly impossible not to occur," the new winter fermentation which slackens year to year" (133), no longer yielding any sense of miracle, but always good for a brief revival. Will it come again this year? Even now? The only ones who aren't on edge are the children. For them, belief just happens and miracles are the way things are. They are used to playing with Spam tins. Spam destroyers. Spam tanks. If now a Spam train, that's fine... It is part of the Christmas game, "The piaster baby, the oxen frosted with gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens to flesh ... He is the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the sky will be milk" (133). 239 Tonight is for adults—for those struggling to believe, wanting still to find life within them. We have been led like lemmings to this seaside church. We have heard the ancient song. It may be that we are being fooled again: we ought to know better by now. But the singing is so affecting, it's a pitch we cannot resist. Perhaps life can yet cheat death, at least for an odd moment. Perhaps the sky can receive its own exemption, perhaps above us now is not a rocket but a Star. Or perhaps none of it is true. It may be that we are doomed and always have been and have only stopped for a moment before charging over the cliff. Right now, it makes no difference. Blessed or doomed, we are here now, listening.

So this pickup group, these exiles and homy kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red­ eyed, sore-throated, piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and all-day hangovers, wishing death on officers they truly hate, men you have seen on foot and smileless in the cities but forgot, men who don't remember you either, knowing they ought to be grabbing a little sleep, not out here performing for strangers, give you this evensong, climaxing now with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping three- and fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church—no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little ciy, our maximum reach outward—pra/se be to God!—[or you to take back to your war-address, your war- identity, across the snow's footprints and tire tracks finally to the patch you must create by yourself, alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way hom e ----- (136).

Where can we go but back to the War? We bundle our greatcoats around us and head out, thinking of what we must do the next day, the 240 next week, the next month—how awful, how bloody awful... your duty, you see.... Babies are fodder for the next round of killing; Gwenhidwy's map predicts only that the War will go on. We can imagine a vampire scenario here, the need for fresh blood, etc. A more accurate analogy, however, may be an Industrial chicken farm (industrial farm, there's your eclipse again—living beings given over to cynical production). What is "life" in such a place but a squawking and over-crowded waiting to die. . . . Everyone knows that chickens can't fly, but ours never even develop wings! In fact, these chickens are all white meat. We've got a patent! Stick out your chests, associates, let the nice people see ----- Jessica leaves Roger. When "peace" comes she and Beaver are both transferred to the Zone, part of an English contingent charged with rounding up spare V-2's and firing them into the sea. Pointsman made sure Jessica was included in the group. With the "Slothrop Affair" worsening hour-by-hour, he cannot afford to have Mexico distracted. When Roger finds out about Pointsman's treachery, he is pissed. At the end of a reign of terror against a confused office staff, he charges into a conference room where Pointsman is attending a high level meeting. We are hoping maybe for a machine gunning, or at least a hostage situation, but instead, in an empty and useless gesture of Dada disgust, Roger urinates on the table. Is this what resistance has become? Jessica is glad to be going. "We're at Peace. The paranoia, the danger, the tuneless whistling of busy Death next door, are all put to sleep, back in the War, back with her Roger Mexico Years" (628). "Her future is with the World's own, and Roger's only this strange version of 241 the war he carries with him" (629). He belongs with Pointsman, and

Slothrop, and Death—the lot of them, creepy. Roger isn't ready to give up on her yet. He's heading for the Zone himself, singing as he goes—first a ballad for Jessica—

1 dream that 1 have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away. And we, so free. Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say... .(627) then an anthem for a fighting/pissing man-

light one up before you mosey out that door. Once you cuddled 'em and kissed 'em, But we're bringin' down Their system. And it isn't a resistance, it's a war... (640).

Here's Pirate flying an airplane, "a more or less hijacked P-47, on route to Berlin" (621). The plane is kelly green. Pirate's idea: "Gray was for the war" (619). He's doing tricks—a roll over Celle, a loop over Brunswick, and an Immelman over Magdenburg. Does he have no shame? Does he think he's free? Maybe that walking stick was magic.

There's a Counterforce in the Zone. Osbie Feel should already be in Marseilles, contacting ace undergrounder Blodgett Waxwing. Webley Silvemail is on route to do a little cafe scouring in Zurich. Katje is going to Nordhausen. They are on the trail of Slothrop, whom they think they can save. The Argentinean anarchists are making a movie, an adaptation of the life of Martin Rerro. They regard Fierro not only as a national hero, but an anarchist saint. In Hemândez's poem, Fierro spends his childhood 242 on the cstancia. Then, he is conscripted into the army. "It is in the period of General Roca's campaign to open the pampas by exterminating the people who live there" (Inchon, 387). Rerro has his doubts about the strategy—it works, but isn't it just a tad evil? He deserts. A posse goes after him. Fierro, a persuasive cuss, convinces the sergeant in charge to join him. They head into the wilderness to live with the Indians. The anarchists see the film as a foundation for a new society, a paradise regained. Der Springer—the former Gerhardt von Goll—is directing. He believes it has been left to him to lay the seeds of reality in the Zone. This "reality" bit, however, has its drawbacks. Springer also wants to film Martin Fierro, part two. Hemândez wrote a second poem seven years after the first. In this one, Fierro assimilates back into Christian society, "gives up his freedom for the kind of constitutional Gesellschaft being pushed those days by Buenos Aires. A very moral ending, but completely opposite the first" (387). Springer is figuring on a sequel. If the first film is successful, they'll have another ready to go. It will be perfect: the charisma of the first will be completely routinized. They will be able to sell the "danger" and "intrigue" of Rerro while also delivering family entertainment. The demographics look very promising __ To convince the Argentineans, however, he chooses a different tact: the strategy of truth. Even the freest gauchos end up selling out, he tells them. That's just how things are. Of course, it's a rather fine distinction between selling out in the end, and realizing—after seven years in the woods, not really enjoying it. 243 pining away for Buenos Aires and ali the little luxuries, like toilet paper— that you always were a sell out, and just didn't want to believe it. "In the final analysis," a final analyst says, "The Counterforce was hindered by the fact that there was no Counterforce." Funny thing about Slothrop, number two: none of his "girls" exists! Flatfoots from the Firm have checked out one star after another and the results are not encouraging. It seems that nutty Tyrone was just fibbing. At PISCES, Pointsman is spouting official denials—the data is not yet complete. It doesn't matter anyway. Slothrop was projecting (a veiy handy w ord) " Meanwhile, Pointsman's elves are scouring G ravity’s Rainbow, searching for what went wrong. They find a reminiscence of Slothrop's first V-2: a sudden blast— not a buzzbomb, not the Luftwaffe... a gas main? "'No it's the Germans,"' says a woman, rolled blonde fringes under a kerchief, doing some sort of monster routine, "raising her hands at Slothrop, 'coming to get him , they especially love fat, plump Americans—' in a minute she'll be reaching out to pinch his cheek and wobble it back and forth" (26). What happens next is incongruous. There doesn't look to be any romantic attraction here—more of a mother/monster thing. "'Hi, glamorpuss,' Slothrop said. Her name was Cynthia. He managed to get a telephone number before she was waving ta-ta, home again into the rush-hour crowds" (26). Could it be that we have a little imaginative revision here, adding a flirtatious overtone where there was none? Suppose Slothrop went a step 244 further, actually fantasized about sleeping with Cynthia? Another star for the map, maybe even a story for Mucker-Maffick. Now we need only a change of date. Picture Slothrop out at the site of a rocket hit, not really doing anything, just looking at the destruction. Suppose he starts telling himself that he was at the same spot just a few days before, having an "illicit rendezvous" with Cynthia, Norma, Susan, etc. The star would be stuck where the rocket hit, but the date would be before. It's an interesting theory, Doctor, but why would Slothrop do such a thing? The Fisher King complex. Slothrop thinks he's refertilizing the earth, spreading sex where there is only death. But that would mean that Slothrop was "into" sex and not death

(pardon the Americanism). Yes. We can't have that. Don't worry. General—Herr Doktor may be wrong here. Another funny thing happens when Slothrop hears that first rocket. He gets an erection. Did "Cynthia" inspire it? Slothrop doesn't think so: "There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a hardon?) (26). At the Casino Hermann Goering and, later in the Zone, Slothrop will search for the source of this hardon. He's pretty sure it is something that They produced, something emanating from that secret room long ago, from that strange smell... 245 They are putting on quite a show for Slothrop. His first day at the casino, he saves a woman, and himself, from a gigantic octopus, baiting him with a crab Teddy Bloat just happened to "find." You'd think an octopus might prefer a nice big human it already has in its clutches to a tiny little crab it will have to go and get, but when Slothrop gives the crab a heave, the octopus goes tearing after it. Could this be a set up? The woman turns out to be none other than Katje, who says to Slothrop, utterly evil, '"Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet '" (189). So begins a tour of American reflexes—'"The devilfish is found quite commonly on Mediterranean shores,"' Tantivy tells him, "'Though usually not so large—is it the size that bothers you? Don't Americans like—"' (192). When Slothrop and Katje become lovers, a bit of silliness ensues—first a pillow fight, then Katje reaches for the Seltzer bottle. The Seltzer bottle? What is this: The Marx Brothers? The Three Stooges? "Where's those banana cream pies, eh?" (197). Everything here is being done for his benefit. They must have something big in store for him. His uniform and ID are stolen—*ol "Tyrone Slothrop" just erased. He's now Ian Scuffling, British war correspondent; he even grows himself a handlebar mustache! Slothrop's cooperating: he's got no choice. He knows he's being watched. '"Either what you've got is contagious,"' Tantivy says, "'or else they've an eye on me too'" (193). Tantivy promptly disappears. Bloat says he's not Tantivy's keeper, but weren't he and Tantivy friends ... ? Slothrop falls into a routine—nights and mornings of good old lust with Katje, then hitting the books all day. It's more studying than he ever did at Harvard: German runes, boundary level temperatures, jet 246 expansion angles, fuel efficiencies, material requisitions and rocket manuals—even a few salvaged by the Polish underground from a latrine at the Blizna training site, covered with authentic SS piss and shit. It's a strange combination Slothrop's absorbing—the technical, the mystical, and the scatological. The sexual must be mixed in there as well: the erections just keep on coming ----- So—his mission must involve the rocket. But could it also have something to do with the Forbidden Room? C'mere Scuffling, we've something to show you. It concerns your friend. What was his name? Slothrop. Oh yeah. He's putting together some top flight information on Them. He knows, for instance, that the British Ministry of Supply contracted Shell to develop a liquid rocket engine, and that the Germans were using the Royal Dutch Shell building as a radio guidance transmitter for the V-2. Then, if you note that all the British rtjcket intelligence is being gathered into the office of Duncan Sandys, who is Churchill's own son- in-law, and that Sandys works for the Ministry of Supply, which is housed at Shell Mex House, you h ave a conspiracy! Often now, he has the sensation of being in an Other World. It looks just like the first, but it's actually a site of perfected Control. They run the place like it was a movie—they get rid of characters, write in others, create buzzbombs, rockets and other special effects, induce hardens—whatever the script calls for. At one point, he finds the directors' private chamber

Deserted in noon's lull, here are resonant reaches of mahogany, green baize, hanging loops of marathon velvet. Long-handled 247 wood money rakes lie fanned out on the tables. Little silver bells with ebony bandies are turned moutb-down on the russet veneer. Around the tables, Empire chairs are lined up precise and playerless. But some are taller than the rest. These are no longer quite outward and visible signs of a game of chance. There is another enterprise here, more real than the last, less merciful, and systematically bidden from the likes of Slothrop. Who sits in the tidier chairs? Do they have names? What lies on Their smooth blaize surfaces? (202).

it's just a room, nothing remarkable, no reason to be so suspicious.

For Slothrop, however, it's as if he has entered the Forbidden itself. It's an ominous magic he's facing. "'Fuck you,"' he whispers. "It's the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that Maybe he'll sneak in tonight—no not at night—but sometime, with a bucket and brush, paint FUCK YOU in a balloon coming out the mouth of one of those little pink shepherdesses there... " (203). He doesn't do it. Painting a derogatory slogan, like pissing on a table, is best done in an initial rush of outrage. If you let yourself calm down, you might start to think. You'd notice, for instance, that it will get you nowhere. They won't care. You are nothing to them, if that's all the rebellion you can muster—and it is ail the rebellion you can muster, why we'll just clean it up (No, it's okay, we'll get it) and we'll enter a little black mark here on your file. Here we are: "Scuffling." Oh look at that, the file is brand new. Your first black mark. How lovely. He imagines staging a Commando raid, accompanied by the faithful renegade Blodgett Waxwing, who has just given him a Zootsuit. They penetrate Shell Mex House, "the rocket's branch office in London," mowing down the security, kicking aside screaming secretaries, savagely looting the files. 248

Throwing Molotov Cocktails, the Zootsuit Zanies at least crashing into the final sanctum with their trousers up around their armpits, smelling of singed hair, spilled blood, to find not Mr. Duncan Sandys cowering before their righteousness, nor open window, gypsy flight, scattered fortune cards, nor even a test of wills with the great consortium itself—but only a rather dull room, business machines arrayed around the walls calmly blinking, files of cards pierced frail as sugar faces... (251).

Katje is also Theirs. Her clothes, mainly evening gowns, are just props. They smell of carbon tet. Her face has a futureless look, as if the substance of her life has been decided, as if all bets are in, and "she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all" (209). The rocket becomes a bridge between them. He was in London where they came down; she was in Holland where they were launched. Katje says, '"Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, i t lives an entire life'" (209). They feel the living rocket's presence, its rising and falling curve.

It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice, guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children— ." (209).

Tantivy is dead, or at least They say so. Slothrop sees an obituary in The London Times: "'True charm ... humble-mindedness ... strength 249 of character. .. fundamental Christian cleanness and goodness'" (252). It says he was killed leading an attempt to rescue members of his unit pinned down by German artillery. Tantivy? Now wait a minute — The obituary is signed by Major Theodore Bloat. He'd only been a captain the last time Slothrop saw him. The story was a plant. . . . This thought occurs to him, but he is already on his way—to Nice, then Zurich, Geneva and the Zone. He has other reasons for leaving. At the Casino, he had quite the security clearance—no problem getting information. When he started asking about the Schwarzgerât, however, a stone wall went up: "'Slothrop, there are no 'SG' documents'" (242). Yeah right. He'll go and find them, that's all. It's a beautiful ploy by Pointsman, giving Slothrop the whole puzzle except the final piece. Out in the Zone, the plan goes, the Schwarzgerât will find him. Everyone will be happy—Sandys will have the modified rocket, or at least get to truck its flight. Pointsman will have Stockholm. Slothrop. . . well that is the one unfortunate consequence. But the man is a freak, an aberration. They can comfort themselves with the fact that the world without him is improved. All they have to do is maintain surveillance, for Empire and Ned Pointsman, not let Slothrop out of their sight.

As Gravity's Rainbow goes on, resistance is increasingly given over to the rocket itself. The rocket is the charismatic figure, the new baby Jesus. Someday, the System may completely contain it—even the freest gauchos end up selling out—for now, however, the key is to trigger 250 its subversive potential. The right consciousness is needed, someone who understands what the rocket can do. But who? Slothrop doesn't have a clue. He manages to give the Imperial flatfoots the slip (imagine Pointsman shrugging, his arms out, a cheesy grin on his face; oops). He becomes a favorite of black marketeers, exchanging information for the Argentineans, obtaining the Potsdam hashish for the hep-cats in Berlin. It is the Berlin crowd, in fact, that christens him Rocketman, after providing him the necessary outfit—a Wagnerian helmet and cape. Yes, he's the Zone's latest superhero, canying the hopes of millions. Let him at that Schwarzgerât. He'll— His Classic Comics existence is undercut. Slothrop's finds the "SG" documents all right, and he finds his own imprint all over them. It seems that Laszlo Jamf entered into a financial agreement with an American financier named Lyle Bland. Slothrop knew him as "Uncle Lyle." The money sent Slothrop to Harvard. It was a way to make up for the experiments performed on infant T. The smell of the Forbidden Room is that of Imipolex... Sold out! to a-a Nazi scientist. And by his own parents! Jeepers . . .

I^nchon writes:

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "At" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here . .. (509). 251 Slothrop has been cut off from the past he thought he knew. His only connection now is to the Forbidden Room. Even America has begun to fade. FDR is dead. He just found out. No one bothered to tell him when it happened. A bespectacled stranger is President now. Slothrop bets he's in league with Them. (As if Roosevelt wasn't, Lyle Bland's voice begins— Let's cut him off. We'll spare Slothrop this much.) Slothrop has already begun to dissipate. It's getting so only a few people can see him—for everyone else he's just too remote. Eventually, he finds his harmonica—or it finds him; it comes floating up in a creek. He sits around playing it in the nude, the spirit of lost haipsmen coming back to him. He is closer to a spiritual medium than he has ever been. By now, however, he is pretty well gone. He will soon become a crossroads, one of many intersections in the Karmic Zone. His emanations move out from this Slothropian Plaza, criss-crossing the world, looking for a home. They have some great adventures: an Incident in the Transvestite's Toilet, a Confrontation with the Pernicious Pop, even high-level, theoretical discussions on the meaning of the "ass backwards" and the difference between shit and shinola, which, when you get down in (I mean "to") it is not much. Home, however, is hard to find. One Slothrop makes it back to Mingeborough, but it's an occupied space, soldiers all around. "They may already have interdicted the kids' short cuts along with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get home" (744). During the great sell-out, "Slothrop" becomes a favorite topic in the press. World-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtiy, holding forth on Nightline, contends that "Dr. JamP' never existed. Jamf was a defense- 252 mechanism, a fiction created to help Slothrop deny that he was in love, sexual love, with death. '"We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop," a spokesman for the Counterforce admitted recently in an interview with the Wall Street Journal." "Opinion even at the start was divided. It was one of our fatal weaknesses [I'm sure you want to hear about our fatal weaknesses]." Some saw Slothrop as a "pretext," others a "microcosm." "The Microcosmists, as you must know from the standard histories, leaped off to an early start..." (738). I'm betraying them all, the spokesman thinks and/or says—at this stage it hardly matters which—"the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I cany it with me. Your virus" (739). Tchitcherine, now there's a real hero. He's the mad joker of Central Asia, the scourge of the Eastern front (Western, if you are a

Russian!), the legendary lover of hundreds. The Nazis thought he was crazy. He kept putting himself in suicidal situations, but they just couldn't seem to kill him. They were having a bad war. Tchitcherine figured they'd peg him eventually. When they didn't, he figured he'd kill Enzian. Once again, he's thinking small, letting personal rivalries interfere with his chance at high history. Write it in his file under the

Blobjidian notation. Back in Central Asia, he and sidekick Dzaqyp Qjilan heard a wandering aqyn sing of the Kirghiz Light:

The roar of Its voice is deafness, The flash of Its light is blindness. The floor of the desert rumbles. And its face cannot be borne. 253 And a man cannot be the same, After seeing the Kirghiz light (358).

Tchitcherine writes down the aqyn's instructions on how to get to it

(there's a nice appropriation of oral culture), and they're off. Tchitcherine finds the light, spends 12 hours face-up on the desert, an ancient city greater than Babylon below him. Eventually, however, he will hardly be able to remember.... He's drawn to the rocket—and not completely because he thinks he'll find Enzian when he finds it. No, the rocket has his Schwarzphünomen humming. If anyone's going to shoot off the 00001 he wants to be there—but as for "subversive potential," forget it. As with the Light, so now: his heart just isn't ready. The mantle falls on Enzian. Everyone's against him: Tchitcherine, the Americans, the British, the Empty Ones. Slothrop's all right, but he's nowhere around. Besides, word is that he was sent to get rid of the

Schwarzkommando. The Pointsman thing was a cover. The higher ups knew the map was a joke. They wanted Slothrop because of his feelings about blackness: classic white disgust.. The conditioning didn't kick in. Or maybe They figured Slothrop wrong. That's good. It shows the System still has flaws. But it also means that next time They'll use more proven methods—superior armament, irresistible numbers. He's already lost people, to foraging parties, snipers, Ombindi's cajolings. He's worried that it is too late for his rocket to make any difference. "Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds 254 away from all others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the center" (519). Each day the Return he dreamed of seems less likely. He is not even sure that a rocket is the right strategy. The true text may lie elsewhere, in power sources and distribution networks not discussed in schools, "routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid." It's a planetary mission. Its true sign could be anywhere: the Krupp works in Essen, the Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, another ruin in another country: "YAAAGGGGHHHHHI" (521). He's thought of calling the Schwarzkommando together, saying "My people, I've had a vision" (525)—but a world-wide search would take staffing he just doesn't have. And he'd still need to keep the rocket as a diversion, a way of bringing the people together, even as he was gradually dispersing them. If there was no rocket, the only binding principle would be the search, or his own failing word. How shaky would his power be then? YAAAGGGGHHHHHI indeed. Now it is too late. The 00001 is done. They pieced it together from what intelligence they could gather—finally getting a description of the

Schwarzgerât in action from Miklos Thanatz, who was there when the

00000 was launched. The rocket reminds Enzian of old times, but it also points out what he has lost. Then, they were boys in love, caressing the rocket's body- brute, freezing through their gloves. He remembers "the way the wind smelled salt and dying, the sound of winter's surf, the premonition of rain you could feel at the back of your neck" (725)—there at the holy place. Test Stand VII, at a base not yet called Peenemünde. 255 Now they are grown men, squinting into a sun that won't let up, feeling a bit like factory workers. The operative mythology is that of the Reclaimed center, but they are mainly hoping just to get the rocket in place. Its the end point of rocket state cosmology. The rocket has had

many different shapes in the dreams of those who would touch it. "It must survive heresies, shining, unconfoundable" (727):

Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the Rocket-throne... Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah, letter by letter—rivets, burner cup and brass rose, its text is theirs to permute and combine into new revelations, always unfolding... Manichaeans who see two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World's suicide, the two perpetually in struggle (727).

The time for such heresies is over.

These heretics will be sought and the dominion of silence will enlarge as each one goes down they will all be sought out. Each will have his personal Rocket. Stored in its target-seeker will the be the heretic's EEC, the spikes and susurrations of heartbeat, the ghost-blossomings of personal infrared, each Rocket will know its intended and hunt him, ride him a green-doped and silent hound, through our World, shining and pointed in the sky at his back, his guardian executioner rushing in, rushing closer ... (727).

Is this Enzian's own death-rocket, his own silence seeker? He's lost the sense of a positive return. The rocket appears only as a dark avenger, pointing out the terrible truth in the midst of collective, agreed-upon lies. He is sharing his thoughts with his sidekick Christian, presumably now his heir. "He must tell Christian everything he knows everything 256 he suspects or has dreamed. Proclaiming none of it for truth. But he must keep nothing back for himself. Nothing is to keep."

"It comes as the Revealer. Showing that no society can protect, never could—they are as foolish as shields of paper...." They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have They ever given us in return for the trust, the love—They actually say 'love'— we're supposed to owe Them? Can They keep us from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can't believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth" (728).

This rocket, then, is to follow the first. It too is to reveal a control that is out of control, the reality of death despite the promise of life. Perhaps Blicero is in command here as well—but a Blicero freed from romantic pretensions, no longer speaking of escape and transcendence.

Blicero meets wide-awake Byron the Bulb. They are headed for the Liineburg Heath. The rocket is to be launched where its predecessor was, where Blicero stopped long enough in the midst of a desperate retreat to get the 00000, and Gottfried, into the air. Katje Borgesius is with them. Bizian has told her that she has been set free, that there will be no more assignments from him or from Them. She doesn't know what to do with herself except follow the trail of Blicero. Ensign Morituri, Thomas Gwenhidwy, and Roger Mexico are tiying to figure out where the rocket will be aimed. They are thinking

North. North is the country of the Kirghiz light. It is also the Herero land of death. Counting the test firings and the attacks on London, the 257 rocket has been fired south, east and west. A northward launch would complete the tribal mandala. The comrades of the Counterforce are still making calculations, haggling over the exact spot, but when it comes they will be ready. It's not a resistance. It's a war. It's not clear,

however, whose side they are on. On one the Schwarzkommando's exposed flanks, we find a chubby

kid named Ludwig. For weeks he has been chasing his pet lemming

Ursula around the Zone. Slothrop helped out for a while, although he thought the kid was nuts: one lemming, c'mon. /f Ursula really existed she was probably looking for some friends. The journey of the Schwarzkommando does not concern Ludwig. He's just a stranger walking alongside. He imagines himself a scout for a vast white army. The troops are on the high ground, just a little ways away. When Ludwig gives the word, they will come down and smear the blacks into the earth.

"But he would never call them down. He would rather go with the trek, invisible" (733). Tchitcherine has been deactivated. He's under the spell of Geli Tripping, an attractive German witch who wants to keep him for herself. The rocket goes right by him. He and Enzian stop and talk. Enzian gives him half a pack of cigarettes and three potatoes. They nod, "not quite formally, not quite smiling." Enzian gets back on his bicycle and returns to the caravan. Tchitcherine goes back to Geli. He needs to round up some firewood before the light is gone. "This is magic. Sure—but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of evening, often forever, without knowing it"

(735). 258 Everything is balanced, poised and waiting. Enzian has even managed to face down the Empty Ones, as least for the moment. '"You're a hallucination, Ombindi, ' putting just enough panic into his voice so that if it doesn't work it'll still be a good insult, 'I'm projecting my own death wish, and it comes out looking like you. Uglier than 1 ever dreamed'" (732). Qpletly and without incident, Ombindi's people are relieved of watch duties. They keep their weapons and ammo. There is no reason to take these. "Bizian's no more vulnerable now than he ever was, which was plenty" (733). He is counting, as always, on a strange magic to protect him... They arrive on the Lüneburg Heath. The Argentine anarchists are already there. The heath is the location for their movie, a stand-in for the pampas. The film and the launch can be made one: the hero encased in the rocket, a new twist on Martin Fierro part two. Der Springer and

Enzian do lunch to talk revenue split... No, that doesn't happen. We are not told what does. Instead, we are given an unexpected yet inevitable ending, a simultaneous, or at least rapidly alternating, analepsis and prolepsis. We are thrown back to the scene of Gottfried's launch, and forward to the Orpheus Theater

"Deathlace is the boy's bridal costume" (750); "Come-onl Start the ShowF' (760). The heteroglossic spread has been reduced to a single line, remarkably straight: the rocket as an axis cutting through time. It is too late.

At long last, after a distinguished career of uttering, "My God, we are too late!" always with a trace of a sneer, a pro-forma condescension—because of course he never arrives too late, there's always a reprieve, a mistake by one of the Yellow Adversary's 259 hired bunglers, at worst a vital clue to be found next to the body— now, finally. Sir Denis Nayland Smith will arrive, my God, too late (751).

Superman shouldn't have stoppled changing to answer the phone. He also gets there just after the nick of time, swooping boots first into a cleared clearing. Philip Marlowe gets a migraine and reaches by reflex for the rye in his pocket. Submariner has a dead battery. Flasticman gets lost in the Imipolex chains. "The Lone Ranger will storm in at the head of a posse, rowels tearing blood from the stallion's white hide, to find his young friend, innocent Dan, swinging from a tree limb by a broken neck." Oops.

Too late was never in their programming. They find instead a moment's suspending of their sanity—but then it's over with, whew, and it's back to the trail, back to the Dmly Planet. Yes Jimmy, it must've been the day Iran into that singularity, those few seconds o f absolute mystery you know Jimmy, time—time is a funny thing. . . . (752).

It's okay Superman, no one blames you. Death is the secret They hid from everybody. Blicero's still with us. Look high, Pynchon tell us.

Look high. The elevator operators here in the City Dactylic sure look slick. They wear green overseas caps, green velvet basques, tapered yellowstripe trousers, "a feminine Zootsuit effect" (735). Did 1 mention they are all women, young women? It's a definite improvement over the old men they used to have in the city below, their white shirts stained under the jacket, smoking cigars in the elevator when no one was on board. They'd just assume spit in your eye ----- 260 These operators have been trained in elevator lore, lots of useless trivia. Studies show that easy chatter from an Official Representative keeps the passengers calm. Elevator rides these days are long-haul affairs. The elevators have lounges, snack bars, newsstands. You can browse through Life or People or Health while waiting for your stop. Most people enjoy the trip, but occasionally you come across one, usually someone who remembers when the City wasn't so tall, and thinks that progress may not be such a good thing—who could cause trouble, if allowed. For these people, soothing talk: ’"before the Vertical Solution,'"

Mindy Bloth, originally of Carbon City, Illinois, is saying, '"all transport was, in effect, two-dimensional—ah, I can guess your question .... 'What about airplane flight, eh?' That's what you were going to ask wasn't it!"' (735). Of course not. He was going to ask about the rocket and everyone knows it. Business travelers rustle newspapers and consult watches. Grandparents continue their needlework, going on about their business as everyone should. Kids who were tearing around in circles stop for a moment, stare at the stranger, then start running again. Good job, Mindy, you cut him off just in time. The elevator continues to climb. CONCLUSION

What do you call a dialectic that can't renew itself? An imprisoned rage? An internal luminescence? Or a long farewell, a slow fade to black? Byron the Bulb may be the Grid's own fool, but he does have his knowledge, his eternal illumination. It may be, however, that ironic omniscience is not meant to last. As Harold Bloom says, the end of Byron's story ends something in Pynchon as well (9). Vineland, I^nchon's latest novel, enacts a failure in the light, the death of even Byronic non-resistance. Vineland can be called a novel that comes after the novel—after, that is, the end of the freedom necessary to hold questions open. It is 1984 in Reagan's police state. The Nixon repression has deepened into a war between the government and its own people. CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Production) helicopters appear in the Northern California sky, while on the ground, the residents—who once believed they were U.S. citizens—prepare to enter, operationally speaking, the third world. On the international front, rumors of an invasion of Nicaragua abound. The detention centers for all dissenters, "the enemy within," are ready. At one point, an evening of approved entertainment, Sean Connery in the G. Gordon Uddy Story, is interrupted by an anglo in fatigues, who keeps looking over to the side, off-camera. 261 262 '"My name is—what should I say, just name and rank?" He is handed papers. He reads into the camera; '"As commanding officer of state defense forces in this sector, pursuant to the President's NSDD #52 of 6 April 1984 as amended, 1 am authorized—what?" (339). There is some

confusion. He gets up, sits down, tries to open a desk drawer, which is apparently stuck or locked. The movie comes back on—for now. We are, however, one short step away from that dreaded moment of pure panopticism when the Tube will stop showing pictures and instead announce, "'From now on. I'm watching you"' (340). Restless ghosts are all around: the Yuroks wait for a chance to reclaim their inheritance; Thanatoids, beings stuck between life and death, spend their days watching the Tube and complaining about how they have been wronged. Hector Zuftiga, former federal agent perhaps now on his way to Thanatoid status himself, escapes from tubal detox, where he is known as the Brady Buncher, a particularly intractable case. Hector wants to make a movie about the sixties, "'all those long ago political wars, the drugs, the sex, the rock n' roll, which th' ultimate message will be that the real threat to America, then and now, is from th' illegal abuse of narcotics" (51). There is a new Puritanism at work here— or maybe the same old Puritanism in a particularly virulent form. We're looking toward what the narrative calls in a typically bitter moment, "a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free

Americans all pulling their weight and all locked into the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie" (221-222). 263 The System is pretty much perfected, the only open question being whether well are still lingering in some pre-fascist twilight or if the night has already come. The answer depends on your level of awareness and your definition of fascism, but the answer doesn't matter much. The issue of freedom, for instance, is over. The informers in the purgatory of the witness protection program are gargoyles on a sheer vertical facade— part of the building, but not allowed in. The trouble is, those not in the program may not be much better off. As one long time info-slut puts it, "'Everybody's a squealer. We're in th’ Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you're telling the man more than you meant to. Don't matter if it's big or small, he can use it all'" (74). Resistance has become simulation. Zoyd Wheeler collects a federal disability check as long as he performs one crazy stunt per year. His specialty is jumping through windows. This year, the event got rescheduled, but no one bothered telling Zoyd. He went to the Log Jam in Del Norte. The media showed up at the Cucumber Lounge in Vineland.

Zoyd had to go to the Cuke. He had no choice. If he'd followed through on his original plan (which didn't even involve window-jumping: he'd dressed in women's clothing and taken along a lady's chain saw, just to see what might develop. A clear violation of his history. What was Wheeler trying to do?) there'd have been no documentation. He wouldn't have been a human interest story for the 6 o'clock news. The team of experts brought into analyze the jump—a physics professor, a psychiatrist, a track-and-field coach—wouldn't have had anything to talk about. Zoyd might not have gotten his check. Besides, the folks at the Cuke had gone to a lot of trouble, putting in a candy window as is used in 264 the movies to make sure Zoyd didn't get hurt. Without the element of danger, the stunt's even more of a fake than it was before. Zoyd can live with this. He's realizing now, for the first time, that he could have been hurt jumping all those years through real glass. He must have been crazyl He's getting old.... Besides this real live simulation, we are also given the memory of an illusion. For the film cooperative 24fps, operating during the late 60's, the camera is a gun. "'An image taken is a death transformed. Images put together are the substructure of an afterlife and a Judgment. We will be the architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig. Death to everything that oinks!'" (197). "They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face" (195). Eventually, however, when the cameras were joined by real guns and their own faces were among those caught in revealing close-up, the members of 24fps split up—heading to Fort Smith, or suburban LA, joining the informant underground, or going into the Karmic adjustment business after trying, and failing, to kill a cop. All they have left is yards of old film, shown only on nostalgic nights, the memory of a revolution that never was. Charisma, in this novel, is on the side of control. Federal prosecutor Brock Vond, so difficult to get rid of that one mafioso compares him to the Roadrunner, is tightening his noose on the former members of 24fps—in particular, one Frenesi Gates, Vond's ex-lover and Zoyd's ex-wife. After years of "protection," which may have itself been 265 only an illusion, she has been cut loose, deleted from the federal computer. Meanwhile, Vond is staging a military takeover of Vineland county, waiting for her to return. He knows she will. His genius is in a suspicion bordering on certainty that rebellion is not what it seems to be—not a thirst for freedom, but an appeal for authority. "While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story. Brock saw the need—if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching—need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national freedom" (269). Vond's desire to play games with guns, of course, has its own suggestions of infantilism, but it doesn't matter he has the funding, the will, and the power. In this family drama, he has been cast as the Pernicious Pop. Now Vond is out to nab Frenesi's daughter. Prairie. Is Prairie the bait he knows Frenesi can't resist? Is he trying to make inroads in the new generation? Or is Prairie his own daughter who he now intends to reclaim? Perhaps Vond simply wants center stage again? During the Nixon years, he had set up re-education camps where his theory couid be tested, radicals turned to informants. Now, the camps have outlived their usefulness. As Hector puts it, "'since about '81 kids were comin in all on their own askin about careers, no need for separate facilitates anymore'" (342). Vond's theory proved too true for his own good! Yes, Vineland is a tightly controlled space. This is a Pynchon novel written by the Whole Sick Crev/. Elements of the earlier work reappear, but without any creative principle to recast them. It is as if we are witnessing the reshuffling of cards. We have the Tarot of the car lot, here seen as the conversion shop known as Rick & Chick's Bom Again, 266 home of the automotive second chance. Rachel's sexy MG is replaced by a Porsche owned by a suburban kid turned counter-culturalist. The owner's name is Rex; the car's Bruno.

[Rex] knew the location of every all-night car wash in the four counties, he'd fallen asleep on his back beneath its ventral coolness, with a plastic tool case for a pillow, and slept right through the night, and he had even, more than once, in scented petroleum dimness, had his throbbing manhood down inside one flared chrome carburetor barrel as the engine idled and with sensitive care he adjusted the pulsing vacuum to meet his own quickening rhythm, as man and machine together rose to the peaks of hitherto unimaginable ecstasy ... (230).

In a retelling of the Mason-Metzger-Di Presso succession, we have Millard Hobbs, "a former actor who'd begun as a company logo and ended up as majority owner of what'd been a modest enough lawn-care service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named the Marquis de Sod" (46). We also have Lany Basmo, another dentist/confessor, who has been given the special dispensation of sending out notices requiring certain "patients" to come to his office—even if they don't need a cleaning, even if they have their own dentist, even if Basmo himself is booked and they end up waiting, as the accused wait in Kafka, for days and weeks on end ----- There are also several references to the grid and its bulbs. When setting up to shoot, Frenesi liked to "actively commit energy by pouring in as much light as they could liberate from the local power company" (201). As the daughter of a gaffer, she knew just what to do. More frequently, however, we see lights going dim. In tubal detox. Hector tries to tell himself that his release is coming— 267 that he really wouldn't be inside for the rest of his life, here along these ever-lengthening, newly branched corridors, with progressively obsolete wall maps of the traffic system posted beneath lights he knew, though staff never admitted it, were being replaced each time with lower-wattage bulbs (336).

For Weed Atman, a kind of anti-Byron, the grid is too large to illuminate. There are too many people involved, too much complicity. Just before 24fps was broken up, Atman, a professor of mathematics and unlikely political activist, was shot by one of his own followers. His own supposed lover, Frenesi, and her lover, Vond, may also have been in on the plan. Unsettled, Atman turns Thanatoid. He would like to know why he was shot, but at this stage, such knowledge is impossible.

He recounts a dream ("'Thanatoids dream,’" he tells us, '"though not always when we think we do'")—

"I'm inside a moving train that exists someplace whether 1 dream it or not, because I keep going back to it, joining it on its journey. I'm conscious, laid out horizontal on some bed of ice, attended by two companions who keep trying, one stop after another, to find a local coroner willing to perform an autopsy on me and reveal to the world at least my murder, my murderers... I can never make out the faces of these other two, though they come in to sit with me now and then. It's always cold, always night, if there is a daytime maybe 1 sleep through it, 1 don't know. Out riding on steel too many years, every jurisdiction we come rolling into well notified in advance, each time men in hats, carrying weapons, standing on the platform, waving us on, who only want to swear they never saw us" (365).

The two companions, however, are devoted. 268 "They live on club-car cofiee, cigarettes, and snack food, play a lot of bid whist, and argue like theologians 'It was all for love,' says one, and 'Bullshit,' the other replies, 'it was political.'... 'A rebel cop, with his own deeply personal agenda.' 'Only following the orders of a repressive regime based on death.' So forth ... 1 hear them late in the rhythmic dark hours, the last of my honor guard, faithful to the last depot, the last turndown" (365-66).

Atman says: '"Used to think 1 was climbing, step-by-step, right? Toward a resolution... but that's when it begins to go dark, and that door at the top I thought 1 saw isn't there anymore, because the light behind it just went off too'" (366). Atman's dream of non-arrival, and the corresponding absence of light, marks the end point of Pynchon's vision of historical entrapment. We are given over full-circle to their control, caught in an implosion dropping us away from the heights of power, the rarefied air of freedom—even the illumination of knowing, and into the darkened purgatory below. The dreams' companions will go on arguing, whatever remnant of charisma each position holds gradually fading with time. Eventualiy, they will be only words to fill the silence—perhaps they already are. life's negation has come without announcing its presence and without imparting a message of meaning to make sense of what has happened. It is no longer possible to say what has gone wrong, much less make things right again. There is nothing for us now but Thanatoid existence, an infinite night of the mind.

As the novel closes, Vond sweeps down on Prairie in a helicopter, lowering himself toward her to enact a rapture from above. Just before he reaches her, however, the abduction is calied off. Vond has lost his funding. He is hauled back to the bird, bitching the whole way. Soon, he 269 will be dead, the victim of Yurok ghosts taking their revenge. Zoyd, whose house has been taken, will get it back. Frenesi and Prairie will be reunited; Prairie has been living with Zoyd while Frenesi remained underground. Even the dog, who wandered away when the troops came to Vineland, will return. Everyone appears on their way to living happily ever after, but there are a few disquieting thoughts:

1. The house can be taken again at any time, in the interest of a fascistic version of the public good. The world of Vineland is that of legalized theft. Private property is only one more illusion, something to hold onto until reality sets in and the occupation begins again.

2. It will not be easy to welcome Frenesi back. She abandoned her daughter, sold out her friends, helped to get Weed Atman shot. That's a lot to forgive, at least all at once. Further, Frenesi may not be around long enough to put in the time true reconciliation will require. Another man in authority may happen along How can she deny the way they make her feel?

3. Prairie seems to have inherited some of the same feelings. After Vond has left her, she looks to the sky: '"You can come back,' she whispered, waves of cold sweeping over h e r ------'It's OK, rilly. Come on, come in. 1 don't care. Take me anyplace you want'" (384).

4. Whether he's in or out of Detox, Hector's move will get made—if not by him, than someone else. 270 Americans everywhere demand that the anti-drug, anti-rebellion, anti­ freedom message get out. The Tube has already begun its interrogation: from now on, it watches us.

A final thought: Word is that I^nchon's next book will be out in 1995. Can a dialectic be jump-started when it is this far gone? Or will this be another Thanatoid text, more rumblings from a powerless soul that may, despite its continuing textual production, be already into the realm of silence ? BIBLIOGRAPHY

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