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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