Radical Hope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon: The Moon and Meteor 1666911682, 9781666911688

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Radical Hope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

Radical Hope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon The Moon and Meteor Phillip Grayson

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grayson, Phillip, 1981- author.   Title: Radical hope in the novels of Thomas Pynchon : the moon and meteor /     Phillip Grayson.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical     references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2022033556 (print) | LCCN 2022033557 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666911688 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666911695 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Pynchon, Thomas--Criticism and interpretation. |     Consciousness in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.  Classification: LCC PS3566.Y55 Z657 2022  (print) | LCC PS3566.Y55  (ebook)     | DDC 813/.54--dc23/eng/20220729  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033556 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033557 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction: The Ocean of Storms (The Sea Ascertained) PART I: THE MOON



1 13



Chapter One: Mare Tranquillitatis: The Failure of Idealism in Gravity’s Rainbow 15 Chapter Two: Mare Moscoviense: The Failure of Reason in Mason & Dixon 31 Chapter Three: Oceanus Procellarum: The Failure of Cynicism in the Early Novels

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PART II: THE METEOR

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Chapter Four: Mare Cognitum (Ahnighito): Meteoric Violence in Against the Day 59 Chapter Five: Saviksoah: The Meteoric Hiatus in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow 71 Chapter Six: Tunguska: Meteoric Vision



83

Chapter Seven: Chicxulub: Meteoric Consciousness in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow 97 Chapter Eight: ‘Oumuamua: Meteoric Grace in Bleeding Edge Bibliography Index

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125

131

About the Author



135 v

Introduction

The Ocean of Storms (The Sea Ascertained)

Approaching the end of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the book’s primary protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, disintegrates. “He became a crossroad” (626), the novel tells us. It occurs after a heavy rainfall he can’t remember as Slothrop sees a “very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural . . . ” (626). From this point forward he appears only second-hand, in remembrances or as the quarry of failed searches, or else in a series of increasingly absurdist vignettes, too detached from himself and his reality to even remember his parents (695). His dissolution is deeply ambiguous. He is, we are told, deeply divided and perfectly unable to come down on one side or the other of this divided self (690). As other characters step into his role in the plot of the novel and Slothrop disappears into pointedly unreal, distinctly imaginative scenes, the possibilities of his existence begin to multiply. The novel, too, begins to fragment into short, often incongruous chapters with titles like “Listening to the Toilet,” “Witty Repartee,” and “Some Characteristics of Imipolex G,” chapters that fit uneasily into the novel’s larger structure of four named parts (“Beyond the Zero,” “Un Perm au Casino Hermann Goering,” “In the Zone,” and “The Counterforce”) broken into numerous untitled sections. As the book draws toward the almost inevitable violence of its conclusion, Pynchon provides us with a character and a story that seem to be desperately searching for some way to escape this inevitability; the scientific, political, and cultural forces that define their (and our) reality. Their success is far from assured (indeed, their failure is almost entirely assured), but their efforts provide us with insight into Pynchon’s own efforts to redeem literature as a potentially ethical counterforce to the corruptions of the modern world. 1

2

Introduction

AT LAST: SOMETHING REAL Literature as a counterforce relies on the almost impossible, and its efforts take the shape of a process whereby the subversiveness of postmodernism, having readily dismantled the revelations of totalizing worldviews, is made to encounter an entirely different type of secrecy, one that does not give way to schematized, simplified, comprehensible and navigable understandings, but rather resists these absolutely. In doing so, this deeply strange, insoluble secrecy resists the extramissive idea that idea that one’s own interiority flows inevitably outward into the reality of the world, shaping and defining it in ultimately haphazard ways. It posits instead that, rather than limiting either our understanding of reality or even the notion of the significance of reality at all, literature can, instead, magnify and expand the realm of the importance of reality. Rather than an escape, analgesic, or analysis, literature can instead function as imposition of reality, an encounter with the Other. Mimicking and utilizing the nature of consciousness itself, literature can impose an encounter between the text and audience that is mired in insoluble, irreconcilable secrecy, and enforces the reality of the world and entities that inhabit it; a reality that itself imposes stark ethical demands rooted precisely in this thorough, external, reality. This is the counterforce that works against the dehumanization and derealization that any schematized worldview either permits, encourages, or exploits. It is an almost impossible ambition, one that abandons projecting hopes and fears onto the constant Moon and seeks instead to somehow pause the meteor in midair. THE MOON The Moon is a key metaphor for early Pynchon. Between the publication of his first novel, V., in 1963 and Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, the Moon had become a key symbol of American national pride, and the landing of the Apollo 11 mission on the Moon in June 1969 marked its final transformation from a symbol of transcendent otherworldliness into a mere tool of political expediency. In keeping with this trajectory, Pynchon consistently uses the Moon to convey notions of corrupt totality and failed transcendence in all of his early novels, culminating in its role as the central driving theme of Gravity’s Rainbow. As Slothrop lay at the crossroads “feeling natural,” and as another character, Vaslav Tchitcherine, a Russian soldier and key counterpoint to Slothrop, is found later “sitting by the stream, not dejected, nor tranquil, just waiting” (748), they call to mind another moonstruck figure in this kind of ambiguous

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repose, the shepherd or king (or shepherd king) Endymion. Attempts to simplify and circumscribe Endymion nicely epitomize various ways to neuter the secrecy of the world that Pynchon subverts and discards throughout his career. Like most ancient myths, the story of Endymion has been told in various ways throughout the years, but there are four primary versions that encapsulate the totalizing worldviews that Pynchon subverts before moving beyond the processes of simplification and subversion altogether. These are outlined in Denys Page’s Sappho and Alcaeus.1 Like Slothrop and Tchitcherine, we encounter Endymion in all versions immersed in nature, sleeping out under the open sky, bathed in the Moon’s silvery light. He sleeps and will not, cannot awaken. He is held, suspended, as it were (or captive) in eternal youth, captive or suspended in eternal sleep. The Moon, in the persona of the goddess Selene, has fallen in love with the sleeping Endymion in all versions. This is where the versions diverge and sketch out four fundamental perspectives on Endymion’s sleep, each loosely, roughly, positing a schematic understanding of reality that Pynchon takes up in his own treatment of the Moon and all the worldly approaches to transcendence that it can convey. In one version of the story2 gorgeous Endymion sleeps eternally in eternal youth because this is what he has asked of Zeus, and because wide-seeing Zeus has granted this request with calm beneficence. In another, he is tormented beyond all reason by a jealous and spiteful god. Because there is the story3 that Zeus (father of gods and men), enraged at a dalliance between gorgeous Endymion and ox-eyed Hera, has struck him with this sibylline stasis as a punishment. Complementing and completing the spectra of possibility that these two deeply contradictory versions set up, there is the version that states that Endymion’s endless sleep is dreamless, too, and gorgeous Endymion is only essentially dead. Unwaking, undreaming, unchanging.4 In these versions the blank, open emptiness of Endymion, laying in the moonlit meadow, permits interpreters to project essentially any condition on him: an idealized transcendent dreaming, a torturous eternal misery, or a simple materialist nonexistence. Or it may be that it was the love of the Moon that set Endymion dreaming. Because Sappho says (they say5), that bright Selene, the Moon herself, came upon gorgeous Endymion one night, bathed in silvery light, and it is her wish that has been granted, her wish that he remain this way forever, gorgeous and soundly sleeping. This complicates the previous categories, drawing out the residue that lingers unaccounted for in the seemingly exhaustive generalities of their accounting. If the first three categories can be considered (roughly, loosely)

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Introduction

as 1) Good, 2) Neutral, 3) Bad, the fourth gives way to the almost impossible realm of irreducible secrecy that might impose an ethical counterforce somehow. So we can approach Pynchon’s use of the Moon with these four basic categories6: 1.  The foundations of life are good, life is just, faith is justified, and our relationship with the transcendent is warranted, essential even. This describes Endymion’s experience of endless sleep as a blessing (a dream come true). 2.  The reality of the world, if it exists at all, is identical with the material world (indistinguishable from the material world). This describes Endymion’s sleep as death and denies the possibility of any kind of transcendence. 3.  The foundations of life are bad, life is cruel, and our relationship with the transcendent is fraught and damaging. This describes Endymion’s sleep as a torment, and posits our existence is in tension with, if not opposition to transcendent forces. 4.  An almost impossible hope that will come to be identified with the meteoric. These perspectives echo the options laid out by Leo Tolstoy in “A Confession.” Tolstoy describes the situation of a traveler who has fled from a beast down into a well, only to find a dragon waiting at the bottom. The traveler desperately clings to a twig, but then “he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon’s jaws. The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them.”7 Tolstoy concludes that “this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all,” and delineates four possible responses to this reality, writing: “I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed. The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity.”8 This parallels the naive idealism and faith in the goodness of the world noted above and embodied most acutely in Pynchon by the Nazi rocket scientists who dream of life on the Moon. Tolstoy’s second way out is what he calls “epicureanism.” This “consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has.”9 This corresponds with the materialism and realpolitik

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that Pynchon examines consistently, linked particularly with math, science, and scientists. The third escape Tolstoy mentions is what he calls “that of strength and energy.” This means of escape “consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity,”10 and aligns with our cynical category above in which the essential malevolence of the world becomes overwhelming. This perspective haunts throughout Pynchon’s work, marked by dark plots, conspiracies, paranoia, and the intervention of supernatural and sinister forces. Each of these perspectives is treated rigorously in Pynchon’s novels, and we will examine them over the course of the first three chapters, before centering the second Part of this essay on a fourth means of escape, which we have hesitated to define, is named “weakness” by Tolstoy. For him: It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally—to end the deception quickly and kill themselves—they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best? . . . I found myself in that category.11

This weakness is defined here as a ridiculous sort of hope, a waiting for . . . something. It is the possibility for the traveler clinging to his twig, beast above and dragon below, the rats of time slowly dooming him, that a passing griffin may inexplicably descend and take him up the by shoulders, flying him away to safety. Tolstoy ultimately finds God to be this miraculous redeemer, but for Pynchon, the reckless hope itself seems, if not sufficient, nonetheless the best thing on offer. It is a radical sort of hope, a hope that has no expectation of fulfillment, but which exists as a talisman against darkness and a reminder that inexplicable things have happened before and will happen again. Especially in his later novels, Pynchon identifies this hope as a striving toward “Grace,” linking the term to Simone Weil’s identification of grace as a force working in opposition to the gravity of the world. The fleeting moments of radical hope that Pynchon crafts call to mind Weil’s idea that there are “instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void.”12 For Pynchon, these instants become filled with these instants, hiatuses in which the laws of reality seem to loosen thief grip, if only for fleeting moment. Our opening chapter, “Mare Tranquillitatis,” takes its title from the Latin name for the Sea of Tranquility, will examine Pynchon’s treatment of idealism, in both the philosophical and colloquial sense of the term. This chapter draws on multiple examples from throughout Pynchon’s career, but this

6

Introduction

viewpoint is most explicitly developed and clearly linked to the Moon in Gravity’s Rainbow through the character of Nazi rocket scientist Franz Pӧkler and his daughter Ilsa. The Pӧklers’ overtly naive and fabulated imaginings of life on the Moon, holding it out as an otherworldly heaven, alienate him from the reality of his work, situation, and relationships. Pӧkler’s dream of space travel becomes increasingly laughable as the novel progresses, his idealism bent toward the devastation of the V2 rocket bomb as the rest of his life collapses around him. For Pynchon, Pӧkler’s dreams are emblematic, and the sinister manipulation of them overwhelmingly common. The use of Nazi scientists and technology to accomplish the Moon landing, which occurred during the writing of, stains this remarkable accomplishment and demonstrates how thoroughly corrupted the modern world has become. Pynchon engages rigorously with German Romantic art and poetry,13 via Pӧkler and elsewhere in Gravity’s Rainbow and his earlier novels, particularly V. In doing so, he can address this worldview deeply, acknowledging the vital, powerful role of ideas—and particularly cultural, literary ideas—while recognizing the ease with which this power can be and has consistently been corrupted. In light of this corruption and the staggering atrocities that it facilitates, Pynchon is able to dismiss this positive view of the world and to subvert and undermine it throughout his fiction. The second chapter, then, takes up precisely the corrupting forces that casually and cruelly manipulate naive idealism. This chapter, “Mare Moscoviense,” takes its title from the Sea of Moscow, discovered and named by the Soviet Union on the dark side of the Moon. This chapter builds on Chapter 1 to consider the skeptical, materialist approach to the world that might be the inverse of Pӧkler’s naive idealism. This perspective is foregrounded throughout Pynchon’s writing, marked by scientific determinism and the belief in a simple, schematized, and masterable world. From his early interest in entropy and the work of the nineteenth-century scientist Clerk Maxwell, through Gravity’s Rainbow’s Pavlovian Dr. Edward W.A. Pointsman and the Michelson-Morley experiment that features prominently in Against the Day, science and scientists’ efforts to circumscribe the world have been constant foils in Pynchon’s work. The attainment and politicization of the Moon encapsulates this directly. The transformation of Nazi scientist Werner Von Braun into the head of NASA and his subsequent success in reaching the Moon with the Apollo program not out of any idealistic dream of space, but rather as a mere pragmatic political gesture at the heart of the Cold War. In contrast to the discontinuities that define and ultimately destroy Pӧkler’s life, Von Braun and the line of scientific progress is shown to be remarkably unbroken, and figures postwar America as a direct continuation of the Nazi project and everything that preceded it. This material history, marked by slavery, colonialism, oppression,

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7

and holocaust cannot provide a viable alternative even to the idealism it corrupts and replaces. Having dismantled ideas of the world as an intrinsically good place, flawed only inasmuch as it fails to align with the real and transcendent ideals that govern it, and finding the confidence of scientific materialism incapable of fully addressing the reality of the world, we may expect Pynchon to embrace instead the cynical perspective that it is precisely the cruel, violent, and inhumane that best defines the reality of the world. Many examinations of Pynchon’s work have pointed out the paranoid cynicism that runs through his work, and chapter 3, “Oceanus Procellarum,” named for the Ocean of Storms, focuses especially on the figure of chemist August Kekulé in Gravity’s Rainbow and on the proliferation of political violence in Against the Day to reckon with the darkness constantly put forth in Pynchon’s fiction. Ultimately, as he does with naive optimism, though, Pynchon finds this cynical despair to be unjustified. Kekulé’s discovery of the shape of the hydrocarbon benzene, ostensibly delivered to him in a dream, would lead to the proliferation of petrochemicals that fuels our current ongoing climate crisis. Part I, then, catalogs various approaches to understanding the world. Each of these approaches is considered and ultimately rejected in the novels. These worldviews are rejected because they are all, in their way, hopeless. This hopelessness marks them as victims of gravity, where gravity demarks the seemingly inescapable forces of violence and oppression in the world. This is starkly highlighted when Tolstoy allegorizes life and finds suicide the most desirable reaction. But it is in the nature of literature itself that Pynchon finds a way to embrace and cultivate secrecy, to move beyond the hidden into the irreducible and to posit there a real way forward. This is what brings us to term his novels “meteoric literature.” THE METEOR The Introduction to Pynchon’s meteoric fiction, “Mare Cognitum,” builds directly on the insights of Chapter 3 to reveal the ways that Pynchon mines optimism from the depths of the human condition in his later fiction. Focusing primarily on Against the Day, which is at once Pynchon’s most wounded and angry novel and the one in which resisting hopelessness becomes most acute, it seeks to carve out space for the almost impossible in a world where hegemonic control of what is possible at all grows increasingly more secure. Against the Day is essentially plotless as a novel. The book’s multiple narrative pastiches do not drive the novel’s action, but rather result from its experimental structure. This structure is premised on the idea of bifurcation, with the narrative splitting off upon the introduction of almost every major

8

Introduction

character, abandoning, sometimes permanently, the action that had been developing. This focus on splitting and duplication, and the implication that such splitting and duplication is happening constantly, everywhere all the time, suggests that our world is just one in an innumerable set of possibilities. As these branching paths compound and proliferate, we begin to move toward realizing all possible outcomes of an event. This idea that the world is as it is for no reason, that it could easily be another way or any other way, is window through which Pynchon can introduce his hope for a better world, a better reality, one that must surely exist somewhere among the forking paths of history, but whose arrival here might be too much to hope for, or bear should it come; a hope that is distinctly meteoric. It is the introduction here of the meteor as an alternative, contrapuntal meteorological image that allows Pynchon to get beyond the seemingly comprehensive ideologies that have led up to such a dark, despairing view of the world. In many ways, it is easy to believe in a just and merciful god, and easy to believe in a cruel and punitive god; and of course, it is easy to believe that the world is all that is the case. To believe that the Moon, though, has gazed upon your sleeping face, and fallen madly in love with you, and has asked Zeus to preserve you in your slumber forever, and consorts with you as you dream (bears you fifty children you will never meet), this requires a broader sense of possibility than many may be prepared to accept. And perhaps the Moon, forever aloft, forever now compromised by its base, realpolitik cooption, must more give way to a more radical image, one that conveys a hope that, rather than being bound up in tainted transcendence, is sought out in the midst of pending hopelessness. This is the image Pynchon finds in the meteor. The second half of our essay takes up the notion of radical contingency and formulates it into the concept of “meteoric fiction.” This chapter, “Ahnighito,” named after a meteorite featured prominently and ominously in Against the Day, posits the meteor as a metaphor for cynical, hard-earned optimism, a true counterpoint to the stained idealism of the image of the Moon. The meteoric nature of Pynchon’s fiction becomes literalized in Against the Day through a direct evocation of Gravity’s Rainbow’s famous opening line, the meteoric: “A screaming comes across the sky” (4). Against the Day opens one of its later chapters with the sentence: “A heavenwide blast of light” (779). This blast belongs to the Tunguska Event, a massive, mysterious explosion that occurred over Siberia on June 30, 1908, likely the result of the explosion of a meteor about five miles above Stony Tunguska River. This “visitation at the Stony Tunguska” has pronounced effects on numerous characters in the novel, pulling them away from the normal, prescribed or proscribed course of their lives and history. It is in this suspended moment of possibility that hope can exist, and that meteoric fiction seeks to prolong and exploit.

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The next chapter, “Saviksoah” takes up the pursuit of this moment of irrational hope, exploring how the encounter with the other, both human and inhuman, is shrouded in secrecy. Jacques Derrida’s observation that “Literature will have been meteoric.”14 rests on the notion that literature can engage with ethical demands this encounter imposes. The encounter with the meteor, which for Derrida is “brief, rapid, transitory,”15 becomes, as literature, rooted in secrecy. The resistance of reality to conform to the schematized worldviews outlined in Part I gives way to a secrecy that is entirely different in kind. Oedipa Maas’s search for the mysterious Tristero in The Crying of Lot 49 provides an illustrative example of this. Like many Pynchon novels, Lot 49 presents itself as a mystery that, rather than resolving, grows more and more complex upon investigation.16 This allows these novels to take up secrecy as a key theme, and to engage with them through the concept of extramission. The belief that vision emerges from the eyes and flows outward into the world is universal and perennial, not because it is true, which it is not, but because it deftly captures the way our consciousness grasps the world. As attention and understanding move outward from one’s mind into the world, it strips reality of its depth. The world around us amounts to a projection, and any external reality pales in insignificance compared to the deep, generative, projective consciousness that we experience within ourselves. This shallow reality engenders shallow secrets, mysteries that are hidden from view somehow, and that, when revealed, resolve; the way the secrecy of a poker hand evaporates instantly once the cards are on the table. This draws a very clear distinction between inner life and outer, between the consciousness that we experience within ourselves and the functional, schematized consciousnesses that we project onto others, between the deep, irreducible secrecy within us and the shallow, resolvable secrets of others. And while these hierarchical distinctions diminish the projected, external, and other, they also create a model of our experience of our own consciousness which is compound, generative, and projecting, a model that clearly resembles literature, with its multiple characters borne out of the mind of an other and projected onto the page. With this privileged access to our experience of ourselves, literature is able to subvert the hierarchy of what can be called type A and B consciousness and to expand reality outward away from us, instilling others with irreducible secrecy and imposing the ethical demands of the world. The third chapter of Part II, “Tunguska” explains this process in detail. The type A consciousness that we experience within ourselves is bottomlessly complex, capable of imagining other, shallower, type B consciousnesses and projecting them into the world. Meanwhile, the others we encounter in the

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Introduction

world are (for the most part) encountered shallowly, superficially. They fail to impose the full depth of their reality on us. Meanwhile, nonhuman and inanimate objects and entities easily take on the same type of shallow reality for us. Pets, plants, cars, phones, et cetera readily take on the type B consciousnesses we project into them, and parasocial relationships blur the distinction between the real and constructed to a high degree, leaving the interior of one’s mind to be the only certain real thing in field of equivalent, impact-less entities. That is to say, the world becomes fictionalized. As we see in the next chapter, “Chicxulub,” Pynchon takes up this concept repeatedly throughout his career, filling his fictions with inanimate characters that inexplicably take up sentience. These range from the experimental dummies SHOCK and SHROUD in V. to Mason’s clock in Mason & Dixon and Byron the Bulb in Gravity’s Rainbow. These figures demonstrate how easily type B consciousnesses can be dispersed into the world, but they are met with the harrowing counterexample of V herself, who slowly, inexorably loses her humanity, becoming first an object and then an idea. Literature is capable of not just overcoming this process of derealization, but of actually using it directly to expand the realm of reality and to impose the reality of others on its audience. It does this because when we engage with literature, we are engaging not with the fictive characters that populate it (or not only with them) but also with the creative imagination that generates and projects them, the authorial consciousness. In the moment of contact with the absolutely other, with the strange stranger of the authorial consciousness, we can find a meteoric moment, a hiatus in which the “laws of the world” are held at bay; a moment in which we can hope for the divine intervention that stays the raised knife of the Akedah. We recall that it “is through such instants that [we are] capable of the Supernatural.”17 And the supernatural may finally only be, may ultimately only need to be, a glimpse of the real true face of the other, some small, real kindness, some moment of peace. The final chapter, “‘Oumuamua” concludes our argument with the claim that meteoric fiction, fiction that holds us suspended, if only fleetingly, works by composing an elaborate, compelling authorial consciousness, one that imposes real ethical demands on its reader, and holds out a hope, however vanishingly small, that these demands might be met in a moment of reckless hope. We identify precedents for this moment in Pynchon’s fiction, from his first novel, V., to the full realization of it in Bleeding Edge, and explain how these define Pynchon as one of the twentieth century’s major writers, in whose work we can find a powerfully generative approach to literature. This is possible because it posits literature as an encounter. We come face to face with a stranger whose nature we can never fully grasp. As with all

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encounters, there is a danger, a promise, even, of violence. Violence against us or violence on our own part. But there is also, however rarely it is fulfilled, the chance for Pynchon’s grace. The nature of human consciousness allows literature to profoundly affect our understanding of and relationship to reality. The compound structure of consciousness, in which a generative and complex consciousness contains and controls multiple simplified fictive consciousnesses resembles the structure of literature, in which a single creative authorial consciousness conjures and manipulates multiple simpler fictive beings not by coincidence, but because literature was developed precisely to evoke the most intimate nature of our mind. NOTES 1. Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 273–74. 2. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus. 3. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus. 4. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus. 5. Eva Stehle, “Sappho’s Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and Young Man,” Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Ellen Green (University of California Press, 1996). 6. These categories owe something to Christian Meillassoux’s systematic attempt at atheism in: Christian Meillassoux, “L’Inexistence divine,” dissertation (Université de Paris I, 1997). 7. Leo Tolstoy and Aylmer Maude, A Confession and What I Believe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921). 8. Tolstoy, A Confession. 9. Tolstoy, A Confession. 10. Tolstoy, A Confession. 11. Tolstoy, A Confession. 12. Simone Weil, Emma Crawford, and Mario van der Ruhr, Gravity and Grace (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11. 13. As rigorously documented in: Doug Haynes, “‘Gravity Rushes through Him’: ‘Volk’ and Fetish in Pynchon’s Rilke,” Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 2 (2012): 308–33. 14. Jacques Derrida and David Wells, Literature in Secret (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995). 15. Derrida, Literature in Secret, 154. 16. Carmen Perez-Llantada Auria, “On Fractal Geometry and Meaning Dissemination: Rethinking Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,” Atlantis 17, no. 1–2 (1995): 229–43. 17. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 11.

PART I

The Moon

13

Chapter One

Mare Tranquillitatis The Failure of Idealism in Gravity’s Rainbow

Throughout history the Moon has hung overhead, beautiful and unreachable. It lends itself naturally to notions of romantic transcendence, of a world somehow both like our own and perfectly different, a silvery ethereal alternative to our earthly, gravity-bound existence. It is an outlook that is outwardly optimistic. In the words of William Blake, “The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after death of the vegetative body.”1 But this is an optimism of escape. A naive desire to replace our fallen reality with some alternative that, by virtue of its discontinuity with this world, has been and shall remain perfected. In evacuating the world though, this ontology leaves it vulnerable to exactly the depredations and exploitation that the dreamer seeks to flee, Nietzsche’s slave-morality.2 The Moon here becomes another world, desirable precisely because it is not this world. Silvery and untouchable, it is an ideal receptacle for ideals that cannot survive the Earth’s harsh atmosphere. It is a tool, in this mode, for the cultural energy that drives systems of oppression, exploitation, and genocide.3 The role of art, and specifically literature in facilitating human cruelty is central in Pynchon’s works. Time and again, he takes up great historical tragedies as the setting for his novels, repeatedly returning to not the events themselves, but years, days, and moments immediately preceding them, as if seeking to diagnose the source for theses paroxysms of violence. Repeatedly, too, he finds art, literature, and pop culture deeply culpable. These are the drivers of society’s energies, harboring, cultivating, and directing its actions and productions, and as Pynchon looks back on the tragic waywardness of the modern world, the enlivening energy that has pressed it to this place is constantly derived from cultural products, and literature in particular.4 15

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Chapter One

As Robert McLaughlin has pointed out, “The colonial situation—that is, the relation, especially the power dynamics, between the colonizer and the colonized—plays an important part in much of Pynchon’s writing,” citing examples ranging from “the early short story ‘Mortality and Mercy in Vienna,’ and the journalistic essay ‘A Journey into the Mind of Watts,’ which suggest that potentially dissident sections of the United States are metaphorical third-world countries and are brought under control through imperial processes.”5 This is further elaborated in V. with the case of Deutsch Sudwestafrika, and the siege party, thrown by German colonial administrators that “seeks to conjure up the ecstasy of power associated with von Trotha’s 1904 genocidal campaign against the Hereros” and the ways that Mason & Dixon “focuses on the ways institutionalized ideologies, epistemologies and discourses seek to possess a continent and control its people.”6 The centrality of this concern in Pynchon’s oeuvre has resulted in a significant amount of criticism on the issue, but the extent to which Pynchon systematically dismantles the various ontological viewpoints that drive colonial and capitalist exploitation. The naive solipsism of Romanticism is presented as a treacherously pervasive worldview, but so, too, are realist materialism and hopeless cynicism. The arc of history, for Pynchon, is gravity’s rainbow. It is the arc of a falling bomb. The structures of civilization are built on sinisterly administered death, and the powers that administer it rely on grand fictional narratives. In V. it is Tristan and Isolde, the intractable linkage of love and death and love for death, that animates the dehumanization of what Pynchon would later call the “preterite,” that drives forward the grand, violent, fascist, capitalist, Puritan narratives that control Stencil’s century and grinds the mass of humanity in its impervious gears.7 This process is what Zygmunt Bauman calls “social death,” which involves the “ascription of non- or subhuman characteristics to groups as a means of discursively, legally, and governmentally dividing them from the social body, denying their rights and humanity.”8 This work builds on earlier work by Orlando Patterson whose Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study closely examines the structural dehumanization of the other.9 This dehumanization, though, is not only present in explicitly oppressive social systems. It occurs within the mind of individuals, as well. We can see the casual disregard for the unique humanity and inner life of the other in cases of “change blindness” wherein strangers are so shallowly acknowledged that they can be replaced with an entirely different person unnoticed. Change Blindness is the term for humans’ general inability to detect change if it occurs outside of their direct focus of attention. The most obvious cases of this occur in the continuity errors that haunt practically every film, as small, implausible or unrealistic alterations in things like props

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and wardrobe from shot to shot go unnoticed throughout the filmmaking process and then unnoticed again by millions of viewers. Change Blindness is not limited to the wetness of clothes or the fullness of cinematic glasses, though. In fact, experiments in the extent to which we operate blind of crucial changes reveal just how shallow our interactions with other people are. In one famous experiment, an experimenter approached a pedestrian and asked for directions to a building on campus. As the pedestrian gave directions to the experimenter, two other scientists interrupted the conversation, walking between the experimenter and the pedestrian carrying a large door. As the door passed between them, the first experimenter changed places with a second experimenter, who then emerged from behind the door.10 As summarized by Nelson et al., the “second experimenter continued to talk to the pedestrian as if nothing unusual had happened. The second experimenter wore different clothing than the first experimenter, and he also differed from the first in height and voice. Even with these presumably noticeable differences in experimenters, half the pedestrians failed to notice the change.”11 These experiments and others make it clear that while we easily, in fact uncontrollably, strip away much of the humanity in the people we encounter in the world, engaging with them primarily in terms of their function regarding us or the uses to which we can put them. If the history of the twentieth century, initiated with Henry Adams’s dynamo, is the story of inanimate objects—machines and technologies, but corporations as well—being filled with a vivifying energy, V. tells us that that energy has been irrevocably corrupted. Adams posits and V. sets out to prove, through the character(s) of V. in particular, that consciousnesses are movable. They can be transferred and replicated, and most importantly, they exist meaningfully outside of the bodies we might assign them to. We project our own consciousness into the world to meet the others that we meet. We absorb the consciousnesses of these others, too, as they meet us. We fill ourselves with the consciousnesses of others, and between us, we construct mutually interacting, spectral consciousnesses. For society, for friendship, for lovers, these spectral entities, intertwined and interacting, the overlapping consciousnesses we use to bind ourselves loosely to one another, suffice. Yet inasmuch as these friends and lovers, these others both real and fictional, remain singular, remain mere components within the compound plurality of ourselves, any real connection is held at bay. Those around us remain opaque, solid and singular, with “no overflowing sets of constitutive but partially incompatible objects packed-away inside,” or else “perfectly transparent objects that, with clean efficiency, convey us without deformation to the ‘real’ objects behind them.”12 They are contained under a single label, singular entities within our own compound mind. They can provide us with mystery, but it is also only in the shallow, paranoid, or

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conspiratorial sense. They cannot offer the real, awesome incomprehensibility of other people. Pynchon takes this critique of the “Tristan-and-Iseult theme,” and, indeed, all of Romanticism, further in Gravity’s Rainbow. A sprawling, encyclopedic masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow is about many things, but central to all of its innumerable threads is the desperate question: how is this possible? What dynamics could lead to, not individual evil, but systematic, ongoing, global inhumanity? The novel is set in the waning days of World War II, and the horrors of the holocaust haunt it unmentioned (51), but never as an exceptional or anomalous tragedy, but rather as a logical extension of the century’s prior genocides. (Discussing the genocide of the Herero people by the German forces of Lothar von Trotha in V., Pynchon’s narrator notes that out of the approximately 80,000 Hereros living in German Southwest Africa in 1904, only 15,130 remained for an official census in 1911, a decrease of 64,870, which the narrator notes is “only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good” (245).) The Herero survivors of von Trotha’s genocide feature prominently in Gravity’s Rainbow, and their presence reinforces the continuity of the Nazi project within the larger framework of colonialism and genocide that defines modernity. Following Adams, Pynchon locates the vitalizing force that drives this ongoing destruction within our culture. In particular, he homes in on German Romanticism as movement that cultivates solipsism, the derealization of the world, and dehumanization of the other through its insistence always on the primacy of one’s inner life, the subsuming of others into one’s own mental life and the conclusion then that, indeed, the world of imagination is the world of eternity, and the world outside of it trivial or fleeting at best, existing only to serve our own ends, demanding and deserving nothing in return. As Richard Locke wrote in the New York Times upon the novel’s release, Pynchon “has brilliantly combined German political and cultural history with the mechanisms of paranoia to create an exceedingly complex work of art,” wherein the “most important cultural figure in ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ [sic] is not Goethe or Wagner, however, but Rainer Maria Rilke, Captain Blicero’s favorite poet. In a way, the book could be read as a serio-comic variation on Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’ and their German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture.”13 One of the novel’s central villains, Captain/Major/Lieutenant Weissmann also returns from V., where he was a decadent German army officer in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, modern-day Namibia, the site of the Herero genocide. In Gravity’s Rainbow he is an SS officer in command of a V-2 rocket battery in the Netherlands. There, he rapes and tortures a pair of children,

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Katje and Gottfried through a series of elaborate, sadistic fantasies, culminating with his murdering Gottfried by placing him inside a V-2 and firing him into London. Throughout the novel, Weissmann dwells on his favorite poet, the German romantic Ranier Maria Rilke. As Enzian, a Herero soldier and former victim of Weissmann’s cruelty puts it, he is “in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance” (660). These entities, in Weissman’s worldview, are essentially inseparable: the poetry bolsters the arrogance, and the arrogance (grand, truly narcissistic arrogance, in which others are purely objects of utility) drives the impulse to empire. The derealization of the outside world that is so central to Rilke’s poetry is exceedingly useful for empire, stripping the ethical world of its ethical weight. We can almost witness this process in Rainer Maria Rilke’s notebooks of August 1914. Rilke writes: Die Vögel fliegen still durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will, ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum.14 [The birds fly silently through us still. O, if I want to grow, I can look at the tree outside, and it will grow in me.]15

Rilke is, at heart, a phenomenologist. The world lives, for him, within each individual consciousness; it animates us, and we, in turn, animate it back. The tree grows, for Rilke, not out in the world where it may or may not exist (who knows), but within his mind as he perceives this growth. By dint of this fact, that growth becomes, as a part of the poet’s consciousness, the growth of the poet himself. The properties of the tree become the properties of the poet who perceives them. The world and mind become essentially and fundamentally inextricable in this view. The mind of the individual is the world, in its entirety. This is perhaps the logical endpoint of Romanticism, or German Romanticism, and a kind of radical solipsism. The idea that the world exists solely within our mind has its logical rigor (though it relies on the transcendental more than it might imagine), but its ethical implications can have a tremendous number of negative consequences. In denying the full reality of the outside world, or at least its reality independent of the perceiving mind, it radically reduces the ethical demands that world places on us. The phenomenological perspective Rilke inherits from Kant precludes an encounter with unmediated reality and entails a shift toward what we will call an extramissive ontology. Tom Rockmore explains:

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This shift occurs through the reinterpretation of a single epistemological model from competing perspectives. The first model continues and develops the canonical, anti-Platonic, modern causal theory of perception, according to which mind-independent things cause ideas in the mind—in Kant’s theory, representations or appearances. The second model refutes this initial model in all of its many variations while suggesting another anti-Platonic alternative. The first very familiar model presupposes metaphysical realism in adopting a representational approach to knowledge understood as requiring the correct representation of the world as it is, beyond appearance. The criterion of truth in this model is the correspondence of the representation to its cognitive object. The second model is not representational but constructivist. It presupposes the failure of the initial strategy, which is replaced by the view that a necessary condition of knowledge is that the cognitive subject in some sense “construct” the cognitive object or objects. The criterion of knowledge in this model is the identity of the subject and object, knower and known.16

This is an inherently artistic perspective. The subject (which may be the only truly real thing in existence) is a generative force, composing the world it perceives. The world depends on the creative energy of the perceiving subject. Even short of the cartesian demon that lies at the solipsistic extreme of this perspective, it prioritizes the constructed nature of the external and the primacy of the perceiving/creating subject. We can consider this extramissive because it imagines the mind of the subject to be the vitalizing source of the outside world. Extramission is the belief that some force or substance emerges from the eyes. This is a perennial and universal illusion, built out of the reality that the eyes of others often do indicate the focus of their attention, giving us access to a rough notion of their consciousness. Once this idea is internalized, the idea that consciousness moves outward from the eyes recreates the phenomenological move in a powerfully intuitive way: the world we see around us is generated within our own consciousness and projected outward from the eyes onto the inaccessible and potentially irrelevant scrim of the external. The generative, projective consciousness of the extramissive model is analogous to the creative process envisioned by Romanticism, in which the authorial consciousness constructs and then externalizes an inner vision. This affinity is a natural touchstone for the Romantics, whose key themes include both the creative power of the individual and the perpetually elusive nature of any totalizing “Truth.”17 But while the quasi-divine role of the creative artist in this analogy is flattering to the poet, as is the insinuation that the artistic creation is equal to or superior to the real world itself, these same comparisons diminish the value of external reality and the others that dwell there. The extramissive model casts the artist as a polyphonic, complex, generative, and projecting entity,

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while the world becomes shallow, singular, and projected. The distinction between fabricated, fictional beings and real human beings is blurred or rendered moot, and the ethical demands that they place on the subject diminish. Phenomenologically, these meaningful objects blur into wholly allegorical objects that have legitimate existence only within the mind. The poem cited earlier, from the notebook of August 1914, provides a place to start. In its entirety, it reads: Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen Dingen, aus jeder Wendung weht es her: Gedenk! Ein Tag, an dem wir fremd vorübergingen entschließt im künftigen sich zum Geschenk. Wer rechnet unseren Ertrag? Wer trennt uns von den alten, den vergangnen Jahren? Was haben wir seit Anbeginn erfahren, Als daß sich eins im anderen erkennt? Als daß an uns gleichgültiges erwarmt? O Haus, o Wiesenhang, o Abendlicht, auf einmal bringst du’s beinah zum Gesicht und stehst an uns, umarmend und umarmt. Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum: Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will, ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum. Ich sorge mich, und in mir steht das Haus. Ich hüte mich, und in mir ist die Hut. Geliebter, der ich wurde: an mir ruht der schönen Schöpfung Bild und weint sich aus. [All things can seem to summon us, our touch; they signal Notice! to us from all sides. A day we passed through, perfect strangers, transforms itself into a future gift. Who reckons up our yield? Who separates us from our years that have gone by? What have we learned from our beginnings except that one thing knows itself in others? Or that we have been warmed indifferently? Oh house, oh meadow slope, oh evening light, at once you’re with us, almost face to face, and you stand close, embracing and embraced. One single space pervades all beings here: an inner world-space. Silently, the birds fly through us still. Oh, I who want to grow, can gaze outside: a tree will rise inside me. I’m anxious, and a house abides within me.

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I’m careful, and my safety has no fears. My love, who I become: inside me dwells the image of all beauty, streaming tears.]18

The poem confronts us with a strikingly vivified world. It has the pulsing, ever-increasing vitality that Rilke cherishes in the art of others and captures so well in his own writing. As he writes, “All things can seem to summon us,” and swell in importance within us: “A day we passed through, perfect strangers, / transforms itself into a future gift.” This is an internal process. Once the world has been taken in, perceived in a distinctly personal way, the artist’s consciousness goes to work on it, as “one thing knows itself in others.” At this point, as discussed above, the directionality of the relationship is inverted, and rather than an encounter with the world enlivening the poetic mind, it is the poet that gives life to the world around him. “One single space pervades all beings here: / an inner world-space,” Rilke writes, as the consciousness, the “inner world-space” of the Romantic creative becomes the vital heart of “all beings,” beings that it no longer perceives, but, conversely, beings that the creative consciousness “pervades.” This territorializing action reaches an apex near the end of the poem, as the extramissive mind captures and claims for its own, not only the natural world, but the other human being. This comes in the form of “My love, who I become.” Rilke is prone to loose variations on the sonnet form, built around a late turn, and this poem is no exception. “My love, who I become,” marks the turn and thrusts us suddenly into an intensely intimate moment. “My love, who I become: inside me dwells / the image of all beauty, streaming tears” (in German: “Geliebter, der ich wurde: an mir ruht / der schönen Schöpfung Bild und weint sich aus”). The lines have a triumphal air. Becoming the beloved marks the apotheosis of the process of phenomenological integration. The beloved other is no other at all, but rather, actually, the subjective poet himself. Fittingly, upon the accomplishment of this integration, we get a final, striking, and strikingly extramissive image: the picture of “all beauty, streaming tears.” These tears literally emerge from the eyes in a metonymy of the whole of reality, which is contained in the subjective mind of the poet and projected outward; the thin veneer of the external only a pale reflection of the vibrant, growing, all-encompassing “inner world-space.” This has implications. Even the beloved other, “My love,” “Geliebter,” an adored and cherished other, exists primarily as a part (and only a small part) of the extramissive mind. The true other, that is, the other that exists independently of the consciousness that perceives her, becomes irrelevant, almost nonexistent.

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Phenomenologically, she has no more claim to reality than any other ding an sich. Which is to say: no claim. The triumphal generative individuality of the poet, here, comes at the cost of everything else, including, most acutely, the other. Compare this to what is perhaps Rilke’s most famous poem: “Archaischer Torso Apollos,” [“Archaic Torso of Apollo”]. While the beloved other is only a part of the artist, the work of art, in this case the titular sculpture of Apollo, is bursting with a vitality and energy distinctly of its own. Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz unter der Shultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle; und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.60 [We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.]19

Despite or perhaps because “Archaic Torso of Apollo” was written significantly earlier, in 1908, it is more fully immersed in the mysterious power of the work of art, without the tidiness and confidence present in the Notebook of August 1914. Evidence of Rilke’s extramissive thinking remains prominent, but the complete internalization of the process is not present here as it

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is in the later poem. Instead, the projective power exists within the archaic torso, rather than the poet himself. The sculpture has no head, no eyes, and yet its projective powers remain. “We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso / is still suffused with brilliance from inside, / like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, // gleams in all its power.” The extramissive ability to project a world continues to exist within the sculpture even without the eyes that should, intuitively, be fundamental to this process. For Rilke, extramission is necessary, with or without eyes, for art to have its power. “Otherwise / the curved breast could not dazzle you so,” he writes. The projective power Rilke associates with artistic creation must somehow still be present in the beheaded torso. It is still present in the paradoxical and difficult to translate phrase: “in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, // sich hält und glänzt.” Stephen Mitchell translates this as “in which his gaze, now turned to low, // gleams in all its power,” which emphasizes the paradox of the eyes retaining or even enhancing their power (or the torso retaining or enhancing the power of the eyes) despite their absence. This is less obvious in the German, which could also be translated as “in which his gaze, dialed back, // continues to shine.” It is not clear whether the light that flows outward from the eyes is both dimmed and brightened within the torso, or only dimmed but still, somehow, amazingly, present. But it is still present. The miracle of the torso of Apollo is that: that despite its lack of eyes, it continues to exert the extramissive force of the artist. That this is miraculous reveals a great deal about Rilke, his aesthetic theories, and his phenomenological ontology. Reality is created in the mind, then projected outward onto the world via the eyes, and expressing this process by replicating it is the duty of the artist. The torso’s ability to captivate, to radiate artistry, without eyes is a stunning accomplishment for the poet, and it crashes into him staggering power in the poetic turn of “Archaischer Torso Apollos.” The sculpture that can project its artistic power without the eyes that such a feat should require has a baffling power. Its absences: the lack of head, the lack of eyes, the lack of genitals at “that dark center where procreation flared,” are somehow more powerful than those objects would be if they were present. So it is that the torso that projects a world without projecting eyes, must also perceive the world without those eyes, must also perceive the world even more acutely, even more comprehensively: “for here there is no place / that does not see you.” This is the effect of being the object, rather than the subject, of the extramissive model. The poet finds himself swallowed up in the generative force of the sculpture, enfolded into its world (its gaze) in much the same way the beloved other is swallowed up by the poet’s creative vision in the Notebook of August 1914.

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If the chronological order of these two poems were reversed, and the Notebook written first, with “Archaischer Torso Apollos” following years later, they would be a testament to Rilke’s development as a writer and thinker. Because the reversal of the poet’s position in these two poems, from subject in one to object in the later is not trivial. The inversion of the extramissive dynamic in “Archaischer Torso Apollos” is not merely the same process from a different angle. Recognizing the generative power of the other is not the same as recognizing it within oneself. Recognizing the legitimate reality of the other is not the same as recognizing reality solely within oneself. Not remotely. Indeed, recognizing the generative power and the true reality of the other is a fundamentally transformative experience. It imposes on us the full weight of the ethical demands of the other. It truly demands that we accommodate that reality and everything it carries with it. You must change your life. The inversion of this process, through which the inner life of the self becomes not only the most valued aspect of reality, but indeed the only true, authentic encounter with it, easily facilitates the dehumanization of the other and the derealization of world beyond the interior of one’s own mind. This is perhaps the logical endpoint of Romanticism, or German Romanticism: a kind of radical solipsism. The idea that the world exists solely within our mind has its logical rigor, but its ethical implications are treacherous.20 In denying the full reality of the outside world, or at least its reality independent of the perceiving mind, it radically reduces the ethical demands that world places on us. As Paul de Man has noted of Rilke, his “metaphors therefore do not connote objects, sensations, or qualities of objects (there is practically no third person in the grammar of the poem), but refer to an activity of the speaking subject.”21 Rilke has faith in poetry as an unmediated path to truth, but Pynchon does not share this faith. The discontinuities of existence exist in literature, too, and lend themselves to exploitation. The Romantic cultivations of the space between the self and world opens a space ripe for exploitation and cruelty. Pynchon’s use of Rilke in Gravity’s Rainbow ties the solipsism of Romanticism directly to the project of colonialism and Nazism22. If the other fails to be fully real, and if our own experience of life is all that we can depend on to truly exist, then the exploitation and destruction of others cannot achieve the ethical weight it requires, allowing the repeated genocides and relentless horrors of the twentieth century to flourish. One could make the claim that Rilke-mad Weissmann is an example of “corrupted idealism [. . .] meant to bring to mind the Nazi rocket scientists, such as Wernher von Braun [sic], who were transplanted from Germany to Texas immediately after the war to work on the American space

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programme.”23 In reality, though, Weismann is not representative of corrupted idealism, but rather, the corrupting force that feeds on idealism. The idealistic victim of this in the rocket scientist Franz Pӧkler. Pӧkler encounters Rilke directly en route to his work on the A3, when he sees a quote from Rilke over his seat where an advertisement might be expected (highlighting its role as propaganda) “‘Once, only once . . . ’” Pӧkler notes that this is “One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle.” Even at this stage Pӧkler is aware that the war effort will end badly for all of them, “in blood, in shock, without Dignity,” (412) and links the mentality that drives them to this disgraceful death is one that fuels itself constantly with the culture artifacts that enliven it (412). Like the A3, Pӧkler’s story, which becomes the dominant thread of the novel’s second section, “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering,” is one of failure. Pӧkler’s story is based on the autobiographies of several Nazi rocket scientists,24 and epitomizes the failure that mires such autobiographies’ attempts at defining the self through retrospection.25 Pӧkler’s ensnarement within this paradigm is already accomplished, and all his meager attempts at escape are premised on exactly the same ontology that he seeks to resist. He longs to remove himself from the reality around him, to retreat into an imaginary heaven of his own making, but it is exactly this denial of reality, this insistence on the self’s inherent primacy that led to his destruction. Pynchon links Pӧkler and his failures with the A3 and its failures explicitly, highlighting the lack of true continuity in their arcs, their attempts to counterfeit this continuity, and the disastrous results this produces. Once more, Pynchon finds deep cultural roots in both the bomb and Pӧkler’s experience of the world, noting that there has been a “strange connection” between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive still images to simulate or counterfeit movement, as in film, of course, but also calculus, as for at least two centuries, “since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air” (379). Transforming the single fluid movement of an object in space into a series of static points, each implicitly isolated from those on either side. For Leibniz and the rocket scientists, this is a mathematical convenience, but, as Pynchon notes, Pӧkler’s experiences stand as proof that these techniques had been “extended past images on film, to human lives” (413). This is true to the extent that “Pӧkler was an extension of the Rocket” (408). The proof that Pӧkler’s life can be broken into discontinuous elements comes in the form of his daughter Isle. Ilse is the most striking and harrowing failed continuity in Pӧkler’s life. One day, returning from work, he sees Isle sitting on the bed in his quarters. The begins to tell him that she is his daughter, but has to trail off (414), her

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questioning tone and the incompleteness of her description of their relationship speaking volumes. But Pӧkler does not hesitate to recognize her as his daughter, at least initially. He picks her up and kisses her before she can finish her introduction Soon, though, doubts begin to creep in. He begins to doubt her hair, which he remembered as “lighter, shorter,” and her face, wondering if it is really “the same face” he remembered as she left with her mother years ago. He catches himself pretending not to find resemblances. Or, “Perhaps pretending” (414). Pӧkler’s doubts about whether the child is truly his daughter, or in the coming years as she returns annually for brief visits and trips to the sprawling amusement park Zwolfkinder, whether he is even meeting with the same child each year. The gaps in her presence introducing an insurmountable degree of doubt. During that first meeting, Pökler, speaks with the child, struck by her asking if she might fly inside the V2 rocket someday. “I’d fit inside, wouldn’t I?’” He responds by telling the girl, that they will fly in it together someday, “Perhaps someday to the Moon’” (416). Pӧkler follows this comment into a prolonged revelry about the Moon. He notes that he had mentioned flying to the Moon as if he were about to begin a story, some fantastical tale, and that when he had not gone on with it, she had made up her own. The engineer in a neighboring cubicle has a map of the Moon, and Isle spends hours with it, studying it, looking for the perfect place for them to live. She finally chooses a “small pretty crater in the Sea of Tranquility called Maskelyne B.” (named after the Astronomer Royal who also features in Mason & Dixon) (416). Isle imagines that they will build a house there on the rim of the crater, Pökler, Ilse, and her mother, with “gold mountains out one window and the wide sea out the other. And Earth green and blue in the sky . . . ” (416). Pökler wonders if he should have told the girl what the seas of the Moon really are, but characteristically, he cannot bring himself to replace fantasy with reality. In linking Isle and the rocket to these childish dreams of Moon as a sort of paradise, a place Pӧkler and his daughter can escape to and live happily ever after, Pynchon makes it clear that this idealism is an element in Pӧkler’s exploitation at the hands of Weissmann and the Nazi power structure.26 When Isle returns, (“no moon-wishes this year,”) Pӧkler lies awake wondering, if she is really his daughter, or if she has been replaced by an imposter, or if he has not met his real daughter at all, but instead only two separate imposters. He admonishes himself for not knowing for certain, but he realizes that “Too much had happened between. Too much history and dream . . . ” (425). History and dreams being very precisely the forces that have entered Pӧkler’s life to dismantle something as fundamental as his relationship with is daughter, his love for her, replacing it with paranoia, doubt, and hopelessness.

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“A daughter a year,” Pӧkler thinks, noting the discontinuity this introduces. Each one will be about a year older than the last, though each time he will have to begin their relationship again “from scratch” unmoored from any shared past (429). Returning to the repeated motif of the filmstrip, he remarks that they have used his love for Ilse to create a sort of cinematic image of a daughter, with “summertime frames of her,” strobing slowly through his life, leaving the responsibility of constructing the illusion of a single child to Pӧkler himself (429). And it is an illusion. The dream of flying someday perhaps to the Moon, the transcendental hope for an escape to some different reality stands in for all the illusions, all the imaginary possibilities held out solely or primarily as a means of control and manipulation, define Pӧkler’s world, his life, and his understanding of reality. As Pӧkler willingly subsumes himself into illusion, never fully convinced but never able to challenge its rule, his attempt to interiorize his existence, to segregate himself from the outside world, presents him as an inverted case of the same solipsistic Romanticism as Weissmann. While the latter can center himself as a creative force and view the outside world and those around as mere raw materials from which he can fashion his own increasingly sinister fantasies, Pӧkler’s adoption of the same perspective allows him to surrender all claim to the real world, meagerly accepting, instead, whatever is dealt onto him and struggling to fashion this into a fantastical continuity. As a central ideological target of Gravity’s Rainbow, it is no surprise that Pynchon’s critique here is so well-developed. It is not, however, the book’s sole target. On the contrary, the novel systematically pursues numerous ontological perspectives, subverting each one until any optimism, however small, can be considered rigorously won. NOTES 1. William Blake, David V. Erdman, and Harold Bloom, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1988), 555. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (New York: Hackett Publishing, 1998). 3. J. Paul Narkunas, “Corporatizing Life in A World System with Thomas Pynchon: ‘Networks of Interest’ and Dispersed Organization,” Criticism 58, no. 4 (2016): 647–77, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.13110​/criticism​.58​.4​.0647. 4. Samuel Thomas, Pynchon and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2011), is a key resource for investigating Pynchon’s approach to the politics of both the 1960s–1980s and the historical periods in which his fiction is set. 5. Robert L. McLaughlin, “Unreadable stares: imperial narratives and the colonial gaze in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Pynchon Notes 50–51 (2002): 83. 6. McLaughlin, “Unreadable stares,” 83.

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7. Louis Mackey, “Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition,” SubStance 10, no. 1 (1981): 16–30. 8. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 9. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 10. Daniel J. Simons, and Daniel T. Levin, “Change Blindness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1, no. 7 (1997): 261–67. 11. Kally J. Nelson, Cara Laney, Nicci Bowman Fowler, Eric D. Knowles, Deborah Davis, and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Change Blindness Can Cause Mistaken Eyewitness Identification,” in Legal and Criminological Psychology 16, no.1 (2011): 62–74. 12. Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 258. 13. Richard Locke, “One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years,” New York Times, 11 March 1973. 14. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen Dingen,” in R. M. Rilke,Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden, ed. Manfred Engel et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996), 113. 15. Our translation. 16. Tom Rockmore, Kant and Phenomenology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 41. 17. Consider, for example: John Watkins, “Byron and the Phenomenology of Negation,” Studies in Romanticism 29, no. 3 (Fall 1990); and Thomas MacFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1981). 18. Trans. David Young, The Cortland Review, Summer 2013. 19. Trans. Stephen Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Bilingual Edition. New York: Vintage, 1983. 20. Eric Bulson, “A Supernatural History of Destruction; or, Thomas Pynchon’s Berlin,” New German Critique 110 (2010): 49–72. 21. Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, RiIke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). 22. Joel D. Black, “Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Boundary 2 8, no. 2 (1980): 229–54. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /302849. 23. Matt Lewis, “Baddies in books: Captain Blicero in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Guardian, 7 April 2015. 24. David Cowart, “Cinematic Augeries of the Third Reich in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Literature/Film Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1974): 364–70. 25. Robert L. McLaughlin, “Franz Pӧkler’s Anti-Story: Narrative and Self in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Pynchon Notes 40–41, (Spring–Fall 1997): 159–75. 26. Monika Fludernik, “Hänsel und Gretel, and Dante: The Coordinates of Hope in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” AAA: Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 14, no. 1 (1989): 39–55.

Chapter Two

Mare Moscoviense The Failure of Reason in Mason & Dixon

The Moon is not a heaven that Pӧkler can escape into. It is, rather, composed of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with traces of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen, and exists hurtling downward in a series of fractal spirals, downward toward the falling Earth, downward toward the falling sun, and downward toward the falling Sagittarius A*. It is, that is, all too real. Which is to say, the Moon is only all too real. When humankind did finally reach it, it was not a silvery celestial heaven, only a political prop. And so we can understand those who seek to deny the reality of our arrival on the Moon. In a sense they are correct. We did not pierce the veil of the heavens and reach some transcendent alternative world devoid of all suffering and gravity. Instead, the Moon itself was attained, claimed as an outpost of a single political entity, and left then to spiral, demystified and only fully real. Only a finish line in an arbitrary political competition. We did not reach the Moon our ancestors had known; we only extended our world to its surface. The inversion of idealism here, a sort of materialist realpolitik rooted in scientific and political realism, presents itself as a workable alternative to the failed, corrupted, and doomed naivete we saw in chapter 1. These attempts to circumscribe the world, though, cannot provide a viable alternative to superstition and idealism because they cannot account for the real mysteries of the world, the secrecy that is irreducible, meteoric. Science, mathematics and their implications and consequences in Pynchon are marked by scientific determinism and the belief in a simple, schematized, and masterable world. From his early interest in entropy and the work of the nineteenth-century scientist Clerk Maxwell, through Gravity’s Rainbow’s Pavlovian Dr. Edward W.A. Pointsman and the Michelson-Morley 31

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experiment that features prominently in Against the Day, science and scientists’ efforts to circumscribe the world have been constant foils in Pynchon’s work, culminating in its thematic centrality in 1996’s Mason & Dixon. The attainment and politicization of the Moon encapsulates this directly. The transformation of Nazi scientist Werner Von Braun into the head of NASA and his subsequent success in reaching the Moon with the Apollo program not out of any idealistic dream of space, but rather as a mere pragmatic political gesture at the heart of the Cold War. In contrast to the discontinuities that define and ultimately destroy Pӧkler’s life, Von Braun and the line of scientific progress is shown to be remarkably unbroken, and figures postwar America as a direct continuation of the Nazi project and everything that preceded it.1 This material history, marked by slavery, colonialism, oppression, and holocaust cannot provide a viable alternative even to the idealism it corrupts and replaces. Instead, materialism, both philosophical and consumerist, defines and justifies the politics of oppression, “the colonialism that notoriously justifies itself as a bringing of light to the benighted.”2 What initially presents as objective state beyond ethics and politics is in fact a deeply ideological platform conveniently included toward hegemonic power. Throughout his career, scholars and critics have lauded Pynchon for his confidence with scientific, technological, and mathematical subjects, without deeply questioning his stance on these materials and the role they play in society. But as with naive idealism, Pynchon’s perspective on skeptical materialism captures its deeply flawed, injurious nature. The depth of Pynchon’s interest in science and technology acknowledges its robustness and seeming plausibility as a way of being in the world. It cannot be dismissed as easily as the blind optimism discussed in chapter 1. The epistemological claims of science are more grounded, more persuasive, and more durable than whatever fantasies or fabulations conjure grand optimism, and it would be difficult to take the history of the modern world as a subject, as Pynchon does, without acknowledging the tremendous success of the materialist worldview. And yet, as David Cowart notes, “in one novel after another, Pynchon has devoted his formidable powers of subversion and satire to exposing the false premises behind the technocratic syllogism.”3 Even as early as “Entropy,” a short story first published in 1960, three years before V., scientific concepts garner strength from the metaphors and myths that can be collected around them rather than any privileged access to reality. The role of science and technology in warping human ideals toward death and destruction in Gravity’s Rainbow has already been touched on, with the cold, mechanical cruelty of the V2 rocket program buffeted by the character of Dr Edward Pointsman, a staunch behaviorist and disciple of Ivan Pavlov, whose experiments with canine behavioral conditioning Pointsman carried on

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into human experimentation, including that carried out on Tyrone Slothrop as an infant. In this way, scientific rationalism is woven into the dense, inescapable web of darkness that makes up the setting of Gravity’s Rainbow, but as we will see in chapter 3, it is the depth of this darkness that sets the worldview of Gravity’s Rainbow’s antagonistic forces apart as something different than the blinkered materialism of rationalism. Instead, the most extensive and compelling examination of rationalism as a force in the world is undertaken in 1996’s Mason & Dixon, whose Enlightenment setting foregrounds rationalism, its role in modernity, and the terminal flaws that preclude its truth. Published after Pynchon’s seventeen-year midcareer hiatus, following 1990’s Vineland, Mason & Dixon, is perhaps Pynchon’s most singular creation. Written in an exaggerated pastiche of eighteenth-century syntax, spelling, and typography, the novel follows the astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon as they work together to observe the transit of Venus in South Africa and then, years later, to map the Mason-Dixon Line which would later famously distinguish slave states from free. From this perspective at the early stages of modernity, Mason & Dixon sets out to diagnose the role of Enlightenment rationality in shaping the horrors of slavery, colonialism, and the broader derealization of humanity and the environment. Pynchon had prepared for these thematic concerns years earlier, in an essay on “Sloth” written for the New York Times in 1993. In this essay, whose subtitle is “Nearer My Couch to Thee,” Pynchon muses on the subject of laziness, before briefly turning his attention to the colonial time-period that would soon be the setting for Mason & Dixon. Tracing the American obsession with ‘productivity’ back to Ben Franklin, Pynchon writes that “Philadelphia, by Franklin’s time, answered less and less to the religious vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and services coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a grid of regular city blocks.” The city in this way, imposes itself on its citizens. Going on, Pynchon points out that “The urban mazework of London, leading into ambiguities and indeed evils, was here all rectified, orthogonal.” Quoting Dickens, who wrote in 1842 that “After walking about in it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street,” Pynchon draws the conclusions that “Spiritual matters were not quite as immediate as material ones, like productivity! Sloth was no longer so much a Sin against God or spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible—that is, against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.” The secularization of Sloth, for Pynchon, ties into a greater attempt to manipulate time itself, which will become one of the central themes of Mason & Dixon.

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As he writes, “In the idea of time that had begun to rule city life in Poor Richard’s day, where every second was of equal length and irrevocable, not much in the course of its flow could have been called nonlinear, unless you counted the ungovernable warp of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use.” The reference to dreams takes us back to Pynchon’s analysis of Barthelme and with him, the idea that literature is essentially the transmission of dreams from author to audience. So it is that Pynchon notes that “in Frances M. Barbour’s 1974 concordance of the sayings, there is nothing to be found under ‘Dreams,’ dreams being as unwelcome in Philly back then as their frequent companion, sleep, which was considered time away from accumulating wealth, time that had to be tithed back into the order of things to purchase 20 hours of productive waking.” Franklin is again a useful example of this, as, during “the Poor Richard years, Franklin, according to the ‘Autobiography,’ was allowing himself from l A.M. to 5 A.M. for sleep.” Notably, “the other major nonwork block of time was four hours, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M., devoted to the Evening Question, ‘What good have I done this day?’ This must have been the schedule’s only occasion for drifting into reverie—there would seem to have been no other room for speculations, dreams, fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal machine was supposed to be nonfiction.” The essay is short, and Pynchon leaves it there, but the clear implication is that fiction has its place, and this insistence on the importance of stories plays a key role both in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. In Mason & Dixon, “Pynchon scrutinizes the age in which technology began to come into its own-bringing with it the modern world’s spiritual desperation. He exposes the fallacy of scientific rationalism at the moment of its great efflorescence in the eighteenth century.”4 Throughout Mason & Dixon, rationalism is central, a key principle in a world that is: unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one. Royal Society Members and French Encyclopaedists are in the Chariot, availing themselves whilst they may of any occasion to preach the Gospels of Reason, denouncing all that once was Magic, though too often in smirking tropes upon the Church of Rome. . . . One may be allowed an occasional Cock Lane Ghost,-otherwise, for any more in that Article, one must turn to Gothick Fictions. (82)

Concurrently, this scientific materialism is linked with financial materialism as well, as the rationally, mathematically defined property line of the Mason-Dixon Line comes almost inevitably to mark slavery, the logical conclusion of the project of rationalism. Franklin, as a hero of the Enlightenment, is as such in league with forces that are hostile to humanity. Indeed, in one of the novel’s more unsettling

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tableaux, Franklin leads a serpentine dance out of a tavern and into the streetan eloquent representation of the idea that rationalism leads its followers through a merry dance echoing the course of the novel itself, in which wildly fanciful turns in the narrative bring in not just founding fathers, but also robotic ducks traveling at near-light-speed, alien abduction, the hollow Earth, and an elaborate conspiracy involving Chinese Jesuits, all of which serve to foreground the novel’s primary concern: the precarious nature of all agreedupon reality and the ease with which the powerful manipulate it to exploit the powerless. As Pynchon writes: History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius [. . .] (350)

The novel’s focus on two real historical figures and incorporation of innumerable others, ties it more explicitly to real history than any of Pynchon’s other books. As Mason and Dixon travel the world in service of the British Empire, its remarkably powerful international business concerns, and the influential families at the head of its elect aristocracy, they encounter systems of oppression, stains on the Enlightenment ideals that would corrupt even the grandest experiments in democracy.5 Much like the involvement of Werner Von Braun and other Nazi scientists has forever tainted the glory of America’s ascent to the Moon, so would slavery spoil the American experiment before it had even begun in earnest. The premise for Mason & Dixon is remarkably rich. The title characters’ names are instantly familiar, though little is known about them in the popular imagination. The association of the Mason-Dixon Line with American slavery draws the book effortlessly into deep national themes, while the dichotomies of the two men, particularly their professions as astronomer and surveyor, allow Pynchon to explore the divided world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Meanwhile, the precise, astronomically straight line they carve into the natural landscape of colonial America incorporates Pynchon’s longstanding interest in the way math and science so often arrive promising order and clarity only to deliver authoritarianism. After a long foray in Cape Town, South Africa, where many of the dichotomies embodied by Mason and Dixon are established (preferences for coffee versus tea, cheerfulness versus solemnity, and most thematically relevant, the celestial pursuits of astronomy versus the terrestrial ones of surveying) and they are first confronted with the horrors of slavery on a personal level. Southern Africa has appeared in Pynchon’s fiction since his very first novel,

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V., and often comes across as a sort of proving ground where his European characters demonstrate the unfathomable depths of cruelty and inhumanity that they are capable of, from rape and murder to slavery and genocide. An as in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, once these depths of possibility have been established, they spread throughout the world. Mason & Dixon amplifies this trope by exploring the means by which this staggering inhumanity spreads, namely: the rationalist project of global capitalism in all its historical guises. Years later, this process manifests itself in the lives of Mason and Dixon, bringing them to America to inscribe the line that would bear their names. At the time, what would come to be called the Mason-Dixon Line was a 233-mile stretch of the Maryland-Pennsylvania border where a dispute had erupted into the violence of Cresap’s War. Mason and Dixon’s work surveying this border in order to quell the violence there would take them almost five years, from 1763 to 1767 and result in a massive, remarkably straight line dividing Americans from one another. Initially, the division is between Penns and Calverts, Protestants and Catholics, but represents more broadly the schisms that have marked America throughout its history, most pointedly the line between slave-owning and nonslave states. In and address the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1854, the proslavery historian John H. B. Latrobe pointed out the historical significance of the line as a marker of binaries. “There is, perhaps, no line, real or imaginary, on the surface of the earth,” he claimed, “whose name has been oftener in men’s mouths during the last fifty years.”6 Latrobe, clearly speaking with his own political interests in mine, is nonetheless useful for demonstrating how extensively the Mason-Dixon Line had worked its way into the cultural consciousness of the time, going on to say that its “geographical, thus became lost in its political, significance; and men cared little, when they referred to it, where it ran, or what was its history—or whether it was limited to Pennsylvania, or extended, as has, perhaps, most generally been supposed, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” As Malpas and Taylor note, “the ability of this specific cartographic inscription to amplify its significance, both in terms of its geographical reach and its metaphorical potential, is central to Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 postmodern fictionalisation of its genesis.”7 The line represents and manifests the fissures within America, the Enlightenment, and, ultimately, all of history. As the character of Captain Zhang, a Chinese Feng Shui expert, predicts, “all else will follow as if predestin’d, unto War and Devastation” now that Mason and Dixon have etched their straight line into the natural cracks and curves of the earth (615). This doom, though it has a mystical aspect that we would have to ignore the book’s central themes to deny, is executed in perfectly worldly ways. Specifically, by means of capitalist, colonial oppression.

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Mason and Dixon’s trajectory through the Enlightenment is controlled by agents of this oppression, chartered companies like the East India Company. They first encounter the world-spanning power of these companies though the person of the future royal astronomer Nevil Maskelyne, who is stationed with Mason at St Helena after Mason and Dixon have left South Africa. As Maskelyne tells Mason: “We are quite the Pair, then,—that is, I presume,” peering at Mason, “both subjects of the same Invisible Power? No? What is it, think ye? Something richer than many a Nation, yet with no Boundaries,—which, tho’ never part of any Coalition, yet maintains its own great Army and Navy,—able to pay for the last War, as the next, with no more bother than finding the Key to a certain iron Box,—yet which allows the Britannick Governance that gave it Charter, to sink beneath oceanick Waves of Ink incarnadine.” (140)

This power is “invisible” for Maskelyne, but certainly not hidden. It is, very clearly, the East India Company, which has the power to fund a seemingly endless series of wars on the Indian subcontinent. Maskelyne has first-hand insight into the influence of the East India Company by virtue of his relationship with a famous high-level administrator within the Company, Clive of India. This allows him to outline for Mason the role the East India Company has shaping his own life. His explanation serves to articulate for Mason, and later, Dixon “the connections between the Company and their Royal Society employers, portrayed in terms of marriages no less dynastic than those between royal families” (169). Mason is not yet prepared to confront the overwhelming power of Empire, so he dismisses Maskelyne’s explanation with a joke. The invisibility that Maskelyne “sees” reinforces Samuel Thomas’s argument in Pynchon and the Political. Thomas observes, “Systems of economic power and social control, on a large and small scale, rely on invisibility”8 This is an astute point, but we can refine it further to point out that it is a specific notion of invisibility, that allows this kind of control, one bound up with secrecy. This connects the chartered companies of colonialism to Buckminster Fuller’s idea of the “Great Pirates,” wherein “the arbitrary laws enacted or edicted by men on the land could not be extended effectively to control humans beyond their shores and put upon the seas. So the worldly men who lived on the seas were inherently outlaws, and the only laws that could and did rule them were the natural laws—the physical laws of universe which when tempestuous were often cruelly devastating.” This facilitated a reign of secrecy in which:

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The so-called British Empire was a manifest of the world-around misconception of who ran things and a disclosure of the popular ignorance of the Great Pirates’ absolute world-controlling through their local-stooge sovereigns and their prime ministers, as only innocuously and locally modified here and there by the separate sovereignties’ internal democratic processes.9

The actions of colonialism are marked into history just as they are onto the face of the earth, but filled with distortions, manipulations, and deceptions that facilitate the consolidation of power and wealth within the hands of a select few, and for Mason and Dixon, these few are predominately corporate. The adventures of Mason and Dixon’s take place in a place and a time when individual nations have less control over the protagonists’ lives than international commerce does, calling back to the transnational corporations like IG Farben in Gravity’s Rainbow. Whether Mason and Dixon are in Dutch South Africa, British America, or even in England itself, they “seem to be more subjects of chartered companies than subjects of any nation. The chartered companies dictate the political and cultural events that surround the novel. Their impact is widespread enough to steer the very scientific inquiries that Mason and Dixon pursue.”10 The implication of this is that these concerns are not as interested in money or political influence as much as they seek to gain dominion over our understanding of reality itself. This is deeply Orwellian, in that Orwell was also writing about the way ideology overtakes the real. There is also the very reasonable conclusion that, indeed, they did. By the time they arrive in the American colonies, Mason and Dixon are aware of their role within the larger structure of the British Empire and the transnational grasp of the East India Company. This is clear when Dixon asks Mason, “Why has ev’ry Observation site propos’d by the Royal Society prov’d to be a Factory, or Consulate, or other Agency of some royally Charter’d Company?” Mason responds, “Charter’d Companies may indeed be the form the World has now increasingly begun to take” (25). This is a fascinating moment in Pynchon’s oeuvre, in which his main characters find themselves caught up in a massive, sinister plot, but cannot be considered paranoid in the least. Gone are the nebulous enemies of the early novels, replaced now by real, identifiable entities who do conspire to maintain and increase their power in the world. Sean Carswell notes of Pynchon that, “In Vineland, he begins naming these larger forces, making them less mythical, casting them in human terms and therefore creating a force that a counterforce can confront. The names these forces are given in Vineland are ‘Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret,’”

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while in Mason & Dixon “the larger forces are the British and Dutch East India Companies, the Royal Society, and, to a lesser extent, the British government.”11 Pynchon’s movement toward real and specific “conspiracies,” is further highlighted by his decision in Mason & Dixon to center his entire narrative on real people, however much liberty he has taken with these people. In building his fiction on a foundation of real people, places, and events, Pynchon is able to directly confront the way historical narratives have been used to colonize time, space, and our perceptions of reality itself. With his counterhistory of “the Line,” Pynchon posits that fiction can provide a respite from the oppressive role that official history plays. This is accomplished through fantasy, play, and the genuine sharing of stories, wherein the relationship between author and audience is foregrounded and the depths of consciousness there enforce an ethical responsibility to the other. The central theme of Mason & Dixon then becomes a means of subverting the political mapping of the United States and its guiding principles of Enlightenment rationality through the deployment of fanciful, surreal, and unbridled exercises of imagination. As Malpas and Taylor point out, “In its sheer narrative exuberance and diversity, the novel counters the impulse to codify, and, in its scepticism of a national mythology of exceptionalism, Mason & Dixon continues Pynchon’s engagement with uncovering the submerged voices of the preterite.”12 He does this by disrupting the factual valences of time and space that would otherwise circumscribe his story. As much as Mason & Dixon specifically confronts the disjunction of space, from the unbounded reach of the chartered companies to the incongruity of the Mason-Dixon Line’s straightness in the American wilderness, it is perhaps even more fascinated with the manipulations and failures of standardized time. The novel includes, for example, talking clocks (121–22), a perpetual-motion timepiece (318), and most troublingly for his characters, a calendar change that results in the loss (or gain?) of eleven days, when England moves over to the Gregorian calendar in September 1752, leading to the 2nd of September being followed by the 14th. The missing eleven days generated by England’s adoption of the Gregorian Calendar leads multiple characters to consider what happens to time when a society begins to count it differently. It is noted that timekeeping is “the money of science” (192), and that moving over to the calendar developed under Pope Gregory is dangerous because “if the Popish gain advantage in Time’s Reckoning, they may easily carry the Day” (190). For his part, Mason imagines the excised days to continue existing “In a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and

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repeating itself,—without end” (555), after having awoken on September 3rd to find that “instead of Populations, there now lay but the mute Effects of their lives,” that most clocks are locked into their final movement into midnight, while a few “continued to tick onward” in this new tempus incognitum (556). More vitally, the disruption of clock-time’s orderly regimentation creates a vacuum into which “all that Reason would deny” (559) swirls. This release from the Enlightenment’s strictures means that “anything, inside this Vortex, was possible,” for Mason (560). But as is so often the case in Pynchon, this realm of infinite possibility, however timeless it may appear, is fleeting. Mason is ejected from the vortex of the missing days, and returns to the recorded flow of history. The power of rational, scientific, mathematical perspectives continually reasserts itself in Pynchon’s fictions, to the extent that there can seem to be a thumb on the scales, and toward such damaging ends that the agent behind that thumb can come to seem truly sinister indeed. This is the movement that carries us toward a third possible perspective on reality: that there powerful, transcendent forces at work in the world, but these forces are inherently inimical to humanity, life, and the earth itself. In Pynchon, this worldview often manifests itself in conspiracies, paranoia, and a sense of looming, ineffable evil behind the actions of the plot. NOTES 1. Scott Sanders, “Pynchon’s Paranoid History,” Twentieth Century Literature 21, no. 2 (1975): 177–92. 2. Harold Bloom, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 266. 3. David Cowart, “The Luddite Vision: Mason and Dixon,” American Literature 71, no. 2 (1999): 341–63. 4. Bloom, Thomas Pynchon. 5. Jon Simons, “Postmodern Paranoia? Pynchon and Jameson,” Paragraph 23, no. 2 (2000): 207–21, http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/43263598. 6. John H. B. Latrobe, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; and Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection, The History of Mason and Dixon’s Line (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, and Co., 1855), 275, https:​//​www​.loc​.gov​/item​/91898509​/. 7. Simon Malpas, and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015). 8. Samuel Thomas, Pynchon and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2011). 9. R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).

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10. Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon Politics after Gravity’s Rainbow (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2017). 11. Carswell, Occupy Pynchon. 12. Malpas and Taylor, Thomas Pynchon.

Chapter Three

Oceanus Procellarum The Failure of Cynicism in the Early Novels

The grand tragedy of an idealism like Pӧkler’s, imagining a heaven on the Moon and then questing after it at the cost of everything meaningful in your life, matched with the worldly success of scientific, materialist approaches that transform seemingly inevitably into modes of oppression can lead us toward a sense that there is a deep, underlying force controlling reality and that this force is sinister, if not expressly evil. In this worldview, there was never a possibility that the rocket would return, deadly, to earth. The transcendent is real, but inherently malevolent. Humankind destroys the Earth because we are “agents of death” (414) whose express purpose on Earth is the destruction of nature. This sense of a covert, insidious power directing events toward darkness is most explicit in Pynchon’s oft-noted deployment of paranoia both thematically and structurally. Paranoia is not the only evidence of such cynicism in Pynchon, whose most prominent early short story, “Entropy” is about the heat death of the universe. The sense of foreboding in “Entropy” as characters throw a lavish “lease-breaking party” in a New York apartment, oblivious to the death of all life setting in outside, carries through almost all of Pynchon’s later works, with some sort of catastrophe, personal, historical, or both, looming just beyond the stories’ settings. These range from World War I in V. and Against the Day, through colonialism and slavery in Mason & Dixon, September 11th in Bleeding Edge, and prospective nuclear war in Gravity’s Rainbow, to more amorphous movements like modernity existing as a decadent and decayed extension of the Victorian era in V., the onset of the catastrophic climate change in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the crushing defeat of the working class in Vineland. Later novels (Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Inherent Vice, 43

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and Bleeding Edge) contain sparks of optimism throughout, but even in these works, there is a baseline darkness, an intrinsically malevolent fortification that must be overcome to earn even this small, desperate degree of hope. Here we will focus on one of the most striking and understudied examples of this darkness in Pynchon, his fugue on the theme of Auguste Kekulé, the real chemist who is credited with discovering the shape of benzene and in so doing opening the door to the creation of synthetic hydrocarbons. Kekulé plays a small but incredibly vital role in Gravity’s Rainbow, where his account of his discovery of benzene’s structure is recounted and interwoven with the novel’s key ideas. Indeed, of the hundreds of characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, Kekulé stands as the most important by far. Kekulé is not the main character of the novel, of course, and only features on a handful of pages, but he and his work provide the basis for the novel’s ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic positions, and Kekulé’s real impact on the real world is almost impossible to overstate, with his work leading directly to the modern world’s reliance on plastics and fossil fuels, the onset of anthropogenic climate change, and more. Through Kekulé’s appearances in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon is able to establish the premise that with the discovery of the benzene’s hexagonal structure in 1865, organic compounds—and with them the natural world—fell under the sway of humankind, “God’s spoilers. Us. Counterrevolutionaries” (736). This is a fateful moment because humans and nature, from this perspective, are in direct tension, and nature falling into the hands of those who have been set into opposition to it by some supernatural force is akin to the fall of a city in wartime. It may be only the beginning of atrocities, but it is the end of any hope to avoid them. So it is that with the subsequent development of hydrocarbons and other “synthetic” molecules, carbon, the basis of all things organic, becomes the basis of all things artificial. The plastics that cover SHOCK and SHROUD, V.’s humanoid test dummies, is composed of essentially the same material as Benny Profane and we are, and yet this organic molecule has been stripped of all its organic qualities; made, in fact, to take on their exact opposites. This movement toward death has its echoes in the Romantic tendency toward taking Love and Death as themes and to conflating them in the process, but here it is not a thematic, aesthetic process but an identification of real historical processes. Carbon truly was made synthetic. The proliferation of hydrocarbons truly has led to the Holocene mass extinction. That there seems to be an elegant aesthetic structure to this process can be attributed to Pynchon’s artistry in its depiction, or, even more readily, it can be attributed to a grand, sinister design behind all of it. The transformation of the organic, here, into the artificial not only represents, but also truly is, the transformation

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of the living into its inverse—not death exactly, which is itself a natural, organic process, but rather a type of endless, nonbiodegradable nonlife that cannot reconcile itself with a living world. This is the world that Gravity’s Rainbow posits: a world already intractably in the midst of its own destruction; a world in which life, demarked by and actually composed of carbon, is not a part of a dialectic with either the dead or the artificial, but rather is subverted, effaced, and replaced by them, in reality. Not only does the discovery of the structure of benzene allow the formation of synthetic compounds and kickstart the final stages of the industrial revolution, it also presages and ensures that the outcome of that revolution will be the subsumption of the natural by the manmade, and the cultivation thereby of death on a massive scale. The nature of the modern world is the deathless annihilation of life, carried out by capital and technology, but guided always by some force more powerful than both, perceptible but incomprehensible and set in opposition to all that might be considered good in life. Gravity’s Rainbow identifies carbon as a sort of deconstructive trace of reality, the natural world made artificial and effaced but still always present in the synthetic. The moment that the effacement of the natural occurs, in Kekulé’s Dream of the structure of benzyne, marks the beginning of an anthropocene apocalypse, replete with unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, mass extinction, and a legitimate threat to human life as we know it on Earth as the natural world itself becomes a human construct trending inevitably toward death. Pynchon is keenly aware of this dynamic, and his depiction of it has led numerous readers to ascribe a sort of grand hopelessness to his novels and oeuvre. Most prominently, Leo Bersani has pointed out that “To put things into relation with one another is already a conspiratorial move, or at the very least a gesture of control,” wherein connection becomes merely a means of exploitation and “plotters get together-they ‘connect’—in order to plot the connections that will give them power over others.”1 However, just as is the case with his constant engagement with science and technology, Pynchon’s exploration of a perspective is not a commitment to its ideals and suppositions, and while the darkness of his novels can be overwhelming, it never becomes inescapable, as the case of Kekulé makes clear. Friedrich August Kekulé is regarded as one of the principal founders of modern organic chemistry, the chemistry of carbon-based compounds. In 1858 he showed that carbon can link with itself to form long chains. In 1865 he reported his discovery of the benzene ring as the basis for another major group of carbon molecules. The mythology around Kekulé and his discoveries begins in a speech at a benzene symposium in 1890. There, Kekulé claimed that the unique hexagonal structure of benzyne had been delivered to him in a dream. In his account,

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he was dozing by the fire one night when images of hydrocarbons began “gamboling before my eyes.” As he dreamed, they began “twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.”2 This account is much to be doubted, but it lingers as a dramatic element in the mythology of modern science. Attributing grand discoveries to dreams was not new to Kekulé, who also spoke about an earlier dream that had inspired his discovery of the propensity of carbon to form straight chains: another earlier dream he had had, in 1854 or 1855, after falling into a reverie aboard a horse-drawn London bus. “Lo,” Kekulé said, “the atoms were gamboling before my eyes!” He continued, “I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after them but only at the ends of the chain.”3

There is reason to believe that these dreams were expedient means of claiming undo credit, as Dr. John H. Wotiz told the New York Times in 1988, there is strong evidence that chemists other than Kekulé deserve credit for benzene. Evidence, exists, for example that an 1854 paper published in the Paris journal Methode de Chemie by the French chemist Auguste Laurent,contains an illustration that clearly shows the carbon atoms of benzene arranged in a hexagonal ring. Two other scientists, Archibald Scott Couper of Scotland and Joseph Loschmidt of Austria also appear to have discovered the ring before Kekulé. And yet the idea that benzene’s structure came to Kekulé in a dream has enchanted people for more than a century. Carl Jung in “The Psychology of Transference,” writes about Kekulé discovering the benzene ring after dreaming of “the Royal Marriage,” the image of a dancing king and queen used by medieval alchemists as a symbol of conjunction, the synchronicity here being irresistible. Jung is referenced in Pynchon’s account of Kekulé’s dream, with his interpretation of the symbolic power of the dream allowing Pynchon to link it into a chain of significance and signification such that its role as a part of a complex, interlocking plot seems undeniable. In Gravity’s Rainbow, this dream becomes an example of supernatural intervention in worldly affairs. Pynchon sets the scene deliberately, with emphasis on the coordination and planning, the premeditation, that has gone into devising and planting Kekulé’s dream. This plotting takes place in some transcendent realm where dreams themselves become instruments of control. There we witness the creation and delivery of Kekulé’s famous dream of 1865, which would revolutionize chemistry and make “the IG possible,” as if IG Farben, in its stateless, capital-driven, amoral modes of power were the primary goal from the outset. This is, in its nature, conspiratorial: the idea that

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there is an intricate, elaborate pattern that must be created and manipulated so that just the right dream material, archetypes and inspirations might “find its way to the right dreamer” (414). Pynchon spends a significant amount of time developing this idea over the course of four pages. His narrator notes that this has a Jungian aspect, with a vast pool of archetypal dream images, but wonders then how this finds its way specifically to the precise individuals that seem to require it. This is an idea that allows him to link the fatalism of this passage with the theme of entropy that runs throughout his earlier works, because it seems to imply that there is some sort of sentient consciousness that controls the distribution of inspiration and executes paranoid, occluded plots. Later this becomes explicit, with Kekulé’s teacher, Justus Freiherr von Liebig. Liebig was working at the University of Giessen when Kekulé first enrolled there, and seems to have performed this role, acting as a gate or sorting demon of the type that Clerk Maxwell proposed to explain entropy and begin unifying the fields of magnetism and electricity, a creature that would “concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else” (414). Once the sorting demon of entropy is linked in this way to the control of human destiny and further with a sort of dispassionate bureaucratic portioning of spiritual election, its darkness is almost unavoidable. The same is true of the theme of paranoia that runs throughout the novel, which seems to be the result of correctly perceiving the collapse and corruption of the world, but not being able to adequately comprehend and categorize it. This occurs in part because its scale is so incommensurable, and in part because an ability to appreciate its strangeness has been conditioned out of us by the insistence everywhere at all times on complacent normalcy, especially in the fields of religion, science, and government that intersect here. We see this with the ethereal bureaucrats who are marshalling Kekulé’s dream to him. They are not captivated by the magnificence of the dreamscapes they marshal or the wondrous creatures that populate them. Rather, they are indifferent to these things, which, beyond their superficial glamour, are merely tools deployed to ensure that power and control are ushered into the right hands (which is to say, those that will cause the most death and destruction of the natural world). Kekulé’s dream is steered through a deep silence, surrounded by a reluctance to live inside the fleeting, imperfect human light of each moment, until these distracted, meticulously uninterested agents allow “the cosmic Serpent, in the violent splendor of its scales,” to pass without feeling or wonder (417); the amazing strangeness of these entities, the Serpent, the Tree o’ Life, becomes so diminished in time. The agents claim that after some time in this realm of marshalled dreams, the archetypes begin to blur together, to lose their majesty. This occurs not through familiarity or their integration into the mundane, but rather, through

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self-criticism, admonishing ones’ self and denying the power of these transcendent figures in order to conform to the blank normalcy of these “agents.” Pynchon’s narrator tells us that “new hires,” when they first arrive, are awestruck, but soon learn to stymie this emotion. The calm themselves, first by masking the wonder, then denying it even to themselves, until, in time, it has been snuffed out completely through a practice of self-criticism that is surprisingly effective (417). Self-criticism here is the root of paranoia, internalizing the panopticon of being always watched, always monitored, with any sense of awe or wonder getting filed as suspicious, abnormal behavior of the type that cannot be tolerated for long. This applies even, or especially, to figures as prominent and central to the sinister plot being outlined here as Kekulé or James Clerk Maxwell, the brilliant Scottish mathematician and scientist who first recognized light, electricity, and magnetism as different manifestations of the same phenomenon and whose hypothetical “sorting demon” presents a means of reversing entropy without using energy, and which plays a significant thematic role in The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon links Maxwell with Kekulé by way of Liebig, again with the implication that all these actions are machinations in a dense, inhuman plot. Gravity’s Rainbow puts forth the theory that Clerk Maxwell in fact intended his sorting demon not only as a convenient metaphor for clarifying a thermodynamic idea instead as a parable detailing the real role of people like Liebig. People Maxwell can mention only through this kind of metaphor as proof of the extent of repression, oppression, and paranoia that settles in on those who begin to approach these occult systems. As Pynchon’s narrator explains, this theory can find sinister meaning in even something as seemingly anodyne as “Mrs Clerk Maxwell’s notorious ‘It is time to go home, James, you are beginning to enjoy yourself’” (418). For its adherents, the Field Equations themselves, with which Maxwell unified light, electricity, and magnetism, “contain an ominous forewarning” premised on their similarity with the operations of the double-integrating circuit in the guidance system of rockets like the A4, a similarity repeated in the design of the underground factory at Nordhausen designed by architect Etzel Olsch that itself recalls the symbolic shape of SS insignia (418). Once again, the events of the past, as monumental as Maxwell’s discoveries or as trivial as his wife’s offhanded jokes, all find themselves becoming mere instruments of a plot that arrives at, but does not culminate with, the V-2 rocket. Here already, though, the cracks in the interpretation of all of history as a sinister plot begin to show. Each and every moment of the past has, indeed, brought us to the current moment. But this is not evidence of a transcendent conspiracy so much as it is simply the nature of linear time. Certain possibilities come to fruition while others slip away unrealized, a singling up of all lines, as it were.

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And so, as a result of intricate metaphysical coordination or simply because things had to happen one way or the other, Kekulé, rather than becoming an architect, as he had initially planned, turns out instead to be one of the “Atlantes of chemistry,” with “most of the organic wing of that useful edifice bearing down on top of his head forever” and taking on the aspect not just of IG, “but of World, assuming that’s a distinction you observe, heh, heh” (418). From this perspective, Kekulé’s experience as an architect is both highly germane, as he searches for hidden shapes among the known molecules of the time, and fundamentally irrelevant, since these shapes are in and of themselves only metaphorical anyway, only “rational formulas” indicating relationships, the transformative processes of chemical reactions (418). Yet this self-negation continues, not only are the shapes not shapes, the “rational formulas” are not pursued rationally, but rather, through acts of imagination with which Kekulé could visualize the tetrahedron of carbon, imagine how these carbon atoms could link into chains. This until he finds himself stymied by benzene. Unable to discern the shape of the nonshape or rationalize the imaginary formula, Kekulé knew the fundamental characteristics of the molecule, the six carbon atoms, each with a hydrogen atom attached, “but he could not see it,” or, at least, could not see it in such a way that its properties could be made to impact others, to work on the minds of other chemists, and then, through them, on the world. Kekulé understood that what he needed was an image, a narrative, really, of benzene that would make it compelling. Something that would allow it to act as a blueprint for new compounds, new arrangements. In this way it could enliven the powerful structures of the world and steer them through history, as Adams’ Virgin steers his dynamo, “so that there would be a field of aromatic chemistry to ally itself with secular power,” and, in doing so, fulfill the sinister and secretive plots that rule the world, going on eventually “to become the IG” (419). This is a crucial sentence. The discovery of the structure of benzene is scientifically essential, of course, but so too is the dream that accounts for it and provides it with worldly power. The nonshape shapes, the nonrational rational formulas, the known but invisible structure, all these impossibilities are essential to understanding Kekulé’s breakthrough not as an extension of the scientific thought leading up to it, but as something delivered inexplicably and supernaturally by forces using it as a means of executing an ongoing nefarious plot. Yet another discontinuity, it allows the life of Kekulé to take on the inevitability of any story about the past, while simultaneously shedding any naturalistic continuity of cause and effect. Kekulé himself also sought to muddy the waters of cause and effect. By attributing his insights about the structure of benzene to a dream, he was able to circumvent his debt to earlier researchers while linking it instead

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with medieval alchemists such as Cleopatra the Alchemist and Sir Thomas Browne, for whom the ouroboros was a symbol of unity and transcendence. Pynchon subverts these efforts in his account of Kekulé’s dream by linking the snakes of his vision not with the alchemical ouroboros, but rather with the Great Serpent, the World Serpent Jörmungandr, whose rousing signals the end of the world in Norse mythology and northern European folklore. This brings us to Kekulé’s dream itself. The dream encompasses another strange, surreal journey, much like the inverted escape from a collapsing London that opened the novel. In this one, life inside “the System” becomes analogous to “riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . ” as the dream goes on, the countryside rolls by, lit by a strange, protean light, and riddled with stops at odd hours for reasons that are never announced, explained, or discernable (420). Along the way, “Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World,” and already the Serpent is reduced to his function within the destructive plot that governs reality in this cynical worldview, as, with the Serpent, Kekulé dreams, too, of the mean, cynical ends to which the “dream is to be used” (420). And already the Serpent is overloaded with apparent significance that will be deflated by the end of the passage, but not without having its effect. It is the Serpent that announces, “‘The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternallyreturning,’” but it is intended to enter into and influence a system “whose only aim is to violate the Cycle” (420). This is the system at the heart of all Pynchon’s paranoia, the heart of the conviction that there is force ruling this world from beyond and that that force is vile, cruel, and destructive. It is a force, a system (Pynchon will capitalize the word from this point on) that is premised on exploitation. The paranoid system in Gravity’s Rainbow is premised on always taking and taking, never returning or giving, “demanding that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with time,” in such a way that demands removing vast quantities of energy from the rest of the world to “keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit,” stripping resources away from not only all the rest of humanity, but from the world itself and all its nonhuman inhabitants, animal, vegetable and mineral, laying waste to all of it in the process (421). This is a process that dooms not only the world, but the system itself. It is unsustainable, driven toward complete annihilation. As Pynchon writes with crushing irony: The System is “only buying time,” and time itself is “an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death,” an inevitable moment that will come when the rest of the world can no longer sustain this runaway exploitation and the entire “chain of life” is drug down into ruin along with it (420).

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As Kekulé’s dream winds to its end, meshing with Pӧkler’s witnessing of its implementation and his own memories of being told the story of Kekulé’s dream by his mentor, Laszlo Jamf, we come to the image of the insane bus driver once again. This time, the “Lord of the Night” is checking tickets, IDs, and travel papers, with his “insane, committed eyes,” that impress on the dreamer the knowledge that “of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity—” leading to the quote from Rilke, “Once, only once . . . ” which is “One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle,” because the System is built on the exact opposite of this idea, and as a symbol of it, the serpent can only mean “that the six carbon atoms of benzene are in fact curled around into a closed ring, just like that snake with its tail in its mouth, GET IT? ‘The aromatic Ring we know today’” (421). The grand anticlimax of this, the meager material simplicity of it, is jarring, humorous at first until the fact that this is the interpretation that has truly changed the world lands with an explosion. Once the dream that will change the world has been crafted, delivered, received and effected, what can be left? For Jamf, it is only the mocking, haunting question: “Who sent the dream?” He goes on to ask, “Who sent this new serpent to our ruinous garden,” musing on the state of a world “already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence—unless innocence be our age’s neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference—” noting that death itself is not the goal of the system but the hollowing out and negation of life, wherein the world is “something that Kekulé’s Serpent had come to—not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . . ” a loss that occurs because natural, organic molecules had been distorted, perverted. The Serpent had whispered, “They can be changed,” paving the way for new, synthetic molecules, the hydrocarbons that define the death spiral toward worldwide ruin. Jamf concludes his account with a final question: “Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us?’” (421). The answer to this question comes more than three hundred pages later, laying bear the heart of the systems sinister plot, its source, and its abhorrent power. Gravity’s Rainbow presents the account mythically, with a vitalized prehuman world standing as a threat to a small and bitter god. This prehuman world is Titanic in its overflowing life, resulting in “an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about the Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in” to protect Olympian creation from its threat. This is the role ascribed to humanity, the “crippled keepers,” who are “sent out to multiply, to have dominion” (734). It is in this role that humanity finds its cynical purpose. “It is our mission to promote death” (734). It has taken centuries to perfect the skills this mission requires of us, but by the time of the V2 rocket, the atomic bomb being developed in parallel, and certainly by

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the time of Gravity’s Rainbow itself, the human ability to spread death and destruction had almost equaled the power of life itself (734). This representation of Kekulé’s work subverts science’s claims of having privileged access to reality, as we’ve seen Pynchon do in chapter 2, and in its implication that our experience of time itself is the result of sinister machinations winnowing all possibilities toward a single, predetermined outcome, it is a difficult perspective to counter. This “mission to promote death” is “nearly as strong as life,” but, as Pynchon notes, “only nearly as strong.” Just as is the case with his constant engagement with science and technology, Pynchon’s exploration of this cynical perspective on life is not a commitment to its ideals and suppositions, and while this towering cynicism is a prominent feature of his early novels, it cannot escape Gravity’s Rainbow unopposed, and in later novels it must admit at least some form of radical hope. Gravity’s Rainbow presents the creation of hydrocarbons as a moment of meteoric impact on par with the atomic bomb and the holocaust, a perception whose prescience only continues to grow. Humans are agents of death, sent to destroy the living world. Pynchon also damningly links this destruction, this transcendent evil with the flow of time that leads all past possibilities into a singular present condition from which there seems little hope of escape, and which if it exists at all, must come in a moment of unprecedented possibility. As nothing can possibly overcome these forces, this system now linked with God and time itself, and for this reason, it is essential that we not limit ourselves to the realms of the possible. This moment of potential impossibility is a meteoric moment, a moment poised between the earth and space, suspended just overhead. In Gravity’s Rainbow, as in his other novels, Pynchon creates a suspended moment with two key pieces of punctuation: the ellipses and the m-dash. The novel begins with a dream sequence. As a screaming comes across the sky, an evacuation begins, but just as Oedipa Maas’s investigations had only compounded the mysteries entangling her, so too this escape is actually no escape at all, “not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into—.” Over the course of the page and a half that recounts this dream, some 788 words, no fewer than twelve ellipses appear. The dream itself belongs to Captain Geoffrey “Pirate” Prentice, or at least, he is the one who experiences it. We soon learn, though, that Prentice’s job involves him taking on the dreams of others, figures that the military has deemed so important that they must no longer be distracted from the war effort by their own dreams and daydreams. In their stead, Prentice

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experiences their fantasies and nightmares. He takes on, that is to say, the imaginations of others and experiences them within his own consciousness. The dream that brings us into the world of Gravity’s Rainbow may be Pirate Prentice’s, or it may not. The source of the dream is never resolved, never mentioned again, in fact. The reality and the fates of those Pynchon calls the “preterite,” the downtrodden and oppressed, those left to suffer and die in the imaginary cataclysm that opens the book, are all left unknown, undetermined. They may be illusions, projections of Prentice’s mind or someone else’s; or they may be memories, of Prentice or someone else (4). Their doom seems assured, and yet the screaming that comes across their sky remains equally unfinished. Pynchon tells us that the “Screaming holds across the sky” (4). The narrator wonders if the destructive force, when it arrives, will come in darkness, or if it will carry with it some light of its own, and whether this light will come “before or after?” but before any of these questions can be answered, we learn that “it is already light” and Prentice emerges from his dream into the dawn of another day in wartime London (5). Whatever may have been screaming across this sky will remain suspended there, held in the sky in meteoric hiatus somehow forever. This opening, suspended indeterminately in the realms of dreams that could belong to anyone, that could be real or imagined, marked by a screaming that could be anything, held forever unfinished in mid-air and demarcated throughout by ellipses that reinforce this shifting, irresolute existence, is matched by the novel’s conclusion. There it is the m-dash that creates the hiatus, that leaves the meteoric object suspended in mid-air. The passage of the rocket through space is parabolic, a geometrical figure that pervades Gravity’s Rainbow to the point of providing the title itself, and which links it to the transit of a meteor. The shape of the rocket’s parabola provides the subtitles of the novel’s last two sections, marking the flight of the mysterious 00000 rocket, a specially modified V-2 designed to launch SS officer Weissman’s lover Gottfried into space. The first of these sections is “Ascent” (774), which ends with the sentences: “The first star hangs between his feet. Now—,” and leads directly into the second: “Descent” (775). Between these two halves of the rocket’s trajectory, marked by the star that hangs between Gottfried’s feet, is the infinitely short moment when ascent becomes descent. We have seen this exact moment before, from the perspective of Pirate Prentice, in the novel’s opening pages. At that point, Prentice had recalled the flight of “the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb” is explained as equaling the moment of “[. . .] fuel cutoff, end of burning, what’s their word [. . .] Brennschluss” (6). As in the final pages of the novel, the instant when ascent tips over into descent is indicated by one short, italicized word: “The

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missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on the peak of its trajectory by now [. . .] beginning its fall [. . .] now” (7). This “now” is profoundly important in Gravity’s Rainbow, and from that first moment so early in the book, Pynchon has prepared us for its significance. The link between the flight of the rocket and the geometry of the factory, though, does not remain metaphorical. Instead, Pynchon drives the connection deeper, utilizing the mathematical function of the double integer to introduce the possibility, however small, of hope. He does so by pointing out that, with the dynamic movement of the rocket, the double integral has a different meaning built out of its function as a means to understand rate of change, “so that time falls away: change is stilled” (301). Mathematically, meters per second is integrated to simply meters, and this mathematical convenience is taken to have, somehow intrinsic within it, a deeper reality that the “moving vehicle is frozen,” so that, in some sense it wasn’t launched and doesn’t fly, and most importantly, “it will never fall” (301). The mathematical freeze of the rocket in mid-air designates the parabola as no longer a geometrical figure, but an algebraic one, while simultaneously, crucially, creates the possibility for the elimination of the perimeter of time. It petrifies the parabola of the rocket’s flight, making it a static shape (like a rainbow) rather than an object in motion through time. This process removes the rocket from time. The “paradoxical timelessness within time” that Pynchon derives mathematically here has—technically somewhat inaccurately—Brennschluß as “a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall” (302). Connoting moreover “an interface between one order of things and another” (302). The timelessness that can be imagined at the apex of a parabola becomes a matter of life and death at its termination. So, at the end, Pynchon returns to the mathematical conception of the rocket to discuss the instant just before its impact, referring to the “final delta-T” before it crashes into the roof of the theater where the novel concludes. Once more a screaming comes across the sky. This time it is clearly identified as a rocket, one of the German V2 rockets that ravaged London in the final years of World War II and that provide the loci of the novel’s multiple plots. The rocket descends toward a movie theater. The crowd within sits in darkened silence watching the images projected onto the screen. They are unaware of the descending rocket. The novel, though, spends extensive time on the falling rocket, leading it toward the final suspended m-dash. The novel describes the last image before the movie screen goes blank. It may have been person dreaming of immortality or at least intimations of immortality. As with the opening pages,

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indeterminacy reigns. The image “may have been” a person, a fictional figure projected onto the screen, himself dreaming, dreaming of stepping outside to see what is really outside the theater. A real or fictional or imaginary person coming outside like Pirate Prentice had, to wish on the first star, only to find, that it was not a star, but a rocket. “A bright angel of death” (760). The rocket here becomes a falling star, a truly meteoric entity, a message from beyond. The rocket itself is, in fact, intended as a cryptic and threatening message. It is the elusive 00000 rocket that several characters in the novel have pursued, and in place of explosives, it carries a child named Gottfried. The 00000 rocket has been fired by the same Weissmann (now calling himself Captain Blicero) who may have tampered with Mondaugen’s sferic data in V. Despite the fact that the movie has stopped, the film strip has torn, or the projector bulb has burned out, we find that “in the darkening and awful expanse of screen, something kept on.” This something, of course, is a Face. It is: “Something we have not learned to see. It is now a close-up of the face. A face we all know.” This face, projected outward despite the broken machinery of the cinema is the face we have not learned to see. Lest we confuse this with a merely human face, its appearance is quickly followed by a hymn attributed to William Slothrop, an ancestor of the novel’s main character, Tyrone Slothrop. In the hymn, we find: “a face on ev’ry mountainside, / And a Soul in ev’ry stone. . . . ” The face of the other is not limited to human beings. It exists broadly and everywhere. Pynchon here, utilizing the extramissive properties of the cinema screen, evokes and expands the Levinasian Face. For Emmanuel Levinas, the face is the property of the Other that makes ethical demands on us. Gravity’s Rainbow extends this property to mountains and stones, projects it against a movie screen and sets it to song, then suspends the meteoric rocket overhead. Then, startlingly and remarkably, he leaves the rocket suspended. And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame that the pointed tip of the rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last immeasurable gap above the roof of this old theater. A last delta-t. In this suspended moment, the novel’s advice is simple and intimate: “touch the person next to you or to reach between your own cold legs” or, if you must, sing. The book provides the lyrics and the “bouncing ball” to guide us, and draws to its end, “With a face on ev’ry mountainside / And a Soul in ev’ry stone. . . . / Now, everybody—” (760). This final line, drawing in “everybody” and ending with the m-dash that suspends the rocket in mid-air, immeasurably just above the roof of the theater, marks Gravity’s Rainbow as a meteoric work, defined by the possibility inherent in such a suspended hiatus.

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NOTES 1. Leo Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” Representations 25 (1989): 99–118. 2. Malcolm W. Browne, “The Benzene Ring: Dream Analysis,” New York Times, 16 Aug. 1988. 3. Malcolm W. Browne, “The Benzene Ring: Dream Analysis.”

PART II

The Meteor

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Mare Cognitum (Ahnighito) Meteoric Violence in Against the Day

What is it that keeps the meteoric rocket suspended in its final delta-t at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow? According to Simone Weil, the counterforce that acts against gravity is grace. “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception,”1 she writes. The hope in this moment, unearned and fleeting, comes as a glimmering prospect of grace, which is to say, unjustifiable hope. In Pynchon, this is the only type of hope that can exist, and he develops the concept elaborately, rooting it in the fleeting suspension of determinism and in the almost impossible conversion of that momentary hiatus into real transformation. Here, we believe in the transcendent precisely because it does not exist. This weltanschauung denies the transcendent and places value instead in contingency. Everything that exists just so happens to exist, and everything that does not exist just so happens not to exist. There is no driving force (natural or supernatural) ensuring either quality. This means that everything that exists can fall out of existence at some point. Entropy is the characteristic that works toward ensuring this process in physical objects. In “The Iliad, Or, The Poem of Force,” Weil notes that Homer’s masterpiece is constructed explicitly around this process, as human beings are transformed into objects through the application of Force, and as we’ve seen in chapter 3, Pynchon has taken up this same process as a key theme in his own works. Existence at all is essentially impossible and definitively contingent, having sprung into being only because of the sheer size of infinity and eternity and contingencies that they must necessarily have at that scale. For philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, this means that contingency itself can be the only essential aspect of reality, “La contingence de l’étant, et elle seule, n’est pas une propriété contingente de l’étant.” [contingency is the only thing that is not contingent2]3 Even down to the cogito, the implication is clear: existence 59

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is contingent on consciousness, and consciousness is contingent to a comically precarious extent. Moreover, if no transcendent force, no divine power, enforces the ostensibly perennial laws of science, then there cannot be laws determining existence itself, nor coming into existence. Which is to say, just as existence is fundamentally, essentially contingent, so too is nonexistence. Just as everything that exists, exists de facto, so also everything that does not exist does not exist de facto. From this perspective, nonexistence is not more negative than existence, because the essence of a thing’s existence is that it cannot exist, and the essence of a thing’s inexistence  is that it can exist.4 This unearned, irrational hope for the miraculous transformation of the world grows increasingly prominent in Gravity’s Rainbow and becomes the dominant note in Pynchon’s later novels. This is the nature of meteoric fiction, rooted in the radical, baseless hope that the meteor in descent might somehow be forever suspended, escaping gravity and the violent impact with the earth that would render it a meteorite without burning into nonexistence altogether. Several scholars have noted this turn in Pynchon’s work. Joseph Slade, for example, notes that “there is a moment, Pynchon believes, just at the dawn of the new, when innocence can be wedded to power, when ‘love can stop it from happening,’ when the unnatural grip of rationalization can be broken.”5 By its nature, this is a fraught, unlikely, and almost impossible task. Even when it does happen in Pynchon’s novels, as it does with “Ludwig and Ursula the lemming in a masterly subplot of Gravity’s Rainbow.” This episode demonstrates that, it, somehow “one small boy can endure suffering to save one lemming, a programmed, determined, built-toCalvinist-specifications creature if ever there was one, then what might not a collective love and perseverance do for a community of the damned once they realize that individuals cannot be completely determined and that their technology need not be corrupted?” though even then, even as “Ursula’s salvation is one of several ‘small mercies’ of a private nature,” the fact remains that “redemption must be collective if people are to halt the rocket’s fall.”6 Grand redemptive miracles may occur, given infinite worlds and all of eternity, but much more common will be these tiny moments, so that the challenge becomes what to do with them. Slade also notes that Pynchon is drawn to chaos as a realm of possibility. That “chaos represents a chance to redirect man’s systems,” even as it “threatens to destroy them altogether,”7 even as the precarious contingency of the situation holds always as its most likely outcome the acceleration of entropy, the cessation of existence. Jose Liste Noya, too, highlights the precariousness of this insistence, this reliance, on contingency. In Pynchon’s works “the text comments on the curtailing of the real, indeed the loss of a plural reality at the hands of forces,

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present in most if not all of the novel’s characters, that refuse contingency and diversity,” and as a result, the “mythical fantasy of reunion opposes the simulatory fantasy of control but, in the process, the text bears witness to the pervasiveness of the latter.”8 And yet, to find any source of genuine opposition to these forces, whose pervasiveness threatens immanently to become total and wholly unopposed. Liste is writing primarily about Vineland, but his recognition of reunion with the other, family, friend, or stranger, that he finds there as a key mode of opposing the destructive forces of control is prominent in all of Pynchon’s later, posthiatus novels. This union or reunion is premised on the suspension of all the deterministic, inherently violent forces that define reality and which might elegantly be limned as “gravity” in Pynchon’s overriding symbolic structure. But this suspension is not sufficient in and of itself. On the contrary, it is almost always wholly insufficient, arising and passing unnoticed or unutilized. But it does provide an opportunity for union or reunion with the other, contingent on the recognition, within that other, of a real, deep humanity, a reality that we are responsible for, that we have an ethical obligation toward. This is what brings us to Against the Day. Against the Day is essentially plotless as a novel. The book’s multiple narrative pastiches do not drive the novel’s action, but rather result from its experimental structure. This structure is premised on the idea of bifurcation, with the narrative splitting off upon the introduction of almost every major character, abandoning, sometimes permanently, the action that had been developing. This focus on splitting and duplication, and the implication that such splitting and duplication is happening constantly, everywhere all the time, suggests that our world is just one in an innumerable set of possibilities. As these branching paths compound and proliferate, we begin to move toward realizing all possible outcomes of an event. This idea that the world is as it is for no reason, that it could easily be another way or any other way, is window through which Pynchon can introduce his hope for a better world, a better reality, one that must surely exist somewhere among the forking paths of history, but whose arrival here might be too much to hope for, or bear should it come; a hope that is distinctly meteoric. As many have noted, “characters disappear, dropped after some considerable space and attention, for no better reason than that the author has galloped off after some will-o’-the-wisp, or no worse than that the plot found no further place to accommodate them—though it could be argued that after prolonged effort Pynchon has not really constructed a plot at all.”9 This structure is premised on the idea of bifurcation, with the narrative splitting off upon the introduction of almost every major character, abandoning, sometimes permanently, the action that had been developing. The result

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is a baroque and kaleidoscopic portrait of the western world as it hurtles helplessly toward the previously unfathomable destruction of World War I. It is this inevitable, incomprehensible violence that ultimately orients the novel. All the forkings and divergences, the digressions and flights of fancy, seem finally to be incapable of preventing suffering beyond anything the world had known before. This is, once again, a theme that runs throughout Pynchon’s fiction, and Against the Day represents its most hopeless expression. The compounding nature of the novel’s narrative and the overwhelming bleakness of its doomed setting have left Against the Day as Pynchon’s most maligned work, and critical consensus seems to rank it as his worst mature effort. James Wood’s review of the novel for The New Republic aptly summarizes most of the criticisms of Against the Day. It is long but lacks clear development, its characters are shallow and forgettable, and ultimately: There are huge pleasures to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases, and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists. The massive turbines of the incessant story-making produce so much noise that no one can be heard.10

Curiously, Wood and other critics also often found Against the Day “easy to like politically, because [it] is earnest about the unverifiable (utopia, ‘hidden geometries of History’) and comically skeptical of the blatant and potentially oppressive (Truth, frontiers, Time, ‘accursed meridians’).” This may say more about Wood’s politics, though, since he would prefer “anarchists closer to the gloomy conservatism of Joseph Conrad.”11 This is a strange criticism because the politics of Against the Day are not especially ambiguous, and not especially benign. As Razieh Rahmani points out, “Against the Day, though fictional and fantastical, is arguably a set of programs for real life,”12 it is only that the specifics of these programs were perhaps too challenging to face, much less embrace, upon the book’s release. Katherine Hume draws attention to this difficulty, noting that “Of the thirty-some major reviews electronically available, only six get beyond plot summary when dealing with the anarchist dynamiting,” and that “even those reviewers basically brush aside the book’s apparent commendation of industrial terrorism as practiced during the book’s time period, 1893 through 1922.”13 This strident perspective is a feature of the novel’s bleakness. It is a proterrorist American novel published shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, and hardly “easy to like” on that level.

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Richard Hardack gestures toward this, noting that “in his introduction to 1984, Pynchon complains that contemporary news media are required to present ‘balanced’ coverage, ‘in which every truth is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one,’” and that, “disturbingly, this is also the way narrative works in ATD.”14 This is a doubling that, Hardack observes, “is simultaneously a self-canceling or neutering. An ‘equal and opposite’ [. . .] or doubled, creation might be far more pernicious than we thought.” Part of its perniciousness is the way it draws significantly on Jean Baudrillard’s essay “The Spirit of Terrorism” in which doubling and violence are intertwined. In particular, Baudrillard writes that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center: goes well beyond the hatred that the desolate and the exploited—those who ended up on the wrong side of the new world order—feel toward the dominant global power. This malicious desire resides in the hearts of even those who have shared in the spoils. The allergy to absolute order, to absolute power, is universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were, precisely because of their identicality, the perfect incarnation of this absolute order.15

The assertion that Americans confronted with the spectacle of the attacks could not help but implicate themselves in it, filtered through Pynchon’s focus not on fundamentalist terrorism but rather on the anti-industrialist anarchy of the early 1900s not only doubles the book’s action once more, but overlays it with a deep, sincere despair. So perhaps, in light of this, the novel’s mixed reception is unsurprising, but Against the Day is a challenging and significant entry into Pynchon’s oeuvre, one that must be reckoned with at some point. The meteoric nature of Pynchon’s fiction becomes literalized in Against the Day through a direct evocation of Gravity’s Rainbow’s famous opening line, the meteoric: “A screaming comes across the sky” (4), Against the Day opens one of its later chapters with the sentence: “A heavenwide blast of light” (779). This blast belongs to the Tunguska Event, a massive, mysterious explosion that occurred over Siberia on June 30, 1908, likely the result of the explosion of a meteor about five miles above Stony Tunguska river. This “visitation at the Stony Tunguska” has pronounced effects on numerous characters in the novel, pulling them away from the normal, prescribed or proscribed course of their lives and history. A brief account of these include: “crazed Raskol’niki [who] ran around in the woods, flagellating themselves and occasional onlookers who got too close, raving about Tchernobyl, the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation,” as well as “Reindeer [that] discovered again their ancient powers of flight.” We are told that “mosquitoes lost their taste for

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blood, acquiring one instead for vodka,” that “watches and clocks ran backward,” snow falls, despite the fact that it is June, and “Siberian wolves walked into churches in the middle of services, quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old Slavonic, and walked peaceably out again” (785). This catalog is vintage Pynchon. We have the dark, ironic humor of anachronism, in which the heretical Raskol’niki’s warning about “Tchernobyl” is both accurate, given the horrific disaster that would take place at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and so far ahead of its time as to be useless in preventing it. We have the outright silliness of flying reindeer. We have the hope-against-hope that time itself can be escaped, either reversed just defied in by a June snowfall. And we have the outlandish and slapstick change in animals, whose primary importance is thematic. The sudden turn away from eating flesh or blood experienced by these mosquitoes and wolves, and by the sea birds that begin diving down to take fish out of the streams, only to disgustedly toss them back after taking a bite suggests the possibility of an escape from the shattering violence of the world that the Tunguska meteor brings to bear, even if “none of the strange effects lasted long, and as the Event receded in memory, arguments arose as to whether this or that had even happened at all” (784). These divergences are radical, and yet, within the context of Against the Day, perfectly logical. The branching structure of the novel, its focus on splitting and duplication, and the implication that this splitting and duplication is happening constantly, everywhere all the time, suggests that our world is just one in an innumerable set of possibilities. As these branching paths compound and proliferate, we begin to move toward realizing all possible outcomes of an event. As we see with the Tunguska event, the more improbable of these realities seem to unstable, collapsing back into our more familiar reality after a period of free rein, as if they were subatomic particles that only spring to existence for a fleeting moment in a supercollider. What is most fascinating about this aspect of Against the Day is the way it uses nonexistence as an affirmative qualification. Wolves do no quote Scripture, but merely by asserting as much, we affirm that the opposite possibility does exist: wolves quote Scripture. It is not true in our world, but if there are an essentially unlimited number of variations on this world, logic dictates that there must also be one of these variations in which wolves do quote Scripture. It is not likely, but when the opportunities for something to happen approach the infinite, then every possibility, no matter how unlikely, will almost certainly have occurred at least once, somewhere, somehow.

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The possibility of talking wolves, in fact, seems simple enough to accomplish in comparison to the true improbabilities that Pynchon is most interested in seeking out with Against the Day, something like a wholly different world. This is expressed throughout the novel as we see possibilities being narrowed to a singly outcome, as “unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor” (10), when the character of Lew Basnight comes off the rails of his “Destiny.” As a character named Professor Vanderjuice cautions Lew before he sets off for the American southwest, “It may not be quite the West you’re expecting” (52). He describes the Chicago stockyards, with all their brutal mechanization, as the end of the Trail—where the almost mythological American Cowboy who roamed free and lived off the land has been replaced by tools used to stun and slaughter cattle after they have been herded through dark metal corridors. Through their binoculars, they observe a group of tourists being shown the stockyards for “an instructive hour of throat-slashing” (53), then exiting through the gift shop to buy “Top Gourmet Grade” (53) meat tainted with the severed body parts of workers whose limbs were caught in the machinery. Lew is struck by the disconnectedness of it all, and the Professor observes that “the frontier ends and the disconnection begins” (53). Again, we see the west as a metaphor for an almost primal, anarchic freedom contrasted against the modernized, industrialized, rational systems of control. Thinking back to where this is all headed and the horrors of WW1, the first modern, mechanized war. The Chums of Chance, a group of boy adventurers that reappear throughout the novel, variously getting into pulp adventures and growing increasingly realistic and disillusioned, also reinforce this them. The newest member of the Chums, Chick Counterfly, seems to struggle to fit in with the all-American idealism of the Chums and their lifestyle, as well as the realities of airship life, such as the cold. The Chums commander, Randolph St. Cosmo points out that “Going up is like going north” (9). The astute Chick counters by pointing out that, if you keep going north, “eventually you pass over the Pole, and then you’re heading south again” (9), leading Randolph to agree that if the Chums were to keep going up, eventually they’d be going down again—not to another planet, but perhaps also not the exact same Earth they left (10). This possibility of other Earths, other realities, other lives, drives the book. The flow of time is always at work singling up all lines, but if we could turn against this flow, fight backward back against the day, we would see the opposite, the opening up of all possibility. As the character of Dr Minkowski points out, building on the real-life work of German mathematician Georg Cantor:

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inside the tiniest “interval,” as small as you care to make it, within each tiny hypervolume of Kontinuum—there likewise must be always hidden an infinite number of other points—and if we define a “world” as a very large and finite set of points, then there must be worlds. Universes! (594)

The possibilities for this arrive from elsewhere. In Pynchon’s scheme, these kinds of intrusions from another reality or possible reality manifest themselves as “angels.” These angels owe something to Rilke, and are not necessarily beneficent, sacred, or even kind. What they are, is different. They are otherworldly in the truest sense of the world. We see one of these angelic apparitions among the post-Tunguska divergences, “everywhere in the taiga, all up and down the basins of the Yenisei,” is a “figure walking through the aftermath, not exactly an angel but moving like one, deliberately unhurried, a consoler.” This figure, “not exactly an angel,” is implacable, defined by its otherness, its strange strangeness. We learn that “Accounts differed as to whether the outsize figure was a man or woman, but all reported having to look steeply upward when trying to make out its face, and a deep feeling of fearless calm once it had passed” (785). The otherness of this figure and its strange, explicitly positive effect on those it encounters contrasts it with other angelic figures in the book. More often, as with the massive angel that guides pilots to the firebombing of Dresden in Gravity’s Rainbow (760), the intrusion from another world is a violent one. Against the Day struggles to reckon with the tension between longing for change and abhorring violence, when the reality is that violence is the greatest agent of change in history.16 And so there are violent angels throughout the book. The first of these is a “mysterious figure in white flannels,” called the “Gentleman Bomber of Headingly.” This figure has specially modified cricket balls into poison-gas grenades that he throws at various matches. Initially a sinister figure, whose “victims aren’t aware at all of having been gassed. And then, suddenly, mysteriously as the newspapers say, forty-eight hours later, they’re dead” the Gentleman Bomber reappears later in the novel, presented with a more “philosophical view”: “Suppose the Gentleman B. is not a simple terrorist but an angel, in the early sense of ‘messenger,’ and in the fateful cloud he brings, despite the supportable smell, the corrosive suffocation, lies a message?” According to Coombs De Bottle, some did survive the attacks. Even in fatal cases there could be a delay of up to forty-eight hours. Successful treatment was known to require four or five hours of absolute rest. “So phosgene is not a guarantee of certain death,” said the Cohen. “And perhaps victims are not meant after all to die, perhaps the Messenger’s intention is actually benevolent, a way of enforcing stillness, survival depending as it does upon a state of quiescence

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in which his message could be contemplated, possibly, later, acted upon . . . ?” (236). This more ambivalent angelic or possibly angelic manifestation does not have the unequivocal benevolence of the Tunguska figure, but nor is it the most terrifying of Against the Day’s encounters with the meteoric other. That occurs earlier in the novel, when the terrorist attacks of September 11 are specifically evoked and linked with the nineteenth-century destruction of downtown Manhattan by a sentient meteor. The collapse of the intervening years and context, as the novel of 2006, the fires of 1835 and 1845, and the meteoric expeditions of 1886 and 1891 are drawn together to create not only meaning, but a pattern, a heuristic intentionality conspiratorially governing reality, forces us to read the novel on multiple levels at once. The first level, we might imagine, is the surface level of the book, its plots and characters: the Vormance Expedition, the meteorite, and its fire. The second level is subtextual evocation of September 11th, its effects, and ongoing ramifications. The third level is supertextual; it is the Authorial Consciousness combining these prior levels consciously and intentionally. The attacks of 9–11 become the meteoric encounter with the Other, an encounter that creates a hiatus in the course of history, presenting therein the opportunity for transformation. This transformation can take any shape, and though of course violence and destruction are most common, most likely, and most natural, they are not inevitable. The supertextual presence of such conspiratorial, paranoid, compound and interlocking themes makes of Pynchon’s fiction an ideal place to locate and consider the authorial consciousness (a process aided, in fact, by the man’s famous reclusivity). This allows us to trace a line linking the ideas that as violence and death crash around us, inevitably, foreordained, controlled irresistibly by forces beyond our control, there is also a possibility of grace in the simple deference of calamity, a refusal to kill or the possibility that the order to kill might be rescinded, or was only given, after all, to create the possibility of grace that might follow in its rescission. In Against the Day, a team of arctic explorers, the Vormance Expedition, modeled on Robert Edwin Peary’s expeditions to Greenland in 1886 and 1891 has, like Peary’s team, recovered a meteorite and returned it to New York City. The voyage down from Iceland is full of portent, and the meteorite reveals itself to be a sentient, destructive presence. “The scientists of the Vormance Expedition,” the novel tells us, “continued to believe it was a meteorite they were bringing back” (692). This misapprehension, though, soon falls away. The novel asks us “who could have foreseen that the far-fallen object would prove to harbor not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well, and a plan for carrying it out?” Here, the literal meteor, a physical object from

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deep space that collides with our own world, is also the consciousness of an entity referred to as “The visitor” (692). The meteorite makes its way to New York, and just as Derrida’s meteor is an emissary of the other, Pynchon’s meteorite is described as a “visitor.” It is nonhuman, to be sure, and wholly other in that way, and yet it is, definitively, “a consciousness.” Because it is through consciousness, the consciousness of the other in particular, that we come to create reality. It infiltrates and is absorbed by our own minds, where we house it and from which we project it. Like Against the Day’s “visitor,” though, which is never described or explained in any detail, left instead to haunt the edges of the narrative in an undefined role and as an indefinite entity, the authorial other cannot be wholly contained within our minds. It resists reduction. It is not a mere part of us. Once in port in lower Manhattan, the meteorite finds a way to release itself from the ship, unleashing a devastating fire on the city. As fire levels block after block, the novel clearly and powerfully evokes the terrorist attacks of September 11th. We see burnt and smoking trees, scorched steelwork that has fallen or is leaning perilously, while the streets near bridges and ferry landings are jammed with the carriages, wagons, and streetcars that people had at first attempted to “flee in, then abandoned, and which even now lay unclaimed, overturned, damaged by collision and fire” (693). These images, the burnt and bent steel of ruined buildings, damaged and abandoned vehicles laying in a wasteland of smoke and ash, a Manhattan landscaped laid to waste, cannot help but evoke the aftermath of September 11. The evocation continues throughout this section of the novel, details of days following 9–11 finding their way back to the days following the city’s encounter with its meteoric visitor. We are told that “the only signs of movement in all the desolate posturban tract one could see from here were a small party of the pith-helmeted warriors, accompanied by a refuse wagon and one of the last live horses in the Metropolitan area,” just as Ground Zero was filled for days and weeks with firefighters and volunteers digging through the rubble on missions first of rescue, and then recovery. As we have seen, the violence of this encounter is of course one of the defining features of any encounter with the other. The novel tells us that “‘The Eskimo believe that every object in their surrounding has its invisible ruler—in general not friendly,” a consciousness that encounters us with the same possibilities of violence, ethical demands and strictures that for Levinas are transcendent and that for Pynchon are at least elemental, “ancient, indeed prehuman, laws,” that result in “a Power that must be induced not to harm men” (358). The violence that the meteoric consciousness visits on New York is the violence that is not only possible, but in fact the fundamental nature of such an encounter.

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The essential violence of the encounter with the other is prolonged in Against the Day just as it was and is in life. “Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath,” the novel explains that any city, having survived this kind of attack, might go forward changed for the better, “reborn, purified by flame,” shaken out of any obsession with things like politics and money, the greedy, petty, exploitative business of every day. But this does not happen to New York. Instead, the city emerges as a “weeping widow,” who, beyond wailsome grief, is also filled with bitter anger, who “would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry,” using them as fuel to feed a hunger for revenge, and “developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness” (153). This dynamic, in which the Levinasian encounter, the demand for nonviolence it makes, is expanded out to describe the moment of a terrorist attack, with the sociohistorical and the personal intertwining to the point of indistinguishability, allowing the attendant dehumanization that permits continued violence. The meteoric encounter here has provided the opportunity for transformation, or even necessitated it, but the city is unable to enact a positive transformation in its aftermath. The city descends into bitterness and returns to the cynical greed that had defined it before. The meteor, we see, is not coercive, or a guarantee of change. Violence itself does not assure change, even if it does seem to requisite for it. The arc of history and the course of individual lives are constantly conflated in Pynchon’s fiction, linked by a determinism that can variously be linked to conspiracy, Pavlovian conditioning, mathematical laws, and numerous other sources—but which ultimately exists primarily as an irresistible denial of free will. This allows the novels to reify the arc of history as it moves through us, while simultaneously suggesting that this arc is composed of and shaped by the personal transformations of the individuals within it. Both personally and historically, then, the call to violence is irresistible, the encounter with the other and with the reality of the outside world is inevitably met with violence and destruction. To imagine otherwise would be to hope for a better world, a better reality, one that must surely exist somewhere among the forking paths of history, but whose arrival here might be too much to hope for, or bear should it come. Hope, that is, cannot be easily come by. What we can poetically call gravity are all the forces that pull us almost inevitably toward decadence, corruption, violence, and destruction. Overcoming these forces, like escaping gravity itself, is almost impossible, and can occur, if it ever can, only under the most delicate and fleeting of circumstances. Accessing the alternatives posited by Against the Day may not be truly possible in any real or pragmatic way, but

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Pynchon’s works do suggest a role for literature in seeking out this kind of Stillstellung. NOTES 1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans Emma Crawford and Mario van der Ruhr (New York: Routledge, 2002), 10. 2. Our translation. 3. Quentin Meillassoux, “L’Inexistence divine,” diss. Université de Paris I, 1997, 44. 4. Meillassoux, “L’Inexistence divine.” 5. Joseph W. Slade, “Thomas Pynchon, Postindustrial Humanist,” Technology and Culture 23, no. 1 (1982): 53–72. 6. Slade, “Postindustrial Humanist.” 7. Slade, “Postindustrial Humanist.” 8. José Liste Noya, “‘Ghostbusters’: Fantasy and Postmodern Death in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Vineland,’” Journal of Narrative Technique 27, no. 2 (1997): 149–70. 9. William Logan et al., “Back to the Future: On Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day,” VQR Online. 10. James Wood, “All Rainbow, No Gravity,” The New Republic (2007). Retrieved 8 Aug. 2022, from https://newrepublic.com/article/63049/all-rainbow-no-gravity  11. Wood, “All Rainbow.” 12. Razieh Rahmani, “The Virtual World of Pynchon’s Fabulation: Against the Day Lit World,” Journal of Language Teaching & Research 11, no. 5 (2020): 769–79. 13. Kathryn Hume, “The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Philological Quarterly 1–2, no. 86 (2007): 163. 14. Richard Hardack, “Consciousness without Borders: Narratology in ‘Against the Day’ and the Works of Thomas Pynchon,” Criticism 52, no. 1 (2010): 91–128. 15. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2003). 16. William E. Engel, “Review of Darkness Visible: Pynchon at Seventy.” The Sewanee Review 116, no. 4 (2008): 660–66.

Chapter Five

Saviksoah The Meteoric Hiatus in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow

Pynchon’s pursuit of this kind of stillstellung in his work is evident from the beginning. His first novel, V. traces the currents of the twentieth century through a pair of converging storylines that alternate between episodes following the relatively static “yo-yoing” of Benny Profane, and the headlong questing of Herbert Stencil. While Profane’s storyline largely centers around 1956 New York and the misadventures of a group of artists called the Whole Sick Crew, while Stencil’s storyline enfolds a generation-spanning attempt to unravel the clues he believes will lead him to the mysterious maternal figure of “V.” Vitally, each of the Stencil-centered chapters is set at a different moment just on the cusp of historical crisis, a plotting strategy that would become one of the defining features of Pynchon’s fiction. As the novel draws toward its conclusion, the two storylines increasingly meld, until finally Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Valetta, Malta in search of V. This structure has allowed numerous critics access to the way Pynchon seeks out the vitalizing role of culture in history. In this reading, the search for the feminine V. is the “desire that will generate a narrative.”1 For most of these critics, Pynchon’s masculine characters are stand-ins for humanity at large who, “like [the character of Evan] Godolphin, we would like to impose our own ‘dream of order’ on the ever-moving surface of V., for like Vheissu, V. and all significant literary works can be considered a tattooed woman whose mystery we are driven to penetrate and possess.”2 More than misogynistic stereotypes, however, this dynamic allows Pynchon to critique the gender politics inherent in western science. Rather than humanity in general, the men in V. are often avatars of scientific and technological progress in all its destructive guises. Eva C. Karpinski points out that, V. “indicts these 71

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representations”: exposing the “Western world’s entanglement in . . . white, Eurocentric, patriarchal and extremely rationalist constructs” in attempting to impose order on the events of history. It is the “extremely rationalist constructs,” in fact, that are Pynchon’s main target, leaving V. to function disruptively as she “displaces either/or oppositions, marking the limits of order and contaminating it,”3 haunting and taunting the rationalist worldview with all that it cannot contain, all that it seeks to deny, and as such, all that it cannot contain or even admit to. What Karpinski and other critics are observing in V. is a structure that allows Pynchon to explore the depths and power of rationalism while simultaneously undermining this power by highlighting its glaring inability to truly account for the world as it is. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin presents a brief, epigrammatic denunciation of historical optimism. What Benjamin labels: “the puppet called ‘historical materialism’” that can only maintain the charade of its Hegelian hopefulness “so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.” In order to achieve any type of hope, Benjamin observes, “The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a [Stillstellung].” A Stillstellung is a pause, a hesitation, a hiatus during which the future can be held in abeyance. It is a moment outside the flow of time, like those in which V. appears and around which Pynchon will build so much of his fiction. This is what allows Benjamin’s historical materialists to presume a degree of objectivity in their perspective on history, and it is the source of their “theology” the optimism that history is moving progressively toward a better future. In place of this illusion, Benjamin famously installed his “angel of history,” whose: face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.4

The idea that history is a storm, “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage,”5 blowing us helplessly away from Paradise, is an animating idea in the fictions of Thomas Pynchon. The picture of history conjured by Pynchon’s novels is one of an endless series of violence, death, and

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oppression. The scale of these novels, stretching over thousands of pages and hundreds of years, and the unrelenting horror of the events that define them (the slave trade, genocide, world wars, mass murderers, September 11th, etc.), belie the enduringly resilient, deeply cynical optimism that undergirds and defines Pynchon’s work. The arc of history in Pynchon’s fiction is as inevitable and inescapable as the laws of nature, and just as predictable. It is an arc on the verge of bending back downward, any notions of escape on the verge of collapse as the fundamental gravity of the world takes hold and pulls it toward a violent collapse. Benjamin continues his meditation on history by remarking that: The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. [. . .] in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clocktowers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment: Qui le croirait! on dit, qu’irrités contre l’heure De nouveaux Josués au pied de chaque tour, Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour.6

The revolutionary fires at the clock tower, striking out against the flow of time, seeking to arrest the day. Not only is it about the hope of preventing some future misfortune, but about halting time entirely, holding the sun still in the sky, as it were. The halted sun is apt because Pynchon’s fiction is meteoric, built on a world that is hurtling downward toward a violent collision. Like Benjamin, Pynchon believes in the storm of history and that optimism requires a silly belief in the hiatus of the present, except Pynchon also believes that Grace is operating (against the Gravity of history) in order to really realize such a stillstellung, or meteoric hiatus. To have any hope at all, we must believe in the most outrageously unlikely possibilities somehow, inexplicably, coming into being; that the Moon might fall in love, that gravity might be brought to a halt; a reckless type of hope in immanence, to believe in miracles because they do not exist. If this cannot be realized in history, perhaps it can be in literature. And if it is to do so, it must occur in opposition to the systemic nature of oppression and violence, the seemingly inescapable role of Force in the world, the structures that can be called “gravity.” This is the topic of Pynchon’s first mature piece of nonfiction, an article entitled “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” published by the New York Times

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Magazine in 1966, shortly after the release of his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. The article finds Pynchon in Watts, a community in Los Angeles that had just seen massive upheaval during the Watts Riots of 1965. The riots had been set off by the police shooting of an unarmed black man, and Pynchon’s postmortem takes a thoughtful, compassionate look at the roots of systemic racism and police violence that underlay life in Watts and ultimately led to the riots. His diagnosis of a mainstream, white cultural superstructure that seems incapable of tolerating its black citizens has proven sadly evergreen, and Pynchon’s article, which breaks little new ground for post-2020 audiences, nonetheless gives some insight into his relationship with the burgeoning civil rights movement, and sheds light, in particular, on his use of racial themes in Gravity’s Rainbow, which would be published seven years later, in particular his understanding of race, racism, and racialized violence as key aspects of American culture. As he writes in the article, while the white culture is preoccupied with what he terms the “various forms of systematized folly” that the Hollywood economy is built on, the consequences of this are imposed on the black citizens of the area, realities like disease, failure, violence, and death, that the “whites have mostly chosen—and can afford—to ignore” (Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” New York Times Magazine, 1966). This schism manifests itself constantly, always with the underlying imposition of white values on this black underclass. The constant subtle violence of this imposition seems to invite or even require counterviolence from Pynchon’s perspective, and a recognition of the need for revolutionary violence stalks through his fiction from this point on, most notably in Vineland and in the aggressively angry Against the Day. As Pynchon notes in the article, these two cultures have been placed in constant tension, with capitulation always demanded from the black citizens of Watts. The two cultures are incapable of understanding one another Pynchon writes, despite the fact that “white values are displayed without let-up on black people’s TV screens,” via the cultural hegemony that they possess, and, conversely, despite the fact that the poverty and immiseration of black neighborhoods is impossible to miss from “atop the Harbor Freeway.” The asymmetry of the situation makes it insoluble and untenable, and Pynchon points out with bitter sarcasm how entrenched this oppressive ideology is when he notes that it somehow never occurs to white Angelinos to exit at Imperial Highway for a change, turn east instead of west, “and take a look at Watts. A quick look.” This would be a small, simple action in physical space, but it requires a sort of psychic expenditure that Pynchon finds most white unwilling to make, or perhaps incapable. This is to say that obviously,

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of course, oppressive structures can be easily destroyed, eliminated from our society, but only if they are surrendered by those they benefit most. The counterpoint here, between a need for either violent revolution or else empathetic compassion, and the relative unlikely hood of either is perhaps the source of much of the darkness in Pynchon’s writing. It is a darkness that precedes this essay (in fact, Pynchon’s first novel, V. is riven through with genocide, violence, and dehumanization), but the depth of the sadness and cynicism that can often be so off-putting to readers is placed into concrete, real-world terms here. Pynchon comes across as a man sensitive to injustice perhaps especially when it is subsumed in the fabric of society, and unwilling to either look away or euphemize it. So it is that he is able to link the police shooting of Leonard Deadwyler with the softer, constant cruelty of antiblackness in LA, of which it is a natural and inevitable outgrowth. The oppression that begins with things like “smiling and Emotional Maturity,” outward signs of assimilation or at least obeisance to hegemonic, capitalist culture. These signs are popular with the “well-adjusted, middle- class professionals,” on both sides of the racial divide, and evidence to an extent that this capitulation to mainstream values is one of the primary goals of this type of systematic oppression. It is a powerful technique (Pynchon writes Gravity’s Rainbow about the power of self-criticism to effect this kind of change in people) but comes with risks as well, since these mainstream behaviors are also alienating for the poor residents that they are ostensibly meant to serve. These attitudes “about conformity, about failure, about violence,” are ultimately unconvincing, and end with the state murder of those who refuse to adopt these poses. This grows out of the reality that “in a pocket of reality such as Watts, violence is never far from you.” It is an aspect of reality itself, and a valuable asset to the Systems that manipulate it, and yet “to these innocent, optimistic child-bureaucrats,” violence is something more like an evil and an illness. They divorce themselves from its reality, and embrace instead a fantastically, patently false perspective on it precisely because this best protects the “property and status they cannot help cherishing.” In of the few quotes Pynchon includes, he reports that Watt’s residents look back on the riots as a paroxysm but wonders in what ways they were truly a break from the status quo there. “‘Man’s got his foot on your neck,’ Pynchon quotes one anonymous resident as saying, ‘‘sooner or later you going to stop asking him to take it off.’’ He then goes on to point out that the level of violence required for even the small, fleeting moments of relief was no surprise, and had been predicted by many.” The aftermath of the riots leaves little room for optimism that change is possible. Pynchon notes that it is in white L.A.’s interest to calm the situation in Watts any way it can, to try to mollify the area and defuse any

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revolutionary impulses without offering the transformative social changes that would address the root causes of the unrest. He views this conflict then as one of values. The goal of the white middle-class, mainstream, hegemony is to incorporate black Americans into their culture without adapting that culture in any significant way. It is the black residents of L.A. who must continue to adapt and adjust in the hope that they will be more likely to “hold down a steady job.” For Pynchon, this promise is a deeply disingenuous attempt to domesticate and subsume any resistance to the status quo, however deeply unjust that status quo is. This is the fundamental idea of V.: that systems of power are in essence dumb machinery that must be enlivened and guided by cultural ideas, values, and narratives. By the time of Gravity’s Rainbow, the nature of those ideas, values, and narratives has become clear, and in their insidiousness they pose the primary deformity in American, Western, capitalist culture. “Journey through the Mind of Watts” serves almost as a notebook for Pynchon, a place to think through the real-world observations that he is making and begin to connect the facts on the ground with the larger ideological scaffolding that he has been constructing. This brings Pynchon to the artistic turn that he often favors, art as a source of optimism, not on the societal level, but at least within the individual or collective. The conflict in Watts is essentially a battle against the unreal. This resistance of the unreal, interestingly, involves precisely the act of “mythmaking.” This is a vital clue to Pynchon’s approach to literature, and he cannot help but see it, here, as a genuine silver lining. With summer approaching he tells us that the riot is being remembered “less as chaos and more as art.” It is talked about as a ballet, as a game of cat and mouse with “The Man” that distracts and dilutes that structural power though both real actions and false alarms. The proper antagonist, he begins to imply, for a cultural narrative that facilitates this kind of oppression is another, better, more empowering narrative, whatever that may be, however unlikely its arrival might seem. Ultimately, Pynchon seems to see art and violence aligned in opposition to these oppressive structures. But this is no easy answer. Neither violence nor art is a panacea. They are neutral in and of themselves, used on and against the weak much more often than they serve a revolution. Pynchon ends his essay describing a piece of art made from the wreckage of the riots by a junior high student. An old, broken, hollowed out TV sits in one corner of the exhibition, its interior replaced with a human skull replete with wiring “threaded like electronic ivy among its crevices and sockets,” named “The Late, Late, Late Show.” Art as resistance critiquing art as oppression. Art’s role in “Journey into the Mind of Watts” is not incidental. We can argue, in fact, that it is central to understanding the meteoric nature of Pynchon’s fiction. At the heart of this role is the way art, and literature in

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particular, interacts with consciousness in order to seek out the suspension of gravity in much the way “The Late, Late, Late Show” does. In particular, literature may be capable of creating a clinamen, a swerve away from the prescribed, enforced, almost inevitable course of events set out by everything that has come before. If this kind of gravity defines reality, as the insistence that Watts is “a pocket of reality,” implies, if it is “the central law of this world,”7 as Simone Weil frames it, if it is the driving force behind Benjamin’s storm of history, then what can oppose it? Weil writes that gravity “impels each creature to seek everything which can preserve or enlarge it and, as Thucydides says, to exercise all the power of which it is capable.”8 This kind of hunger for power is the defining characteristic of all Pynchon’s villains, both human characters and the systems of hegemonic evil that ensnare and fuel them. Gravity “is shown by all those motives which are directed towards asserting or reinstating the self, by all those secret subterfuges (lies of the inner life, escape in dreams or false ideals, imaginary encroachments on the past and the future, etc.) which we make use of to bolster up from inside our tottering existence.”9 These “secret subterfuges” are the worldviews tested in Part 1. Escape into dreams, the imaginary encroachment of the past and future. Dreams of power and surrender to power. Poetry has its link to fascism because it achieves this: it is a means of achieving inner peace, and inner peace is no kind of grand ambition. This is why Tolstoy arrives at suicide as a logical and noble end. Gravity accounts for all phenomena (as we’ve seen) causing Weil to extend “the determinism of Descartes and Spinoza to all natural phenomena, including the facts of psychology.”10 All possible approaches to life fall subject to it except the radical contingency that increasingly marks Pynchon’s works that that he increasingly comes to call, after Weil: “Grace.” Grace here is much like Benjamin’s stillstellung, a hiatus in which the impossible may, somehow, be realized. Weil writes: Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This is contrary to all the laws of nature. Grace alone can do it. Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this Void. The necessity for a reward, the need to receive the equivalent of what we give. But if, doing violence to this necessity, we leave a vacuum, as it were, a suction of air is produced and a supernatural reward results. It does not come if we receive other wages: it is this vacuum which makes it come. It is the same with the remission of debts (and this applies not only to the harm which others have done us but to the good which we have done them). There again, we accept a void in ourselves.11

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For all the unremitting darkness in Pynchon, he is always careful to carve out space for this kind of counterforce. It provides the most joyously optimistic moment in Gravity’s Rainbow, and swells in prominence, surviving the darkness of Against the Day until it comes to define Bleeding Edge. It is strikingly evident late in Gravity’s Rainbow when “Roger [Mexico] is invited to dinner,” with his lover’s husband at a massive estate filled with the wealthy beneficiaries of all the sinister multinational systems detailed throughout the book. Roger invites along Pig Bodine, a character who recurs throughout Pynchon’s oeuvre, and together, they set out to oppose this assemblage of power as best they can. Christopher Ames describes what follows as “the most ecstatic, joyful and hopeful moment in the novel,” a scene that “exploits in its style the same tension between decorum and obscenity operating in the content, draws its power from traditional carnival roots. Not only the obscenity, per se, but the combination of human excretion and food lies deep in the festive tradition.”12 The disgusting nature of the dinner exploits this. It is presented early on that “Going into dinner comes a priestly procession” (728), and that the dinner is meant to center around the cannibalization of Roger, and at one point his head is “held by four or six hands upside down, the lips being torn away from the teeth,” as guests whisper “’How quaint, Stefan’s even though of head cheese!” and “it’s another part I’m waiting to get my teeth in” (728). This attack is countered by Roger and Pig’s deployment of comically revolting food concepts. These include “snot soup . . . pus pudding . . . scum souffle . . . menstrual marmalade . . . clot casserole” (729), and so on, literally ad nauseam, allowing the two men to escape from the ceremony initially meant to culminate in their own deaths. This is a small but pivotal victory for the counterforce and echoes the book’s own reception. As Roger and Pig volley their grotesque figurations, we “detect the presence of Brigadier Pudding,” who “has even more of a mouth on him than he did alive,” and “it is through Pudding’s devotion to culinary pranksterism that the repulsive stratagem that follows was devised” (729). Pudding is the character at the heart of the novel’s own “repulsive stratagem” in an extended pornographic scene that culminates in explicit coprophagia and which no doubt played heavily in the Pulitzer Prize committee’s refusal to award the novel on the basis of obscenity. So, Pynchon specifically and presciently links this disgusting turn with the subversiveness of his own novel. The disgusting stratagem is effective because it works to expand the realm of reality. Roger Mexico and Pig Bodine, whose names alone set them apart are distinctly fictive, unreal entities, nonetheless evince an ability to affect the literal physical bodies of readers. Unreal though they may be, they have real impacts in the world, even amongst such lofty bastions of propriety as the Pulitzer Board.

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The silliness of Pynchon’s naming scheme has been much commented upon, but this scene points toward its contradictory effectiveness. Pynchon’s names are a parody of the trend of assigning characters meaningful names, and while they are ripe for interpretation, they are overripe, and become Brechtian directives to the reader to remember that this is a work of art. Examples of these names are too abundant to enumerate here, but a few key examples can demonstrate how Pynchon approaches his naming schemes. The most often discussed on Pynchon’s names is certainly the lead character of his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, a housewife named Oedipa Maas. There are numerous ways to interpret the name of Oedipa Maas, from the Freudian to the Sophoclean. They are all relevant, often contradictory, and finally end with Oedipa standing in as cipher, a symbol capable of accepting almost any interpretation. This type of floating significance, capable of revelation and deception simultaneously fits neatly withing the Crying of Lot 49’s broader thematic pursuit of these ideas. This has facilitated some highly paranoid readings. For example, Pierre–Yves Petillon moves from the hyper-meaningful name of Oedipa into the other names within the novel, culminating in Pynchon’s labeling of the novel’s mysterious and sinister antigovernmental syndicate, the Tristero. Beginning with a line in The Waste Land: The whole concept of the Tristero seems to derive linguistically from a reference in Eliot’s The Waste Land to “le Prince d’Aquitaine a tour abolie” (line 430). This line itself bears a cryptic reference to Gerard de Nerval’s poem ‘El Deschidado,’ in which most of the major themes of the Tristero are sounded (the exile into a shadowy, marginal world; the former prince whose ‘tower’ has been ‘abolished’; the ‘black sun of melancholia’). Nerval’s poem, in turn, takes its title from the motto on the shield of the mysterious Disinherited Knight who turns up at the beginning of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and who will eventually represent both the Saxons and the Jews evicted from their estates by Norman chivalry. This might well seem the sort of crazy hunt for idle sources and clues that any would-be scholar feels he or she might indulge in, were it not that Pynchon is perfectly aware of the implications of those half–hidden references woven both lexically and thematically into his “text” at large.13

Charles Hollander builds on this idea further, finding that “Petillon’s reference offers yet another way of understanding the preoccupation with Jews in Lot 49.” For, Hollander, the name Tristero inevitably leads us to conclude that “Elite Jews, like the Biblical Joseph, have had alliances with elite Gentiles, like Pharaoh, since the Egyptian period,” that “‘Metz’ evokes the French city, with its important Jewish settlement as far back as the tenth Century,” that “Stockhausen, whom Pynchon mentions, began a center for electronic music at Cologne in the 1950s,” which is relevant because Cologne was “an important shipping center as far back as Roman times, also had an important

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Jewish settlement during the Hanseatic League (from the thirteenth to the fifteenth Century).” Furthermore, “Pynchon also mentions the California town Carmel–by–the–Sea (49), named for the Biblical Mt. Carmel in Israel,” before concluding that: The name of the PPS mail carrier De Witt (53) alludes to the Dutch statesman Jan De Witt (1625–1672), a friend of the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Further references to Beaconsfield reinforce the Disraeli–Rothschild– nineteenth–century financiers thread. Zapf’s Used Books (78) recalls the Egyptian Zaphnath Paaneah, Pharaoh’s name for Joseph of the coat of many colors, the interpreter of Pharaoh’s dreams.14

The reference to De Witt, in its turn, leads Hollander to point out that the “Dutch statesman Jan De Witt favored local rather than international priorities for the Low Countries, opposed William of Orange and was killed—killed and dismembered, his limbs displayed publicly on lamp posts as an example: dismembered, like many victims in The Courier’s Tragedy,” explaining why “Fallopian says the PPS mail carrier De Witt is ‘the most nervous one we’ve had all year’” (53). This all builds toward a hypothesis that Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, is in fact naming the parties responsible for the assassination of John F Kennedy. As he writes, “Implicit in Pynchon’s fiction is the view that events in recent American history have led to a virtual constitutional crisis, a challenge to the supremacy of the presidency by the intelligence community. Many of the events in Lot 49 have to do, however indirectly, with this crisis.” Until finally: So The Crying of Lot 49 is about Oedipa, her life, her loves, her mental states, and her curious quest to decipher the estate of Pierce Inverarity. And, by allusion, it is also Pynchon’s meditation in the state of American affairs in the mid–sixties, about Russo–American relations during the American Civil War, about the fate of Jan de Witt during the founding of the Dutch republic. It is about the acrimonious U.S. elections of 1940 and 1944, and about the OSS in Italy during the Second World War. It is about Thurn and Taxis and its relation with the Rothchilds, and about the relations of the Rothschilds and the Morgans. It is about how certain American corporations and banks were instrumental in preparing Germany for war, and (by implication) about how those same corporations and banks were instrumental in driving Pynchon & Co. into receivership. It is about how McCarthyism hounded lots of Yankees and Jews out of the government, about how Germany rebounded from the Second World War to become one of the world’s richest nations, about how so many former Nazi officials went on to rank among the world’s elite. It is about how the CIA got to be superordinate to the presidency in American realpolitik. It is about how mid– sixties America resembled Nazi Germany, the Dutch republic and the Roman

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empire at their worst, about the fear that cessation of political and intellectual exchange would cause a new decline of the West. And all these meditations were triggered by the assassination of President Kennedy.15

This is a reading that, at the very least, strains credulity, but the novel itself (and Pynchon in general) encourages it by compiling ambiguity, suggesting the possibility of a comprehensive meaning, and then refusing to provide that meaning, implying that it can still be found with an acute or creative reading. It is a specific example of how Pynchon feigns difficulty by lampooning an obsession with meaning-making, the pareidolia that comes from over-interpreting something until it appears simple and comprehensible. A more tethered and compelling example of this is an analysis of the name of Denis in Inherent Vice. Denis is a minor character whose name is crudely and sillily comical, in that it is a normal name modified by the explanation that its correct pronunciation “rhymes with penis.” Nonetheless, it is an open enough signifier to accommodate a deep, insightful reading of the novel. Albert Rolls points out that “Whether it rhymes with penis or not, the name is English for the Greek Dionysios or the Latin Dionysius and is from the Greek, [follower of or] ‘belonging to the god of wine.’ Pynchon’s pronunciation joke, at the very least, calls attention to the pre-Christian significance of the name, alluding to the phallic element of the Dionysian cult and perhaps also to Phales, ‘the personified phallus.’” Which Pynchon uses so that “Denis’s name thereby points toward a Dionysian register and an Apollonian register, making Denis, metaphorically speaking, a site of sixties’ conflict,” that Inherent Vice takes as its primary thematic concern. In fact, “It is as a facilitator of escape” from this conflict “that Doc assumes the role of Dionysus, one of the few figures in Greek mythology to successfully return someone—his mother, Semele—from the underworld.”16 These names serve to emphasize the fictionality of Pynchon’s characters and work, a quality that is essential to the ethical and aesthetic goals of his novels. Pynchon’s novels are long, highly detailed and deeply complex, resulting in an immersive fictional world, and devices like these idiosyncratic names and the silly songs that characters often inexplicably break into serve primarily to disrupt this immersion. This allows Pynchon to highlight the fictive nature of his worlds, and in particular his characters. Brigadier Pudding, with his “culinary pranksterism” that amounts to eating feces directly from the bowels of a dominatrix is one of the more acute examples of this. The name is transparently silly at first glance, scatologically crass on further inspection, and always at risk of trivializing one of the darkest and most disturbing characters in recent American literature, a career soldier in service of the British Empire whose murderously sadistic exploits in colonial Africa led him to seek solace in starkly self-abnegating sexual masochism

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late in life. And yet it is vital to Pynchon’s project. We must remember that Brigadier Pudding is imaginary not so that the machinations of his character are less meaningful, but so that they are more so. This may be the most challenging aspect of Pynchon’s work, because diminishing the immersiveness and verisimilitude of a novel’s characters runs directly contrary to the literary ideals that many, if not most, readers bring to fiction, and yet highlights the ability of the clearly unreal to enlarge the realm of the real, a process of instauration, of making the clearly fake really impactful, is at the heart of Pynchon’s fiction, and its ethical core. Our interaction with unreal entities, fictional, imaginary characters, is central to literature, but more than this, central to our interactions with the world, and it is this relationship that must be exploited in order for art to forge a counternarrative strong enough to begin to attempt to combat the Systems that surround us. NOTES 1. Dana Medoro, “Traces of Blood and the Matter of a Paraclete’s Coming: The Menstrual Economy of Pynchon’s V,” Pynchon Notes 44–45 (1999): 22. 2. Medoro, “Traces of Blood,” 244. 3. Eva C. Karpinski, “From V. to Vineland: Pynchon’s Utopian Moments,” Pynchon Notes 32–33 (1993): 33–43, 37. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 249. 5. Benjamin, “Theses.” 6. Benjamin, “Theses.” 7. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario van der Ruhr (New York: Routledge, 2002), xxi. 8. Weil, Gravity and Grace, xxi. 9. Weil, Gravity and Grace, xxi. 10. Editor’s note. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario van der Ruhr (New York: Routledge, 2002), 104. 11. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 55. 12. Christopher Ames, “War and Festivity in Gravity’s Rainbow” (n.d.), 12. 13. Pierre-Yves Petillon, “A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the Wilderness,” New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O’Donnell, 127–40 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 144. 14. Charles Hollander, “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 40–41 (1997): 61–106. 15. Hollander, “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA.” 16. Albert Rolls, “Inherent Vice’s Two Directions,” Berfrois, 13 Feb. 2014.

Chapter Six

Tunguska Meteoric Vision

One way to understand this interaction is through the work of neuroscientist Michael Graziano. Graziano’s research centers on the way we perceive consciousness, the consciousnesses of others and the consciousness of ourselves. This provides an explanation of the way our relationships with fictive beings work, with an especial focus on the ways we engage with the authorial consciousness of a text. This begins with the illusory sense of extramission, evident throughout Pynchon’s fiction and literature more broadly. Extramission’s hold on the popular imagination stems from the way it so elegantly encapsulates the way we project consciousnesses, both our own and others,’ onto the world around us. Neuroscientists have long known and clearly established the fact that we create models of others’ attention and use these models to fabricate a notion of their inner life. Creating these models is largely, and most immediately, accomplished by tracking the gaze, and while tracking another’s gaze may be most obviously linked to understanding the focus of their attention, this information, in turn, reveals a tremendous amount about the consciousness behind it. We experience this as a “somewhat ethereal property of awareness” that we attribute to others, “and that, in violation of the physics of optics, emanates from [an individual] toward the object of his awareness.” This model operates in violation of our knowledge about vision, but endlessly useful in tracking attention, recognizing the mental states of others, and predicting their future behavior. It is inaccurate, but useful. This is true for our interactions with human beings, who we may assume are conscious in and of themselves, but is also an irresistible habit, a deeply embedded aspect of our own minds, and we cannot help but apply it much more broadly.

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This results in what Graziano defines as Type B consciousnesses. Type B Consciousness is essentially the consciousness that is imagined to exist in another entity, rather that entity is an object, a concept, or another person. Projected consciousnesses are so fundamental, in fact, that we easily overlook how strange they are. We populate the world with consciousnesses that we project from within us, and in order to do so, we must populate our own minds with innumerable independent consciousnesses. These Type B consciousnesses remain singular, simple, superficial, but in the process of constantly manufacturing and sustaining them, we become, within ourselves, complex, compound, and plural. Jacques Derrida seems to intuit this constant compounding in his own exploration of marionettes and consciousness, couched in an analysis of Paul Valery’s Monsieur Teste. For Derrida, the title character in Valery’s novel is haunted by the internalized consciousness of the marionette, resulting in an “undeniable internal strangeness, both intestinal and radically other, vertiginous, unheimlich.”1 The real existence of real consciousness in a clearly inanimate being, and the ways in which that leads to the compounding and pluralization of the projecting mind leads Derrida to ask, in anticipation of the projected consciousness we are tracing here: “Do marionettes have a soul[. . .]?”2 he wonders. “Are they, as is said, made of wood? Insensible and inanimate, spontaneously inanimate, not having sovereignty at their disposal the source itself, sponte sua, their animation, their very soul?”3 The very real consciousness injected into and present in an inanimate object makes such an object “both sensible and insensible, neither sensible nor insensible, sensible-insensible [. . .] sensible-insensible, living dead, spectral, uncanny,4 unheimlich.”5 A singing bird, for example, we know is conscious, but so is the puppet, the phone, the wind, the universe itself. We both anthropomorphize nonhuman entities and dehumanize real people, moving toward an entropic equilibrium in which almost everything in the world is equally quasi-human, engagingly personified but stripped of any ethical privileges. As breezes, animals, machines, computers, fictive beings, and real strangers all fall into the same state of semireality, objects that exist for us to interact with without placing any ethical obligations on us, a terrifying and complacent unreality settles in around us. This is not a new problem, though the strangely human/ nonhuman entities of the digital world perhaps exacerbate the urge and ability to populate the world with human-objects. What is new, and what we hope will lead to further consideration, is the solution we posit here: the extension of ethical responsibility to include human-objects as a result of the recognition of the more undeniable reality of such beings that literature can provide.

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This occurs as a result of an encounter with the authorial consciousness. Shifting the focus of literary theory away from readers, characters, formal structures, and historical influences, this approach foregrounds the idea of literary texts as points of intersection for distinct consciousnesses, in which the reality of the authorial consciousness becomes as undeniable as the reality of oneself, if only fleetingly, if only during the brief hiatus realized by the encounter. For Graziano, it is important to distinguish between the complex, compound, pluralized consciousness we perceive within ourselves and the simplified, single, and shallow consciousnesses we perceive in others. These shallow, singular consciousness are what Graziano calls type-B consciousnesses, and they are held as component parts of our own complex, compound, and creative type-A consciousnesses. This structure, a compound unity that contains multiple simpler components within it, very accurately describes a literary work in which a text’s authorial consciousness contains and unifies a plurality of simpler fictive beings. Appreciating and understanding the focusing of attention, in turn, is a critical (perhaps the most critical) element in ascribing a consciousness to others, as well as to ourselves. Graziano writes: “We intuitively understand the dynamics and behavioral consequences of attention, and we perceive it as awareness originating in other agents.”6 In order to get to the cogito, there must also be an object of thought, and whether it is doubt for Descartes, jangling keys for a cat, or a lengthy essay for a weary reader, it is this object of awareness that allows us to infer a consciousness directing it. Consciousness springs from precisely focusing attention, defining an existence that picks and chooses, that carves out a reality rather than floating through an undefined void indistinguishable from itself. As Graziano explains, “attention” is a comprehensible process. Stimuli affect the brain from both within (thoughts, emotions, etc.) and without (sounds, smells, etc.). The brain attends to these stimuli to varying degrees. This in turn, according to Graziano’s work, leads to the formation of an Attention-Schema, a second-level awareness of attention, including where it is directed and the sense that it originates somewhere in the body, especially the head. This schematic model of the brain’s attending is what we call consciousness. We direct our attention toward something. Our vision, in turn, is directed, similarly, toward that object. Finally, we can understand the focus of the attention of others by observing where their vision is directed. This is useful and efficient, and it assumes that vision flows outward from the eyes. It is evidence of, and stands in for, the direction of attention. Attention, in turn, is the most directly tangible evidence of the consciousness of others. In

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this outward movement we can perceive the roots of extramission. You are, indeed, sending your attention outward toward its object, and doing so via your eyes. If the link between extramission and attention is fairly easily established and intuitive, and if the role of attention in the construction of consciousness is clear, we can move to the idea that consciousness itself can be projected. This idea is at once simpler and more fraught. Simpler, because clearly consciousness can be projected outside of the mind, otherwise interaction with others and with the world around us would be impossible—it is necessary that some representation of ourselves be sent out into the world to conduct our affairs there. And yet, once we’ve established that our consciousnesses must be able to leave our body and mind, we have to account for its spectral existence outside them. In Graziano’s neurological definition, attention is the focus on particular stimuli, and consciousness is essentially composed of a schematic representation of this attention, giving rise to awareness. We construct a simplified, roughly accurate map of our brain’s perception of stimuli. This map, this Attention-Schema, is consciousness. This allows us to perform the same operation that perceives an Attention-Schema in ourselves on others. If attention lies at the heart of consciousness, and our schematized awareness of our own attention is what gives rise to our consciousness, then the attention of others implies a consciousness within them, too. We can see then that the myth of extramission persists and persists so widely because we associate vision closely with things that are projected: attention, which is directed outward at an object of focus, and consciousness, which we construct for people and things that exist outside of our own bodies. As such, a close examination of extramission and its implications can shed a tremendous amount of light on the way consciousness functions within literature, as a realm for the creation of fictional consciousnesses, and as a site, via these fictional consciousnesses, for a transformative encounter with a compound, plural, and hybrid alterity. What distinguishes fictive beings is our awareness of this very fictiveness. We have begun to look at how fictional characters emerge in the same way our own consciousness does and the way the imagined consciousnesses of others do, but the airiness of their immateriality means that we need to define the existence of fictive beings more rigorously. In his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour notes that these fictive beings populate the world, imposing themselves on us. They are the informational entities we ascribe to ourselves and others as well as the characters in literature. Our physical bodies provide us with access to alternate realms of being, but in literature they function only with our abiding awareness of their fictionality.

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As such, the reality experienced by fictive beings is both precarious and, as a result, demandingly rigorous. As Latour says, beings of fiction are not based on falsity or illusion, but rather on “what is fabricated, consistent, real.”7 They must maintain the audience that provides their consciousness, projecting it into them. They require eyes to see them, because they are not present in the world waiting to be perceived. Rather, they emerge directly from these emitting eyes. This is not to say that such consciousnesses are imaginary, because “without any doubt,” Latour tells us, “there is some exteriority among the beings of fiction; they impose themselves on us after imposing themselves on those responsible for their instauration.” They are composed of information, just as my consciousness and yours are. The existence of projected consciousness is reciprocal, vital, and in constant flux, and crucially, it does not begin with us as readers. Instead, a vast network of entities must interact in order to create a text in the first place, and to function as what we consider the author or creator of a text (fiction, poetry, film, etc.). If we attempt to remove this constructed, fabricated nature from a fictive being, this journey of instauration is disrupted. Latour emphasizes the exteriority of fictive beings in order to defend them from the ephemeral status of signs and symbols, loaded with meaning but deprived of ontological weight. He points out that “if listeners are gripped by a piece, it is not at all because they are projecting their own pathetic subjectivity on it,” rather, he claims, “it is because the work demands that they,” as audience members, “become part of its journey of instauration.” He goes on to claim, moreover, that “imagination is never the source, but rather the receptacle of beings of fiction” [emphasis in original]. “One becomes imaginative,” he claims, “when one is gathered in by works of fiction.” This insistence on the exteriority of fictive beings resists the extramissive sense that the world is a creation of our mind, that is composed and then projected outward, existing only spectrally, owing its existence only to our own generative powers of imagination. The journey of instauration that Latour is so careful to liberate from the reader is very much a part of this. It removes the onus for the creation of a fictive being from the reader, replacing us with the vague and sprawling authorial presence within and around a text. Indeed, supplementing Latour’s fictive beings with the insights on projected consciousness that Graziano provides leaves us with a fairly sufficient way of explaining fictional characters—they function as an intricate interaction between the words on the page and the consciousnesses we create therefrom. What provides literature with its profound depth, though, is precisely its fictionality, the reality of its artifice and the demands inherent within that which force an audience to look beyond the superficies of the plot and players. It is the realization that the audience

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is not the projecting source, and that other, equally compound, plural, and generative, type A consciousnesses must exist in the world and demand our accountability. The understanding that our projection is playing out atop another, earlier projection, is inescapable in the encounter with literature, and while fictive beings remain in the spectral realm of singular consciousnesses, opaque and/ or transparent Type B consciousnesses, they point us back to the source of this earlier projection, a mind that is not a physical human being, and yet, in its compound, plural nature, is so much like our own experience of our own minds. It is the irreducible complexity that lies behind and enfolds each and every one of these singular fictive beings. So like us, and yet wholly different, this is the Authorial Consciousness. It is so unlike us it cannot be really known, and its existence draws us into the realm of real and complete secrecy. A world that does not come from within us. The constructedness of fictive beings leads to a constant awareness of a source from which they emerge. We come to recognize behind them, fabricating them, driving them onward, is an Authorial Consciousness that is compound, plural, generative, and capable of projection. It is, as such, a mind like our own. It is, in fact, the only other type A consciousness we can ever experience outside our own. By establishing a mind like our own in its plurality and its compound, projecting nature, the Authorial Consciousness actively and constantly asserts a reality of its own that is equivalent to the reality of ourselves as we experience it. It is undeniably a real consciousness to the same extent we are, and makes on us, therefore, the ethical demands that inhere in that. Fictional beings can seem so real to us because we engage with them as if they were. Conversely, though, this means that real people can seem just as spectral and contingent in the projected world of our interactions. Once again, extramission suggests how this occurs. As we will see, the consciousnesses we devise for others and that which we experience in ourselves bear a crucial distinction. For Graziano’s neurological approach, it is sufficient for him to term these consciousnesses type A—the reflexive consciousness we create and ascribe to ourselves and experience as life, and type B—the schematic model of attention we imagine for an other, animate or inanimate, and project onto them. For our part, though, we must go further and draw out the key distinction between the consciousness we experience within ourselves, and that which is ascribed to others, be they friends, animals, puppets, the wind, etc. The crucial distinction, though, unnoticed until now, is that type A consciousness and type B are experienced as radically different. Most crucially, our own minds, our conscious experience of ourselves, must include

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innumerable other type B consciousnesses that we project onto others and interact with. As such, my own mind becomes compound. It is pluralized by the sprawling network of other, singular, Type B consciousnesses it contains. We animate the inanimate. But simultaneously, we animate the already animate. We project our own self-made consciousnesses into other people just as easily and irresistibly as we do into marionettes and storm clouds. We populate the world thusly, but shallowly. It is filled with type B consciousnesses, including the projected ghosts of ourselves. A shallow, never-really-believed consciousness is a startling amount of consciousness for a marionette, but it is also startlingly little to imagine within a human being. This is the faceless world of ethical phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. It is a world in which we interact with others in such a way that lubricates social life, but it relegates everything we encounter to the same inanimate-animate level we use to interact with puppets and imagined birds. The projected consciousness that enlivens the inanimate also leaves the animate merely a projection. Levinas calls this the “presence before a face,”8 that is, an existence that must be acknowledged, but which makes no ethical demand on us. This is the uncanny that might cause us to shudder briefly, should we need to burn a puppet for firewood, but which would never stop us from doing so. It is also the force that would allow us to burn a human being alive. Just as consciousness flows outward from us into the entities that we encounter, Levinas notes that “This is positively produced as the possession of a world I can bestow as a gift on the Other.”9 We move through a world that is enlivened at every step by our own perception of it, and yet which remains always only a projection of our own mind, a shallow, undemanding entity, each man only as human as a puppet. Everything and everyone we encounter becomes a part of our own mind, an element that dwells within it, but they are also only just that. Marionettes that haunt us. The effects of this come through in the ethical philosopher and phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas’s notes about the strange, seemingly contradictory nature of the way we think about subject-hood. Thought, Levinas tells us, evoking extramission, “in reaching out toward objects, does not actually take leave of itself, since its objects—considered as ideas and contents of thought—are, in a certain sense, already within it.”10 Which is to say, the concept of extramission, in which our subjectivity moves outward away from us into the world, has to give way to the deeper notion of consciousnesses that are contained within us and projected outward. Because of course there is a significant difference between intellectually acknowledging that other people are real and really alive, really human beings, and having that reality thrust on you in such a way that it can overcome the fact that we engage with others almost exclusively as type B consciousnesses,

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singular and projected, as real as, but no more real than, fictional beings, imaginary things. This is the task that Emmanuel Levinas, whose worked centered on the ontology and the ethical demands of the other, sets for himself, and prescribes with great difficulty for all of us. For Levinas the realization of the other is defined by a sense of “extreme exposure, defenselessness, vulnerability itself.”11 For Levinas, it is “[b]eyond the visibility of whatever is unveiled” where “mortality lies in the Other.”12 This vulnerable mortality issues from and forms the essence of the other’s undeniable reality. The ability to annihilate the other creates, for Levinas, the birth of ethics. This begins with the spectral, type B consciousnesses, which Levinas describes as “beings, which we call consciousness.”13 These beings, though, may only be projections of our own inner thoughts, only consciousnesses in the sense that tables and phones have consciousnesses, because we construct consciousnesses for them within ourselves and project those consciousnesses onto them. We can compare this to the type A consciousness we sense in ourselves, what Levinas terms “self-consciousness” and connects to “multiplicity,” a consciousness “losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth.”14 It is the discovery of this Type A mode of consciousness is an other that awakens us to the reality and vulnerability of the world, to our obligations within it. Once we realize the full reality of the Authorial Consciousness, and with it the whole world beyond us, we must resist doing violence. The command to do no violence at all is daunting to the point of impossibility. If it can be realized at all, it can only be realized for the briefest moment, in the fleeting suspension of ethics, in a moment of meteoric hiatus. Pynchon himself has delved into this topic, writing a foreword for the collected works of Donald Barthelme and a glowing review of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. These are particularly interesting pieces of writing that reveal a great deal about Pynchon’s literary values. Discussing Barthelme, for example, he writes, that one of the “several humiliating features” of making a living from writing fiction is that, in contrast to every other type of worker within the capitalist system, from “piano movers to systems analysts,” sells their bodies or parts of their body into the system, while writers are left “wretched and despised,” selling their dreams, their intimate imaginations, a process Pynchon calls “painful.” This focus on the intimacy of “dreams” speaks to Pynchon’s own proclivity to disregard literary realism early and often. Putting a positive spin on things, he writes, “in most cases it doesn’t present much moral problem,” since by the time these intimate dreams make their way into the public sphere, they have been transmogrified beyond recognition, so that even devoted writers who work on being able to “write legibly in the dark” struggle to capture the “clarity and

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sweep,” the fundamental grandeur and immersiveness of dreams, with their intense emotions, and “transcendent weirdness.” This makes it a safe bet that most writers’ dreams, remain mercifully “untranslated and private after all.” Failure, in this account, is safe. It protects the deepest intimacies of the writer from the consuming world. And yet, failure is not success at all. So Pynchon congratulates Barthelme on being able to deliver his dreams to the audience unadulterated, despite the genuine risks he associates with that. By this point, we recall, Pynchon has not published a novel in fifteen years, and the sense that he is building himself up to the eminent release of Vineland is palpable in each of his 1988 essays. We can also detect Vineland looming when Pynchon talks about California. Vineland is the second of Pynchon’s California Novels (after The Crying of Lot 49), books set during his lifetime and in the places he’s lived. Vineland will, as such, establish California as a key part of Pynchon’s artistic repertoire, and we can sense something of his own use of it when he describes Barthelme’s antipathy toward the state. Barthelme’s California is, he writes, “not perhaps geographical so much as psychological California,” based on the state’s reputed tendency to tolerate “wishful thinkers,” and other who seek to defy the passing of time and the evils that it brings into the world, both politically, with the storm of history that continues to pile wreckage, and personally, with the process of aging. Pynchon has more admiration for this than he ascribes to Barthelme, but he is clearly including himself when he concludes that Barthelme is like most other serious writers who cannot afford the luxury of this foolhardy defiance, and so have little patience for those who do embrace it. Pynchon often comes across as this sort of failed hippy; idealistic but incapable of naivete, pacifist but always aware of how the powerful exploit passivity, laid-back but too ambitious to give himself over to a life of leisure. Maybe most acutely, then, he writes that, Barthelme’s “other great gift to us is precisely his melancholy,” which is presented edifyingly, as “praxis and example,” a means of survival that manages, every now and then, to provide “as they used to sing at the end of Hee Haw, ‘a smile and a laugh or two.’” Pynchon writes, using a construction he’ll return to constantly in Vineland to incorporate pop-cultural references into his work. He goes on to point out that a good honest push back against the forces of tragedy, is something that literature can help us with, and that this, in the final analysis, is perhaps vitally important. Indeed, Pynchon himself would largely turn away from tragedy in his later novels, always carefully laying in points of hope, usually centered around families, chosen or biological. The means of accomplishing this, of allowing this kind of optimism into his stringently honest fiction, might be most evident in another review he wrote in 1988, about the English translation of

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Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Márquez was a Nobel Prize winner and one of the centuries most acclaimed and important novelists, introducing a global audience to South American literature and establishing the genre of Magical Realism. Márquez had written his most famous novel, 100 Years of Solitude, in 1967, and we can sense Pynchon’s admiration for how Márquez has moved on from that accomplishment in his new novel. In his review, published just a few years before Pynchon would initiate his own late phase, he writes of Márquez: “oh boy—does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity,” allowing the “voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction” to mature into new resources, arriving at a higher level that is both “classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar.” The words could just as easily apply to post-Vineland Pynchon, and it’s easy to imagine them as aspirational. Similarly, he notes Márquez’s growth, seeming to touch back on the themes of Vineland in particular: “we have descended, perhaps in some way down the same river, [. . .] haunted less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having spoken, or having spoken gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded.” He goes on, “As revolutionary as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a duty Garcia Márquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion.” He also makes the interesting point that “the only honest way to write about love,” is to envelope it in darkness and finitude, and that without these things, there may be “romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera,” but not love. “What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point,” he goes on, is “an author’s ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.” Given that Pynchon’s early fiction, in particular, is often accused of misanthropy because of the coldness he evinces toward his characters, and the degree to which this is tempered in later work like Mason & Dixon. Fictive beings must exist within fictions because they are, in their essence, a single component held within a larger consciousness that we are experiencing only indirectly: the Authorial Consciousness. Whereas fictive beings take their place in our minds alongside the plethora of other consciousnesses we hold there, those of teachers, of buildings, of friends, the Authorial Consciousness is unique in that it is not one mind of many within our own. It is, instead, an entity with many component consciousnesses of its own, existing outside of ours but still evident to us. The relationship with this Authorial Consciousness is the richest and most profound contact with alterity for precisely this reason; richer even than our

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encounters with the imagined consciousnesses of real people. We think of even other real people as singular. They may be complex, but they are a unity, singular, constructed, and projected out from within ourselves. Contained as a singular element within ourselves. Literature, though, presents us with unremitting proof that the Authorial Consciousness, like our own, contains multitudes within a subjectivity we cannot contain. This disallows the incorporation of their consciousness into our own. The Authorial Pynchon cannot take his place beside the fictional Slothrop. Instead, that consciousness remains held out, its gibbous complexity compounding and introducing an impermeable secrecy. It is a mind that is like ours, not within it. Pynchon shows us that consciousnesses are movable. They can be transferred and replicated, and most importantly, they exist meaningfully outside of the bodies we might assign them to. We project our own consciousness into the world to meet the others that we meet. We absorb the consciousnesses of these others, too, as they meet us. We fill ourselves with the consciousnesses of others, and between us, we construct mutually interacting, spectral consciousnesses. For society, for friendship, for lovers, these spectral entities, intertwined and interacting, the overlapping consciousnesses we use to bind ourselves loosely to one another, suffice. But this is a story of heartbreak, too, and we see in it the sacrifices exacted by this ghostly ephemerality. We can sense in ourselves bottomless depths, and the promise of such depths in others is bottomlessly alluring. Yet inasmuch as these friends and lovers, these others both real and fictional, remain singular, remain mere components within the compound plurality of ourselves, any real connection is held at bay. We can think of this in terms of extramission. The world, the universe, comes from within us somewhere, issuing out from our eyes. Or else we have, somewhere within us, a substance we can send forth that is capable of apprehending the entire world. The things we meet in the world emerge from us or are contained within us. The mind that animates my computer is one that I construct for it, project into it. When we imagine the emotions and motivations of a storm, its consciousness is one that we create for it and send out into the world to inhabit it. So much of everything is contained within us and created to a significant extent by our own minds. These others remain opaque, solid and singular, with “no overflowing sets of constitutive but partially incompatible objects packed-away inside,” or else “perfectly transparent objects that, with clean efficiency, convey us without deformation to the ‘real’ objects behind them.” They are contained under a single label, singular entities within our own compound mind. They can provide us with mystery, but it is also only in the abscondito form of secrecy. Abscondito, from the Latin for secret, which we can identify with a form of secrecy that can resolve. It is secret in the way that a hand beneath

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a table cannot be seen, and whose appearance, once the hand is lifted and placed atop the table, becomes a mystery no more. While they remain singular, the consciousnesses of others can only provide us this penetrable form of secrecy. They hold none of the alluring bottomlessness that we sense or at least hope must surely be present in someone, something besides ourselves. Something real. So it is that the projected consciousness, the transferable and movable consciousness, real and pragmatic and spooky as it is, has to give way to a stranger and less certain interaction. The outward motion that sends us into the world to interact with others is met (though rarely, though only at specific times, only with great trepidation) with an inward impulse that drives us back along the course of extramission into the emitting eyes, back to the source, the infinite and projecting other. Because we do look people in their eyes. As if behind the eyes lay a deeper reality about the other (a source for everything that issues forth from the eyes, which may be, the instinct for extramission tells us, the whole world, everything). This is an impulse born of an belief in extramission. We look in people’s eyes because we believe, intuitively, that that is the portal they come out through, and through which we might get a glimpse of the secrets within (secrets that are not merely hidden, merely abscondito, but bottomless, infinite, kryptic, and beyond that, wholly and completely irreducible). NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington. The Beast and the Sovereign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 184. 2. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 187. 3. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 187–88. 4. English in the original. 5. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 188. 6. Michael Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 97. 7. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 238. 8. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 9. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity. 10. Emmanuel Lévinas, Martin Heidegger and Ontology, Johns Hopkins University. Web. 28 Aug. 2016. 11. Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre Nous: Essais Sur Le Penser-À-L’autre (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1991), 125. 12. Lévinas, Entre Nous, 125.

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13. Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being, Or, Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). 14. Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being.

Chapter Seven

Chicxulub Meteoric Consciousness in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow

The secret of the other is what holds their ethical demands on us. It cannot be dismissed or solved, cannot be realized or understood. The secret of the other, underneath everything else, is an irreducible singularity that can only be encountered, and the force of that encounter is imposition of the full reality of the other. This becomes a hugely important encounter in Pynchon, though it is often expressed as anticlimax, the refusal of violence. Near the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, there is a subsection titled “Isaac,” referencing the aborted sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham. Pynchon writes that there “is an Aggadic tradition from around the 4th century that Isaac, at the moment Abraham was about to sacrifice him on Moriah, saw the antechambers of the Throne” (764). This moment, so near the climax of the novel, draws attention to the violent blow, in this case a falling V2 rocket, that Pynchon himself is about to suspend just before its fatal strike when he ends the book with the rocket still one “last delta-T” above the roof of the theater below (775). The most famous and influential analysis of the Akedah for modern readers likely comes from Søren Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling. De Silentio’s text inaugurates an impossible ethics, in which any correct action becomes unattainable, if not altogether inconceivable. De Silentio’s name is gesture toward the negativity of such an ethics. Working as as a pseudonym for Soren Kierkegaard is as such serving as his own sort of fictive being, de Silentio delivers an extended analysis of what is called the Akedah, the biblical tale of Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of his son 97

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Isaac in Genesis 22:1–19. The silence in question is the silence that envelops Abraham and Isaac as they ride toward Mount Moriah for three days. For Kierkegaard, this period of time is staggering. Passed over in the biblical account, the hiatus between the command for Abraham to kill his son and the arrival at the place where the sacrifice is to occur beggars’ belief for Kierkegaard, and he is subsumed by it. Working in contrast to Hegel’s outward-rippling ethics, especially in the Philosophy of Right, Kierkegaard seeks to elevate the individual experience over the universal. He writes that: the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior—yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal; it is and remains for all eternity a paradox, impervious to thought.1

The movement toward the personal undermines the categorical imperative and the outward-facing ethics of earlier authors while attempting to create a “suspension” of the ethical that Kierkegaard associates with religious faith. In this suspended state, Abraham “transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher telos outside it, in relation to which he suspended it.” Derrida seizes on this idea of the suspension of ethics in order to consider what happens in the moment of suspension, not only in the hiatus that precedes the arrival at Mount Moriah, but in the hiatus during which the sacrificial knife is held aloft above Isaac. The importance of this moment of suspension, this hiatus, is brought on by the impossibility of meeting the ethical obligations imposed on us by others. These obligations are strikingly laid out by Emmanuel Levinas in his discussion of the face of the other. Judith Butler expands on this idea in her book Precarious Life. Butler emphasizes the importance of violence, and correspondingly, nonviolence, in ethical action. Meditating on Levinas’s notion that “the face is what one cannot kill,” Butler writes: “Why would it be that the very precariousness of the Other would produce for me a temptation to kill? Or why would it produce the temptation to kill at the same time that it delivers a demand for peace?” In seeking an answer to this question, Butler notes that there is a vital need now: to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the

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emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense.2

This, in many ways, is a key concern of this essay. How can fraying the edges of limits of what we can know offer insights into a forward-looking approach to literature? The framework set forth by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Butler struggles to accommodate the strangeness of fictive beings and especially the authorial consciousness. Other writers, such as Luce Irigaray, Astrida Neimanis, Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, and Donna Haraway have sought to expand the ethical realm to include the nonhuman an inanimate in ways that have significantly shaped our thinking in this essay. Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, and theorist Luce Irigaray has worked throughout her career to expand the realm of subjectivity, primarily on the argument that it traditionally excludes women and must be made to accommodate female subjectivity and agency. Along these lines, especially in her 1991 book, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Irigaray invokes the association of women with natural forces. In her efforts to dissociate the female from the natural, Irigaray simultaneously suggests an inverse solution: an increased respect for the natural such that an association with it would not be de facto denigrating. “There remains the earth ancestress,” she writes, an entity which “was once the most fertile, that has been progressively buried and forgotten beneath the architectonic of patriarchal sovereignty. And this murder erupts in the form of ambivalences that have constantly to be solved and hierarchized, in twinned pairs of more or less good doubles.”3 The chore, one could argue, is not to rescue women from the realm of beings that are excluded from ethical consideration, but rather to expand that consideration outward so as to take in more of the world. The “hydrofeminism” of Astrida Neimanis undertakes something of this effort. “By venturing to feminism’s ecotones,” she writes, “and leaping in, we can discover that feminism dives far deeper than human sexual difference and outswims any attempts to limit it thus. Here is gestation, here is proliferation, here is danger, here is risk.”4 In her emphasis on the permeability of the human body and her deconstruction of the internal/external binary, Neimanis means to confuse the distinction between animate and inanimate, emphasizing the interconnectedness of everything on earth. Stacy Alaimo, too, works toward understanding the role of the nonhuman and the inanimate in our lives, focusing on “the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.” Like Neimanis, Alaimo utilizes the interactive flow of substances “between people, places, and economic/political

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systems”5 in order to hazard the preconceptions of traditional ethical systems and the hierarchies they reinforce. These works seek to make ethical sense of an understanding of the world that acknowledges how deeply, intractably, intertwined every element of existence is. Simultaneously, as in the case, especially, of Irigaray here, theory takes on a deep concern with issues of identity, working against the objectification of various types of humans. What tends to be lacking with these approaches is an appreciation of the personal. Feminist, queer, decolonial, new materialist, and critical-race approaches to animal studies and the environment demonstrate ways of expanding the ethical realm, but always only with the goal of incorporating a new, essentialized identity group. They react to the problem of the human-object, but only through a Hegelian, universalizing, approach that considers literature to be primarily a sociopolitical phenomenon or instructional tool rather than an authentic encounter with the other. As such, they cannot grasp Kierkegaard’s impossible ethics, and they cannot address the real power of literature. Derrida’s expansion of the alterity Kierkegaard finds in God to include any other, a foundational move for many of these later theorists, is still the most useful tool for us in addressing the way we can, should, and do respond to the strange otherness of the authorial consciousness. We see both the impossibility of the demands of an ethics that recognizes the reality of the Authorial Consciousness, the other, and the world, and the hope for a hiatus of grace in the ethics of Jacques Derrida. In his treatise on religion and ethics, The Gift of Death, Derrida notes that valuing others means acknowledging the fact that we constantly fail to meet our obligations to them. “As soon as I enter into a relation with the absolute other,” Derrida writes, recalling the absolute otherness of an Authorial Consciousness that is at once a type A consciousness like ourselves, and yet wholly other, outside ourselves and inhuman, “my singularity enters into relation with his on the level of obligation and duty.” We become aware of our responsibility to the other through an encounter with the Authorial Consciousness, and yet we also become aware of our inevitable failure. We must fail to meet our obligations to the other, because, as Derrida writes: “I am responsible before the other as other; I answer to him and I answer for what I do before him,” but at the same time, “[t]here are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility.” As we see our ethical obligations expand to the Authorial Consciousness, they also expand infinitely beyond that. We also find ourselves accountable for fictive beings and nonfictional beings alike. Our ethical duties spiral ever outward until “I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another

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without sacrificing the other other, the other others.” The realization of the reality of the other asks more of us than we are able to provide. So it is that we find ourselves “sacrificing and betraying at every moment all [our] other obligations,” including but not limited to “obligations to the other other whom [we] know or don’t know, the billions of [our] fellows [semblables] (without mentioning the animals that are even more other than [our] fellows).” The encounter with a type A consciousness other than our own, the Authorial Consciousness, imposes on us the reality of other consciousnesses, including the type B consciousnesses of fictive beings, and others (our fellows, our semblables) whom we only encounter as type B consciousnesses. In doing so, it exposes the extent of our obligations to the world, and the impossibility of meeting them. For Derrida, though, and perhaps more so for Pynchon, these obligations and this failure can be suspended, at least for a brief moment. Just as the literary encounter with the Type A consciousness of the Authorial Consciousness induces this crisis, its solution, momentary and fleeting and as it is, is also bound up with literature. “Literature will have been meteoric,” Derrida says, finding in fiction a suspension of the very ethical demands it imposes. The encounter with the meteor, which for Derrida is “brief, rapid, transitory,” becomes, as literature, a fleeting moment wherein the possibility of transformation can exist. Just as a meteor only exists in the atmosphere, becoming, the instant it touches the ground, a meteorite, so this moment, this hiatus must pass, quickly and violently. The violence that we do to every other other returns. But for a moment, in this moment of encounter, the ethical becomes accessible, a free decision is possible. Faced with this impossibility, then, the generalized, categorical nature of ethics is replaced with a specific, singular demand. This demand is couched in secrecy and exemplified, for Derrida, by the strangeness of the Akedah. Abraham’s relationship with Yahweh, like any relationship with any Other, according to these impossible ethics, is defined by bewildering and unfathomable demands. The promise of descendants as numerous as the stars is followed by infertility. The command to father children outside of marriage is followed by the pregnancy of Abraham’s wife. The miraculous child is demanded as a sacrifice. The demand is withdrawn. For Abraham, Yahweh’s demands are not nullified by their later reversals because ethical action is not and cannot be predicated on knowledge of the future. God’s demands do not adhere to the logic of simple causation. What they amount to, ultimately, is the moment of suspension, the knife held above the child’s head, the hiatus that precedes the failure.6 Derrida writes, again, confronting us with the gaze, the vision that moves outward extramissively from the other: “As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other,” he says, “I know that

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I can respond only by sacrificing ethics.”7 We must sacrifice ethics, because our obligations to every other correspond precisely with obligations to every other other. Derrida explains that, “I put to death, I betray and lie, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that,” referencing Abraham and Isaac directly, “Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over the other, to this or that other to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably.”8 Derrida’s imagery here is powerful and evocative, but we might refine it slightly. It is not that the knife is raised every instant in our obligations toward the other, but that it descends. “By preferring what I am doing here and now, simply by giving it my time and attention,” he goes on, “I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know.”9 This sacrifice, this betrayal, is not, as we will see, best embodied in the raised knife, but rather the knife after it has been brought down, sacrificing the other. This is a minor but important distinction, because we can find in the raised knife, in the moment before the decision that must be made, and we must sacrifice infinite other others for the sake of a particular other, a meteoric pause outside of ethics and the sacrifice of ethics. Derrida himself will return to the Akedah in Literature in Secret, and find, in the knife, raised, suspended (if only for an instant), a possibility for hope. This moment is meteoric in the sense that “It keeps itself suspended, perhaps over a head, for example over Isaac’s head at the moment Abraham raises his knife over him, when he knows no more than we do what is going to happen.”10 This meteoric moment of possibility, the moment just before, is also associated with literature, where such an ethical encounter comes to the fore. When literature approaches “the impossible—impossible forgiveness,”11 for example, it is then, Derrida claims, that it becomes meteoric. “The [meteor]’s secret is that it becomes luminous upon, as one says, entering the earth’s atmosphere,” he writes, “arriving from who knows where, but in any case from another body from which it has become detached. Then what is meteoric must be brief, rapid, transitory. Furtive in its lightning passage.”12 The meteor, which can only exist in fleeting passage through the atmosphere (becoming a meteorite the moment it lands), comes to stand in for the moment just before the sacrifice of ethics, the moment when we betray the other others. It is a necessarily brief and passing moment. So it is that “the life of a [meteor]14 will have always been too short.”13 The ethical hiatus of the meteor must pass and pass quickly. The knife must descend on someone. Unless, through some miraculous anticlimax, it does not.

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Two illustrative cases from Pynchon’s early novels draw on the nature of vision and consciousness to demonstrate how secrecy moves through these novels, how it is linked with vision, and how the meteoric hiatus of anticlimax reveals a moment of ethical possibility. In 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49, “Shall I project a world,” (15) is the primary question. The novel’s heroine Oedipa Maas finds herself immersed in questions of authority. Charged with executing the will of her former lover, Pierce Inverarity, she finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into a conspiracy that may have been constructed by Peirce himself; or the workings of an international organization set up in opposition to the Postal Service; or a series of coincidences linked into an ornate web of meaning by Oedipa’s own mind. It is the final possibility that most haunts Oedipa. The chance that the world around her issues solely from within her own mind. That she does indeed project the only reality that she can confront. This possibility, that the world is essentially unreal, drives Oedipa onward in her search for the heart of the plot she finds herself tangled in. She seeks the source of the plot, the guiding hand. She seeks, essentially, an Authorial Consciousness that is not her own. Superficially this quest primarily takes the shape of the Tristero, a mysterious countermail service with a long, possibly real history that seems to provide Oedipa with a mystery to solve and little else. More than a MacGuffin, though, the Tristero’s role as an alternative form of communication, one promising an escape from the restrictive and oppressive powers-that-be, reveals the true aim of Oedipa’s quest. She is searching for an authentic connection; a way to communicate and commune with another in some sort of pure, authentic way. This aspect of Oedipa’s quest, the search for genuine connection, comes to a climax in her encounter with the Nefastis Machine, a supposed perpetual motion machine designed by the supposed inventor, John Nefastis. Oedipa’s quest, if not wholly tragic, is at least perpetually unfulfilled, and her experience with the Nefastis Machine demonstrates why, while at the same time delivering a clear-eyed perspective on counterculture(s) as a whole. Oedipa’s encounter with the Nefastis Machine is spread out over two scenes in sections 4 and 5 of the novel. She first hears about the Machine second-hand from Stanley Koteks, an engineer at Yoyodyne, one of the myriad holdings she’s left to administer as the “executrix” of her former lover Pierce Inverarity’s will. This is followed by a direct encounter with the machine at Nefastis’s apartment. Throughout these two scenes, an especial focus is placed on the focus of each character’s attention and how it’s deduced and manipulated by the others, with increasing emphasis on where they are looking and what they must be seeing. For Oedipa in particular, the awareness of others’ attention is access point through which she seeks connection in

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these scenes, while the Nefastis Machine itself illustrates the sly and insidious ways in which this search for connection is funneled into coercive outlets. The scenes begin with Oedipa lost and wandering the floors of Yoyodyne. Immediately text turns to two specific elements, both of which will be reinforced throughout her experience with the Nefastis Machine: her eyes and the attention of others. Finding herself separated from the group of stockholders she’s been touring the factory with, “All she could think of was to put on her shades for all this light and wait for somebody to rescue her. But nobody noticed” (58). This lack of attention leaves her lost, until she is able to finally engage Koteks. Soon the interactions between Oedipa and Koteks are centered around interpreting where one another are looking. Immediately, Oedipa notices that Koteks is doodling a muted posthorn, the symbol she’s come to associate with the Tristero and its attendant mysteries. This initiates a series of actions in which each character follows the gaze of the other, recognizes their attention, and reacts. When Koteks first greets Maas, deftly sliding a large envelope into a drawer, he’s clearly noted that this was where Oedipa’s attention was focused, before his own attention is diverted “catching sight of her badge” (59). The badge, marking Oedipa (falsely) as a stockholder, seizes Koteks’ attention and allows Oedipa to pursue the conversation about the Nefastis Machine that follows. It is at this point that Koteks provides the first description of the Nefastis Machine, pointing out that the sorting done by the Maxwell’s Demon violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics because “‘It’s mental work,’” explaining that “All you had to do was stare at the photo of Clerk Maxwell and concentrate” on a particular cylinder (86). This defines the Nefastis Machine as one that is driven by a quality called extramission. Briefly, extramission is “the myth that we see by means of some substance that emanates out of the eyes and touches objects,”14 the only possible explanation for the Nefastis Machine’s ability to sense the eyes of Oedipa or some other “sensitive” upon it. Extramission is a universal and longstanding myth, and its continued widespread appeal across eras and cultures is likely rooted in the same facet that draws Oedipa forward with more emotional intensity than even she seems aware of. The myth of extramission is built upon the ability to detect the visual attention of others. This awareness of attention marks and in many ways makes up consciousness itself. It is only natural, then, that Oedipa, seeking to communicate with, connect with, and truly understand some vague alterity that she’s never able to define for herself, would be drawn to extramission as source of this connection. Immediately after learning how to operate the Nefastis Machine, Oedipa seems to become aware of the power of her gaze and the ability of others to

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perceive it, as well as her own ability to determine the focus of others’ attention. We’re told that she, “behind her shades, looked around carefully, trying not to move her head. Nobody paid any attention to them.” The Nefastis Machine has brought the notion of extramission to the forefront of Oedipa’s mind, but it not her first encounter with it in the novel. One of the driving phrases of her mystery and the novel itself reappears to reinforce the role of projective vision in Oedipa’s quest. Where she intends to write Nefastis’ address are the words she’d written earlier: “Shall I project a world?” As it so often does in this novel, though, Oedipa’s minimal progress is almost immediately met with undermining failure. Her conversation with Koteks comes to an end when she slips up, pronouncing W.A.S.T.E as waste, and loses Koteks’ attention. He “opened a book and proceeded to ignore her,” reinforcing the central theme of their entire conversation, the direction of attention is evidenced through the direction of one’s vision. This also leaves her with no plans to actually attempt to operate the Nefastis Machine, and her time at Yoyodyne has done little, at least superficially, to advance her investigations. When Oedipa arrives unplanned at Nefastis’s apartment, the theme is reiterated and expanded. Upon first meeting him, Nefastis tells Oedipa “‘I like to watch young stuff’” (73) explaining his focus on the TV’s image of dancing girls. Oedipa is primed for her understanding of the focus of his attention to generate empathy, and replies: “‘I understand.’” Oedipa’s quest is laid out at its most bare at this point. The vagaries of the Tristero mystery fall away. Nefastis may or may not have a W.A.S.T.E. address, but ultimately, Oedipa’s decision to visit him is unrelated to the greater arcs of the mystery. Instead, her encounter with Nefastis and his Machine keys in on the emotional and psychological roots of her investigation. The Tristero, as a postal service, is a means of communication, but Oedipa is looking for a deeper form of communication. The Nefastis Machine, with its emphasis on extramission and all the promises of revelation inherent in that seems to hold the possibility for this type of connection. Indeed, Nefastis claims that “‘Communication is the key’” (86) to the machine, and that the scale of communication involved is massive. According to Nefastis, the subject has to receive a “staggering set of energies,” and then in turn feed back a commensurate amount of information (86). This emphasis on reciprocity, though, is off-putting for Oedipa. She seems to intuit that the machine will not be capable of accomplishing this. “‘You’re not reaching me’” she tells Nefastis, and then, once he’s tried re-explaining the Demon “She looked at the picture on the outside of the box. Clerk Maxwell was in profile and would not meet her eyes” (86). The attentions of other, specifically as evinced by their eyes, is Oedipa’s point of entry into the minds of others, the means of connection and communion that she’s seeking throughout the

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novel and the drive that the Nefastis Machine claims to exploit for mechanical gain. But there is nothing there for Oedipa to see. Maxwell’s “visible eye seemed mild and noncommittal,” leaving Oedipa to speculate uncertainly about his inner existence. Nefastis continues to urge Oedipa to focus on the machine as if it were a human she was seeking to connect with and understand, telling her “‘Watch the picture,’” and to “‘concentrate on a cylinder. Don’t worry.’” And while Oedipa gives this task an incredible amount of effort, it is clear from the outset that the machine cannot work. Nonetheless, Oedipa cannot give up her attempt. The “mental work” Koteks had mentioned earlier begins to seem far less trivial as Oedipa seeks to interact with the photo of Maxwell, which only “gazed away, into some vista of Victorian England whose light had been lost forever.” But the photo of Maxwell gazes nowhere. Everything Oedipa perceives is her own creation, a fact she soon realizes. After momentarily thinking her attention may have moved the machine’s piston, she admits the truth to herself. It was “only a retinal twitch, a misfired nerve cell.” A statement that ends with a definitive period (86). Realizing that the machine is a misguided fantasy at best, Oedipa is overcome with emotion. She grows deeply afraid for some reason that nothing would transpire with the Nefastis Machine (87). This may come as a surprise to the reader, but when viewed as a condensed case of the pursuit that drives the entire the novel, the intensity of Oedipa’s emotions make sense. She thinks about how wonderful Nefastis’s supposed hallucinations must be to share (87). She has been led to believe that the consciousness is accessible through the eyes, through observing the gaze of others and through projecting her own outward toward them. The Machine had promised to turn this “mental work” into real physical energy, but it had failed her, and she is incommensurately upset. “surprisingly about to cry with frustration, her voice breaking,” and by the time Nefastis has returned from his TV (to which his own attention has been devoted this entire time) she is crying. The failure of the Nefastis Machine to render industry from her attention bothers Oedipa tremendously, but the worst is yet to come. When Nefastis subsequently proposes that they “‘Have sexual intercourse,” Oedipa screams and runs from his apartment. She’s so distraught from the entire session that she drives aimlessly for an indeterminate amount of time, granting her attention to nothing, functioning “automatically” until being brought back to reality by the imagined “virility” of “a swift boy in a Mustang.” In the midst of this fugue, though, Oedipa takes an odd precaution. Before driving off, she has “flung a babushka over her license plate” (87). This is an action that predicts Nefastis’s watching her drive away, focusing his attention on her license plate, learning about her in doing so. This could

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be a stroke of paranoia, but everything involving the Nefastis Machine, from her earlier conversation with Stanley Koteks to the supposed operation of the machine itself, from Maxwell’s inscrutable gaze to Nefastis’s absorption in his TV, has primed her to understand that there is a genuine significance to observing and interpreting the gaze of others, and through it the focus of their attention, the worlds they project. It’s only natural for her predict Nefastis looking at her license plate, and to seek to protect herself from it. It is not merely an observation, but an access point to a consciousness she has no desire to commune with. The Nefastis Machine is a ruse, while Nefastis’s actions reveal the darkness at the core of the ruse. The Nefastis Machine, we learn along with Oedipa, was never designed to operate in the way Koteks had detailed. Her attention was never meant to be simply translated into the literal operation of a machine, but rather, manipulated in more subtle and insidious ways. As Oedipa learns that she’s been misled, and that Nefastis’s so-called invention is only designed to lure women into his apartment for sex, she screams and runs out the door, as if it has become clear to her that no amount of attention could have awakened Maxwell’s Demon, and that the obstacles between her and the escape into authenticity she seeks instead amplify and multiply at every turn. This slippery and indefatigable series of systems could very well serve as a synopsis of Lot 49 itself. The fields of power are proliferated in this way, disguised as their own enemies, just as the Tristero and the stamps of lot 49 are, and the attention that up until this point had held such promise becomes sinister, frightening, leaving Oedipa to throw a babushka over her license plate before driving away, fearful that Nefastis could cast his eyes on it. The conclusion of The Crying of Lot 49 sees Oedipa continue deeper and deeper into the morass that the Nefastis Machine has revealed or opened up for her. Just before her experience she had fallen into a reverie on revelation in which she “could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers” (95). But with Nefastis she sees past this onset of understanding into the shifting, ungraspable workings underneath. They leave her screaming and amnesiac. The Crying of Lot 49 ends with Oedipa in an auction house, awaiting the titular sale of a stamp collection that may or may not hold the solution to the myriad mysteries she finds herself surrounded by. Before the crying of the lot can begin, the novel ends, leaving its audience suspended in a moment of uncertainty. Gravity’s Rainbow builds toward a climactic confrontation between rival half-brothers Vaslav Tchitcherine and Oberst Enzian. The two have pursued one another throughout the book, seeking a self-realization they imagine can

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only come through the destruction of the other. It is an archetypal conflict, with the half-brothers, one white, one black, moving slowly and inexorably toward one another and the presumably deadly encounter that would define their meeting. Tchitcherine, in particular, has a compulsive need to destroy the Schwarzkommando and with them his deeply mythologized half-brother Enzian for reasons that are “not political,” but rather “pure, personal hate” (732). The men are driven by forces beyond their control, forces of history, of personal destiny, but also forces of narrative, of novelistic expectations. The inevitability of their confrontation is known, not only by each man in the story, but by the reader as well, who senses its important place at the climax of the novel. What occurs instead is a nonconfrontation that reveals to us how fiction can come to impose the reality of the world on us, the ethical demands that come along with this, and finally the fleeting moments of grace that can meet these demands, if only for a moment. Just before his encounter with Enzian, Tchitcherine is magically blinded by his lover, the aspiring witch Geli Tripping. Her magic begins with the substances Tchitcherine’s body emits: “toenail clippings, a graying hair, a piece of bedsheet with a trace of his sperm, all tied in a white silk kerchief.” Later, she recites a charm, “fastening the silk crotch torn from her best underpants across the eyes of the doll, his eyes, Eastern and liquid, though they’d been only sketched in clay with her long fingernail” (748). And just as these eyes are not Tchitcherine’s, but rather, those of a roughly made effigy, neither is the blindness that Geli’s spell induces. Not really. Geli’s spell is simple. It makes Tchitcherine “blind to all but [her]” (748). The word “blind” here, though, clearly has a meaning beyond what we usually attach to it. Tchitcherine is not alarmed when he awakes “blind.” Instead, we find him “sitting by the stream, not dejected, nor tranquil, just waiting” (748). Later, his interactions with Enzian clearly demonstrate that his literal vision is unimpaired. Blindness and vision, and in particular our intuitive failures to understand them factually, are a key means through which literature expresses its interactions with our minds. It is as vision, as a visual substance, that we grasp consciousness itself, both our own, and, more vitally, others.’ Geli’s spell, performed on eyes that are not literally Tchitcherine’s, inducing a blindness that is not literal blindness, works on vision that is not literally his vision. Instead, like the hair, nails, and semen she carries with her to magically summon him, the vision she seeks to influence is vision that emerges outward from Tchitcherine. Accordingly, extramission flows throughout the scene between Tchitcherine and Enzian. Geli’s magic words as she casts a spell of Tchitcherine are: “May

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he be blind now to all but me. May the burning sun of love shine in his eyes forever. May this, my own darkness, shelter him” (748). These words at once invoke extramission, the sun that shines out from within Tchitcherine’s eyes, while simultaneously resisting and inverting it. The “sun of love” shines “in his eyes,” the real movement inward that defines physiological sight, accompanied with Geli’s “own darkness, that is sheltering and protective.” Despite his “blindness,” then, Tchitcherine’s attention remains, and remains linked to vision. “At her step, his head lifts, and he sees her. She is the first presence since last night he’s looked at and seen.” Simone Weil suggests that “This gaze is first an attentive gaze, where the soul empties itself of all its own content in order to receive in itself the being who it looks at as he is, in all his truth. This can only be done by those capable of attention” (748). We see this in both Tchitcherine and Enzian. Tchitcherine’s emptiness is explicit, that is the “blindness” Geli has conjured for him, a blindness to everything but the invisible truth. Enzian’s emptiness is more complex and based on a hazardous relationship with reality discussed momentarily. The role of attention as a supplement to vision is underscored in the narrative commentary on Geli’s magic. The secret to Geli’s magic is concentration, the narrator tells us, “She inhibits everything else: the moon, the wind in the junipers, the wild dogs out ranging in the middle of the night.” Avoiding these distractions, Geli focuses her attention on Tchitcherine, and more specifically, the twinned extramissive entities of his consciousness and his distinctly outward-oriented eyes. “She fixes on Tchitcherine’s memory and his wayward eyes” (748). The transition from these “wayward,” extramissive eyes to the “blind” eyes that follow her spell is an ethical one with its roots in the nature of our consciousness and in particular the way that consciousness interacts with literature. It is a movement away from an interaction with a spectral world that one creates within and projects outward into the world, toward an encounter with a world beyond ourselves, a world with a reality independent of ourselves, and, as such, a world that demands an ethical response. For Tchitcherine, this movement is accomplished through magic, but it is also the natural process of literature. Extramission reveals the way we think about consciousness, and the projective nature of our interaction with the world. Indeed, the way we interact with fictive beings is much the same as it is with “real” people. Enzian embodies this process with his own ontological ambiguity. According to an organization in the novel known as PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender) and others at the paramilitary occult organization Pynchon dubs “The White Visitation” the origins of the Schwarzkommando, Enzian’s group of breakaway African soldiers, can be traced to England’s own propaganda efforts in Operation Blackwing.

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Operation Blackwing centers on a film meant to terrify the German army and populace with the threat of colonial African soldiers deserting during the final stages of the war early in the novel. This film is later credited with actually summoning or conjuring the real Schwarzkommando that Enzian leads, with the definitive question here being: “can fantasy produce reality?” (275) [emphasis in original] This uncertainty level of reality haunts Enzian and the other Herero Schwarzkommando throughout the rest of the novel on multiple levels of reality. The historical Herero, some of whom did serve in the German military, though years before WWII, were victims of the colonial genocide carried out by Lothar von Trotha in German Sudwestafrika. The tribe barely survived this extended massacre (which itself plays a role in Pynchon’s V. as a premonition and forerunner of the horrors that would follow in the 20th century). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Enzian’s Herero are under assault from within by the “Empty Ones,” a group of Herero engaged in abstinence, abortions, and the general nonproliferation of the tribe. Their “program is racial suicide” (314). This precarious existence, both historically and within the fiction of Gravity’s Rainbow, directly springs from and feeds back into the precariousness of the Schwarzkommando as a potentially fictional creation within the novel’s “Zone” of postwar, ungoverned and unregulated statelessness, and as a fully fictional creation of the novel itself. Even for Tchitcherine, Enzian is “mythical.” It is Enzian’s fictional status that allows Tchitcherine to mythologize him, and to so avidly pursue the annihilation of his own brother. Because even if Enzian is fully physically real, he remains, for Tchitcherine, a projection from within. Tchitcherine pursues him in much the same way he had pursued the legendary Kirghiz Light (“The flash of Its light is blindness”) earlier in the novel. This meteoric hiatus is what we see in Gravity’s Rainbow. After years of obsession and searching, Tchitcherine at last comes face to face with Enzian. He is blind now, blinded by Geli’s spell, the nonblindness cast over his noneyes, impacting a nonvision, extramission, that is actually a story about consciousness. Tchitcherine and Geli are eating her magic bread by the stream when they hear an approaching convoy. Tchitcherine rises, dresses, and goes to see “if he can beg some food, or cigarettes” (748). The convoy belongs to Oberst Enzian and his Herero soldiers, the men Tchitcherine has been seeking out and hoping to destroy throughout the course of the entire novel. Now, the “black faces pass by,” faces in the Levinasian sense, real others, defined extramissively by the focus of their attention: “some glancing at him curiously, others too involved with their own exhaustion, or with keeping a tight guard on a covered wagon containing the warhead section of the 00001” (748). Finally, at long last, Tchitcherine comes face to face with Enzian who

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stops on his motorcycle for a moment in the middle of the bridge. Little trivialities transpire in broken German. Tchitcherine chisels some cigarettes and potatoes from the Schwarzkommando, unaware of his own longstanding and deep enmity toward them. Finally, the two men “nod, not quite formally, not quite smiling, Enzian puts his bike in gear and returns to his journey. Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, watching them down the road, shivering in the dusk” (749). And so their encounter ends. The nonaction of the anticlimax reveals the nonviolence of the literary hiatus, the graceful response to the literary encounter with the other. The novel itself seals the importance of the meeting between Tchitcherine and Enzian a few lines after the passage quoted above. “This is magic. Sure, but not necessarily fantasy” (749). It is magic within the context of the novel, in which Tchitcherine has been bewitched by his lover Geli Tripping so he cannot “see” anyone but her on this particular morning. But magic is not fantasy, and indeed, this is “certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it” (749). This is a moment whose importance explicitly reaches out beyond the bounds of the novel. It is insistent, and whatever else it may or may not be, it is magic, in a uniquely literary form. Tchitcherine’s blindness is a failure of extramission. Tchitcherine cannot project a world. As such, when he encounters Enzian, he does not see the Enzian he has composed in his mind and sent out into the world. He does not see the spectral, projected, essentially fictive Enzian. Instead, he confronts a fully real human being, and rather than being met with death, killing Enzian or being killed by him, the moment passes with trivial kindness, “half a pack of American cigarettes and three raw potatoes” (749). In this encounter we find the consequences of literature: an awareness that the world is not ours alone, and that it demands from us more than we could ever provide. But that, for just the briefest moment, we can find grace in recognizing this, releasing the idea that we are projectors of all we see. NOTES 1. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Penguin Great Ideas (Harlow, UK: Penguin Books, 2005). 2. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006). 3. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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4. Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 5. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). 6. Charles Molesworth, “Facing the Middle: Alan Wilde, Levinas, and the Poetics of Fiction,” Boundary 2 16, no. 2/3 (1989): 391–400. 7. Derrida, Gift of Death, 69. 8. Derrida, Gift of Death, 68. 9. Derrida, Gift of Death, 69. 10. Derrida, Gift of Death, 133. 11. Derrida, Gift of Death, 139. 12. Derrida, Gift of Death, 139. 13. Derrida, Gift of Death, 140. 14. Michael Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Chapter Eight

‘Oumuamua Meteoric Grace in Bleeding Edge

The 2013 novel Bleeding Edge marks the culmination of several ideas that have been developing throughout the years in Pynchon’s works. Released fifty years after his debut novel V., Bleeding Edge serves as an important capstone in the career of a man many consider to be the finest American novelist of his generation. The events of September 11th center the novel in much the same way the events of WWII center Gravity’s Rainbow, the events of WWI center Against the Day, and the American Revolution centers Mason & Dixon. What distinguishes Bleeding Edge, however, is the way that it differs from Pynchon’s other major works in its treatment of this traumatic, epochal event. By locating September 11th within the center of the plot and expanse of the novel, Bleeding Edge is able to explore its role as a transformational, meteoric hiatus rather than a looming world-historical disaster. The historically important events of earlier novels exist on the periphery of the stories, which tend to be set either just before or just after that event. Indeed, the structure used in The Crying of Lot 49, in which the novel terminates just before the climactic moment of revelation, seems to serve as a template in all of these novels. Bleeding Edge diverges from this pattern, setting the events of 9–11 directly in the middle of the novel’s plot, allowing the novel to explore the ways in which Pynchon’s predominating concerns apply to and make sense of this key moment in contemporary American history. In giving us both sides of the meteoric hiatus, Bleeding Edge is able to explore the impact of this particular phenomenon with different depth and nuance. Bleeding Edge applies Pynchon’s long-developed ideas about alterity and escape to the September 11th attacks and the weeks and months surrounding them. The novel contextualizes these events by subjecting their spectacle to the rigorously visual exploration of consciousness and the other that our study of extramission has suggested we should expect from a novel so engaged with questions of morality and grace. 113

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Pynchon’s works often take the form of a mystery that promises to reveal meaningful but hidden information only to dissolve into a diffuse ambiguity of dropped plot threads, unresolved complications, and compounding additional mysteries. Much like the other works in the author’s oeuvre, Bleeding Edge, too, takes the shape of a mystery wherein each revelation complicates, rather than simplifies, the world of the protagonists. This movement from the hidden to the unfathomable and finally to the singularity of each encounter in their irreducible complexity in Bleeding Edge drives a superficial, singular sense of secrecy to a compound, plural one, along the lines of Derrida’s analyses of the abscondito and krypto. Bleeding Edge realizes this process through its linking of its main character, an unlicensed fraud investigator named Maxine Tarnow, and the deep web portal DeepArcher, which she finds herself investigating. Maxine finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine web of business, financial, and political intrigue that surrounds the final days of the dot-com boom in New York’s Silicon Alley, but it is her encounter with the nonhuman strangeness of DeepArcher that provides her with the tools and awareness she needs to be able to seize the transformative moment (the meteoric moment we associate with the raised knife) when it arrives. Maxine navigates the mysteries of the tech industry, DeepArcher, and eventually 9–11 itself throughout the novel, and their superficial resolutions fall by the wayside as we witness her pursue, or stumble upon, the possibility of transformative grace in her life. Much like Derrida’s Abraham, Maxine finds herself faced with a life-or-death decision. Her moment of truth comes as she confronts the novel’s antagonist, the corrupt tech billionaire, Gabriel Ice. She too finds herself with the raised knife in the form of her Beretta 3032 “tomcat” pistol, drawn and pointed at Ice. It is a tense situation, handled gracefully, as Maxine’s experiences with DeepArcher have prepared her to recognize the reality and ethical demands inherent in the face of the other, of every other. It is a moment in which the encounter with the other creates a secrecy that is transcendent rather than limiting, an absolute intimacy. This intimacy binds us to the others we encounter, and the infinite other others they imply. It is a meteoric moment, like the Akedah and the sentient meteorite of Against the Day, and promises a transformation in Maxine, if she can only recognize it. Her success is subtle, but clearly portrayed in the novel’s final pages as she watches her kids walk to school without her for the first time. It is a change that will not be undone, echoing the novel’s opening moments in a way that underscores not a return to normalcy, but change and transformation in a positive way. The novel as a whole is full of exactly such momentary breaks, underscoring their existence, and along with that, the rapidly fleeting nature

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of the freedom they provide. The September 11th attacks, calling back to Against the Day, are the most obvious, but the unexpected de-randomizing of DeepArcher’s security structure, the brief power outage that follows the Lester Traipse Memorial Pulse, and more, all demonstrate breaks in which we might find grace, and in which Maxine, it would seem, does. DeepArcher is a node on the deep web, that seems to have the potential to offer some sort of sanctuary from malignant forces of the world. that characters in other works were only able to seek geographically or metaphysically. The program, developed by Maxine’s acquaintances Justin and Lucas, is described as a search engine, but actually acts as an esoteric online space wherein the visuals presented are contributed by users from all over the world for free. This is “Hacker ethic,” in which each person does their part, then disappears uncredited (359). DeepArcher becomes a space in which the boundaries of what is possible in both “meatspace” and reality itself become blurred or disappear altogether, “the deep unlighted [. . .] the border country, the edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information [. . .] the edge of the beginning before the Word” (359). But like all of Pynchon’s utopian visions, DeepArcher is not destined to last. The end of DeepArcher’s hidden-secrecy, though, does not come in a slow, meticulous trickle, it comes on September 10th, 2001, when its random-number source suddenly ceases to be random. DeepArcher’s secrecy relies on being untraceable, a trait obtained by deploying a high-quality supply of random numbers. Its source of these random numbers had been the Global Consciousness Project, which is a network of worldwide randomevent generators operated out of Princeton University. The theory behind the project is that if the consciousnesses of humanity are all linked together somehow, any major global event, including disasters, will “show up in the numbers,” as indeed it did, when, on the 10th, “suddenly these numbers coming out of Princeton began to depart from randomness” abruptly and drastically for a few days, spanning September 11th. As a result, “DeepArcher’s defenses began to disintegrate, everything was more visible” (341–42). This explanation of the end of DeepArcher’s hidden-secrecy immediately follows a meeting between Maxine and her “emotherapist” Shawn, a correlation that will continue throughout the rest of the novel as Maxine’s experience of secrecy transforms. The secrecy that comes with the end of secrecy, for Derrida, in linked with the Greek word “krypto,” which “extends beyond the visible,” to “enlarge the field of secrecy,” and finally present the secret as “illegible or undecipherable rather than invisible.” This manifests itself in DeepArcher’s becoming essentially unrecognizable to Maxine when she returns. In particular, she encounters signs which “she doesn’t recognize even the font they’re written in [. . .] pop-ups out of the Invisible and into your face” (354), and yet as DeepArcher becomes more illegible or indecipherable,

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Maxine also finds herself increasingly drawn to it: Knowing that she should be trying to sleep Maxine still instead brews a dozen cups of coffee and log onto DeepArcher (402–3) and later realizes that “she can’t stay out of DeepArcher” (426). It is the increasing complexity and unpredictability of the now unhidden that attracts her, the “herds of tourist-idle, cop-curious, [. . .] ROM hackers, homebrewers, RPG heretics, continually unwriting and overwriting, disallowing, deprecating, newly defining and ever-growing inventory of contributions to graphics, instructions, encryption, escape” (426). The allure of the incomprehensible that DeepArcher provides is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in a scene that takes place in “meatspace.” As the result of a speedboat chase she finds herself at the landfill islands near Staten Island, remarking on the trash there, what she knows of her own waste, multiplied by “everyone in the city she knows, multiplied by everybody she doesn’t know, since 1948, before she was even born” allowing the mass to spiral beyond comprehension until it takes on a religious character: “what she thought was lost and out of her life and only entered a collective history, which is like being Jewish and finding out that death is not the end of everything—suddenly denied the comfort of absolute zero” (166–67). “This little island reminds her of something” Maxine thinks, immediately after beginning to contemplate eternity, and that something, of course, is DeepArcher (167). As the interlude at the landfill islands demonstrates, DeepArcher, in its existence as a kind of nonhuman mind, a strange stranger,1 has acquainted Maxine with a deeper form of secrecy. She has seen the compound, pluralized secrecy that that resists simplification, that defies models and paradigms. With DeepArcher, though, as with the Authorial Consciousness, the importance of the encounter lies not within the encounter itself, but in the way it reverberates through the rest of reality. It is at once the introduction of a crippling degree of ethical obligation, and the suggestion of a possibility for a type of Grace. As such, even as DeepArcher itself has its possibilities tamed, falling out of secrecy and absorbed back into the surface web and the desacralized world, Maxine’s transformation continues. Naturally, it does so in meatspace, with the humans who demand the most of us, aided by Shawn, the “emotherapist.” This notion becomes explicit late in the novel, when “The Wisdom” revealed to Maxine puts it simply: “it is what it is” (423–24), nothing more, nothing less, and nothing different. Maxine follows up the revelation, which comes from Shawn with a Bill Clinton joke, pointing out that this is “Depending on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is” (424). Profundity delivered in this way, surrounded by cynicism and silliness fits well with Maxine’s briefly sketched religious beliefs: a sort of paradoxical vein of mysticism, calling she calls “Jewish Zen,” referring specifically to Gershom Sholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (263). In his work, Sholem

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defines mysticism as that which “does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that will span it,” essentially, the deus abscondito.2 One of the terms Spanish Kabbalists used for this hidden god was the “Indifferent Unity,”3 and we can see how this unity manifests itself as the book draws to a climax. This leads directly into Maxine’s confrontation with Ice outside of an Upper West Side apartment complex in a altercation with his soon to be ex-wife, Tallis. Throughout the novel, Ice has come to represent the faceless malignant forces at work in the lives of the characters and their world, and for perhaps the first time in a Pynchon novel, our protagonist is not only face-to-face with the embodiment of this malign energy, but at an advantage, with a gun drawn on him and his body failing him, as “Gabe isn’t looking too fit” (473). Here, reduced to arguing with his wife in the middle of a Manhattan sidewalk, Ice is not the essence of all the evil forces at work in the world, but an ailing man, all too human all of a sudden. The moment is the apotheosis of Pynchon’s ongoing consideration of the sources of evil in the world. An abstract and faceless “They” that haunt through his early novels, never encountered either by the audience or by the characters themselves. This might most simply be seen in the Tristero of The Crying of Lot 49. These entities become more embodied in the later novels, in characters such as Brock Vond (in Vineland), and Scarsdale Vibe (in Against the Day), who do come into contact with the protagonists of the novels they’re in. Gabriel Ice is the starkest example of this. A titan of industry, an abusive husband, a key figure in vast, sinister conspiracies, Ice resembles most of Pynchon’s antagonists, embodiments of the worst aspects of human nature. What Maxine sees, though, is a seam of humanity shining through Ice, a brief moment of vulnerability, and Pynchon expresses it through a description of his face. Throughout the novel, we see these seams open up, only to quickly be subsumed again into the overriding systems that control them. DeepArcher, with its momentary promise of unrestrained freedom falls under the control of advertisers, corporations, and the same mundane vagaries of the surface web. The Lester Traipse Memorial Pulse knocks out power in the Adirondacks, but only briefly, before everything is restored to the status quo. The random numbers generated by the Global Consciousness Project become nonrandom for a short time, but just as quickly return to random again. Even September 11th, which looms so large in our cultural consciousness, is only a momentary rupture in the novel, “as forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize control of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play and dependable history shrinks to a dismal perimeter centered on ‘Ground Zero’” (327–28).

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In the case of Gabriel Ice, though, Maxine is there, face-to-face, to experience this moment with him, and it is a moment of incredible power. The term ‘face-to-face’ is apt; when Maxine first sees Ice’s face, several months earlier, “his eyes [. . .] are less expressive than many Maxine has noted at the fish market” and he has “thin and careful lips”; he is completely nondescript, and Maxine notes that “in the business you run into far too many of these faces” (310), faces that are as much inhuman masks as anything else. Now, however, even as he speaks with a threatening bluster, we see “his face all red and swollen, some trembling he can’t control,” an intensely human, vulnerable face (473). Confronted with this image of Ice’s face, Maxine immediately thinks of her Beretta, and just as quickly, “the Tomcat is now in the equation” (474). Judith Butler, meditating on Levinas’s notion that “the face is what one cannot kill,”4 speaks very well to Maxine’s position at this point in the confrontation when she writes: “Why would it be that the very precariousness of the Other would produce for me a temptation to kill? Or why would it produce the temptation to kill at the same time that it delivers a demand for peace?”5 [emphasis in the original]. And Maxine provides an answer. She stands with Gabriel Ice at gunpoint in broad daylight, but their encounter is nonetheless held wholly in secret. Pynchon writes: “In this fold of space-time, women accessorized like Maxine do not point sidearms at people. It must be something else in her hand” (473); Maxine and Ice are enveloped in secrecy, even in the open, not because they are hidden. “Such a secret does not have the sense of something to hide,”6 rather, in the mid-day street with Ice, Maxine is confronted with the singularity of him as a man, as a person, and of her connection with him at this moment. His face. Primed by her experience with the nonhuman secrecy of DeepArcher and by the simple and colossal revelation that “it is what it is,” Maxine is able to experience this moment held in secret from the world as one that “does not consist in hiding something, in not revealing the truth, but in respecting the absolute singularity, the infinite separation of what binds me or exposes me to the unique, to one as the other.”7 It is a moment in which the irreducible complexity of reality is made explicit, inexplicable, unrepeatable; a moment that cannot be made to fit honestly into any model or paradigm because it is itself utterly singular. It is the promise, in these moments of rupture, before everything is returned to ‘normal’ to be able to transform in the face of the meteoric encounter with the other. Maxine’s power and her transformation in this moment is reinforced by the description of what she “must” look like holding Ice at gunpoint: “She’s offering him something, something of value he doesn’t want to take, wants to pay him back a debt maybe, which he’s pretending to forgive and will eventually accept” (473–74). The novel leaves us here to understand what exactly it is “of great value” that she is offering him here on our own. It could

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of course be death, but everything we have seen up to this point suggests that it is not (Isaac does not die in the Akedah, and Ice does not die at Maxine’s hand), that instead, it is exactly this secret, singular and irreducible and at its base sacred. There is no reason to imagine that Gabriel Ice has been changed. Maxine herself admits that “nothing’s over,” but something significant has changed for Maxine. We see the transformation the next morning, as she ascends into the street once again, and “overnight, all together, the pear trees have exploded into bloom [. . .] it’s their moment, the year’s great pivot” (475–76). There is the threat that once again this is a fleeting change, that “it’ll last for a few days, then all collect in the gutters,” which is true for the leaves, but for Maxine herself, this great pivot is not the same temporary reprieve it has been for other entities in the novel. This is revealed to Maxine herself cryptically, ambiguously, but with a sign that is distinctly unique and hopeful, when on the way home “she notices a reflection in a top-floor window of the gray dawn sky, clouds moving across a blear of light, unnaturally bright, maybe the sun, maybe something else,” (476) and we can imagine, since the sun is, by definition, never “unnaturally bright” that it was of course “something else,” something “meteoric” in Derrida’s sense of the word, where it is something “suspended, perhaps over a head [. . . . ] Absolute secrecy, a secret to keep as a shared inheritance concerning a secret that can’t be shared.”8 More evidence that this is a permanent pivot for Maxine comes as she arrives home and is faced with another change that will not be reversed. Her sons, Ziggy and Otis, leaving to walk to school on their own for the first time. This, it seems, is grace. We recall that Simone Weil tells us that “Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes.” This explains “unnaturally bright” “blear of light” that Maxine sees. It is the Derridean meteor, it is Weil’s lightning flash. It is the “heavenwide blast of light” that explodes over Siberia. In the moment of contact with the absolutely other, with the strange stranger of the authorial consciousness, we can find a meteoric moment, a hiatus in which the “laws of the world” are held at bay; a moment in which we can hope for the divine intervention that stays the raised knife of the Akedah. We recall that it “is through such instants that [we are] capable of the Supernatural.” And the supernatural may finally only be, may ultimately only need to be, a glimpse of the real true face of the other, some small, real kindness, some moment of peace. We can see Pynchon preparing for this idea in his 2003 forward to George Orwell’s 1984. In taking up Orwell’s almost unrelentingly dark novel and finding the seam of brightness that threatens to emerge, perhaps, somehow, Pynchon suggests an approach that can be brought to his own works, which so often follow the same pattern.

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The foreword provides a brief and brilliant perspective on Orwell’s novel. Perhaps surprisingly, given the reputations of both Pynchon and 1984, he finds the novel to be, in the final analysis, a case study in wild optimism. He accomplishes this by focusing on the book’s peculiar so-called appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak.” “The Principles of Newspeak” seeks to explain and translate the subliminally controlling official language of Oceania, the totalitarian regime at the center of the book. The psuedo-appendix begins immediately after Winston Smith, the book’s protagonist, has been broken under prolonged torture, and dies with the famously heartbreaking sentence, “He loved Big Brother.”9 This is such a totalizing, finalizing, and pessimistic ending for the novel’s narrative that “The Principles of Newspeak” comes across as a sort of afterthought, drawing too little attention to even be underwhelming. Pynchon, though, is drawn to “The Principles of Newspeak.” “Why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?” he asks. The answer, Pynchon claims, “may lie in simple grammar.” He points out that: From its first sentence, “The Principles of Newspeak” is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.

This is a very convincing reading of 1984, but more than that, it provides us with a window on Pynchon’s thinking about literature and how it should function. But the grammatical mechanics by which 1984 accomplishes its optimism is only the proximate explanation for why the book chooses to end with such a bizarre, almost imperceptible happy ending. Its deeper source must surely be more personal, and the pathologically camera-shy Pynchon locates this deep, personal hope-against-hope in a photograph. As Orwell himself wrote: “When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though

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in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have.”10 Here, literalized, then, is the face of the author that Pynchon connects with. The photograph shows Orwell and his adopted son, Richard in Islington, England, around 1946, and Pynchon describes it as such: The little boy, who would have been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so—it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger—his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character with a backstory in which he has seen more than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston Smith “believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945 . . . ” Richard Blair was born May 14, 1944. It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in 1984, was imagining a future for his son’s generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would. It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted - a faith so honorable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed.

This is the cynical, hard-won optimism that Pynchon presents throughout his career, and most especially in the novels that appeared after his extended hiatus following Gravity’s Rainbow. Of course the idea that parental love “can always be taken for granted,” or that faith in it can never be betrayed is a naïve, childish idea, the idea of two-year old Richard Blair, not Orwell himself, whom we can almost imagine swearing to do whatever must be done to preserve it, and even less is it the authorial Pynchon, who is further qualified away from it with “perhaps even ourselves,” and, most importantly, only “for a moment, anyway.” The optimism of Pynchon is not a child’s optimism, and it is always fleeting. It is the optimism that looks at 1984, perhaps one of the bleakest books of the twentieth century, and it sees a happy ending that could only be explained by a foolhardy commitment to respect a child’s optimism, at least for a moment. Notably, the only publicly available picture of Pynchon taken since his adolescence had been snapped on the streets of New York a few years before the publication of this foreword. It was, of course, an unauthorized photo, and we can only imagine, given his unambiguous hatred of being photographed,

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an unpleasant experience. In it, he is holding hands with his own young son, Jackson. This is not to suggest any kind of one-to-one correspondence between the photo of Pynchon and the foreword to 1984. After all, a few years earlier, Pynchon had already written his own book set in 1984, Vineland, in which love for Big Brother, as such, is a key theme. It only suggests that Pynchon’s work is built out of an intimacy that is easy to overlook. It is not the intimacy of autofiction, where the details of the work and the author’s life are almost indistinguishable, but more like the intimacy of surrealism. The audience is granted access not to the outward details of the author’s biography, but rather the imaginative life roiling deeper within. Intimacy built on a shared imaginative experience, a shared fantasy, intimacy of the type that Pynchon seems intent on building, is not only premised on a psychological perspective that values the subconscious over the social, and not at all on an aesthetic perspective that values the immersive over the didactic. It derives, rather, from an ethical perspective in which the intimacy itself, between author and audience, enforces an undeniable recognition of the reality of the inner lives of others. Literature, for and in Pynchon, imposes the full humanity of the author on reader and confronts us, then, with the overwhelming responsibility we have to world full of such fully realized others. And so we constantly find Pynchon in his books, not merely in the characters (though he is there), and not merely in the settings and events that overlap with those he’s experienced himself (though those, too, are there), but in the endless insistence that he, some specific, performative persona of his, “the face that [he] ought to have”11 is there telling us these stories. Pynchon accomplishes this on many fronts. There is the Verfremdungseffekt of his idiosyncratic naming schemes, which usher in characters such as the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, Meatball Mulligan, Pig Bodine, Zepho Bark, Weed Atman, Mike Fallopian, and many more. Characters with names like these quite often “stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs.”12 Giddy anachronisms abound. Characters like Pig Bodine and families like the Traverses recur in novel after novel and setting after setting. And riding along above all of this is a narrative voice that is remarkably flexible, prone to pastiche, and yet, above all else, distinctive and unique, unmistakable across thousands of pages and a career of more than fifty years. It is a voice that has been singing out on a remarkably consistent constellation of themes, as well: history and culture, conspiracies and paranoia, detectives and de facto detectives, hypnagogic and hallucinogenic states, math and science, grace. And like George Orwell before him, Pynchon is able to find, in the ideals of family, a sliver of hope, if only for a moment. It is this clear-eyed, almost hopeless optimism, the idea of finding grace in the suspended moment, that

‘Oumuamua

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marks Pynchon as the most astute literary mind of our time and allows him to craft books that utilize the nature of literature, the way that it cultivates empathy, in ways that address the importance of reality and our place within it. NOTES 1. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2. Gershom Sholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 8. 3. Sholem, Major Trends, 12. 4. Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity, 87. 5. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), 134–35. 6. Derrida, “Literature in Secret,” 154. 7. Derrida, “Literature in Secret,” 122. 8. Derrida, “Literature in Secret,” 133. 9. George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, and Erich Fromm, Nineteen Eighty-four (New York, Plume, 2003). 10. George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (New York: Penguin/Secker & Warburg, 1984). 11. Orwell, Inside the Whale. 12. Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).

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Index

9–11. See September 11th Attacks Abscondito, 93–94, 114, 117 Adams, Henry, 17–18, 49 Akedah, 10, 97–102, 114, 119 Alaimo, Stacy, 99 Ames, Christopher, 78 Apollo Program, 6, 32 Atman, Weed, 122 Attention-Schema, 9, 16–20, 83–86, 88–89, 103–7, 109 Authorial Consciousness, 10–11, 20, 67–68, 83, 85–93, 99–101, 103, 116, 119–21 Barbour, Frances M., 34 Bark, Zepho, 122 Barthelme, Donald, 34, 90–91 Baudrillard, Jean, 63 Bauman, Zygmunt, 16 Benjamin, Walter, 72–73, 77 Bersani, Leo, 46 Blake, William, 15 Blicero, Dominus. See Weismann Bodine, Pig, 78, 122 Browne, Sir Thomas, 50 Butler, Judith, 98–99, 118 Byron the Bulb, 10

Cantor, Georg, 65 Carswell, Sean, 38 Change Blindness, 16–17 Chernobyl, 63–64 Cherrycoke, Wicks, 122 Chums of Chance, 65 Clinton, Bill, 116 Conrad, Joseph, 63 Cowart, David, 32 De Silentio, Johannes. See Kierkegaard, Søren De Witt, Jan, 80 Deadwyler, Leonard, 75 DeepArcher, 114–18 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 68, 84, 98, 100– 102, 114–15, 119 Descartes, Rene, 77, 85 Dickens, Charles, 33 Dionysius, 81 Dixon, Jeremiah, 33, 35–39 East India Company, 37–39 Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 79 Endymion, 3–4 The Enlightenment, 33–40 Entropy, 6, 31–32, 43, 47–48, 59–60, 84 Enzian, Oberst, 19, 107–11 131

132

Extramission, 2, 9, 19–20, 22–25, 55, 83, 86–89, 93–94, 101, 104–5, 108–11, 113 Fallopian, Mike, 80, 122 Franklin, Ben, 33–35 Fuller, Buckminster, 38 Gentleman Bomber of Headingly, 66 Global Consciousness Project, 115, 117 Godolphin, Evan, 71 Grace, 5, 11, 59, 67, 73, 77, 100, 108, 111, 113–16, 119, 122–23 Graziano, Michael, 83–88 Haraway, Donna, 99 Hardack, Richard, 63 Hegel, Georg, 72, 98–100 Hollander, Charles, 79–80 Hume, Katherine, 62 Ice, Gabriel, 117–19 IG Farben, 38, 46 Irigaray, Luce, 99–100 Jamf, Laszlo, 51 Karpinski, Eva C., 71–72 Kekule, August, 7, 44–52 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 38, 80–81 Kierkegaard, Søren, 97–100 Koteks, Stanley, 103–7 Krypto, 114–15 Latour, Bruno, 86–87 Latrobe, John H.B., 36 Laurent, Auguste, 46 Lester Traipse Memorial Pulse, 115–17 Levinas, Emmanuel, 55, 68–69, 89–90, 98–99, 110, 118 Locke, Richard, 18 Maas, Oedipa, 9, 52, 79–81, 103–7 Márquez, Gabriel García, 90, 92 Maskelyne, Nevil, 37

Index

Mason, Charles, 33, 35–39 Mason-Dixon Line, 33–36, 39 Maxwell, Clerk, 6, 31, 47–48, 104–7; Maxwell’s Demon, 47–48, 104–5 McLaughlin, Robert, 16 Meillassoux, Quentin, 11n6, 59 Metz, Christian, 79 Mexico, Roger, 78 Michelson-Morley Experiment, 6, 31 Morton, Timothy, 99 Mount Moriah, 97–102 Mulligan, Meatball, 122 Nefastis Machine, 103–7 Nefastis, John. See Nefastis Machine Neimanis, Astrida, 99 Noya, Jose Liste, 60–61 Olsch, Etzel, 48 Operation Blackwing, 109–10 Orwell, George, 38, 119–22 Page, Denys, 3 Patterson, Orlando, 16 Pavlov, Ivan, 6, 31–32, 69 Peary, Robert Edwin, 67–68 Petillon, Pierre-Yves, 79 Pointsman, Dr. Edward W.A., 6, 31–33 Pӧkler, Franz, 27–28, 31–32, 43, 49 Prentice, Captain Geoffrey “Pirate,” 52–55 Profane, Benny, 44, 71 Pudding, Brigadier, 78, 81–82 Rahmani, Razieh, 62 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18–26, 51, 66 Rockmore, Tom, 19 Rolls, Albert, 81 Roman​​​​​​​ticism, 16, 18–20, 25, 28 Sappho, 3 Schwarzkommando, 108–11 Scott, Walter, 79 September 11th Attacks, 43, 63, 67–68, 73, 113–15, 117

Index

SHOCK and SHROUD, 10, 44 Sholem, Gershom, 117 Slade, Joseph, 60 Slothrop, Tyrone, 1–3, 33, 55, 93 Spinoza, Baruch, 77, 80 Stencil, Herbert, 16, 71 Stillstellung, 70–73, 77 Tarnow, Maxine, 114–20 Tchernobyl. See Chernobyl Tchitcherine, Vaslav, 2–3, 107–11 Tolstoy, Leo, 4–7, 77 Traipse, Lester. See Lester Traipse Memorial Pulse Tripping, Geli, 108–11 Tristero, 9, 79, 103–5, 107, 117 Tunguska Event, 8–9, 63–64, 66–67 Type A and B Consciousness, 9–10, 88, 90, 100–101

133

Verfremdungseffekt, 122 Von Braun, Werner, 6–7, 25, 32, 35 Von Liebig, Justus Freiherr, 47–48 Von Trotha, Lothar, 16, 18, 110 Vormance Expedition, 67–68 W.A.S.T.E., 105 Weil, Simone, 5, 59, 77, 109, 199 Weismann, Captain/Major/Lieutenant, 18, 26, 55 Wood, James, 62 Wotiz, Dr. John H., 46 Yoyodyne, 103–5 Zhang, Captain, 36

About the Author

Phillip Grayson is an assistant professor of English at Tennessee State University. His work on Pynchon and others focuses on the nature of our relationship with the unreal: fictional beings, imaginary consciousnesses, and the narratives they inhabit.

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