The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon 071851369X

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THE POSTMODERNIST ALLEGORIES OF

THOMAS PYNCHON Deborah L Madsen

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Leicester University Press Leicester, London

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Deborah Madsen worked as a freelance editor

before joining the English Department at the University of Leicester where she is now a senior tutor for American Studies. She has published essays on a range of modern American texts; she is executive editor of The Year's Work in English Studies and an assistant editor of The Journal of American Studies.

THE POSTMODERNIST ALLEGORIES OF

THOMAS PYNCHON

To my mother, Vivienne M. Jones

©

Deborah Madsen, 1991

First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Leicester University Press (a division of Pinter Publishers Ltd) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Leicester University Press ..

Editorial offices Fielding Johnson Building, University of Leicester University Road, Leicester, LEI 7RH

Trade and other enquiries 25 Floral Street, London, WC2E 9DS British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7185 1369 X

Typeset by The Castlefield Press of WelJingborough, Northants. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Ltd, Worcester

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 An Abstract Account of Allegory

.

VI

1 7

2 Vacillating in the Void ? Verbal Vivification

in V 3 The Typology of the Tristero: The Crying of Lot 49

29 54

4 The Numinous, the N oumenon and the Text

in Gravity's Rainbow

78

5 Postmodernist Allegory and the Postmodern

Condition: Slow Learner, and Vineland

114

Bibliography

135

Index

141

·

VI

Acknowledgements Part of Chapter 5 appeared in different form in Over Here: Reviews in American Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1990); permission to reproduce this material here is gratefully acknowledged. I am grateful for the generous assistance of Andrew Taylor and Ken K. Ruthven. I thank Stephen Fender for sustaining my interest in allegory, and Luke Hudson and Peter Nicholls for careful readings of the manuscript. lowe a special debt of gratitude to my husband, Mark S. Madsen.

INTRODUCTION

Attempts to define postmodernist fiction remain embroiled in a realism/ experimentalism dichotomy that has seemingly exhausted its analytic potential. The extent of the challenge posed by recent fiction and criticism, to the conventional concept of realism, creates the impression that 'realism' is now inadequate to describe any text. Experimentalism, often defined as anti-realism, also involves the same discredited assumptions about the relationship between art and reality . Yet influential poststructuralist approaches to both postmodernism and allegory still posit concepts of mimetic form as the defining 'other'. The intensification of interest in allegory during the past decade has coincided with critical speculation concerning the nature of postmodernism. Theories inspired by poststructuralist conceptions of language have tended to conflate the two terms into a single concept that distinguishes postmodernists from those contemporary writers (like Bellow, Updike, Roth) who situate themselves within a continuing tradition of the realistic novel. Postmodernist art is said to be characterized by a self-conscious awareness of the arbitrary nature of language: allegory. 1 This conflation serves in large part to generalize the scope of both terms so that they describe all non-mimetic forms and consequently lose historical and descriptive specificity. These concepts are made to participate in a prescriptive modal approach to contemporary fiction; that is, the classification of texts on the basis of their rhetorical styles. Modal criticism attends to the relationships posited between literary traditions and genres which are manifest in distinctive styles: irony, satire, postmodernism or allegory, for instance. Linda Hutcheon, in the introduction to her book Narcissistic Narrative, criticizes the modal approach to postmodernism for its analytic imprecision. 2 Approaches to postmodernism as a cultural episteme - a broadly based reaction against dominant conceptions of 'the real' - fail to discriminate among the variety of contemporary cultural practices and also fail to create a clear and credible distinction between contemporary and earlier cultural movements. However, the

2

Introduction

historical relevance of the term clarifies when the variables involved in definition are reduced, as they are by a generic approach. Genre criticism allows the displacement of synchronic change into a diachronic perspective: the postmodernist 'shiff, considered in terms of a single genre, becomes perceptible by contrast with the stable, abstract, generic context. The work of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Robert Coover, among others, represents a movement away froll! such a modal orientation, towards the recuperation of literary genres that exist as subcategories of, or structural possibilities within, the broader category of non-realistic form. It is now generally accepted that in Pricksongs and Descants Coover uses the fable form and that Barth's Giles Goat-Boy retrieves allegory for modem use. 3 This recuperation of past traditions is, in the view of Andreas Huyssen, a more significant characteristic of postmodernism than is formal innovation. Huyssen perceives, underlying postmodernist innovation, a 'search for a viable modern tradition apart from, say, the Proust-Joyce-Mann triad and outside the canon of classical modernism'." It is to the pre-Enlightenment tradition of literary genres, distanced in time and sensibility from the nineteenth century novelistic tradition, that Barth and Pynchon have recourse. This is not to claim that all postmodernist art is to be identified with the revival of past genres, but to suggest an alternative to generalizing poststructuralist conceptions of postmodernism. The context of a generic tradition defines the nature of Pynchon's work and also illuminates (through the contrast provided by a stable set of generic features) the specifically postmodernist qualities of his narratives. Yet there remains some resistance to the idea of using a generic methodology to approach Pynchon's fiction: Maureen Quilligan has been the only theorist to include a discussion of The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow in an historical account of allegory as a genre. 5 The reason for this must be, at least in part, that allegory is a notoriously ill-defined term, so the notion of a postmodernist allegory only compounds the problem of definition. The historical connotations of this term suggest that allegory has undergone a series of transformations - culminating, perhaps, in Gravity's Rainbow. It is my contention that despite their immediate differences these works do exhibit a sustained allegoric structure. It is in this concept of a generic structure that the clearest difference between a genre and a mode lies. 6 A mode has no characteristic structure of action: the definitive quality of satire, for instance, resides in its effect; whilst comedy, tragedy and allegory are defined by the manner in which their plots unfold. Carolynn VanDyke, in her recent study of allegory, uses

Introduction

3

the structuralist concept of codes to define genre as a 'significant and widely used variation of other literary codes', and allegory as a variation of the 'syntactic codes of narrative': the plot. 7 However, Van Dyke's definition of allegory as a 'narrative whose agents and objects are Realistic' - modelled on philosophical realism - excludes from the genre all texts written after Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress because these texts manifest a shift in perspective to include concrete agents and intelligible realities which undermines the abstract character of allegory. Still, the superficial dissimilarity between allegoric works would seem to contradict the notion of historical generic continuity, and to undermine the adequacy of the term 'allegory' to describe postmodernist fiction like Pynchon's work. That is, until it is recognized that such an appearance is common to the histories of all literary genres. Because a genre is both synchronic and diachronic, each new work is both a product of the existing set of generic features and possibilities and is itself a transformation of them. Each unique text alters the generic set by reading its potential features in a new way. The narrative mechanisms of genre themselves are subject to change since it is the value structures represented through these narrative strategies that are sensitive to cultural modification. Generic rules form the structure of assumptions which motivate the narrative towards a particular perspective upon culture by focusing attention upon certain kinds of value. In this respect, genre is not culture-specific, but the fleshing out of generic mechanisms in individual texts most certainly is. Allegory generically focuses upon interpretation as an activity that mediates between the individual consciousness and culture. But allegory is one of those metaphoric discourses about reality which collectively go by the name of 'culture'. Consequently, individual allegoric texts are able to present a self-conscious account of the way cultural discourses seek social validation and also the way in which these cultural discourses authorize certain configurations of cultural power. Narrative truth and absolute truth are conflated in the same quasi-transcendental source of legitimation that is invoked for both culture and society. Allegory is, and works upon, the idea of culture - not the political, social and economic realities, but the explanations and justifications of them that culture provides. And so here I deal with Pynchon's manipulations of the idea of culture, the cultural discourses that use the fictional characters and are used by them. Pynchon's narratives are interested not so much in discovering a superior form of truth (though such a quest consumes both his characters and Pynchon's critics), as they are interested in the values and interests supported by these discourses of truth. So while the narrative diegesis pursues truth, the narrative seeks

4 Introduction

enlightenment - an enlightened awareness of the ways in which the ideas of culture are used to sustain cultural power at the expense of individual freedoms. Carolynn Van Dyke deals with the symptoms of genre and not the structure of assumptions that produces culture-specific generic variations of narrative codes. In fact, she claims that it is not necessary to consider the rules by which narrative paradigms are generated and sequentially related to each other to form the plot. These 'rules', the stable set of generic assumptions which are manifest in a genre-specific plot structure, would threaten the historical and stylistic specificity of Van Dyke's definition. As we shall see, the generic 'rules' of allegory are derived largely from figural interpretation which, despite historical modification, retains its integrity as a distinct form of hermeneutic practIce. The generic basis of allegory is hermeneutic: the plot structure, as a quest for knowledge, is motivated by the problem of interpretation. So the reason for allegory's availability for historical transformation must go beyond the fact that all genres exhibit this tendency to change; allegory is particularly susceptible because it is an epistemological form. Allegory is responsive to changes in cultural conceptions of the nature and availability of knowledge. For instance, the difference between patristic and Protestant allegoric narratives arises primarily from the shift away from the concept of the Church as the mediator of sacred knowledge towards the individual who is placed in a direct hermeneutic relationship with the Deity. The question that motivates the plot of a Protestant allegory like The Pilgrim's Progress is no longer quid agaswhat should I do to obtain salvation? - but opus Dei: how does God act in my particular case? The definition of allegory as a hermeneutic genre is problematic. To claim that allegory is about the ways in which different interpretative methods either can or cannot make available knowledge of transcendent realities is to raise the question of what kind of knowledge it is that allegory engages. To specify religious knowledge would be unsatisfactorily vague; many forms investigate knowledge of the sacred .sermons, hagiography, Hebraic midrash, biblical commentary, to name a few. Equally inadequate is the claim that allegory deals with the knowledge peculiar to textual or semiotic interpretation. Allegory does presuppose a radically fallen world in which language has become an equivocal medium that expresses the opaque nature of signs as they appear to a degenerated spiritual understanding. So through its language, allegory attempts to establish interpretative principles which make possible the comprehension of realities that cannot be

Introduction

5

apprehended literally. Yet poststructuralist theory would have us believe that all texts manifest rhetorical contradictions which are generated by the attempt to represent in language that which resides outside language. In these terms, allegory becomes synonymous with all reading experience. But if allegory is a genre, this cannot be the case. As a genre, allegory is distinguished by a characteristic plot structure. So instead of asking, misleadingly, whether allegory engages a genrespecific kind of knowledge, we must ask in what manner it is that allegory engages knowledge. For allegory addresses the constraints imposed on, and by, all systems of knowledge, as the genre asks what it is that can be known and how this knowledge is made possible. Here, the connection between allegory and postmodernism begins to clarify, for one of the primary characteristics of postmodernism is this concern with the power of totalizing, absolutist cultural discourses to exploit privileged hermeneutic and cognitive systems in order to prescribe the objects of knowledge. The postmodern era has seen the rise of a whole range of oppositional 'isms': sexism, racism, speciesism, ageism. And the emergent field of cultural theory takes in three powerful social currents: a feminist critique that deconstructs patriarchal ideologies, as well as the psychoanalytic interrogation of cognitive norms that favour rationality, and also a radical Marxist-inspired discourse that exposes the ideological manouevrings of capitalism within Western cultures. Of concern to all these forms of postmodern discourse is the creation and determination of subjectivity (the knowing self) by powerful cultural interests. The repressive force of specific ideologies, as totalizing explanations of the nature of reality, is seen to be aimed at the perpetuation of certain configurations of economic, political and social power. Consequently, the machinations of these unseen 'movers' of cultural reality form the subject for representation in postmodernist allegory. By focusing upon the questing character's discovery of the constraints that are imposed upon social knowledge by the cultural construction of both social knowledge and the questioning self, postmodernist allegory is able to represent the mechanisms of ideological repression without pretending to occupy a position above or beyond this discursive system - a system in which no discourse is innocent. But the denial of an authoritative point of view or interpretative norm results in the ambiguity and the absence of a normative value structure that many of Pynchon's critics have noted. Pynchon's dynamic uncertainties have been analysed and explained with reference to the explanatory contexts made available by cybernetics, thermodynamics, Weber, Rilke and Jung - all terms that are offered by the fiction itself. However, the step that takes us beyond the terms

6

Introduction

represented by Pynchon's books and into the terms of genre criticism liberates us, as readers, from a slavish imitation of Pynchon's questers who seek the key to the meaning of their world in the discourses of cybernetics, thermodynamics, Weber, Rilke, and Jung. This step back from the intellectual conditions of the fictive world also allows us to see that the qualities of ambiguity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy are the effects produced by the way in which these narratives behave - as postmodernist allegories.

Notes 1. Michael Newman, for instance, includes allegory in 'A Critical Lexicon of Selected Terms from the Discourse of Postmodernism', in his essay 'Revising Modernism, Representing Postmodernism: Critical Discourse in the Visual Arts', Postmodernism: ICA Documents 4 (London: ICA, 1986), pp. 32-51. Poststructuralist theories of allegory are discussed above in chapter 1. . 2. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York & London: Methuen, 1984). 3. See Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 'Fabulation and Epic Vision'; and John o. Stark, The Literature of Exhaustion (Durham: Duke University Press, 1974). 4. Andreas Huyssen, 'The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970's', New German Critique, 22 (Winter, 1981), p. 52. Huyssen does not define but uses the term 'postmodernism' to refer to experimental movements in art and avant-garde trends in criticism. 5. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), presents a persuasive account of the allegoric genre that corrects many inherited prejudices. Quilligan discusses the changing form of allegory within the context of shifting cultural conceptions of language but does not deal explicitly with the specific historical moment labelled 'postmodernism'. 6. Gerard Genette argues that it is the narrative nature of genre that most clearly distinguishes genres from modes. Modes like irony and satire are to be defined in terms of the effect produced through a characteristic linguistic construction, in contrast to the projection of a specified content which is definitive of genres. 'Genres are, properly speaking, literary/or aesthetic/ categories that pertain to linguistics or, more precisely, to an anthropology of verbal expression.' Quoted by Jacques Derrida, 'The Law of Genre', trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Quarterly, 7 (Autumn, 1980), p. 63. 7. Carolynn Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth: Structures ofMeaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 37.

1 AN ABSTRACT ACCOUNT OF ALLEGORY

The definition of allegory has a distinguished history, reaching back to ancient theories formulated by the Latin rhetoricians. In the writings of Diomedes, Quintilian and in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, allegory is located in the cognitive gap separating sign from referent. Diomedes argues that in allegory the referent is not intrinsic to the sign and it is in the process of referring, of creating a similitude, that allegory resides. Significantly, Diomedes did not consider either the moral appended to the fable (epimythios), or personification (conformatio) to be allegoric because these tropes explicitly state their referents. A enigmata, mystery, is a necessary precondition for this mode of allegory. Throughout the Latin writings, allegory is defined as the activity of designating additional reference(s). Allegory speaks 'other' (allos) through rhetorical substitution. The unreal becomes real as aenigmata are displaced by concrete referents. For Latin rhetoric allegory performed a conservative function by representing an analogy between the alien and the familiar. An absence (the disjunction between sign and referent) could, through allegory, be supplemented by the 'known truth' .1 Poststructuralist theories of allegory depart from Latin definitions by privileging absence over a potential for fulfillment: a departure that seems to have been motivated, at least in part, by Walter Benjamin's comments on Baroque allegory.2 In The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin proposed that allegory names both a process of transforming things into signs and also a way of expressing the transitory, mortal nature of the world by rendering the physical world as an aggregation of signs. In this way, allegory functions as more than a figurative technique; according to Benjamin, allegory is a mode of experience, registering the recognition of truth's absence. In the context of allegory 'the image is only a signature, only the monogram of essence, not the essence itself in a mask'.3 The allegoric sign or 'emblem' expresses the desire for an absolute presence - truth in its essence - that is absent. It is this desire that Paul de Man isolates in Allegories of Reading.

8 An Abstract Account of Allegory Any literary form which purports to satisfy this desire and claims to represent, to make present, some ultimate referent De Man considers to be a mystification of the fundamentally arbitrary (allegoric) nature of language. The claim to represent contradicts his ideal or paradigm text. 'The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction'.4 In other words, all texts represent in some way their own failure to represent an extra-textual reality. In allegory, this process of self-deconstruction is taken further: Allegorical narratives tell the story of the failure to read whereas tropological narratives ... tell the story of the failure to denominate. The difference is only a difference of degree and the allegory does not erase the figure. Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading. 5 Here we can see the classical definition of allegory as a series of metaphors privileging a narrative which is assumed to reveal a discontinuous relationship between the semantic 'tenor' and narrative 'vehicle'. Allegory 'does not erase the figure': the creation of a referential contract - Diomedes's similitudo - is explicit. Allegory disrupts the creation of a 'reading' which would close or contract the free play of signifiers by grounding them in terms of an ultimate referent. All narratives are contaminated by the indeterminate nature of a language that prevents the establishment of a pure or unequivocal system of representation. But allegory, according to De Man, 'engenders, in turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration'. So the metaphoricity of allegory addresses both the failure and desire to represent by adding to or supplementing an antecedent similitude. Paul de Man's account aligns allegory, as the hermeneutic imposition of meaning, with a language that is defined as being arbitrary and indeterminate. De Man takes no account of the possibility that it is allegory which constructs for itself a language and a rhetoric~l means of representation, by which to express the perception of meaning as fragile and tenuous. Since every allegoric narrative is an exercise in the production of a generically identifiable deployment of language ('Allegory'), it is misleading to describe the genre as an embodiment of some externally given, seemingly transcendental language, and to ignore the use of language by the genre. Following Paul de Man, Craig Owens uses the vocabulary of poststructuralist linguistics to move from a description of the nature of language to that of allegory. Neither critic addresses the question of how it is that narratives function to define themselves generically, yet uniquely, as allegory. It is my purpose therefore to ask, how do Pynchon's three major narratives operate as allegory?

An Abstract Account of Allegory 9

What we will find as a result is that those characteristics most frequently isolated by Pynchon criticism - ambiguity, uncertainty, semantic instability, the absence of a normative ethical base - define themselves as consequences of the way Pynchon's books function as allegory: specifically as postmodernist allegory. For allegory generically engages the opposition between a finite and temporal perspective and an infinite or atemporal potential for meaning: the tension between signifier and signified. The metaphoric nature of allegory, which holds together two separate realms of meaning, is able simultaneously to express a dissemination of signs and a desire for semantic unity, by exploiting the gap between figurative vehicles and tenors. In conventional allegory this duality would represent the dissemination of a sacred One into a multiplicity of earthly signs, and would function as the basis for an epiphanic unification of sign and meaning. But postmodernist allegory severs this logocentric relationship between signs and an ultimate meaning. Consequently, postmodernist allegory registers a sense of disjunction and displacement away from a determinate referent, into an unregulated proliferation of signs. In this realm of ecriture, ambiguity and uncertainty dominate in the absence of all normative structures.

Figural Interpretation and Allegoric Representation Allegory is equated with reading by Paul de Man; Craig Owens proposes allegory as the model for all commentary. The concept of rhetorical 'doubling' lies at the centre of Craig Owens's description of allegory. If allegory designates the separation of subject from predicate, thing from discourse, sign from referent, then in the attempt to bridge this gap between signifier and signified allegory adds to or supplements an insufficient, antecedent meaning. So one text is 'doubled' by another in a manner akin to commentary. 6 According to such claims, allegory therefore exemplifies linguistic instability. The most obvious omission here is the possibility that a linguistic disjunction (between sign and referent) is the consequence of a way in which allegoric narratives define themselves as allegoric. For the single most important characteristic of allegory is the relentless way in which it pursues an ultimate referent that would bridge the rift between signs and their significance. Figuralism, the interpretative mode favoured by allegory, seeks to represent a transcendental 'Other', an absolute meaning, capable of revealing a stable semantic relationship between the material world, perceived reality and the realm of the sacred. The Bible, in the Western

lOAn Abstract Account of Allegory

allegoric tradition, represents a figural unity of different kinds of sign: the Bible describes God's covenants with humanity, the Gospels describe the life of Christ (the archetypical figura), and the biblical language itself is an expression of revelation. The Bible is the kind of text that Maureen Quilligan terms a 'pretext', a narrative that is assumed to articulate the sacred through its language and to reveal the way divine authority is made known in the material world. 7 Quilligan uses the term 'pretext' to suggest both the anteriority of the sacred book and the nature of its relation with the allegoric narrative. For the privileged pretext anticipates the capacity of the narrative, by which it is invoked, to redeem a 'fallen', a fractured and fractious allegoric language. The pretext displays the power of a language that claims to reach beyond the multiplicity of an arbitrary system of signs to name divine referents within a univocal system of signification. Above all other texts, the Bible demonstrates to Christendom the active involvement of God in the affairs of human history which, when interpreted figurally as a single semiotic system, reveal an inherent relationship with the events of divine history narrated by the Scriptures. Interpreted figurally, words assume a twofold reference: one literal, one spiritual. The material signifier refers to a literal thing, a corporeal entity which in turn becomes a secondary signifier referring to an absolute or sacred referent. The secondary interpretation of the things of this world provides cognitive access to a world of transcendental realities. The quest structure of the allegoric plot, which follows a figural hermeneutic, forms a sequence in which the decoding of material signs (visibilia) becomes a secondary encoding as visibilia assume the additional, the 'deeper', significance of allegoria: signs possessed of the potential to represent the sacred 'Other'. This sequence of transformations perpetuates itself until, drawing upon a history of many decodings, the narrative is able to identify a transcendental centre that grounds the play of the narrative signs. Alienated sign and significance are reconciled by the figural revelation of an absolute spiritual bond between them. The spiritual ontology of this figural scheme is stable, largely because it is self-validating. If we believe that signs can represent the sacred then, interpreting figurally, we will find the sacred represented by signs. Spiritual truths are reserved for those who interpret spiritually. So figuralism encapsulates a basic epistemological dilemma: is the perceived figural pattern projected by the mind or does it reside in reality and, in either case, how can we know this with certainty? Of course, each of Pynchon's three major works asks precisely this question but so too does every work of allegory as it enquires into the

An Abstract Account of Allegory

11

capacity of a fragile and tenuous human language to speak of the 'Other'. It is the way in which the narrative structures the interpretative process of coding and so engages knowledge of the sacred, that marks allegory as a distinct deployment of language. Figuralism is essentially an historical mode of interpretation, constituting all signs - words, persons, events and things - as aspects of a spiritual pattern that is manifest in time. Figuralism assumes temporal signs are incomplete in an historical form; constantly their fulfillment is deferred, but eternally they are fulfilled in God's providential design. The time-bound yet spiritually inspired sign gives not only temporal form to the timeless but is also a sign of timelessness. The historical figura is described by Erich Auerbach as 'the creative, formative principle, change amid the enduring essence, the shades of meaning between the copy and the archetype'. 8 So a figural hermeneutic is required to reveal the continuity of the divine pattern informing history. That which we perceive as a temporal progression, a series of discontinuous moments, is unified in the spiritual order which exists in 'God's eye-view' as 'history-all-at-once'. This disjunction between 'now' and 'eternity' is exaggerated in Pynchon's allegories, where characters are caught between an incomplete system of temporal signs and the suggestion of a continuous meta-realm of meaning. Through figural interpretation, the visible sign (figura) would be resignified to reveal the spiritual significance hidden in it. So meaning would not be divorced from the 'spirit' informing it; the sign would represent a literal referent and, metaphorically, a spiritual reality: an archetypal 'One' that exists within the multiplicity of material historical and linguistic signs. The assumption of metaphysical depth is radically criticized by postmodernist allegory, yet even in its postmodernist mode allegory remains profoundly implicated in the ontological assumptions of figuralism. The assumption of a functional analogy between material phenomena and spiritual reality underlies the narrative structure of allegory: a system of significant correspondences becomes progressively more apparent as the operations of figural interpretation become more effective. In the broadest sense, the style of allegory is symbolic. A protracted controversy about this aspect of allegory still rages, and as one consequence the business of defining the genre itself has been limited. All symbolic forms share the assumption that an integral relationship exists between modes of being, and that knowledge of invisible realities is available through the principle of analogy. The Romantic concept of the symbol, however, denies its function as a conventional epistemological sign and constructs of it instead a mystical bridge between the imagination and a transcendent unity - the kind of

12

An Abstract Account of Allegory

bridge, in fact, that allegory unsuccessfully seeks. The symboliste conceives of the world as the emanation of a divine One, and the symbol as an avenue for direct, non-discursive knowledge of the 'One'. So the symbol both participates in, and fuses with, the reality of the 'Other' in a form of mystical metonymy, a momentary illumination or vision. But this conception of symbolism ignores the fact that both the allegoric sign and the symbol are characterized by an inevitable discrepancy between the form of the image and its meaning. Their primary difference is one of degree. The symbolic referent is assumed to b~ somehow inherent or incarnated in the visible image, whereas the allegoric image operates on the principle of metaphor: the tenor is displaced from the metaphoric vehicle so that it can be rediscovered through figural interpretation. The disjunction between temporal signs and a grounding referent is pursued by the allegoric plot through an extended sequence of interpretative modes; in rhetorical terms, the allegoric plot may be seen as a series of metaphors seeking to transform themselves into symbols. However, in allegory the tension between realms of meaning is not resolved by the revelation of a metaphysical unity; rather, this hermeneutic tension is displaced into a pretextual realm of an ineffable, unrepresentable mystery.

Postmodernist Allegory and the Function of the Pretext The postmodernist modification of allegory focuses upon a change in cultural attitude towards the pretext. The objective status of the figural order invoked by the pretext is validated, in conventional allegories, by the authority held by the pretext as a culturally important book. As a pretextual commentary, the narrative shares the authority of the anterior text; but more than this, the narrative signs acquire ontology when they are perceived as signs of the divine. Given this fixed ontological centre, traditional allegory is an epistemological form, concerned with the way in which knowledge of the sacred can be made present in a narrative that 'speaks of the Other'. Postmodernist allegory does not assume the existence of a fixed ontology; in the absence of a 'transcendental signified', allegory shifts its focus to the ways in which the nature of potentially divine signs can be ascertained. So the dominance of epistemological questioning in conventional allegory gives way to a radical ontological critique in postmodernist allegory. The traditional exploration of metaphoric 'depth' becomes an investigation of the ontology of verbal surface or visibilia, in postmodernist modifications of allegory. Yet the difference between

An Abstract Account of Allegory

13

traditional and postmodernist allegory is a difference of emphasis, not of kind or genre. For instance, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy culminates in an epiphany of surfaces, in sharp contrast to the conventional revelation of the pretext as a 'deep structure' informing the meaning of narrative signs. Giles Goat-Boy discovers value in the ordering of visibilia which are without any principle of depth. The hero's revelation of holiness is, literally, a vision of wholiness; his postmodernist epiphany is a vision of a superficially unified reality: 'an entire, seamless campus ... all one, and one with me.,9 By questioning the ontological claims of all signs, postmodernist allegory problematizes the relation between the narrative and the pretext; in postmodernist allegory the pretext shares the self-consciously fictive nature of the entire allegoric construct - text and commentary. But the possibility remains that a signified invisible order may reside in reality and that absolute meanings may be revealed amid the free play of allegoric signs. This open attitude towards the significance of the pretext which, after all appears in postmodernist allegories as one amid many potentially important cultural discourses, helps to distinguish postmodernist allegory from a modernist text like Nabokov's fale Fire which also takes the form of a commentary upon an anterior text. The figural function of the pretext is to establish, hermeneutically, the existence of a system of signs that reveals the transcendental significance and unity of phenomenal events and language. At the same time the narrative, as a pretextual commentary, is designed to renew or recuperate the values represented by the pretext as an authoritative interpretation of the world. The characteristic allegoric relationship between the narrative and pretext is, therefore, symbiotic. Pale Fire, however, substitutes for this scheme a parasitic relationship between text and commentary by including the prior, privileged text in the form of a document. This explicit presentation of the pretext works counter to its conventional allegoric function, violating as it does the distance that is traditionally preserved between the allegoric text and its pretext. In the form of a document, susceptible to a revisionary thematic interpretation, the integrity of the pretext is shattered and pretextual authority is radically undermined: the text becomes a function of its interpretation. Interpretation incorporates the pretext into itself and creates a closed system of meaning that contrasts sharply with the openended character of postmodernist allegoric narratives. John Shade's poem functions as the pretext only in the literal sense that it is a prior text: prior to Kinbote's allegorizing commentary. Together, the text and commentary form a closed system designed to lead the reader, not to a recognition of the allegoric 'Other' (alIos), but

14

An Abstract Account of Allegory

deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of verbal complexity as the pretext disappears, becoming the shadow or 'shade' of its interpretation. Through interpretation Kinbote shifts the signifying centre of Shade's poem, creating an autonomous, self-referential entity: the commentary refers to the poem and the poem only to the commentary. It is a closed system, with Kinbote as the medium of transformation and centre of signification. Where allegory uses the pretext to point to significant correspondences between the narrative, the world, apd a powerful explanation of reality, Pale Fire simply circles around a central pivot which is Kinbote. Within this system, reading is a self-fulfilling activity with no potential ethical value. Language is employed simply as the mediu~ for complex verbal games - played at the expense of the reader who seeks a significance that extends beyond the limits of the system. Where allegory requires that the reader choose among potential 'realities' and so respond to the values represented by the pretext, Pale Fire undermines the whole notion of the real in favour of the imaginative or fictive. It is the closed quality of Pale Fire, antithetical to the whole enterprise of allegory, that defines it as an example of late modernist rather than postmodernist fiction. Kinbote, in his preference for an orderly cultural and literary tradition and his aristocratic notions of art, reflects several of the beliefs of 'high' modernism. Repeatedly, Pale Fire asserts that value should be sought in art, in a secular literary tradition, rather than in the world: a characteristically modernist stance. It is in this manifest preference for a closed or autonomous literary artifact that modernist texts differ most markedly from those postmodernist assumptions that are amenable to allegory.

Postmodernist Allegory and 'the Tyranny of the Signified' In contrast to the hermeticism of such modernist texts as Pale Fire is the postmodernist tendency towards open, inquisitive forms: Julia Kristeva's 'readerly' 'attempt to expand the signifiable', alternatively described by Phillipe Sollers's 'writerly' 'experience of limits' .10 Craig Owens identifies this tendency with what he calls the 'deconstructive thrust' of postmodernism. Owens draws upon Kristeva's comments about the modernist avant-garde to describe the postmodernist disruption of 'mastering' discourses as part of the attempt to expose 'the tyranny of the signifier'. 1t Owens goes on to explain: '[i]t is precisely at the frontier between what can be represented and what cannot that the postmodernist operation is being staged - not in order to transcend representation, but in order to expose that system of power that authorizes

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15

certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others.' So while a modernist text like Pale Fire affirms its own status as an autonomous discourse, postmodernist narratives, as Charles Russell argues, extend themselves intenextually to encompass the cultural languages and social discourses that destroy the 'innocence' of textual language. 12 The empirically 'real' is reconstructed as a tissue of competing cultural discourses: those metaphoric descriptions that can parade as reality itself. In this sense postmodernist allegory is a subversive form, exposing the systematic repression that is an effect of orthodoxy. The metaphysical unity revealed by conventional allegory becomes an ideologically imposed homogeneity in Pynchon's postmodernist allegories. These ideological systems perform the same conventional function as the pretext; they are powerful explanations of the nature of reality which derive their influence from their capacity to reconcile the semantic disjunction between signs and cultural significances. Yet this certainty is purchased at an enormous cost to the individual's freedom. As contemporary feminist, Marxist and psychoanalytic discourses argue, orthodox Western beliefs do not offer an authentic unification of experience; rather, the political and economic interests of white middleclass males are served by the value structures of capitalism, patriarchy and rationality. All ideological systems are too embroiled in the politics of cultural experience to offer anything more than a way to limit and make experience manageable by imposing upon it a finite set of cultural meanings, and denying all significances that do not surrender to the tyranny of the ideologically determined signified. The world of Gravity's Rainbow, for instance, is variously organized according to theology, physics, history, myth, popular culture, cybernetics, literature, chemistry, mysticism, biology, politics, economics, psychology .... Each system of belief or body of knowledge holds a pretextual promise of complete and consistent meaning. Each offers to explain the nature of reality, of culture and of the individual's place within the larger whole, but on condition that all other claims to knowledge are renounced. In the assertion of a totalized meaning these 'mastering discourses' establish the terms of their own necessity. As Raymond Olderman describes them, these multiple perspectives create a pervasive ontological ambiguity by positing so many kinds of 'reality,.13 But it is this condition of uncertainty that pretextual discourses are to overcome. The inability of even the most powerful ideology to provide a total interpretation of reality, taking in every contingency of cultural experience, involves the postmodernist allegoric narrative in a version of the hermeneutic circle.

16

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The pretext in postmodernist allegory is multiple, appearing as only one discourse among many, distinguished only by the cultural power it can exert. Yet within every allegory any text or discourse that is held to be a valid interpretation of reality can act as a pretext. The pretext need not be a sacred book. For instance, Bernard Silvestris's twelfth century allegory, the Cosmographia, takes as its pretext the cosmological study most respected at that time - Plato's Timaeus. Silvestris's allegory models its narrative world on the Platonic pt:inciples that are subsequently interpreted in terms of Genesis: the limitations of pagan cosmology are supplemented by Christian theology. So the inadequacy of one explanatory model finds compensation in another ideological system. This allegorical mechanism leads David Porush, in his study The Soft Machine, to identify as one of the postmodernist characteristics of Pynchon's fiction the hermeneutic (pretextual) use of science. According to Porush, Pynchon's fiction deconstructs its own incarnate metaphor (the machine) in order to expose the limitations of positivistic explanatory structures and to reveal the 'unmachinelike machinery of the reader's consciousness' that cannot explain how. the narrative signs connect. 14 Porush here is describing the way in which Pynchon's allegory exposes the 'tyranny' of a pretextual discourse (positivism) that masquerades as reality, providing a false sense of the unity of the world and failing to take account of all possible varieties of experience. Whilst the hermeneutically staged encounter between disparate scientific and interpretative systems is not specific to postmodernism, certain scientific statements (particularly those concerning entropy) do function as pretexts within Pynchon's allegory. Here it may be that Pynchon draws upon a tradition of metaphysical speculation that has already constituted science as a pretextual discourse by positing scientific enquiry as the basis for an entire, metaphysical explanation of reality. For instance, Protestant science from 1650 to 1850 was predicated upon the 'Argument from Design' which, according to Stephen T oulmin, has only in the past hundred years become unfashionable: '(a]s a source of Protestant inspiration, the Works of God revealed in the operations of nature remained, as they had been since the sixteenth century, coequal with the Words of God revealed in Holy Scripture' .15 Divine providence, working through nature as through scriptural history, is assumed to transform things into signs that 'speak of the Other'. Through this kind of religious and philosophical interpretation scientific concepts are made available as pretextual discourses. This pretextual dimension of Pynchon's allegorical use of science has given rise to recent work by Joel Black, Robert Nadeau, James Earl and N. K. Hayles, all of whom explore the theo/philosophical background

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of those scientific concepts which, in Pynchon's fiction, engage with problems of knowledge and freedom. 16 These critics describe how the narratives pursue the assumptions of classical, Newtonian, science to a point where they reveal the inherent limitations of any totalizing metaphoric explanation. A discrepancy - described by Murphy's Law and Godel's Theorem - is revealed between the pretext and that which it purports to explain. This rationalistic pretext is placed in the proximity of an unquantifiable, numinous aspect of nature - represented in terms of the pretextual discourse of the 'new' physics - that resists mechanistic formulation and appears to offer the potential for human freedom and self-determination. In theological terms, the Protestant Design confronts pantheistic chance. The pretextual world view of classical physics is grounded in the existence of indestructible particles of divine origin (and so of absolute ontological status), which behave according to immutable laws, and that physics claims to describe. This entire world-view is undermined by the 'new' physics which views the world as a pattern of probabilities and inherent uncertainties; where nothing, including human consciousness, is distinct and isolated; where spatial forms have the ontological status of intellectual constructs determined by methodology: in short, the 'cosmic web' described by N .K. Hayles. Essentially, the two physics are opposing cosmologies and they meet as such in the concept of entropy. Entropy, in Pynchon's work, appears both as a pretextual explanation of the nature of reality and also as an element within other pretextual discourses. For instance entropy, when formulated as an irreversible, cosmic tendency towards disorder, appears to constitute a classical, immutable law. But in the context of the entire universe the prediction of entropy's inevitable increase is dependent on probabilities - the probability that the universe is not infinite but in fact a closed system, that the long-term ordering influence of gravity is not an effective counter to entropy. Interpretations of the applicability of entropy to the condition of the universe and to our knowledge of it foreground opposing cosmological and pretextual views. Pynchon's use of the concept as the primary model for the nature of his narrative world has led to a critical focus upon this particular pretextual discourse; but because critics have not noticed the precise status of the concept of entropy within these narratives, none have remarked upon the peculiarly postmodernist nature of Pynchon's choice. For unlike such pretextual images as that of the Fall of Man, entropy carries with it no connotations of metaphysical depth; it describes only the quantitative condition of a closed system. Entropy does not describe a relationship between visibilia and some anterior cause: any suggestion of ontological depth must remain

18 An Abstract Account of Allegory speculative and imported to the pretext, though it is from a tradition of such speculation that the pretext gains its cultural power. Such speculation there certainly has been. From the mid-nineteenth century, the religious implications of the laws of thermodynamics have been debated and entropy, specifically, has been mythologized as a version of the Fall into history and linguistic difference. 17 The First Law, the law of energy conservation, gave grounds to many scholars for the argument that God is manifest in the world through modes of energy or force; that the economy with which nature has been created - so that although forms of energy may be transformed, energy itself cannot be destroyed - is evidence of an omnipresent and omnipotent Deity. To take an example: Herbert Spencer formulated a whole mystical philosophy on the basis of the First Law of Thermodynamics, expressed in his First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862). Spencer argued that science and religion correspond in their assimilation of the forces of matter and spirit: inferring from the data of experience the existence of 'Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed'; sharing the 'consciousness of an Incomprehensible and Omnipotent Power' - an 'Absolute Being'.18 Spencer further argued that the power manifest by the universe, the cause of phenomenal existence, is inscrutible and finally unknowable: only the laws of its manifestation can be inferred experientially. These laws would form an explanation of the nature of reality akin to the allegoric pretext. Of course Spencer, and many of his fellow scholars, assumed that this ineffable power was a supreme good; an assumption apparently contradicted by the Second Law - the law of entropy. The concept of an irreversible process in history, of decay and dissolution as a function of time, seemed to contradict any meaningful philosophy of the relation between nature and man, man and God. Yet the prediction of a heat-death for the universe was translated into the Christian concept of perdition, within the context of the Bible's promise of eternal life rather than infinite temporal progress. So the Second Law of Thermodynamics was seen as posing a basic choice to man: Christian redemption or annihilation. For if the First Law posited the existence of absolute Good or Truth, then its contradictory partner implied the existence of Evil, an absolute force operating in time and leading history ever closer to perdition. Such a temporal progression is described by' Henry Adams, in his Education: perhaps the best known contribution to this tradition of cultural and metaphysical speculation over the nature of entropy.

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19

Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at t!t e Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the irruption of forces totally new .... [They] were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediaeval science, were called immediate modes of divine substance. 19 Given an allegoric pretext such as this, the ungrounded play of narrative signs in Pynchon's allegory offers itself as symptomatic of entropy, primarily because the narratives' protagonists respond so seriously to the threat they see posed by entropy. As in all allegory, the pretext enters the narrative primarily through the characters' interpretations of their world and their place within it. So entropy is represented as a powerful explanation of the nature of Pynchon's fictional reality by the characters' attempts to counter the perceived operations of entropy within their worlds. But the quasi-figural patterns of connection that are sought as counters to the increasing uncertainty and disorder supposedly produced by entropy are conducive to entropic decay, since they may exaggerate an entropic homogeneity and rationalize an antientropic spontaneity. Such a hermeneutic response to cultural ambiguity and uncertainty - which has recourse to a totalizing pretextual explanation - can only lead to a heightened awareness of the existence of ambiguities that resist pretextual explanation. In Pynchon's story 'Entropy', Callisto succumbs to this paradox. Callisto has consciously transformed his apartment into 'a tiny enclave of regularity in the city's chaos, alien to the vagaries of weather, national politics, of any civil disorder.,20 He extends the analogy between entropy in thermodynamics and in culture into a rationale for his bizarre form of existence. But in his attempt to avoid apocalypse, Callisto may hasten its progress. In his hermetically sealed apartment, Callisto does not appear to realize that some forms of order - whilst intended to counter the entropic trend - may in fact accelerate it. For although the immediate effect of entropy is to produce chaos, this disorder leads finally to stasis: a stagnant order which is total homogeneity; forms and distinctions dissolve into a chaos which emerges finally as a lethargic sameness. Consequently, the interpretation of entropy as a postmodernist pretext leads not to the revelation of an authentic unity within experience but instead to an oppressive sameness that is the result of the tyranny of a 'mastering discourse' that would substitute itself for all other interpretations of reality.

20

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Postmodernist Allegory and the 'Discourse of the Same' In conventional allegory, the organizing epistemologies that operate as pretexts would, through interpretation, reveal as their secondary referent, some 'transcendental signified' that grounds them all in a unified providential scheme. However, in postmodernist allegory the 'quest beyond the Zero' dissipates in the paradox of Zeno: the quest for a divine continuity among static signs is endless.21 Each signified becomes another signifier, ad infinitum; the play of linguistic differences is not ended by recourse to a singular founding presence 'behind' narrative signs. Yet allegory is so designed that all the narrative features lead to a culminating revelation of the metaphysical unity of cultural experience. Consequently, the failure to represent such a revelation of the unifying 'One' creates the powerful impression that something is missing. This unavailability of the grounding referent has been described by Molly Hite as 'the trope of the absent centre,.22 This 'centre' is predicated on a semantic 'Origin' that precedes and so is not available within language. The withdrawal of this transcendent origin consequently generates language and history as structures that seek to retrieve a pure, Edenic signified. According to Hite, Pynchon exploits the idea that 'things ought to add up' to such an originary signified in order to motivate the quest for meaning and unity amid chaos. But this desire for semantic consistency underlies all allegory; what Pynchon exploits (through the genre more than the single idea) is the cultural determination of the desire for complete certainty in all things. His explanation of allegory is designed to reveal the ways in which the desire for an all-encompassing explanation of reality is used to sustain the economic and political interests of a powerful elite. The subjection of the Preterite by contemporary cultural practices to the 'tyranny of the signified' is the object of Pynchon's allegorical representation. Here, we have the nature of Pynchon's modification of allegory. Rather than 'Presence, postmodernist allegory discovers' Absence': the absence that makes present the desire for absolute meaning. In the space vacated by the traditional transcendental signified, Pynchon's narratives discover provisional systems of power and the pretextual explanations of reality that these systems use to rationalize and to perpetuate their interests. These pretextual discourses constitute canons of knowledge that repress the signifying potential of the sign through the corruption of a kind of quasi-figural secondary reference. The Preterite are kept in a preterite condition of ignorance by the oppressive power of signifiers that are manipulated by 'Them'. The hermeneutic potential of the sign is

An Abstract Account of Allegory 21

rigorously circumscribed by the interpretative hegemony of 'Them': alternative possibilities for meaning are 'blocked, prohibited or invalidated'. Only local or intermediate meaning systems are discovered to be interpenetrative. These systems are related by a common structure and logic, as Charles Russell finds in Gravity's Rainbow: 'they appear to suggest, as many of the characters in the novel believe, that they are ultimately all connected and controlled by an omnipresent and malevolent agency. ,23 The pursuit of absolute meaning within the narrative and the characters' quest for some absolute explanation of their world has resulted in a corresponding trend towards totalization in critical analyses of Pynchon's work. There is in Pynchon criticism a tendency to look to a particular pretextual discourse for the key to a complete explanation of the narratives. To sketch a few examples: entropy in thermodynamics and in cybernetics has provided both Ann Mangel and Peter Abernathy with a metaphor for the fictional worlds of the narratives. 24 The humanistic interpretation of science by philosophers, poets and other writers has allowed Joel Black and N.K. Hayles to place Pynchop's work within the explanatory context of intellectual history.25 The work of Charles Clerc and David Cowart on Pynchon's use of film identifies the disjunction between artistic description and reality itself as determining the nature of the fictional world. 26 This same disjunctive quality has been explained by John Stark and more recently by David Seed as the consequence of Pynchon's attitude to history, which juxtaposes the documentary with the fictive. 27 Disjunction has also been seen as a consequence of Pynchon's use of Weber (which creates a dichotomy between that which is subject to 'routinization' and the interest that routinization serves) in Joseph Slade's early work. 28 These and other pretextual discourses have been invoked to explain the nature of Pynchon's fictional practice. But as is the case with postmodernist pretexts, all that emerges from these investigations is a renewed sense of ambiguity, of semantic instability, and of the absence of normative value structures - those features that Pynchon criticism seems most to desire to explain. This residual ambiguity exacerbates the radical ontological doubt that many scholars see as a dominant characteristic of postmodernism. 29 Pynchon makes use of the two primary consequences that, in Ihab Hassan's reckoning, follow from the assumption of a decentred world. First, indeterminacy of meaning results from the disappearance of a grounding ontology; and second, the inability of any discourse to claim ontological superiority results in what Hassan terms 'immanence': the tendency of the mind, and text, to appropriate all reality to itself. 30

22

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These two aspects of the postmodernist ontological critique are used to represent the activities of an absolute and corrupt power base that constrains the signifying potential of all signs and limits the field of all forms of knowledge in order to ensure its own survival. By working upon all analytic categories, destroying what cannot be exploited, this corrupt authority would exaggerate semantic indeterminacy and by then reconstructing all signs, (together with the means of their interpretation) in misleading and mystifying ways, the quest for authentic cultural knowledge can be directed into sterile channels. All of reality would be appropriated and used in this effort to construct a complete explanation of reality that still would obscure the real distribution of cultural power. This sense of an absence that is meaningful in that it obscures the real presence of malign powers pervades the world of Pynchon's narratives, motivating the quest for meaning through pretextual discourses, figural signs and the allegoric self. However, the questing self, in postmodernist allegory, is not innocent. Pynchon's allegoric questers - Stencil, Profane, Oedipa Maas, Slothrop, Enzian, Tchitcherine - have all been tainted by the cultural determination of subjectivity. The postmodernist allegoric quest is dogged by the possibility that it has been directed by some equivalent of 'The Firm'. Each character is eventually confronted with the possibility that the quest has been determined by some mastering cultural discourse; focussed by culturally powerful ideas of metaphysical depth (including the concept of an essential self), and directed away from the real goal which would be the revelation of their own determination by powerful economic and political interests. Pynchon's postmodernist heroes pursue the ultimate referent of a conspiratorially ordered system of surfaces. But amid the ungrounded play of ecriture no transcendental meaning is discovered; in the absence of a transcendental signified signs exist as ungrounded ecriture. The ontological priority of either semiotic 'waste' or the 'Word' is subverted. In the hero's terms, it is impossible to determine whether the desire to get outside the quest-system to a privileged position of observation directs the quest away from the 'Real Text' or whether access to a seemingly absent centre is actively disrupted. This is to ask: is 'the trope of the absent centre' a totalizing structure that expresses 'Their' rationalization of all signs into secular surfaces, through the corruption of epistemological modes? Does this trope create a sense of positive absence, of something missing that ought to be regained? Or does the same trope indicate that a secondary meaning is to be found within textual surfaces, but that this meaning is overlooked by the heroes' culturally determined and obsessive pursuit of 'deep' structures?

An Abstract Account of Allegory 23

Conventional allegory places the hero finally in a privileged pretextual position from which he is made aware of his self, language and history as aspects of a signifying system that is ultimately controlled by a metaphysical 'Good': the Word. No such finality, no epiphany, is provided for by postmodernist allegory; instead postmodernist questers discover, from within reality, the extent to which their desires and aspirations and their approach to the quest has been manipulated by corrupt cultural forces that use the quest after absolute meaning to extend the domain of their ideological hegemony. In the presence of many competing descriptions of reality and in the resulting absence of ontological certainty, the preferred cognitive access available to human consciousness is paranoia. In the absence of a transcendental signified, it is imp'ossible to know what is absolutely real: ontology meets epistemology on a common ground of ignorance and potential delusion. Still Pynchon's questers, like all allegoric hero/ines, cannot accept as fact the idea of a purely literal reality devoid of any secondary 'invisible' meaning. Oedipa Maas, for instance, finds herself in a position where she must make a conscious choice between interpretative modes. Significantly, she chooses paranoia. For either there was some Tristero beyond the legacy of America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. 31 She would remain 'unfurrowed', not constrained or imprisoned by her own culturally determined mode of perception. Paranoia is a mode which, whilst predicated on the assumption of an unseen motive in historical and verbal signs, preserves an awareness of relativity, of an 'Ellipse of Uncertainty' between subject and predicate. Paranoia is the neurosis most akin to a figural hermeneutic. Figuralism and paranoia share the assumption of an anterior source of meaning or, in Foucault's terms, the 'sovereignty of an original Text,.32 Actually, Foucault's description of paranoia applies equally to the figural interpretation of a world from which a meaningful system of resemblances is divorced from its signs, and also to the paranoid as one who is therefore 'alienated in analogy'. Beneath the established signs, and in spite of them, he hears another, deeper, discourse which recalls the time when words glittered in the universal resemblance of things ... the Sovereignty of the Same, so difficult to express, eclipses, the distinction existing between signs. 33

24

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Such a concept of 'the Same' poses grave problems for the postmodernist quest: the necessity, and extreme difficulty, of distinguishing coincidence from true repetition; the repetition which is entropic stasis from that which is the progressive manifestation of an authentic unity; ultimately, it is the need to distinguish between the appearance of similitude and a real, meaningful continuity, in the absence of a legislating transcendental signified. The play of linguistic differences, in a narrative of allegoric 'surfaces', crosses all boundaries; distinguishing structures are obliged to panicipate in a process of incomplete secondary signification. Where traditional allegory engages a quest for epistemological authority, postmodernist allegory seeks ontological certainty. Despite the absence of ontological absolutes, and panly because of it, postmodernist allegory continues to issue a generic imperative to the reader. The unavailability of any higher discourse, deep structure or legitimate authority, on to which responsibility for the ethical implications of interpretation can be displaced, means that these issues are directed at the reader: though this occurs through a textual surrogate, the hero/ine. Barth's Giles Goat-Boy and the work of Thomas Pynchon, in contrast to modernist hermeticism, use language to make demands upon and to elicit responses from the reader. As has frequently been noted, postmodernist texts characteristically attempt to engage the reader in the processes of reading and writing rather than the facts of writer and written artifact. 34 One way in which this engagement is created is through the actions of a hero/ine whose function is that of a reader. In the manner of the traditional allegoric hero he is an interpreter as he confronts basic epistemological problems that must be approached through interpretation. But the ontological dimension of interpretation - ascertaining the nature of the real- extends to the moral, ethical and religious ramifications of these linguistic and cognitive problems. For the unity sought by allegory not only grounds signs but grounds them in particular ideological configurations. Consequently allegory issues an ideological imperative to the reader. The same imperative applies to the surrogate-reader, the hero/ine, who discovers that the 'self' is an ideological construction or extension of the transcendental signified. The reader of, and in, allegory is deeply implicated in a (quasi-)transcendental discourse, and it is the awareness of complicity that the narrative translates into significant action. In comparison to modernist hermeticism, the allegoric attempt to represent the operations of some mastering discourse through its surface manifestations (linguistic and social), does appear to be an attempt to 'expand the signifiable'. This expansion is not simply the liberation of signs from the

An Abstract Account of Allegory 25

tyranny of a mastering discourse (logocentrism or patriarchy) that Craig Owens and Julia Kristeva envisage. Rather, postmodemist allegory works subversively from within, to expose the operations of a dominant signified - the repressive centre that masks itself with the appearance of ineffability. Pynchon's narratives do not exhibit an unquestioned rejection of logocentrism but instead problematize the whole issue of 'centres' and their relation to 'surfaces'. Seen in these terms, postmodernist allegory represents an inversion of traditional allegoric assumptions. In traditional allegories the process of exposure is revelatory rather than subversive; a fixed ultimate referent is the source of coherence rather than of repression. In the following chapters, Pynchon's inversion of the primary components of the generic allegoric plot structure is pursued in detail: the nature of the postmodernistfigura in V, the postmodernist pretext in The Crying of Lot 49, and the implications of these changes for the postmodernist allegoric hero/ ine in Gravity's Rainbow.

Notes 1. For a thorough account of ancient definitions of allegory, see Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories ofAllegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburg & Brighton: Duquesne University Press & Harvester Press, 1981). A translation of Diomedes's 'Concerning Tropes' is given in Appendix 1. Important studies that set Hellenistic allegorical interpretation in the context of Western allegorism include Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891), and Rudolph Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). J. Tate explores the function of allegorical interpretation in terms of speculative philosophy and the Platonic critique of interpretation, in two essays: 'On the History of Allegorism', Classical Quarterly, 28 (1934), pp. 105-14, and 'Plato and Allegorical Interpretation', Classical Quarterly, 23 (1929), pp. 142-54,24 (1930), pp. 1-10. 2. See, for instance, Paul de Man, 'Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), and Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,' Part 1, October, 12 (1980), pp. 68-9. Owens defines allegory largely in terms of the Derridean 'supplement' and proceeds to identify the 'deconstructive impulse' as characteristic of postmodernist art. This is a stimulating argument but it universalises and dissipates the descriptive power of both terms - allegory and postmodernism. 3. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osbourne (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 214. This difficult text is discussed within the entire context of Benjamin's comments on allegory, and

26

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

An Abstract Account of Allegory the poststructuralist implications explored, by Bainard Cowan, 'Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory', New German Critique, 22 (Winter, 1981), pp.l09-22. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p.205. Ibid., p. 205. See, in this connection, Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse' and Paul Smith, 'The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism', Dalhousie Review, 62 (1982). Maureen Quilligan, The Language ofAllegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 100. Erich Auerbach, 'Figura,' Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), p. 49. My use of the term figura differs from that of Auerbach in that I do not share his assumption that the figura must have the status of a real, historical event. On the contrary, I assume that historical events can function as figurae because they share the semiotic status of figural signs. This 'semiotic' concep~ion of figurae is to be found in the writings of the Greek Apologists, particularly Justin Martyr, where signs of God are found in the non-Christian order and in nature. See Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies inJustin, Clement and Origen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy (1966, rpt., London: Granada, 1981), p. 777. Julia Kristeva, 'Postmodernism?', Bucknell Review: Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, XXV, 2. ed. Harry Garvin (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), p. 13 7; Phillipe Sollers, 'The Novel and the Experience of Limits', Surfiction: Fiction Now . .. and Tomorrow, ed. Raymond Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975). Craig Owens, 'Feminists and Postmodernism', in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London & Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 57-82. The identification of postmodernism with deconstruction is particularly problematic in terms of allegory. If allegory is identified with poststructuralism and postmodernism is identified with poststructuralism, then both terms - allegory and postmodernism - are applicable to all texts, since poststructuralism claims to describe the rhetorical contradictions inherent in all texts. See Paul de Man, 'Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics'. The tripartite identification is made by Gregory Ulmer in 'The Object of Post-Criticism', in Postmodern Culture. Ulmer's argument is undermined by his claim that 'in allegory anything may mean anything else' (p. 96). This is patently untrue to any reader who has not found the allegoric use of language to be incomprehensible; Ulmer has neither poststructuralist nor allegoric warrant for this assertion. Charles Russell, 'The Context ofthe Concept', Bucknell Review, pp. 180-93. Raymond Olderman, 'The New Consciol1sness and the Old System', in Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, ed. Charles Clerc (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 199-228.

An Abstract Account of Allegory 27 14. David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York & London: Methuen, 1985), p. 117. Porush provides a useful account of twentieth century scientific developments and philosophical responses as the intellectual milieu for what he calls 'cybernetic fiction', i.e. fiction that engages in a dialectical relationship between human consciousness and mechanistic technology. Concepts of information theory, entropy, noise and 'uncertainty' are clarified within their historical context: the most relevant point for the literary critic is Porush's treatment of the hermeneutic and metaphoric bases of these concepts. 15. Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1982), p. 218. Toulmin defines 'modern' science as that which is based upon;. mechanistic Cartesian methodology; in contrast, 'postmodern' science recognizes that the scientist is always and inescapably a participant in, rather than a spectator outside, the realm of material objects and mechanical processes. Consequently, postmodern science seeks to modify the scientific world view in order to accommodate human consciousness, to integrate rather than aggregate scientific understanding. 16. Joel D. Black, 'Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow', Boundary 2, VIII. 2. (Winter, 19!i0), pp. 229-54; Robert L. Nadeau, 'Reading from the New Book of Nature: Physics and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow', Studies in the Novel, 11 (1979), pp. 454-71; James W. Earl, 'Freedom and Knowledge in the Zone,' in Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 229-50; N.K. Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 17. See Erwin N. Hiebert, 'The Uses and Abuses of Thermodynamics in Religion', Daedalus (Fall, 1966), pp. 1046-80, which collects a number of responses to the problematic relationship between science and religion, from theologians, philosophers and scientists. 18. Ibid., quoted pp. 1055-56. 19. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, 1931),pp.382-83. 20. Thomas Pynchon, 'Entropy', Kenyon Review, 22 (Spring, 1960), p. 279. Future page references are given in the text. 21. Zeno's Paradox is discussed by D.R. Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979). 22. Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983). 23. Charles Russell, 'Pynchon's Language: Signs, Systems, and Subversion' in Approaches to Gravity'S Rainbow, p. 253. 24. Ann Mangel, 'Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49', in Mindless Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 87-100; Peter Abernathy, 'Entropy in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49', Critique, 14.2 (1974), pp. 18-33.

28

An Abstract Account of Allegory

25. Joel D. Black, 'Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow'; N.K. Hayles, The Cosmic Web. 26. Charles Clerc, 'Film in Gravity's Rainbow', in Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 103-51; David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art ofAllusion (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, London & Amsterdam: FeHer & Simons, 1980). 27. John O. Stark, Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980); David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (London: Macmillan, 1988). 28. Joseph Slade, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner, 1974). 29. See, for instance, Richard Wasson, 'Notes on a New Sensibility', Partisan Review, 36 (1969), pp. 460-77; Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations ofthe Times (Urbana, Chicago & London: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Brian McHale, 'Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow', Poetics Today, 1.1-2, (1979), pp. 85-110. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York & London: Methuen, 1987), and 'Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing,' in Approaching Postmodernism, pp. 53-79; Alan Wilde, 'Surfacings: Reflections on the Epistemology of Late Modernism', Boundary 2, 8 (Winter, 1980), pp. 209-27, and Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981);Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton, Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie's Journey Home (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983); Stanley Trachtenberg, ed. The Postmodern Moment: A Handbook of Contemporary Innovation in the Arts (Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 'Introduction,' pp. 3-18, and Philip Stevick, 'Literature', pp. 135-56; Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1986). 30. Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (Urbana, Chicago & London: University of Illinois Press, 1975). 31. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lat 49 (1966, rpt., New York: Bantam, 1978), p. 137. Future page references are given in the text. 32. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1970, rpt. New York: Random House, 1973), p. 41. 33. Ibid., p. 49. 34. See for instance, Jerome Klinkowitz, 'New American Fiction and Values,' Anglo-American Studies, 2 (November, 1972), pp. 241-47, and Charles Russell, 'The Context of the Concept'. This aspect of postmodernist allegory approaches the mode of metafiction: see Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York & London: Methuen, 1984) and Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London & New York: Methuen, 1984), for suggestive accounts of metafiction which do not, however, discuss the allegoric implications of the mode.

2 VACILLATING IN THE VOID? VERBAL VIVIFICATION IN V

The very title of V evokes the question: what or who is V? Although it is not formulated until much later, this problem forms the exegetical context for the entire narrative. It 'frames' the opening scene, set in Virginia, in the vicinity of the 'Sailor's Grave' where, 'overhead, turning everybody's face green and ugly, shone mercury-vapor lights, receding in an asymmetric V to the east where it's dark and there are no more bars'.l It is through such a street, illuminated by V - 'the street of the twentieth century' (p. 323) - that the quest for 'her' significance leads. V exists as a narrative; as an historical figure, the Lady V; and as a proliferating number of V-structures or V-signs which are perceptible in the narrative world, such as these V-lights. The three elements share a common basis in the quest for V, for the genesis or etiology of the twentieth century - for its presiding genius. The narrative and the quest are virtually identical, united in the attempt to discover the meaning and history of V through the temporal manifestations of the Lady V and of seemingly incidental V-signs. But the relationship is one of only virtual identity. A rhetorical gap is sustained between the two 'texts' so that whilst a character like Hugh Godolphin or Raphael Mantissa may conceive of V - as Vheissu or Venus - as a type of void, a 'gaudy dream, a dream of annihilation', the ongoing development of the narrative plot is directed towards the construction of a figural system in which V is the primary object of interpretation. The narrative attempts to discover the significance of the past for the present by bringing the two into a hermeneutic relationship with V. So whilst many of its characters are left vacillating in an existential void, the narrative itself attempts to vivify its verbal signs, to discover amid the various significations of V a signifying centre which would be the 'spirit' informing modern history, giving it pattern, significance and direction. Like the 'Street', V's status is that of a metaphor. However, the 'tenors' to the 'vehicle' that is V are so various, their ontological and epistemological status so ambiguous and their relationship so

30

Verbal Vivification in V

disjunctive, as to suggest that the source of narrative uncertainty is located in the nature and function of V. For the uncertain status of V is a result of 'her' function, which is curiously akin to that of a personification figure. In V the signifier and the signified are so closely identified as to become one, so that 'she' becomes almost purely a signifier, and throughout the narrative the range of signification of this initial sign is explored in a number of contexts and through different interpretative structures. The identification of many V-figures gives rise to the possibility that together these figures constitute some kind of V-metaphysic, the weltanschauung of the twentieth century and modernity's link with the past. One of the most powerful of the narrative's strategies for suggesting this possibility has been described by William Plater, and this is the use of the iconography of the Catholic Church to chart the development of a number of key V-figures. 2 But it is the relentless recurrence of alim~ted set of values, all associated with V in both the past and the present, that establishes the almost irresistible prospect that V forms a powerful and 'mastering' discourse within the Western cultures of the twentieth century. The narrative's obvious fracturing of historical time into disparate episodes only heightens the apparent meaningfulness of transhistorical connections to a systematic V-metaphysic. This perception of V as a sign that figures both in sequential and in transtemporal history is perfectly consistent with V's figural status. The allegoric figura participates in a pretextual discourse that offers itself as a total explanation of the nature of reality and so is independent of the contingencies of sequential history, yet the pretextual significance of the figura as a sign, that points to the semantic unification of experience offered by the pretext, must be manifest in each of the temporal episodes that constitute history. It is due to the status of V as an allegoric figura that V-figures are located within and yet stand outside history; because V is a figura, V both is and is not a cultural weltanschauung. This fracturing of time and meaning, which results from V's allegoric status, is taken up by Thomas Schaub as he describes the ambiguity that he sees as characteristic of Pynchon's fiction. Thomas Schaub describes the allegoric fracturing of the narrative world as a conflict between some four-dimensional realm of continuous meaning (a space-time continuum), and the temporal realm of fragmentary experience and necessarily partial perception (a three-dimensional world). The dilemma which confronts the characters who inhabit such a world is that whilst reality is experienced in three dimensions it is known in four, and consequently any continuity of meaning is known in abstract terms and experienced only in suspicions. Integration of

Verbal Vivification in V

31

experience is made possible through those texts or those canons of knowledge that function as pretexts. Semantic unity therefore is expressed in imagistic terms by allegoric figurae - abstractions given temporal form - but, as Schaub recognizes, the very process of temporalizing precludes the representation of a timeless unity. In his description, the allegoric quest is problematized by the attempt to discover the meaning of the world from within the world, or to find within them a true history that exists outside time. 3 In other words, the allegoric quest is complicated by the unavailability of some privileged, 'Cartesian' point of view, above and beyond the biases and self-interests of cultural politics. Any sense of unity within this fictional world cannot find confirmation; only by creating the suspicion that it is absent because it is unnamed can this perception of meaning be represented. However, the attempt to name, amid the complexities of the act of naming, in a corrupt and increasingly deterministic world is the ongoing effort of Pynchon's allegories. Pynchon exploits allegory's traditional engagement of both a finite, temporal perspective and an infinite, atemporal potential for meaning in order to explore the ideological 'tyranny of the signified'. The metaphoric basis of allegory enables the simultaneous expression of the dissemination of signs into cultural experience and the socially instilled desire for semantic unity. Pynchon uses this mechanism to register the sense of displacement from a determinate metaphysical referent that results from the existence of multiple pretexts while at the same time expressing the psychological and cultural rejection of an unregulated proliferation of signs (ecriture) in favour of a single privileged pretext. Three primary narrative strategies serve Pynchon's representation of this peculiarly allegoric paradox in V. First, V is represented as pervasive, disseminated by a host of V-signs, V-characteristics that conspire to suggest a V-metaphysic permeating history. The plenitude of ambiguously related V-signs (/igurae) in the story suggests an atemporal dimension of meaning, but access to this secondary dimension is denied by a fragmentary narrative style of representation. So, second, these signs are expressed through dislocative narrative techniques, most obviously the historical dislocation of narrative episodes that are recounted by diverse and fragmentary points of view. Thus, V sustains a tension between a series of finite interpretative modes and the desire for a (quasi-)transcendental discourse that cannot be made present to knowledge. Third, this always frustrated totalizing gesture borrows its ritual form from the Catholic Church: the progression of the Lady V through a parodic impersonation of each of the three persons of the Trinity.

32

Verbal Vivification in V

The V-metaphysic A mere half dozen terms conspire to suggest the existence of a 'Vmetaphysic': the inanimate, prosthesis, violence, tourism, decadence and disguise are concepts that function as cultural values or social preferences that are used to order life, and to endow experience with specific kinds of meaning. And as such, these concepts combine to form a pretextual discourse, a valorized interpretation of reality that explains the status of all cultural signs by altering or relegating to waste those signs that are inconsistent with the pretextual ideology. This reduction is achieved through the determination of the nature of identity and through an insistence upon some singular determination of the meaning of history. It is the appearance of these V-concepts in each of the historically disparate episodes of the narrative that creates the impression that V symbolizes a single and all-encompassing determination of history. So, for instance, though the initial sequences of the narrative (a number of vignettes, presented in flash-back) deal with Profane'~ reminiscences, we are confronted with a series of variations on the theme of the inanimate dominating or annexing the animate. This increasing ascendancy of a non-human principle is represented in the form of a symptom, a symptom of the corrupt metaphysic progressively diagnosed as, or identified with, V. In the 'Sailor's Graye', the debased status of the human is represented by the phenomenon known as 'Suck Hour'; the debased condition of language as a referential medium is expressed by the common name shared by all of the barmaids who work there. The over-signification of the name creates a meaningless homogeneity by eliminating the element of difference, the structuring principle that makes any language functionally significant. The influence of the inanimate is a tendency towards this kind of sameness which causes 'natural' difference to be replaced by manufactured homogeneity. . The growing hegemony of the inanimate principle is causally linked to a lin:guistic condition. The 'inanimation' of language encourages a preference for nouns over verbs and gives rise to a corresponding shift in perception. Profane discovers such an inanimate vocabulary as the basis of the phenomenon of human love for an object. Although he realizes this through his encounter with Rachel Owlglass and her MG, it is corroborated by Pig Bodine's relationship with his motorcycle, and Da Conho's attachment to his machine gun. All are instances of the mechanical supplanting the human; Rachel herself is defined in MGterms. Profane's communication with her occurs within a context limited, both physically and cogr:titively by an object-centred discourse

Verbal Vivification in V

33

of 'MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at' (p. 27). The Whole Sick Crew share a predeliction for nouns which they simply shift into different combinations to constitute conversation. Yet a distinction between kinds of nouns is provided by Paola Majistral, the girl who deals only with proper nouns: 'Persons, places. No things. Had anyone told her about things?' (p. 51). It is an important distinction; dominated by the values of the V-metaphysic the Crew treat people and places as if they were no more than literal objects. Surgical prosthesis, exemplified by Fergus's 'sleep switch' and Esther's nose, establishes a further and explicit development of the trend towards the inanimate. This bodily incorporation of inorganic matter is one of V's most obvious signs. The plastic surgeon Schoenmaker's justification for his profession is based upon the assumption that surgical prosthesis is a matter of purely physical transformation - that the physical and psychological or spiritual are discrete realms, available for independent manipulation. Rachel's notion of interdependence between 'inside' and 'outside' is rej~cted by Schoenmaker, a character who is clearly aligned with the V-metaphysic. His belief is based upon the deflection of internal reality into external appearance. This deflection of 'soul' into 'skin', as it is later expressed, is more fully explored in terms of the 'tourist' phenomenon: like tourists, 'the lovers of skins' (p. 184), the imperfect gathered in Schoenmaker's waitingroom, constitute one of the few forms of 'communion' to be found in this V -dominated world. It is a communion based upon a common faith in, and preference for, the cosmetic and the exterior. A character such as Schoenmaker is represented as acting as an agent of the V-metaphysic, establishing the value structure that rationalizes the manipulation of reality which is associated with V. Such characters express the belief that intrinsic value does not exist; that all things possess only a literal significance and that this can be changed. For like all allegoric pretexts, the V -metaphysic contains the philosophical justifications necessary for its own realization. And according to the terms of this pretextual explanation of the world, the world is subject to selective interpretation; all values and significances that are not consistent with the ideological grounds of the pretext are altered or rendered insignificant. The denial of personal depth, for instance, produces a generation of passive victims like Profane, aimlessly wandering, or rather 'yoyoing', up and down the 'street of the 20th century', completely subject to the influence of 'Fortune', or the sense of history as a series of discrete moments, available for any sort of ideological interpretation and determination. These narrative operations of the pretext give rise to descriptions, like

34

Verbal Vivification in V

Don Hausdorff's 1966 analysis, of V as symbolic of the workings of a mechanistic and meaningless modern society upon the human spirit. 4 Hausdorff sees V as embodying one of the two cultural alternatives that Henry Adams, in his Education, predicted for America: the Virgin! Venus and the Dynamo. V does represent a vision of cultural possibilities in the sense that V stands as the icon, the figura, of a whole constellation of repressive or 'mastering' cultural discourses. Each of the Vcharacteristics identified by the narrative share a common opposition to what is: prosthesis, tourism (the international equivalent to 'yoyoing'), and the political activism that is mob violence or anarchy all seek to establish the primacy of meaninglessness: an historical and epistemological chaos that is unchanging in its resistance to coherent explanations other than those sanctioned by the V-metaphysic. Cultural alternatives are obscured while methods of interpretation based on assumptions other than the primacy of the literal - the rule of the noun - are discredited as paranoid delusions. Each of the preferences associated with the V-metaphysic (the inanimate, prosthesis, violence, tourism, decadence and disguise) endorse the value of the literal as the denial of intrinsic significance. Aieul, the cafe waiter, introduces the concept of tourism as a kind of alienation from intrinsic value. The tourist is characteristically out of place wherever he goes, a perpetual transient whose perceptions are carefully prescribed by the tourist's own 'pretext', the Baedeker tour guide. As a denizen of the Baedeker world, Maxwell Rowley-Bugge conceives of himself and knows that others, the tourists, see him as 'as much a feature of the topography as the other automata: waiters, porters, cabmen, clerks. Taken for granted' (p. 70). The tourist subscribes to the V-metaphysic by perceiving others as inanimate objects - automata - deprived of their humanity in the very act of perception. This assumption lies at the centre of what I have called the Vmetaphysic: the selective perception of the world which accounts only for literal appearances and substitutes a set of mechanical relationships for a moral order. The growing hegemony of the V-metaphysic as the gradual but inexorable progress of the inanimate into the living realm is explored by Stencil in the guise of Gebrail, the driver. Here, the last of V's pretextual values is introduced: metaphor, as the form given to something that would otherwise remain inapprehensible and, alternatively, disguise as the concealment of that which we prefer not to apprehend. The nihilist Gebrail thinks of culture as disguise in this latter function. The trappings of civilization he dismisses as concealing illusions. Thinking himself free of the 'lies' that are civilization. and organized religion, Gebrail plays

Verbal Vivification in V

35

upon the homonymous relation between desert and angel (Gebel/ Gebrail), to construct a scenario in which the desert rather than the Lord's angel dictated the Koran to Mohammed, thus reducing Allah and his Paradise to 'wishful thinking'. But this reduction of historical explanation to literal absurdity is indicative of Gebrail's own domination by the ideological 'lies' or cultural 'delusions' of the V-metaphysic. In this, Gebrail's behaviour is quite consistent with that of an allegoric character who reads the nature of the fictional world according to the dictates of the narrative's dominant pretextual discourse. It is in the 'confession' of Fausto Majistral that the values associated with V are brought together in the attempt by one individual to interpret the significance of his history and the nature of his human identity. What Fausto discovers is the extent to which he has been determined by the changing ideologies that govern history. He does begin with a highly relativistic approach to history, assuming that reality simply is and that any conceptualization of it is metaphoric, formed in alchemical memory: 'The word is, in sad fact, meaningless, based as itis on the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous' (p. 307). In the attempt to overcome the inevitable alterations made by memory and to produce a valid account of his experience, Fausto works upon the journals of his previous personalities, interpreting, rejecting, then reinterpreting them, trying to capture an objective truth that eludes subjective formulations. Interpretation is his access to the histories that are marginalized and obscured by the dominant ideologies that determine historical understanding. He concludes that '[t]he writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past'. In his struggle against the V-inspired pressure towards meaninglessness, he cannot escape the sense of history as a 'fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason'" (p. 306). The concept of time as discrete, with no intrinsic or recuperable value, and the concept of meaning as a metaphoric disguise for meaninglessness are pivotal concepts within the V-metaphysic. The notion of history as metaphor or as a form of disguise is based on Fausto's heightened awareness of the literal dimension of language. As a product of British colonialism and educated in two languages Fausto is particularly aware of the perceptual constraints imposed by language. Speaking and thinking in both languages, Fausto conceives of himself as 'a dual man, aimed in two ways at once', torn between two cognitive modes. As a result, Fausto describes the development of his personality (through four stages to the time of writing his 'confession'), in terms of

36

Verbal Vivification in V

his changing attitude towards, and usc of, language. Fausto I is characterized by a love of high-flown rhetoric, Shakespeare and Eliot; whilst Fausto II, a product of the seige of Malta, is 'more Maltese and less British'; he is a 'young man in retreat', a retreat into religious abstraction and poetry. 'Moving towards that island-wide sense of communion. And at the same time towards the lowest form of consciousness' (p.315). It is a communion in 'Purgatory', and a retreat into nonhumanity. As Fausto III begins to emerge, abstraction gives way to a 'sensitivity to decadence' or inanimation. It is in his encounter with the woman who embodies these qualities the progress to the inanimate, decadence, and disguise through metaphor - the prosthetic Lady V, in the guise of the Bad Priest, that Fausto III is born. The Bad Priest encapsulates the apostasy that V represents: directing, encouraging and embodying a decline towards closed systems in which entropy eventually triumphs, deflecting attention away from matters of the soul by preaching the doctrine 'Seek mineral symmetry, for here is eternal life: the immortality of rock' (p. 340). Th~ extent to which V has come to embody physically - through prosthesis - the process of inanimation that she directs is revealed in the circumstances of her death. Trapped beneath a fallen beam, during a bombing raid, the curious children literally dismantle her; removing first a wig, to reveal a crucifix tatooed on the scalp, then an artificial foot, followed by a set of false teeth and 'a glass eye with an iris in the shape of a clock', digging with the point of a bayonet the star sapphire from her navel. As Fausto administers the sacrament of Extreme Unction, she is said to be 'past speech', uttering only cries, non-human cries that sound like 'the wind blowing past any dead reed' (p. 344). Indeed, V now, and as the Bad Priest, is a 'hollow man'; even her corpse is 'object's cold'. It is this cold, this encounter, that motivates Fausto's 'confession'. V creates Fausto III, an indecipherable, gibbering entity who sees history as a series of discrete moments, reality merely as physical facts, and metaphor as a lying form of disguise. So while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the «practical» half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie ... (p. 326). This is precisely the form of perception that V encourages by opposing all coherent cognitive, linguistic, social and moral systems; by substituting

Verbal Vivification in V

37

for them an explanation of reality, a metaphor, that denies intrinsic meaning in favour of the value of the transient. The Lady V, as Fausto encounters her, exemplifies the determination of the individual by cultural forces and sharpens his awareness of his own determination by the values inculcated through the languages he has been taught. V reveals the extent to which the individual is the product of cultural discourses rather than of an inherent personal identity. As a narrative figure she makes visible the constraints that are placed upon the self by a set of explanatory discourses. In this she is performing the conventional function of the allegoric figura, representing in the story those values that determine the nature of the fictional world. But as the focus of an entire pretextual discourse, the V-metaphysic, she restricts rather than enables the quest for knowledge. Through the tyranny of a literal vocabulary the V-metaphysic blocks access to alternative metaphysical explanations of the world. The consequent 'singularity' of V creates the impression that V somehow 'is' the spirit of modernity. R.W.B. Lewis responds to this sense of V as a weltanschauung by describing V as the Antichrist. s Lewis places V within the pretextual discourse of Christian eschatology and explains the nature of the narrative history over which V presides in these pretextual terms. That is, Lewis places himself in the same position as the narrative characters who attempt to interpret the significance of V through her figural role. The narrative makes of the Lady V both a subject and object of pretextual interpretation by representing her as a figura and as the pretext that the figura represents. However, R.W.B. Lewis, as well as Herbert Stencil and Fausto Majistral search for an explanatory pretextual context in which to situate and to make sense of V. The consequence for Fausto is that he discovers the deterministic ideological pressures that are applied to his self by the culture in which he lives. When Fausto confronts V he realizes that, in a very real sense, there is no difference between them; each has been created by the conditions of modern culture. And it is this realization that Pynchon's postmodernist allegory is designed to represent. The merging of subject and object, of self with the values of cultural discourses, provides the central insight of postmodernist allegory. However, critics like Robert Golden fail to see the significance of this style for the representation of the self, and focus instead upon the attitude towards modern society that is assumed. So in Robert Golden's analysis of V the merging of self and community is seen as an aspect of Pynchon's view of modernity: in an increasingly mechanistic and technological society, (as Golden describes the fictional world) cultural values are directed towards the elimination of humanity. Conscience would be the first to go, though individual volition, free will and

38

Verbal Vivification in V

personal responsibility would follow. From the displacement of history, politics, and violence itself, from the personal into the public realm will emerge the apocalyptic 'reign of nothingness' that Golden sees as the end of history desired by the modern 'mass man,.6 Golden's analysis describes V purely within the terms offered by the Vmetaphysic. This constraint would seem to be inevitable for any critical description that takes its cues from allegoric characters who are represented as seeking the meaning of their narrative world through the interpretation of the narrative's pretext. And in the case of V this pretext is formed by the V-metaphysic. The questing characters of the narrative do offer themselves as surrogate readers and the dual figural and pretextual functions of V do encourage the reader to explain the narrative in terms of the domination of individual identity by powerful cultural discourses. Consequently, Richard Patterson focuses his analysis upon the ways in which knowledge is made possible, by looking at the form and function a~d limitations of systems of knowledge that are subject to cultural (pretex,,:" tual) constraints. For knowledge is possible only within the terms of a structure or pattern of connections, and in Patterson's analysis V symbolizes the link between signs that enables knowledge. It is V's figural status that he is describing: the link between the fictional world and its metaphysical explanation (the pretext) that is represented by the figura. This postmodernist figura connects the values shared by a number of disparate historical moments with the perception of the characters that these values are significant, in that they may define the nature of the fictional world and also identify the forces that are shaping both personal and cultural identity. Patteson concludes that 'Pynchon's fictional territory might be said to lie along the perimeter which divides knowledge from non-knowledge'. 7 Sitting on the fence is the Lady V: the figura that participates in the narrative world and its explanation; the subject and object of allegoric interpretation.

Historical Dislocation and the Characterization of V Allegory has its generic origins in the effort to renew the meaning and significance of the past by interpreting cultural history in relation to contemporary social conditions. But a consequence of the Vmetaphysic, revealed through the figural representation of V, is the conjunction of subject and object in the individual self. That is, if the self is determined solely by cultural discourses then, in a sense, the meaning of cultural history is to be determined solely by the individual. This gives

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rise to a plurality of historical interpretations and so to a multiplicity of 'histories'. The impact of this dimension of the narratives on the criticism of them, has been considerable: the relationship between the documentary and the fictive in Pynchon's use of history has been explored by many scholars in work that ranges from source-hunting to the more sophisticated analyses of the use of historiography. in Pynchon's fiction. The allegoric nature of Pynchon's novels foregrounds the importance of ideas of history as means for organizing cultural data that can be, in themselves, repressive. Pynchon's allegory attends to the ways in which ideas of history can constrain historical inquiry by prescribing the questions that can be asked of history. The concept of history that forms a part of the V-metaphysic places rigorous constraints upon historical knowledge, by defining history as a series of discontinuous moments that can furnish no insight into the nature of contemporary reality, except as history is fictionalized and falsified by the individual consciousness. The narrative introduces a number of subjective historical frameworks, each of which produces a discrete interpretation of the meaning of history and refuses to disclose the over-view that Stencil seeks. Eigenvalue visualizes the structure of history as a sine-wave or rippled fabric in which continuity is disguised by the modulating amplitude of the cycles. So, from the perspective of 'the bottom of a fold', any overview is impossible. Profane formulates a sexual theory of history: 'history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whom ever he chooses' (p. 214). Historical consciousness among the Whole Sick Crew is limited to Roony Winsome. He alone has any interest in their status as 'products of a decky-dance'. It is the etiology of this decadence, the origin of V as the modern century's presiding genius or 'mastering discourse', that Stencil attempts to discover; he seeks knowledge of why and how it happened, and how anybody - but V specifically - had contributed to it. Stencil is compromised from the beginning: he nurtures a 'repertoire of identities' and evades the centre to which all things seem to tend Malta, scene of his father's death. Instead, he chooses to project himself, through his subjective historical imagination, into a series of intermediate historical manifestations of V, hoping to know this 'centre' without ever actually and personally confronting it. He begins his journey in Alexandria, with the murder of Porpentine. The single event, the culmination of a complex political conspiracy, is recounted from eight different perspectives; but the common 'identity' of these narrators is indicated by the title of the chapter: 'In which Stencil, a

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quick-change artist, does eight impersonations'. Through each guise, a set of 'facts' is objectively reported, yet no single, coherent picture of the situation emerges that could be called the whole historical truth. The perceptions of each narrator are partial, their knowledge fragmentary and incomplete and subject to cultural bias. Elements of the V-metaphysic appear here, suggesting a transhistorical dimension of V. But even through this series of personae Stencil is unable to escape the constraints imposed by history: the cultural history within which he is situated and the relativity of culturally determined historical perception. Stencil seeks, from within culture, understanding of the cultural forces that have determined the identity of his self and his society. But it is the nature of cultural ideology to refuse to disclose the interests that it serves. Consequently, whilst Stencil is able to pursue the significances of V as an allegoric figura, revealing a pretextual V-metaphysic, he is still unable to identify the economic and political interests that are served by this pretextual ideology. This ambiguous result gives rise to sense of a significant. absence operating in the fictional world. The narrative's insistent reduction of meaning to the literal exaggerates the sense that this pressure is applied by some extra-literal force. The pivotal terms of the V-metaphysic are all reducible to this linguistic condition: they are the psychological, perceptual or cognitive and social expressions of a corrupting language. V appears to operate on the cognitive categories imposed upon experience, through which knowledge is possible. By eroding the 'difference' upon which cognitive structures depend, the force of V works to limit the possibilities for historical knowledge. Critics have tended to respond to this suggestion of purposeful meaninglessness in one of two ways. Richard Patteson describes Pynchon's representation of a sense of a void behind the illusions that are created by the historical imagination; similarly David Wills and Alex McHoul describe Pynchon's deconstruction of all meaning systems. 8 Commentators take an all or nothing attitude towards Pynchon's construction of meaning and these critics assume that authentic understanding is not possible in Pynchon's fictional world. On the other hand, critics among whom W.T. Lhamon and Edward Mendelson figure prominently, describe this absent force as the Paraclete who introduces to the narrative world an absolute, sacred dimension of meaning that disrupts temporal modes of understanding and communication. 9 Both alternatives depend upon influential cultural assumptions about the nature of language. Lhamon and Mendelson invoke Christian eschatology to act as a culturally important explanation of the nature of Pynchon's narrative world; Patteson, and Wills

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and McHoul draw upon the narrative's own V-pretext to explain the sense of a powerful and deterministic absence, a response that is encouraged by the narrative's own attitude towards its allegoric pretext. This sense of something absent as crucially important is heightened by the narrative's relentless focus on the politics of nostalgia, as part of the allegory's attempt to bring past and present into a meaningful relation. ship with the pretext. Stencil therefore concentrates his quest upon the signs of the Vmetaphysic, their historical origins and, particularly, the images of the future that are projected by the V-metaphysic. He tries to interpret, from the vantage of present or 'real time', V's implied attitude to the past and to the future. He attempts to hold the two in such a balance that would be the historical equivalent of Sidney Stencil's political 'Golden Mean', revealing the relationship between the cultural past and future. The past is invoked by the image of a 'hothouse' sense of time, founded upon a nostalgic conception of time, of history as a cyclical repetition of the past: the 'hothouse' is the assumption that time is static, without progress or change, and that the past exists only to be relived in the hermetic medium of memory. Stencil attempts to bring the 'hothouse' into relation with the image of the 'street' which is predicated on the idea that time is linear, that the present exists as a function of the future and consequently must be devoted to the realization of futuristic dreams. The 'street' is therefore a place of political revolution, of violent opposition to the present order and of death. Both time-schemes constitute a rejection of the present, of the lived moment or 'real time', in favour of illusions, memories, and dreams and as such are firmly situated within the V-metaphysic. Stencil's account of the progress of V, and her temporal design, in Southwest Africa, in 1922, exemplifies the function of the narrative as historical, cultural interpretation. Mondaugen is the single witness to and reporter of the action, but the reliability of his account is seriously undermined by the progressive interiorization of his point of view, as the story shifts from an objective first person narrative concerned with the facts of his situation, to a gradual predominance of impressions and then fantasy and imaginative speculation. His professional function, to record 'sferics', further threatens his reliability by suggesting a tendency to seek pattern where there may be none. But Mondaugen's story reveals the effects of V in the South-West Protectorate through the pretextual interpretation of the V-metaphysic. V appears here in the guise of Vera Meroving; Victoria Wren's desire to shape historical events to the form of her own choosing now reified in Vera's elaborate clock eve. , This reification embodies the shift in V's

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activities, from her Florentian interlude where violence was the predominating V -quality of events, to the centrality here of one of V's more 'historical' characteristics: the 'hothouse' conception of time. For, as Mondaugen quickly discovers, the centre of activity in Foppl's 'seige party' is the reconstruction 'in words and perhaps in deed' of von Trotha's genocidal campaign of 1904. But as Mondaugen also discovers, the distinction between word and deed is one difficult to sustain within the context of this decadence - a dissolution of distinctions which is as characteristically V's as is the deflection of reality into 'hothouse' dreams of the past. The decadence of the seige party defines itself for Mondaugen as an analogy with Munich at Fasching, 'a city dying of abandon, venality'. He dreams of being led through Munich's streets by Vera Meroving, streets populated by faces which bear the marks of the V-metaphysic: 'white faces, like diseased blooms, bobbed along in the dark as if moved by other forces toward some graveyard' (p. 244). It is, however, this dreaming which casts doubt upon the validity of his entire account. Mondaugen conceives of himself, in the role of witness to the seige party, as a voyeur; subsequently it occurs to him 'that if dreams are only waking sensations first stored and later operated on, then the dreams of a voyeur can never be his own' (p. 255). Here, Mondaugen's subjectivity begins to merge with the pretextual discourse that is the basis of his interpretation. The determination of subjectivity by powerful cultural values, that is so graphically illustrated by the psychology of genocide, taints Mondaugen's relation to the society he is describing. As the subject and object of the narration are merged, he finds himself increasingly unable to distinguish either between the actors in this drama (the sources of his information) or to distinguish internal from external reality, thereby confusing the respective 'hothouses' of Foppl and Hugh Godolphin. The reappearance of old Godolphin and the resumption of his relationship with Vera/Victoria is the major link between the two Vpersonae, and the 'conspiracy' that Mondaugen has suspected, existing in a latent and unacknowledged form between Vera and himself, coalesces and takes tangible form around the figure of Godolphin. For in a way that Mondaugen cannot know, she manipulates events and moulds Mondaugen himself into a wraith of Evan Godolphin. Only the narrative reporting reveals her machinations, directed towards the recreation of the atmosphere of Florence, in order to conquer and possess Hugh by drawing him into the 'hothouse' of Vheissu, permanently. She operates upon the tentative distinction between memory and present reality, a distinction rapidly declining as the seige party goes on.

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It is in the account of von Trotha's genocidal campaign against the Herero and Hottentot tribes that the practical consequences of the Vmetaphysic are set out at length. Here, pivotal pretextual values intersect to produce a situation in which humanity is defeated and replaced by the inhuman. The values, associated with V as figura, that dominate all of the historical episodes which are subject to interpretation through the V-metaphysic are shown here to be elements of a 'mastering' cultural discourse that determines individual subjectivity on a mass scale. The process of dehumanization is represented as taking the initial form of 'liberation' from the constraints of moral imperatives, though it entails absolute subjection to the tyranny of ideologically determined meaning. This freedom is quickly translated into the practical value terms of 'functional agreement' or 'operational sympathy', the attitude that 'you were in no sense killing' (p. 261). With this attitude the natives are reduced to objects, automata, in the act of perception which conceives them only in terms of an ideologically inscribed function: the function of the victim. The narrative describes an awareness of a kind of natural order that takes over when the ideological hegemony of the V-metaphysic is complete, so that the act of killing assumes a new significance: 'It had only to do with destroyer and the destroyed, and the act which united them' (p. 264). From this sense of structure, 'a set symmetry, a dancelike poise' there is no return; it is the point at which a coherent moral order is finally and irrevocably replaced with a totalitarian cultural discourse, a metaphoric explanation of reality, in which 'soul and soul' become 'victimizers and victims, screwers and screwees' (p. 49), (as Rachel perceives it in modern New York). The 'touristic' mode of perception, with violence as a catalyst, produces a set of decadent, inanimate relationships, a 'symmetry' where meaninglessness triumphs over intrinsic value. The events of 1914, in terms of their colonial political policy, are events of the 'street': this genocidal extermination of natives a necessary historical stage, a function of the future, the glory of an empire. From the point of view of the future, these events form the stuff of nostalgic 'hothouse' dreams. The reliability of Mondaugen's account is, however, highly ambiguous. His scurvy-induced fever suggests the possibility that it is all simply hallucination; yet if his source is in fact Foppl, then the interpretation Mondaugen makes of his account is open to question Mondaugen does, after all, leave the seige party with 'those first tentative glandular pressures that one day develop into moral outrage' (p. 277). Together with the ambiguous role of Hugh Godolphin as a source of information, they form multiple points of view, similar to

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those that reported the Florence episode, but further internalized, located within the single mind of Mondaugen rather. than in the narrative itself, which earlier shifted among the minds of the characters involved in the action. The determination of the story by those cultural discourses that determine the subjectivity of the narrator is further complicated when Mondaugen's entire story is 'Stencilized'. Attention is drawn to this fact by the interruptions made by Eigenvalue as he listens to Stencil's retelling, making skeptical enquiries about the story's validity. In Mondaugen's characterization, V remains ambivalent, defined by 'her inability to come to rest anywhere inside plausible extremes, her nervous, endless motion ... but finally making, having made, sense only as the dynamic uncertainty she was' (p. 256). This 'uncertainty' is reflected in the diverse geographical appearances that Vera appears to have made: Florence, Southwest Africa, Munich one Fasching; suggesting that perhaps it is her influence that Mondaugen identifies when he describes the nature of the seige party as 'a soul-depression which must surely infest Europe as it infested this house' (p. 277). The notion of decadence as a disease and a disease that is spreading, obviously relates this episode to the V-metaphysic and Mondaugen's experience to that of the America of the Whole Sick Crew. As Richard Patteson observes, 'The velt, one might say, is die W eIt' .10 The prophecy that Profane receives from SHROUD is an explicit statement of the V-metaphysic that has been developing implicitly throughout the narrative. In these terms, SHOCK and SHROUD represent early prototypes of what humanity will become. Von Trotha's extermination of the Herero and Hottentot tribes foreshadows the Nazi extermination of Jews. That both are based on the perception of a race of men as essentially inanimate is revealed in SHROUD's analogy: 'Thousands of Jewish corpses, stacked up like those poor car-bodies. Schlemihl: It's already started' (p. 295). The narrative's effort to interpret the significance of the present by bringing contemporary reality into relationship with the past discovers the extent to which history is constrained to a single pattern of meaning by the operations of powerful cultural discourses; the narrative's interpretation of its own pretextual discourses reveals the difficulty of registering authentic experience when subjectivity is entirely the product of cultural ideology. .

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V and the Ritual Construction of Meaning It is amid the narrative's description of the constraints placed upon perception by the V-metaphysic that we are given the first indication of the nature of V, as Victoria Wren. This indication is cast in the form of Victoria's religious experience and belief. William Plater describes the way in which the evolution of V takes form within the conceptual context of the Catholic Church and its iconography in order that the extent of her power and influence can be represented. tt Plater describes the pretextual function of those values that V comes to represent, values that operate within culture in a manner similar to that of the Church's theological discourse. V evolves from Virgin and bride, to mother, to Queen, incorporating the three elements of the Trinity and becoming a force, of the same kind as this Christian Idea, but of radically different temporal manifestation. In Victoria Wren, V exists in the aspect of the bride. This is not to suggest that Victoria is V: their relationship is more one of possession than identity. Victoria's perverse Catholicism, combined with antipodean 'yarns' from her Australian uncle, form the material for a manufactured dream world, a metaphoric or pretextual Vworld, that she can control and manipulate. Gradually the temporal domain of this manipulation is extended from the dream world of adolescent Victoria into reality as, through espionage and political conspiracy, the force of V is manifest. It is in Stencil's 'impersonation' of Walde tar, the train conductor, that the political and religious conceptions of conspiracy are juxtaposed. Musing upon the history of Alexandria as a scene of persecution and of God's intervention, Waldetar concludes that: 'Events between soul and soul are not God's direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune or of virtue' (p. 78). The nature of V's conspiratorial method becomes increasingly apparent as a reconciliation of 'fortune' and design: of using the appearance of accident to further her design. Consequently, it is the allegoric coincidence of discrete figural signs (in the V-metaphysic) that provides the means for expressing and seeking V. Each province becomes the domain of V; events between 'soul and soul' she controls in her aspect of individual agency or Machiavellian 'virtu'; the relationship between 'soul' and 'no-soul' is hers in her metaphysical, deistic aspect. Her 'design' is revealed through the V-metaphysic soulless 'communion', non-human 'decadence', the superficial perception of 'tourism', the dominance of 'skins' over 'souls', the nostalgic 'hothouse' and violent, futuristic dreams of the 'Street'. Thus far, the religious nature of V has been described in terms of the experience of the novitiate - Victoria and Veronica the rat in the aspect

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of the Virgin. In Florence, however, Victoria's literal progress to the condition of 'bride' is revealed. Now a 'self-proclaimed citizen of the world', Victoria's 'marriage' to Christ has been consummated through a series of 'imperfect, mortal versions of himself' and, in her perverse manner, she interprets these consummations in overtly figural terms as 'outward and visible signs of an inward or spiritual grace belonging to Victoria alone' (p. 167). The origin of her perverse religious temperament, 'a nun-like temperament pushed to its most dangerous extreme', is ambiguously located by the narrator in 'some malady of the generation', the spirit of the age. This progress from virgin to bride is not explicitly linked to the ongoing development of V until later - when the narrator observes that '[h Javing once accepted duality Victoria found it only a single step to Trinity' (p. 199) - after the definition of V has been expanded through her association with Vheissu. The iconographical characterization of V is strengthened by the narrative's sustained allusion to Dante's The Divine Comedy in the account of Vheissu. By invoking Dante's text to validate the pretextual interpretation of Vheissu (which is represented in terms of the V -metaphysic) Pynchon obtains both a generalization of V's domain (into Western literary and religious tradition), and also an increase in credibility for his claim to situate V within the mainstream of Christian mythology. It is to Victoria Wren that Hugh Godolphin recounts the discovery of Vheissu, and it is an account which augments previous suggestions of V's infernal nature. For his description of the geographical approach to Vheissu is allusive of the landscape through which Dante makes his descent into Lower Hell. The 'treacherous swampland', for instance, recalls the Marsh of Styx, across which Dante travels to the gate of Lower Hell. From this point, he descends from the sixth to the ninth circle of Hell, through the circles of speculative sin, sins of malice, fraud and treachery. These sins - akin to the avatars of V - represent a falling away from truth into apostasy where appearance contradicts intention. In semantic terms, each of the infernal souls has repeated Satan's fall from grace by subverting the coherence of divinely inspired meaning and a natural relationship between sign and referent. That these semantic terms are evoked by Vheissu is suggested by the 'green lake' which recalls the Pit of Cocytus (Canto XXXI). Dante finds, submerged in this well, the giants who guard the ninth circle. He singles out Nimrod, 'through whose evil thought/ There is more than one language in the world'.12 Construction of the Tower of Babel is attributed, biblically, to Nimrod. To him is accredited the moment of the fall from linguistic grace: from a transparent and univocal to an obfuscated and equivocal referentiality. Dante passes Nimrod in silence, following

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Virgil's advice that every language is to Nimrod as Nimrod's is to others - meaningless. Here, Dante is guided by 'Reason', in the shape of Virgil, but Godolphin's vision of the meaninglessness of Vheissu destroys his reason. As he asks Victoria, 'But why? Have you never harrowed yourself half-way to - disorder-with that single word? Why' (pp. 16970). Vheissu also destroys his reasons. The colours of Vheissu, which take no meaningful shape, like a 'madman's kaleidoscope', perhaps correspond to the semantic shapeshifting that Dante finds punished in the Inferno. Godolphin's 'vast tundra' is reminiscent of the Plain of Dis, the vast plain filled with the cries of entombed heretics; the 'dolmens and temples of dead cities' are allusive of the city of Dis, where skeptics and heretics are tormented. The 'vast tundra' also recalls the sandy waste that separates the second and third circuits of the seventh circle of Hell. There, as elsewhere, those who sin verbally - that is, with evil semantic intention, like heresy, skepticism, flattery - are punished; in this case, the naked souls of blasphemers are tormented by burning .sand. Yet'it is treachery, the sin that underlies all instances of semantic violence, that is punished in the fourth zone of the ninth circle, the Lake of Cocytus. Beneath the Vheissu-like 'hard blue ice' of Cocytus where Dante sees tortured shadows, Godolphin finds the spider monkey frozen in the Antarctic ice. But Dante discovers Satan, Dis, frozen upside down in the Lake of Cocytus: if the spider monkey is a 'mockery of life', then Dis is a mockery of meaning - an infernal inversion of divine beauty, order and harmony. Archetypal traitors - those who have subverted the authority that supports and sustains divine semantics: the Church and the Stateare figured by Judas, Brutus and Cassius, each of whom is tortured in one of Satan's three mouths. Dante's vision of immobilized chaos is comparable to the 'dead center of the carousel' (p. 205) which is Vheissu. The circles of Hell through which Dante passes are perhaps refigured by the mountains that circle Vheissu; these mountains are themselves allusive of the mounts and precipices that Dante must climb, to reach the centre of Hell, as Godolphin must to reach Vheissu. There, at the centre, Godolphin too discovers a vision of total meaninglessness; a dream landscape - perhaps a 'colonial doll's world' - of random, kaleidoscopic colour, where dreams are more real than reality: a place which Godolphin conceptualizes as a woman. The link between Vheissu and V is forged initially by this shared female quality, but Vheissu possesses other V-characteristics. Apparently comprised only of 'skin', it is a tourist's domain like Alexandria; and although Godolphin conceives of himself, as an explorer, as the diametric opposite of the tourist - 'They want only the skin of a place, the explorer

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wants its heart' (p. 204) - he leaves Vheissu as a tourist. For the effect upon him of this vision of an existential void, of 'Nothing', is exile from the human community: Vheissu transforms him into a perpetual transient. And, in the manner which has been progressively identified as V's, his perception of reality is deflected into dream - dreams which appear more real than reality - as Vheissu comes to occupy the 'hothouse' of his memory. The violence of V is reflected in the 'barbarity, insurrection, internicine feud' of Vheissu, and the inanimate, that most obvious of V's signs, is encapsulated for Godolphin in the corpse of a spider monkey found beneath the Antarctic ice. 'If Eden was the creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu' (p. 206). Unlike Dante, Godolphin does not discover Satan standing immobilized, frozen, but he does read the Devil's message: the knowledge of certain death and denial of eternal life. He interprets the corpse as a sign and, like Herbert Stencil, reasons from this the existence of a sinister V-plot. Victoria Wren adopts Machiavellian virtu in her role as an agent of what Sidney Stencil calls 'the Situation'. Finding faith and the Church inadequate to her purpose', she adds to them this element of personal control which is manifest in espionage. Victoria is attracted to political intrigue primarily because 'it became more effective the further divorced it was from moral intention'. And, as we have seen, the movement away from a coherent moral order is a characteristic effect of V. Mantissa, the Gaucho and Ferrante share Victoria's commitment to the idea of personal control, a commitment which is related by the n~rrator to a fin de siecle decadence, as he asks: 'what was the tag-end of an age if not that sort of imbalance, that tilt toward the more devious, the less forceful?' (p. 199). Victoria makes use of this decadence or deviousness, to achieve 'the conforming of events to the channels she'd set out for them as glorious testimony to her own skill' (p. 199). So the confused cluster of conspiracies culminates in a 'fair of violent death, framed and staged, it seemed, for her alone' (p. 209); it is a ritual of violence that William Plater interprets as a celebration of the marriage of the two orders - virtu or control and the Church, faith which is the birth of V. Indeed, it is the point at which Victoria shows an initial recognition of her possession by V: 'It was as if she saw herself embodying a feminine principle' (p. 209). She has been, thus far, seen in the aspects of virgin and bride; here she develops further to become a force. This should not be surprising, in its earliest forms the Holy Ghost was feminine - as the Hebrew shekinah. V does not forego her earlier characteristics in this development; she progresses through the accumulation of strategies through which her force may be manifest. The perverse V -version of the

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Trinity which is promised and foreshadowed here in Florence is not realized, however, until 1913 in Paris, when we see 'V in love'. The effect of historical dislocation in the representation of V, is to suggest omnipresence as the condition of V's existence by contrasting the historical perspectives constructed by Stencil, (vehicles) with a concept or principle that transcends the limitations of those perspectives (tenor). In this way the narrative is able to represent the historical Vepisodes in three dimensions while suggesting that the pretext of which V is the figura exists in four; in a realm outside that of one-way or chronological time. It is the tension between these dimensions that establishes the status of the manifestations of Vas figurae, and provides clues to a continuity beyond the ideologically constrained perspectives of cultural history. It is in Paris, in 1913, that the V-Trinity foreshadowed in Florence is realized, as Stencil perceives the final triumph of V over Victoria. It is in her relationship with Melanie I'Heuremaudit, 'la fetiche', that V, having progressed from virgin to bride, assumes the status of 'Mother'. As 'Mother', V corresponds not to the Christian Idea of God-the-Father, but more to the Paraclete cast in feminine form, a pervasive force. The Trinity which V now embodies is reified in the image of 'V, on the pouf, watching Melanie on the bed; Melanie watching herself in the mirror; the mirror-image perhaps contemplating V from time to time' (p. 409). Melanie and V impersonate the inanimate and so serve the same ultimate design - the annexing of the human by the 'Kingdom of Death' (p. 411). V recognizes 'the fetish of Melanie and the fetish of herself to be one. As all inanimate objects, to the one victimized by them, are alike'. In this way, 'the Kingdom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like V's, which represent a kind of infiltration' (p. 411). It is the infiltration of present reality by another world, a metaphoric interpretation of the world that is most fully realized as the 'V -metaphysic', identified now as the 'Kingdom of Death' which provides the dominant value structure of modern history. Working, initially, through the structure of the Catholic Church V has created, or symbolizes the creation of, an alternative 'communion' that possesses its own cognitive or perceptual mode - that of the tourist - a characteristic preference for the artificial and cosmetic; its own political philosophy, based upon futuristic dreams or nostalgic memories, both realized through the deviousness of espionage or the violence of revolution: in short, a communion expressed through decadence and predicated on a clear and willed progress towards the non-human. The reaction away from present or lived reality, which is the basic impulse of this progress, is a reaction in the direction of death.

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And as the narrator points out, the establishment of 'the inanimate Kingdom' will eventually include the personal death of V. Perhaps in response to some awareness of this, the narrator speculates, she would become 'a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh' (p. 411). For the 'kingdom of death' is served by the very fear of death itself and the attempt to preserve the body through prosthesis or by incorporating bits of inert matter, which resist decay. It is suggested, the establishment of the 'inanimate Kingdom' on earth, in contemporary society, has reached a late stage. It is V's claim to transform death that leads William Plater to describe her development in terms of a metaphysical principle. 13 But in fact this is the claim of all allegoric pretexts: discourses that transform the nature of reality by reinterpreting the value structure upon which its nature is based. V is able to transform death, to unite the extremes of life and death, by reducing life to a condition of inanimation, and by denying intrinsic value to all of cultural life. The violence which is an important aspect of V's figural representa-:tion, greets the performance of Porcepic's ballet. Rape of the Chinese Virgins (L 'Enlevement des Vierges Chinoises). Here, the 'Sacrifice of the Virgin' is realized literally in a fatal confusion of literal and the metaphoric, performance and reality, as Melanie falls victim to the inanimate. She is impaled, in what William Plater reads as a ritualistic· sacrifice to V. Performed in August, he interprets this ballet as a version of the Feast of the Virgin'S Assumption, also celebrated in August, which marks V's final transition to the status of 'Queen': henceforth to reign over decadence wherever the Kingdom of Death should establish itself.

The Movement Towards Closure Stencil refuses to formulate a definition of V. His refusal to do so is based upon fear; fear that the 'sense of animateness' he discovers through the quest will disappear with its conclusion; the fear that it will be revealed as a consequence of Stencil's own determination by the cultural discourses represented by V. A provisional movement towards closure, towards defining the ontological nature of V, is made in the Epilo'gue. Here, the narrative approaches V more closely than Stencil ever dares, through the point of view of Sidney Stencil; and likewise, those concepts that characterize the V-metaphysic are brought into a closer conjunction. Particularly, the nature of history as metaphor and its relation to the pretextual status

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of the V-metaphysic are discussed in explicit terms. The sailor Mehemet, for instance, claims that the world, like the individual, is dying of old age; that all change tends in the direction of death, in a constant progression of decay, and that civilization and the crises of politics simply disguise this inexorable process. It is Sidney Stencil, however, who casts this development in the terms of an historical principle: 'suppose instead sometime between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one every took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle - blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether - fatal' (p. 461). David Richter has identified the significance of 1859 as the year in which both Marx's Critique of Political Economy and Darwin's The Origin of Species were published thus marking the inception of a mechanistic image of man and society .14 This world view characterizes all of V's figural manifestations. Stencil continues to see the marks of this disease, old age or Vmetaphysic manifest in the world around him. Consequently, he develops an apocalyptic attitude towards history, particularly in terms of the involvement of the Catholic Church in political crises. She awaited a Third Kingdom. Violent overthrow is a Christian phenomenon. The matter of a Paraclete's coming, the comforter, the dove; the tongues of flame, the gift of tongues: Pentecost, Third person of the Trinity. None of it was implausible to Stencil. The Father had come and gone. In political terms, the Father was the Prince; the single leader, the dynamic figure whose virtu used to be a determinant of history. This had degenerated to the Son, genius of the liberal lovefeast which had produced 1848 and lately the overthrow of the Czars. What next? What Apocalypse? Especially on Malta, a matriarchal island. Would the Paraclete be also a moth