PARTISAN REVIEW
521
cause They need our terror for their Survival. We are their harvests."
To play the critic's game with Pynchon is not only to read but to
participate in his scenario. That is, we become either the manipulated
We to his uncannily ingenious They (which, I think, is part of his fun
as it might be part of ours), or, more solemnly, play They to the
We of multifarious and discontinuous experience. Obviously, there's no
way to escape participation in the game. We should play it carefully.
The book describes a world of unintelligible and unintelligent ener–
gies, a world in which the primary fact is not thought or feeling or
belief but energy itself. The energy is so potent (manifest in the ima–
gined world and Pynchon's own prose ) that it crosses the barrier be–
tween matter and spirit (and that barrier, that "interface," as Pynchon
calls it, is a presiding preoccupation of the book): naturalism becomes
spiritualism, and seances, emanations and mystical visions 'become as
commonplace as technology and orgies. As the energy builds, sweeping
cartels, people, light bulbs, rockets, sex, races, films, dope, technology in
its path, it moves beyond the control of any elements that participate
in it. A critical mass develops, a mass to be celebrated because it can't
be contravened: "Critical mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical
means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of
being
connected
one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good."
The world, this book, are beyond return, beyond freedom. Technology
is assimilated to theology, and the mass to be celebrated is connected
with both Catholic and Calvinist ritual, though it may be a black mass.
Energy creates the same kind of mystique of objects that we find in
V.,
though here it is carried even further. Although humans may b('
transformed into objects (as V herself came apart like a bad joke) , ob–
jects themselves are alive, full of a significance we can't quite com–
prehend but we can feel. Pynchon's language is itself full of this kind
of energy, and through it he assimilates the world of science fiction and
horror movies to the texture of our own culture. In both worlds, objects
have assumed an importance larger than human, have, like Dracula,
made slaves and automatons of people who do not believe in his power
or believe too late. Their human energy is transformed into inhuman
energy in an act which simulates love. And of course our society is
driven (it would seem now uncontrollably) by a passion for produc–
tion and possession, driven in a way which finally wrests power from
humans and invests it in things. A consumer culture loves its possessions,
lives for them, is ultimately transformed by them.
