52b
GEORGE LEVINE
by subjecting them Lo the questions that our nonliterary culture forcibly
implies, Pynchon has created a great historical novel, a great fantasy, a
great parody. But more than that, he has found a potentially liberating
literary mode. By making us wallow in our fantasies, our products, our
bad jokes that we use to help redeem us from our numbness, he severs
our connection with any of the mythologies which have contributed to
our dehumanization, our transformation of people into objects. In
V.,
we watched how our myths, when acted out, not only removed us from
the particularities of our own lives, but helped us to reduce those who
didn't fit the myths to objects. Mass slaughter (we call it genocide these
days ) was one of the consequences.
Pynchon takes the post-Romantic exhaustion of feeling for granted
and deals with the ques t for new feeling. Death and sexual perversion
(in which the lover becomes object) are other consequences. In
Gravity's
Rainbow,
the Hereros of
V.
reappear as the Schwarzkommandos, partic–
ipating like their white master in the pursuit of the ultimate energy –
where sex and death come together - in the V-2. But the Hereros are
now "The Empty Ones," deracinated, homeless, whose fulfillment can
come only with death, and whose true object is suicide. Colonialism
comes back to haunt the white masters, and the fantasy of Black violence
(King Kong, along with Dracula, may well be the star of the show)
pervades the book. The potentiality for annihilation now is total, and
the Blacks and whites, colonials and colonists, are brothers, as the star
Black, Enzian, is the brother of one of the star whites, Tchitcherine, a
Russian rocket man and paranoid, whose body is full of metal plates
and who seeks to destroy his brother.
Literary and myth detectives will, clearly, have a picnic. Faulkner,
Melville, Conrad, Lawrence, Borges, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mal–
colm X (not to mention Cole Porter, Superman, Frankenstein, Dracula,
King Kong, "Have Gun Will Travel," Mickey Rooney, Clerk Maxwell,
President Truman) are all presences here. Ahab sought the whale, Mc–
Caslin sought the bear, Siothrop seeks the rocket. Women are mysterious
and untrustworthy and all-absorbing. Blacks are the occasion for guilt,
violence, hatred, sexual fear. We have the conjunction of sex and death,
the Puritan doctrine of the elect and the preterite, the reverence for
power, the mutual love of men (both homosexual and straight), the
attempted murder of the brother and the son, the American innocent
in a duplicitous and morally exhausted Europe - except that America
is morally exhausted, too. This catalogue can go on, and each item in
it is both parodied and developed seriously.
