PARTISAN REVIEW
527
But all of these myths appear in the context of popular and non–
literary culture, and as many critics have already noted, the predominant
art influence is that of the film. All these myths appear in the frames
of motion pictures so that we are at once entertained, engaged, and
conscious of the potential artificiality. Films are collections of still
photographs which create the illusion of movement and continuity. But
they are rather like the coins in the Borges parable in his story "TIan,
Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius." That is, the coins lost yesterday and found
today need not be the same. The picture in frame one is not the picture
in frame two. Their connection is an illusion created by motion and
electric energy. Thus the film creates in popular form the great Amer–
ican myths. Pynchon takes them as he finds them and pushes them at
least one step beyond. Everywhere he takes enormous risks of banality
or vulgarity (on the model of the motion picture) because he is un–
afraid to act out the fantasies of fear, of racial madness, of power,
which are the staple of our popular media. He makes them both fan–
tastic and felt reality.
The only American myth that survives is the anti-myth of Henry
Adams. Adams is a presence in
V.
In
Gravity's Rainbow,
Pynchon has
found a way to embody his anarchic vision.
The Education of Henry
Adams
can, in fact, provide much of that gloss on the book that desper–
ate literary seekers after coherence will be looking for, but the gloss
cannot be comforting since it is an affirmation of incoherence. Here,
for example, is Adams, not Pynchon:
The sum of forces attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man
is attracted; he suffers education or growth; he is the sum of the
forces that attract him; his body and his thought are alike the
product; the movement of the forces controls the progress of the
mind, since he can know nothing but the motions which impinge
on his senses, whose sum makes education.
The technology, the preoccupation with Pavlovian conditioning, the
persistent reduction of people to natural forces - all of these in Pyn–
chon echo Adams's way of thinking. So too does the sense that the
energy being produced by the world is being doubled every ten years (as
Adams says), or is moving out of control (as Pynchon implies). In any
case, Adams shares the view that the energy moves man into "a super–
sensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance
collisions of movements imperceptible to his sense, perhaps even im–
perceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other and so to
