528
GEORGE LEVINE
some known ray at the end of the scale . . . - physics stark mad in
metaphysics." The old myth of unity is dissolved. What reli1ains for
Adams as for Pynchon is energy, the irrational, unintelligible experience,
particulars.
The "anti-paranoid" myth is the greatest risk Pynchon runs as a
writer because formally it means Slothrop's fate, that is, dissolution.
Parody can protect him from formlessness but not from the energies
released by the destruction of old forms, by the accumulation of in–
coherent particulars which might relate in any of a thousand ways-
and might not. Pynchon leaves it all open, disturbingly. And in the
process he plays games with relationships. Metaphor is the key here. In
V.,
Fausto Maistral, the Maltese poet, talks about how metaphor "is a
device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics
as legislation and God as a human form with beard [the poet is alone]
living a universe of things which simply are." Yet no one is more con-
\
vincing than Pynchon in the invention of metaphors which force us to
the equation of meaning with paranoia. As in
V.,
for example,
Gravity's
Rainbow
gives us a letter -
s
- to worry over. Each
s
brings to mind
the Schwarz-gerat which allows the V-2 rocket to defy gravity; Slothrop;
the German SS; the shape of two lovers lying together; the shape of the
j'
tunnels in the rocket center at Nordhausen, which is based on the
double lightning stroke and the sign of the double integral, and the
"double integrating circuit in the guidance system of the rocket,"
U.S.w.•
until the snake's tail is in his mouth, and the violent energy expended
doubles back on itself entropically reducing and homogenizing all ele–
ments.
S
is, of course, a double parabola, and the parabola, marking
the flight of the rocket, is the shape of gravity's rainbow itself. More–
over, the upper arch of the parabola marks the interface between con-
trol and submission, the point where the energy and control of the
Schwarz-gerat surrenders to "ballistics." But Pynchon can assimilate all
this to the action of his characters, to the movement of his plots, and
to his sense of the shape of Western culture. The arch of that parabola
came, in this mythology, in the First World War:
an English class was being decimated, the ones who'd volunteered
were dying for those who'd known something and hadn't, and de–
spite all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while
Europe died meanly in its own wastes, man loved. But the life-cry
of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle
and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a
collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal after–
thought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper.
