114
PARTISAN REVIEW
Gravity 's Rainbow .
Characters recur (notably Mondaugen and Weissman
from
V.),
themes and motifs recur, anarchic parties begun in the short story,
" Entropy " (1960), reconvene , there are historical and geographical
intersections, Henry Adams and James Clerk Maxwell are once more recited,
and Tyrone Slothrop , recognizably doomed, undertakes in this novel the
same quest that harried and frustrated Herbert Stencil in
V.
and Oedipa Maas
in
Lot
49 . But to conclude from all this evident continuity that Pynchon still
coolly inhabits the world projected in the earlier fiction is to misread the
significance of
Gravity 's Rainbow.
The first two novels are essentially Melvillean masquerades in which
Pynchon himself operates as the confidence man . They are, in effect,
positionless , centered only by the movement of the questions asked . In
Gravity 's Rainbow
Pynchon moves from poised inquiry to statement .
"J
amf
was only a fiction ," Slothrop finally realizes, "to help him explain what he
felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time
exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny what he could not possibly admit:
that he might be in love , in sexual love, with his, and his race's death."
Slothrop is finally abandoned , thrown away as the protagonist, and in his
place Captain Blicero (Weissmann transmogrified) speaks with a compelling
directness . When we first meet Weissmann in
v.,
he is a German officer
stationed in Southwest Africa during the twenties, a Nazi sympathizer
spiritually in transit from Roehm's SA to Himmler's SS-simply another
version of Hawkes' cannibal , Zizendorf. Magnified as Blicero in
Gravity 's
Rainbow,
he is a protean figure, the keeper of the Rocket's secret, the secret
Slothrop finally in fear and trembling apprehends .
It
is Blicero who supervises
the creation of the Rocket , who launches it to rise and struggle with the
gravitational pull of the mundane . "I want to break out-to leave this cycle of
infection and death ," he asserts at the end of the novel. "I want to be taken in
love : so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered,
inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become.. . . " As we shall
see , this rhapsody of transcendence does not celebrate the profuse richness of
the world, its teeming
thereness,
nor does it propose, as one reviewer suggests,
a " defense against suicide .' , Blicero is not a Pierre Bezukhov yielding at last to
the round wholeness of the compossible. He sings instead a very old Cathar
song , the "white" song sung by the "wolf of Pontus," Marcion , by his
disciples Tatian and Apelles, and most importantly by Manes.
From the start Pynchon has played knowledgeably with the Manichean
perspective in his writing , spelling it out on numerous occasions, but always
stating it as the probable, as a thesis, the curious strain that runs through
Calvinism and which becomes curiouser and curiouser as history leans on its
NewJerusalem . In
Lot
49 Oedipa is told of an obscure band of seventeenth-
