120
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a
person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgoccen
experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory: as
insupporcable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an
aisle of crees , chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof
raised in the economy of fear , stepping in the trepidation of flesh that
will become myth ; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but
human hunger pressing its beast to its prey .
And while it is true that
Nightwood
concludes with Robin Vote, the
eland-woman, on all fours, debased, imitating a rabid dog, the force of this
conclusion depends on the measure we have been given, that luminous
creation myth.
There are passages in
Gravity's Rainbow
where Pynchon writes with a
similar grace and lyrical precision . The long meditation that occurs when
Roger Mexico and Jessica visit a small church in Kent on Christmas Eve is
simply a
tour de force,
superb prose, a discourse that figures the conjunction
of an incoming V-2 and the twinkle of the Christmas star:
Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too , roaring like the Adversary,
seeking whom they may devour. Ie 's a long walk home tonight. Listen to
this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening,
even if they are 'not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest
tertor , listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news
of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this
one-something to raise the possibility of another night that could
actually , with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the
Adversary , destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our
stories , all false , about who we are: for the one night , leaving only the
clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail,
there 's too much shit in these screets, camels and other beasts stir heavily
outside, each hoof a chance to ,wipe him out, make him only another
Messiah . . . while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling
useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence.
Butthe measure in this passage is not really given, the interpolated phrase, •'all
false," undercuts Roger's longing, and what fills the meditation, what impels
it fotward , is Pynchon' sloathing for the continuity ofthe obscene in history, the
ovetwhelming sense that it has always been thus, always as dire. The only stars
that speak in this firmament are those that come crashing down to explode in
our faces . So wicked is the world depicted in
Gravity's Rainbow,
so burdened
with lunacy and despair, that indeed it deserves to be ended. In this regard, the
novel' sfinal section, "Counterforce," deserves close scrutiny . For it is here that
Slothrop sinks, an unredeemed Ishmael, that Blicero fires his last significant
rocket, the 00000 , and Pynchon clarifies his primary metaphors.
