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PARTISAN REVIEW
historical and narrative, this expense of intelligence, divulges only a brutal
joke. The true mystery is not there : it is under Soldiers' Field in Chicago . Late
in the novel, as Slothrop sits listlessly in Berlin, a scrap of newspaper informs
him : MB DRO ROSH!.
In escaping Pointsman's surveillance in southern France, Slothrop
becomes the equivalent of a randomly bouncing molecule slowly and
inexorably wearing down . He escapes only Pointsman's plot, not the box of
history or the box of his nature . Nor do any of the lovers, rogues, artists and
swindlers whose fortunes either coincide or collide with his. Those few who
esteem tenderness in the novel, notably Leni Pokier, a young German
Marxist , and Roger Mexico, are inevitably deprived, betrayed by their lovers,
betrayed by their idealism. Slothrop' s search for the rocket leads him into the
bowels of the earth, the Mittelwerke at Peenemunde, and into the darkness of
the body itself where he circles, a guideless Dante, all the terraces of sexual
depravity. Episode by episode, borrowing from De Sade, Havelock Ellis, and
undoubtedly Burroughs , Pynchon catalogues the various positions and
possibilities. This is the furiously coupling and uncoupling world that
Pointsman strives to master demonically, whose exchanges he attempts to
systematize.
It
eludes him . When first met in the narrative , he is trying to
seize a stray dog for his laboratory and comically fails, getting his foot caught
instead in a loose toilet bowl. Near the end of the novel he castrates the wrong
man and is thoroughly disgraced. But his disgrace is not necessarily a good
sign in
Gravity 's Rainbow,
an indication that tyranny is as finite as tyrants.
It
proposes rather the hopelessness of history and the ignorance of knowledge .
The contraposed emergence ofWeissmann
I
Blicero in
Gravity 's Rainbow
inscribes the novel's other narrative, its other discourse . For where Slothrop 's
plot-line is fouled with numerous plots, comically entangled with questions ,
false identities , doppelgangers , lost lovers, vindictive enemies, strewn with
surreal episodes , Blicero moves steadily and surely toward his appointed goal.
He is the Bad Priest, the heresiarch whose doctrine is Gnostic transcendence,
Manichean purification, whose science exists only for the uses of magic , whose
disciples understand from the start that what he pursues in his cruelty is the
clarity of the absolute. Unlike Pointsman who serves the Demon, Blicero is the
master of whiteness . His African pupil and former lover, Enzian, discovers in
Europe the meaning of that whiteness: "love, among these men, once past
the simple feel and orgasming of it , had to do with masculine technologies,
with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he
enter the service of the rocket . . . . Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket
was an entire system
won,
away from the feminine darkness, held against the
entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature : that was the first
thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn , his first step toward citizenship
