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in the Zone ." To Blicero also belong Katje Borgesius and Gottfried, blonde
and blond, a matched pair of selfless O's whom Blicero instructs in the
chastisement of the flesh, the negation of its will.
It
is the ecstatically
sodomized Gottfried, a bleached and neutered boy sheathed in Impolex, a
plastic skin, whom Blicero sends up in the 00000 rocket as his cerebral seed .
That orgasm strains against the pull of the physical world , the pull of history ,
the pull of human desire, strains to reach the whiteness beyond space and
time, Poe's whiteness, Melville's whiteness, the "colorless all-color" from
which, Ishmael confides in
Moby Dick,
we all shrink. But Brennschluss
inevitably comes too soon fouhe 00000, it burns out like the novel itself
striving at this far reach, falls back toward Los Angeles into our time even as
the novel itself spirals back into literature, into self-reflexive fiction, its own
specific gravity .
Where are we, then, at the conclusion of
Gravity's Rainbow?
Looking at
the moon. "Is the cycle over now," Blicero speculates, "and a new one ready
to begin? Will our new Deathkingdom be the Moon?" Govinda Lal's fugitive
manuscript in
Mr. Sammler's Planet
begins with much the same question:
" How long will this earth remain the only home of Man?' , In Bellow's novel,
however, we are on familiar ground since both Dr. Lal and Mr. Sammler are
ironic humanists whose moon-talk is comfortably situated in the civility of
philosophical discourse, but in Pynchon's fiction the ground is far from
defined, far from safe. For one thing, this admirable Ahab wears the uniform
ofa Schutzhaftlingsfuhrer.
Gravity's Rainbow
begins with an epigraph citing
Wernher von Braun's belief in a spiritual existence after death, and of course
von Braun was one of the principal engineers who designed the V-2. Like the
fictive Blicero who stands apart from the concerns ofthe preterite, the muddle
of politics, von Braun has always insisted that his work on the rocket was
dedicated to a higher vision. Unlike Hitler and Goebbels who saw in it the
instrument ofrevenge, Wagnerian tympani, and unlike Gerhard Degenkolb,
Walter Dornberger and Albert Speer who were fascinated by the technologi–
cal aspects of the rocket, von Braun's eyes were presumably lifted upward,
beyond good and evil, toward the purity of space . Pynchon appropriates that
version ofvon Braun and transforms it, turning von Braun's convenient piety
into the knowledge of the Manichean who knows, above all, that liberation is
attained only against nature, against the pull of gravity. The thrust of von
Braun's rocket is thus the same act as the thrust of Blicero's cock up
Gottfried's ass, a denial of the woman's belly, earth's womb.
Through the mock-historicity of
V.
andLot49,
as we have seen, Pynchon
himself elusively plays Stencil's game of" approach and avoid," beguiling his
readers with mazes of information that lead nowhere. In their dark, Stencil,
Oedipa and Siothrop feel their way along the walls of the womb-world that
