124
PARTISAN REVIEW
confines them, looking for an opening, lookieg (to use an apt phrase) for the
light at the end of the tunnel. No such light is ever shed. Yet Pynchon's
Manichean view of their dilemma is itself constrained, not wholly realized or
believed. There are two rockets fired at the end of
Gravity's Rainbow,
the
00000 and the 00001, the first containing Gottfried and the second Enzian,
"a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World's suicide,
the two perpetually in struggle. " Both rockets are nonetheless on death trips,
both seek the only bright and splendid way out, the way of the Elect, leaving
Slothrop alive beneath them, earthbound and mediocre. The true struggle in
Gravity
IS
Rainbow
is thus between Pointsman and Blicero, Demon and
Demon, between modes of death . And here Pynchon's fiction reenters the
sphere ofhistory . For these two eminent figures are allegorical representatives
not ofLight and Dark, Good and Evil, Spirit and Matter, but of the Bourgeois
and the Heroic.
In his "hard, ruthless, comic" approach to the history of the Second
World War, Pynchon refuses one by one the liberal pieties and moral postures
that typically inform such histories. He writes instead a comic novel whose
locus is V-bombed London, the concentration camp, destroyed Berlin,
throwing in at the end, off-stage, the dull bang at Hiroshima. Yet out of all
the burlesque and parody, the caricature and comic routines, he strives to
retrieve, or at least reinvent, the value of evil. For what threatens Slothrop's
humanity is not the violence of war, but the blankness of peace . He is most
alive when the London air is taut with the screaming imminence of his death.
Life is lived best amid those tight chances, lived most intensely when there is
no complacent middle securing it, only sharp perilous extremes. The ethic
Pynchon finally renders in
Gravity's Rainbow
is the ethic of the desperado,
not the ethic of the survivor inclosing himself in cool ironies. So the novel is
extravagant in style, conception, technique, an extravagance that often
overspills into self-indulgence, but which nevettheless constitutes the core of
the book.
It
is through this extravagance that Pynchon insists on his otherness,
his anarchic criminality. The meaningless world described in
V.
and
Lot 49
frames this fiction.
It
is the outlying horrific space that surrounds the
Gotterdammerung of 1945 . What menaces Stencil and Oedipa in their
constant search for the plot is the nausea of the sufficient sameness of everyday
life, the common plotless course of bourgeois existence that wears down
without significance to an inconspicuous death in a Home for the Aged.
Blicero struggles to explode this "cooperative structure of lies," this
rationalized world where everything and everyone is named and known.
The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible . There is no
dignity. The mothers have been masculinized
to
old worn moneybags of
