MORRIS DICKSTEIN
197
ground Man
these Oedipal tangles are doubled and redoubled into
a plot of appalling complexity , even repetitiveness , so that individual
identity pales-it becomes hard to keep track of the characters or to
separate them, and the solution comes to interest the author far less
than the obsessive mesh of parallel relationships. In
V.
the detective
Herbert Stencil is himself a cipher (as his name implies), who merely
organizes an immense range -of partial perspectives into one large
diagram, a pattern of possible coherence and meaning. But where
detective novels really do deliver a final secret that solves and abol–
ishes all puzzles-Edmund Wilson objected that " this secret is
nothing at all" compared to the preceding mystery-Pynchon is a
modernist who leaves open the possibility that this final solution may
be a mirage . . . a mirage or a shocking confirmation of a plot-ridden
and mysteriously overorganized world .
The doubling and proliferation in the plot of these novels–
which approaches a point of surfeit, even nausea, in the dense,
choked pages of
Gravity 's Rainbow-always
points to an ambiguity
of identity, to mysterious correspondences behind the plenitude of
the world 's surfaces. In Pynchon the ambiguity is historical, ontolog–
ical: who am I, where do I come from , who's pulling my strings, how
can I wrench some meaning from my hieroglyphic surroundings?
In Vonnegut the ambiguity is moral: what's the relation within
Howard W. Campbell,
Jr. ,
the double agent who is the protagonist
in
Mother Night,
between the writer. the lover, the Nazi propa-
/ gandist and the American spy? Vonnegut himself tells us that the
moral of the story (' 'the only story of mine whose moral I know' ') is
that "we are what we pretend to be , so we must be careful what we
pretend to be. ' ,
What makes Vonnegut appeal so much to adolescents is prob–
ably a certain adolescent pessimism and moral absolutism, a modern
Weltschmerz , which often threatens to reduce complex human
problems to simple dichotomies , easy formulas. This is especially true
when he speaks in his own person, in essays, prefaces, and interviews ,
where the mask of the wise simpleton quickly becomes cloying. But
in the novels something else happens . Simplicity of statement begins
to have a quite different function . The manner becomes flat and
factual, the chapters very brief, like the precis of an action rather than
a full-scale novelization. Descriptive and psychological texture are
