We'll meet again. But surely They never left us alone in the first place? "I'll be back," as Arnold Schwarzenegger always sez, restating the patently obvious. The Beast is never far away unless he's off shooting yet another sequel (Nightmare on Elm Street : Everybody's Dead). For all our interpretive liberty our hope, if not of resurrection, then at least of shining through we cannot terminate the serial of nightmares. We cannot escape the code we crack too late, the bomb we fail to disarm, "the father you will never quite manage to kill," as Pynchon describes Weissmann/Blicero, the sadist whose future is The World (747). Indeed, Gravity's Rainbow concludes with its own dark hymn to second coming. If in the end everybody sings, then here is our text:

There is a Hand to turn the time


Though thy Glass today be run


Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low


Find the last poor Pret'rite one...


Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,


All through our crippl'd Zone,


With a face on ev'ry mountainside,


And a Soul in ev'ry stone.... (760)

William Slothrop's heretic hymn is as deeply ambiguous as it is apocalyptic. In overt doctrine it seems fairly close to orthodoxy, looking forward from the death of the body ("Though thy Glass today be run") to the ultimate day of judgment when all the Preterite, those souls not destined for salvation, will be touched by the Light of uncreation. But we know that this radiance is the same one Kubrick shows us in the last frames of Strangelove, a Light first operationally deployed at Hiroshima. That recognition might yield a gloss for the cryptic line, "a face on ev'ry mountainside," which perhaps refers to the silhouettes of objects and people discovered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Richard Rhodes explains: "The fireball flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of its immolation fixed on the mineral, vegetable, and animal surfaces of the city itself.... A human being left the memorial of his outline in unspalled granite on the steps of a bank" (715).

But what doctrine, apocalyptic or otherwise, could illuminate "a Soul in ev'ry stone?" There would seem to be more to the Slothrop hymn than a conventional vision of the Last Days. In fact the mysticism here is more Gnostic than Christian, more postmodern than Puritan. The phrase "a Soul in ev'ry stone" evokes one of Pynchon's major themes, the amalgamation or synthesis of animate and inanimate nature, a process which deconstructs the polar opposition of body and world, life and death. The idea crops up frequently in his writing, for example in V. when Benny Profane discusses the fate of humanity with SHROUD, a "synthetic human" used for radiation studies:

"What do you mean, we'll be like you... some day? You mean dead?"


Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean.


"If you aren't, then what are you?"


Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go. (267)

In Gravity's Rainbow this convergence of animate and inanimate is most strongly associated with coaltars, the "preterite dung" that is "passed over" from the first great flowering of life on earth. Placed in the hands of man the "spoiler," this chemical wealth inaugurates a spreading empire of death (165; 720-21). In William Slothrop's revelation, preterite humanity suffers the same fate as the life that flourished before the last Great Extinction: it is snuffed out and plowed under, returned to the inert strata of "Earth's mind" (354; 589). This is no resurrection, no transfiguration into higher being, but instead a truly ecological apocalypse, the reclamation of resources within a closed system. It is a recycling of the karmic wheel a mythos, incidentally, that seems to provide the design principle for Pynchon's next novel, Vineland.

Applying this cyclical logic to the text itself, we might turn back from the end to the beginning. The first words of the novel, the epigraph to Part I ("Beyond the Zero"), come from the credo of Wernher von Braun: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death" (1). William Slothrop's hymn puts this faith in a radically different Light, portraying the persistence beyond Ground Zero as a literal return to the ground. Though "spiritual existence" may indeed continue, higher life will be blasted back to its elements. Spirit, pneuma, or ruach may survive within the stone, but the human race as we know it will not.

The most significant crux in the final hymn, however, is "a Hand to turn the time," a synecdoche for the supernatural agency that oversees this apocalypse. The concept of a transcendent controller or motivator seems decidedly Gnostic, suggesting that human experience is ordained by a distant God, an ineffable influence operating from a higher plane. This idea may have some analogy to the post-Newtonian watchmaker God, the expression of a cosmology obsessed with balance, reciprocation, and regular function (555). William Slothrop's heresy begins with the assertion that Judas Iscariot is as holy as Jesus Christ, since without Judas' sin there would have been no occasion for Jesus' sacrifice. If the Hand in William's hymn is the Hand of God, or of Providence, then its handiwork includes both saved and damned, Elect and Preterite. Which might explain the Hand of Providence which at one point "creeps among the stars, giving [Tyrone] Slothrop the finger" (461). The God of the Slothrops is capable of gestures both sacred and profane (with the Slothrops themselves falling no doubt into the latter category).

So if any voices break the silence at the end of Gravity's Rainbow, the apocalyptic vision they invoke would be a peculiar sense of the End indeed. It implies not a redemption of the just but a revolution of the zero, a campaign of extinction, a return to initial conditions so that the Wheel may start again. But what is the nature of the Wheel? This may well be the ultimate ontological question raised by Pynchon's novel. The most significant thing about William Slothrop's clockwork God is that it seems less divinity than cyborg, a divided or extended being, part spiritual essence or governor, part mechanical system. The mechanized "time" which the Hand turns, after all, is in every sense of the word a technology, an articulated tool or, as Marshall McLuhan observed, a prosthetic extension of the being that creates it (5).

Is this divine tool, which seems cognate with History itself, something as simple as the hourglass that measures each mortal life? If that were so, then the turning or resetting of the time would imply some form of restoration probably reincarnation rather than redemption, but a second chance nonetheless. Yet the remainder of William Slothrop's text belies this possibility, dwelling instead on holocaust and extinction. The prospect of faces on mountainsides and souls in stones seems to invoke the Parabola not the Wheel, that shape of no second chances, at least for humanity. The Wheel or machine to which William's God is connected must be something more complicated than an hourglass (which is after all hyperboloid, not paraboloid). It may be a system like the one postulated by another Pynchonian prophet, a figure who was probably Willam Slothrop's fictive precursor. This is Robert Scurvham, founder of a sect of "most pure Puritans" described in The Crying of Lot 49:

Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast, intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like a ship's master, had been last to go. (116)

If at this point we subject the machine of Slothrop's apocalypse to Enzian's supreme question If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? we may be in for a disconcerting answer. Suppose William Slothrop's apocalyptic time-machine is a Scurvhamite device; then it is also in Stanley Kubrick's sense a Doomsday Machine, since its purpose is to seduce humanity into absolute extinction. The sunshine scenario would thus face a serious challenge, since Gravity's Rainbow appears to close not on a hymn to transcendence but on an obscure prophecy of mechanism triumphant. There is a Hand to turn the time; time is the system that contains us; and living inside the System, Pynchon elsewhere remarks, "is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide... of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity" (413).

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