| If we pay careful
attention to the simple page order or bound sequence of the discourse, then
we may discover a more satisfactory answer for Bersani's ontological question.
What is Gravity's Rainbow? it is a novel. And what is a novel? a
commodity whose production and distribution are entirely controlled by a
multinational conglomerate with substantial ties to the defense-industrial
establishment. The novel itself offers a framework of this analysis. The
Slothrops, we recall, once owned paper mills, producing "a medium or
ground for shit, money, and the Word... the three American truths, powering
the country's fate" (27-28). We cannot hold Pynchon's text, however
magical its implications, above the constraints and associations of its
medium and that medium is print and paper. Shit, money, and the Word, that
which paper receives or embodies, are all aspects of the One-Way World,
caught up in a linear process of consumption in which resources are removed
from availability and energies dissipated. The Word is as heavily implicated
in this function as anything else. In its own way (in its "classical"
aspect of work rather than text), a novel is also a dissipative system:Gravity's
Rainbow is a strongly determined, serial structure, laid out in strict
order from first page to last. We may choose to construct a transgressive
text out of this commodified work, but we cannot deny the work's existence
or its significance. Even if we choose not to read the last pages of Pynchon's
novel, what we do read is still in every sense bound up with them. So the work called Gravity's Rainbow fixes a firm ironic limit on any such textual excursions. We can speculate all we want about counterforce, counterculture, creative paranoia, or rhizomatic anarchy; but the nature of Gravity's Rainbow as novel means that any autonomy we may postulate in the fictive Zone must be strictly temporary. It will last (before encountering contradiction) only until we begin the final sequence in the last twelve pages. There may be great significance in such tenuous outbreaks, "temporary autonomous zones" or TAZs as Hakim Bey has called them. "Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance," Bey notes, "the TAZ can 'occupy' these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace" (101). But what is this peace relative to? Or to return to the language of criticism: to what discursive system, what medium or mode of information, do our festal visions belong? If they are mated to a system that will inevitably deliver a last word (even one which we must supply ourselves) then they belong undeniably to a discourse of Apocalypse. Yet the door of revelation swings both ways. Irony is a commutative operation, the antithesis of a One-Way World. If Pynchon's apocalypse marks the inevitable limit of redemptive vision, then we must inquire into the limits of its fatal necessity as well. After all, if we read the last scenes in the Orpheus theatre as a prophecy of doom for Nixonian America, then we can also celebrate the failure of Pynchon's clairvoyance. Nixon came and went, as did Mr. Reagan and his jokes about bombing the Soviets. Miraculously, our spells against falling objects have held up. We go on being at the movies, a festival of apparently inexhaustible sequels. Yet even in our survival or persistence we cannot simply disengage ourselves from the text, or from the work (or Werke) it inhabits. We must somehow understand both elements of our Real Text, "Mindless Pleasures" and "Gravity's Rainbow," eros and thanatos, aposiopesis and punchline. Which brings us to another ontological question. We know what Gravity's Rainbow is a novel: a discursive structure that obeys the law of good form and duly signifies its own finality. But why is Gravity's Rainbow such a novel? What made Pynchon produce such a text? Why not indeed call the book "Mindless Pleasures" and leave out the parabolism, the paschal sacrifice of Gottfried, the Perfect Rocket and its covenantial arc? Why does Pynchon's plot move so relentlessly toward extinction? What made him wish us all dead? We may attempt to answer these questions by examining the way that apocalypticism intersects with that other major Pynchonian discourse, paranoia. It is worth remembering that Daniel Paul Schreber, Sigmund Freud's establishing case of paranoid dementia, had his own visions of the end of the world. Like various characters in Pynchon's fictions, Schreber believed that everything in the universe was connected, in his delusionary system by "spermatic rays" emanating from the body of God. In a late stage of his first illness, Schreber fantasized that God had destroyed all life by withdrawing these extensions of His being. The creatures remaining after this catastrophe (with the crucial exception of Schreber himself) were simulacra or automata, imitations of true humanity. Shortly after this delusion appeared, Schreber's mania went into remission. To explain this event, Freud interprets Schreber's apocalyptic fantasy as a metaphor for the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis so that it may be re-invested in newer, healthier relationships (48). The validity of this interpretation is highly dubious, and it would certainly be foolish to imply some simpleminded congruence between Schreber's imagination and Thomas Pynchon's. Pynchon invokes "paranoia" more often from the doper's perspective than the shrink's, and it is pointless to speculate about his personal psychopathology. Still there seems some warrant for bringing the case of Schreber to bear on the end of Gravity's Rainbow, if only as a hermeneutic probe or sounding rocket fired into the darkness of the Text. In Freud's reading of Schreber's case history, apocalypse proceeds not from prophecy but from wish fulfillment. Schreber's vision of extinction signifies the erasure or emptying-out of his paranoid system of discourse. Apocalypse here is a deeply paradoxical convergence, both the end of something and the beginning of something else. Perhaps something like this paradoxical or paranoid logic is also at work in the very different context of Gravity's Rainbow. If it is, then we would have to understand the end of that novel not as an appendix or vestigial cadenza, but as a turn back toward well-formed narrative and teleological history. Yet in the Schreberian sense this turn must also be a major irony, a paradoxical renunciation of the grand narrative even as it is brought to its highest expression, where the latency of universal connectedness becomes manifest in an eruption that is "blindingly One" (703). Irony, as we have observed, opens a two-way channel of signification. In an ironic context, ideas of the opposite collapse; achieving the one brings us to zero, just as the withdrawal of cathexis may signify the re-investment of libido. Since there is always a Hand to turn the time, we come to zero only in preparation for continuing beyond the zero perhaps, like the unfortunate Schreber, into repetition and relapse; but just as possibly into a new, post-paranoid order of signification. Pynchon's apocalypse cannot tell us which of these outcomes to expect. It is not really of the prophetic order, not a vision of the future, terminal or otherwise. It might, however, constitute a remarkable revelation of the state of narrative, just as in Freud's imagining Schreber's apocalypse reveals the course and crisis of his illness. What is Gravity's Rainbow? it might be the apocalypse of apocalypses, a novel that invokes not the end of the world, but of the word, or of the narrative order as we have known it. After Gravity's Rainbow, the end of the world is not what it used to be. It is on its way to something rather different, an order in which the enterprise of narrative may answer to a new paradigm: a new apocalypse. |