Beyond the Zero

"You were in London," she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, "while they were coming down. I was in 's Gravenhage" -- fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile's lingering -- "while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven't even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there's so much more, so much none of us know..."

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -- guessed and refused to believe -- that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children...

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 212.

It took an entire month. An all-consuming month. But I finished Gravity's Rainbow.

The book comes saddled with enormous expectations. The New Republic called it "The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." Its publisher touted it as "a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first." Culturally, it has become less a work of art in-and-of-itself than a literary rite of passage; a sort of post-modern trial of ordeals to test scholastic tenacity and fortitude.

Which is a shame. Because the book is a real joy. Occasionally tedious and difficult, yes. But compulsively readable. It is a text of inexhaustible meaning; a boundless source that could inspire a lifetime of hermeneutical play.

Pynchon sifts through the war-torn semiotic debris of Western Civilization and thematically toys with rocket science and chemical engineering, Tarot cards and the Kabbala, Pavlovian psychology and scatter-plot statistics, Golden Age Hollywood Cinema and Harlem jazz, the military-industrial complex and international capitalism, Teutonic mythology and Rilkean poetry. It is a dazzling web of meaning and countermeaning; a text which operates on mutually exclusively registers which ultimately deny any unequviocal meaning.

The image of the rainbow -- the rocket's parabolic journey from launch to impact -- becomes a symbol of "saturnalian density" by book's end. It comes to represent Europe's romantic and fetishistic obsession with death incarnated in the V-2 rocket. But it also carries with it a terrible sense of historical fatality. That circumstances once set in motion cannot be undone, that the very arc of the rocket necessitates its own fall.

And while I cannot offer any extended exegesis - that would necessitate a few more read-throughs and some heavy charting - I thought I would share with you one of my favorite scenes.

While traveling through the Zone, the vertiginous space of immediate post-war Germany, Tyrone Slothrop, the novel's picaresque anti-hero, is enlisted in a quest to find an orphaned child's lost lemming. After days of fruitless searching, Slothrop begins to suspect that the lemming may not in fact exist and perhaps the child is being lead by some maniac faith, some suicidal impulse...

"That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor, William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape has already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table."

"Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles."

"Aw, shit."

This prompts a brief analepsis in the narrative focusing on the peculiar William Slothrop, a swineherd spiritually tortured by the annual slaughter of his entrusted and trusting hogs.

William must've been waiting for the one pig that wouldn't die, that would validate all the ones who'd had to, all his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying... possessed by innocence they couldn't loose... by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life....

William spun this into a theological tract, On Preterition, on those that God passes over for the few he chooses for salvation. Taken to its logical extreme, this meant sympathy for Judas Escariot, a figure as essential to the historical jigsaw of salvation as Jesus. This, of course, was a heresy none of the spiritually or economically Elect wanted to hear and the pamphlet was promptly banned and burned.

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back -- maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up...