A substantial
amount of evidence supports such a reading. In its last pages Gravity's
Rainbow moves into a series of fragmentary, elliptical passages for
which at least two structural metaphors suggest themselves: stray frames
from a distintegrating film, and the track of a ballistic missile arriving
on target. The rationale for these figures will become clear shortly (on
the film metaphor, see Seed, 218). Some of these jumpcut sequences take
place in Holland in early 1945, detailing the final moments of Captain Blicero's
rocket battery. This narrative line ends in human sacrifice, with the launching
of Blicero's lover, Gottfried, aboard an A4 fitted with the numinous Schwarzgerät.
Other segments cut to Berlin in the summer of the same year, or to places
not on any map or calendar (e.g., "The Takeshi and Ichizo Show").
But though the articulation of these scattered sequences is never spelled
out, one possible narrative seems highly suggestive.
This reading is based partly on intimations of large formal patterning or
architecture in the novel. Echoes and returns are a regular feature of Gravity's
Rainbow , so much so that Pynchon often seems to be flaunting them,
as when Slothrop in his German meanderings unaccountably recovers the harmonica
he lost down a Boston toilet five or six years before (622-23). Pynchon
plays up Slothrop's failure to recognize this "Kute Korrespondence,"
but there is more than just metafictional irony to such connections. Characters,
objects, and events seem to recur roughly as far from the end of the novel
as their first introduction lay from the beginning. Slothrop loses his harp
at the Roseland Ballroom during the first 100 pages; he recovers it in Germany
during the last 150 pages. For all its antipathy to grand or absolute structures,
Gravity's Rainbow does seem at least to flirt with overt symmetry.
The shape implied by this symmetry appears to be a paraboloid curve, the
(supposed) trajectory of a ballistic missile in flight.
The movement toward holocaust in the end of Gravity's Rainbow can
be demonstrated thematically as well as formally. The last segment but three
in the novel's closing (de)cadence is called "Orpheus Puts Down Harp"
(754-57). This passage locates us in contemporary Los Angeles, in a rundown
movie house called the Orpheus Theatre. We meet the proprietor, Richard
M. Zhlubb, who seems to be an amalgam of Nixon and (parabolism again) the
monstrous Adenoid that haunts Sir Blatherard Osmo in the early pages of
the novel (14-16). Manager Zhlubb takes the reader, who as Pearce points
out is here apostrophized directly as "you," for a brief spin
in "the managerial Volkswagen." This automotive detail anchors
a chain of more local parallels that link this episode in contemporary California
to the intercut scenes from 1945 Germany. Aside from the fact that those
little German cars were a direct legacy of Adolf Hitler, there is the congruence
of letters (V-l-s-w-en) in Volkswagen and Vergeltungswaffen or "retaliation
weapons," the generic name for the V-1 and V-2. The burden of these
correspondences becomes clear when Manager Zhlubb relates "a fantasy
about how I'll die" traveling along the Santa Monica Freeway, accidentally
suffocated by a plastic garment bag blown over his head by the wind. This
vision echoes Gottfried in his fatal rocket, wrapped in the Imipolex shroud
of the Schwarzgerät. We are being haunted here by what William Gibson
would call a "semiotic ghost," an undead dream of fascist utopia
(29). Swords may turn into plowshares, Rockets into Beetles, but the managerial
ethos or Führerprinzip goes on, locked into its dream of immolation.
During the ride with Zhlubb along the freeways, a large number of garbage
trucks come into view. "It's a Collection Day," another parabolic
mirroring, this time of the ingathering of preterite souls in Pirate Prentice's
dream during the first pages of the novel (3-4). It quickly becomes clear
that Collection Day, "Returning to the Center, with all the gathered
fragments of the Vessels," carries its full eschatological force. Manager
Zhlubb's death fantasy appears to have been predictive. The "Orpheus"
sequence breaks off on a (literal) note of rising panic:
The sound of a siren takes you both unaware.
Zhlubb looks up sharply into his mirror. "You're not holding, are
you?"
But the sound is greater than police.
It wraps the concrete and the smog, it fills the basin and mountains further
than any mortal could ever move... could move in time....
"I don't think that's a police siren."
Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. "I don't
think " (757)
The next sections, "The Clearing" and "Ascent," cut
back to the launching of Gottfried's rocket and its few minutes of flight.
"Ascent" takes us to apogee, the point at which the missile exhausts
its upward momentum, hangs for an instant, then pitches over and starts
its ballistic fall: "The first star hangs between his feet. Now
" (760). But in the final section, "Descent," we leave Gottfried
and find ourselves earthbound, in an old movie house whose exact whereabouts
are unclear. It may be the Orpheus or it may be another place entirely.
The reader is now addressed not in the second person but in the first person
plural:
The screen is a dim page spread before
us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned
out. It was difficult even for us old fans who've always been at the movies
(haven't we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. (760)
Like the episode on the freeway, this passage may connect to Pirate Prentice's
dream-evacuation in the first pages, which also features a withdrawal into
a last dark space, and which observes that the machinery of salvation is
"all theatre" since it is already "too late." The passage
may also resonate against a rocket-bombed London cinema mentioned early
in the text. But the most compelling space-time coordinates for this scene
are Los Angeles in the 1960s. That was the last stop in Pynchon's previous
fiction, The Crying of Lot 49, and it may also be the imaginative
tether of Gravity's Rainbow, a point of departure and return. The
final theatre might be read, as Tony Tanner has suggested, as the place
author and reader both inhabit, the place where we've always been at the
movies (90). It may be that general theatre of operations called the World.
This conceit was already old when Shakespeare used it, but Pynchon updates
it for new media, emending "All the world's a stage" to "Shall
I project a world?"(Lot 49, 82). Whether acted or projected,
the nature of the incipient performance seems clear enough:
And it is just here, just at this dark
and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a
mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last
unmeasurable gap above the roof of the old theatre, the last delta-t. (760)
If we are inside the Orpheus in contemporary California, then the pointed
object in question must be the business end of a Soviet ICBM (the "pointed
tip" of a re-entry vehicle). Yet in the only sense that makes sense
for this holocaustal reading, the missile in question is a rocket indeed,
and one Rocket in particular. In violation of linear history but in accord
with a powerful alternative logic, the projectile here is the very same
A4, serial number 00000, that carries Gottfried to his Liebestod. To
make this identification we must of course remove ourselves from the "secular
history" of normal space-time and enter another order of being, a domain
of synchronicity or dreamtime. This is a parabolic or paranoid order in
which everything is at least potentially connected, where events in one
coordinate system (Germany, 1945) may map on to another (Los Angeles, 1969).
We are drawn to this mystical folding of space and time by the lessons Pynchon
delivers elsewhere in the novel about the metaphysics of projectiles. In
an earlier section of Gravity's Rainbow, the rocket engineer Franz
Pökler finds himself detailed for field observation to a proving ground
in Poland. He is ordered to stand in a shallow trench at the precise point
on which a test missile has been targeted. Since what Pökler is meant
to observe is a premature airburst, the bullseye is paradoxically the safest
place to be; an errant rocket is least likely to end up where it was actually
meant to go. Yet Pökler knows that the A4 is as unpredictable as the
men who operate it. Thinking about the possibility of a direct hit, he suffers
considerable anxiety which he takes to be the point of the exercise, arranged
as a sadistic game by Captain Blicero. The Damoclean rocket, like Derrida's
"absolute missile," does not abolish the chance of death.
As it happens Pökler lives through this game of Rocket Roulette. The
test vehicle breaks up harmlessly at altitude. But his experience of being
on Ground Zero yields a crucial insight: "inside Pökler's life,
on no record but his soul, his poor harassed German soul, the time base
has lengthened, and slowed: the perfect Rocket is still up there, still
descending" (426). The full significance of this passage, and of the
phrase "Perfect Rocket," requires some knowledge of the application
of integral calculus in rocket guidance:
To integrate here is to operate on a rate
of change so that time falls away: change is stilled.... "Meters per
second" will integrate to "meters." The moving vehicle is
frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched.
It will never fall. (301)
That last phrase "It will never fall" is equally pertinent to
Pökler's predicament at the target point, to "your" position
in the Orpheus Theatre, and perhaps also to our perplexity in reading the
end of Gravity's Rainbow. The phrase asks us to believe (in mythic
or paranoiac terms) that the rocket at apogee passes through a temporal
singularity, an equipoise or still point exempt from the normal laws of
time and motion. Because they spend that uncomputable instant outside the
linear embrace of analysis, all rockets may be regarded under the aspect
of a timeless, even transcendental allegory. So that every rocket fired
does become the "Perfect Rocket" of Franz Pökler's reflections
and perhaps also the "absolute missile" of Derrida's. Each rocket
participates in that finned signifier with everyone's name on it, that which
hangs perpetually over our heads, suspended by chance or by the next higher
assembly (in)to which chance integrates, namely history.
|
next
title page
p18 index |