The American Century: Literature since 1945 709infinite regression. So, also, finally is the suspicion of conspiracy: Gravity’s Rainbow
explores the possibility that, as one character puts it, “war was never political at all,
the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people distracted.”
In this fictive maze, the V-2 rocket assumes an elusive significance. It answers “to
a number of shapes in the dreams of those who touch it – in combat, in tunnel, or
on paper”; each rocket, the reader learns, “will know its intended and hunt him ...
shining and pointed in the sky at his back ... rushing in, rushing closer.” The
intimations of a conspiratorial system, here “dictated ... by the needs of technology,”
is wedded, in a way characteristic of Pynchon, to a centrally, crucially indeterminate
sign. Like V., the V-2 rocket is as compelling as it is mysterious, as beautiful as it is
dangerous, constantly dissolving into nothingness, deadly. Compared to a rainbow
arched downwards, as if by a force of gravity that is dragging humankind to its
death, the rocket initiates the same need to find meaning as V. did. Similarly, it offers
an excess of meaning, an excess that is an evacuation. Since Gravity’s Rainbow,
Pynchon has moved forward to the landscape of the 1980s and, through ample
reminiscence, the 1960s in Vineland (1990), then back to the early twentieth century
in Against the Day (2006) and forward again to the 1960s in his variation on the noir
novel, Inherent Vice (2009). In between Vineland and Against the Day, he moved
back to the early republic in Mason and Dixon (1997): to the days when men like the
two famous surveyors mentioned in the title were trying to establish boundaries in
the boundlessness of America, in order to appropriate it. America is memorably
described in this novel as “a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may
yet be true.” It is the world, the landscape that inhabits all Pynchon’s fiction: the
realm of measurelessness and dream, the indicative and the subjunctive, the closed
and appropriated and the open. And it is typical of the author that he should weave
his speculations on legends, the rich “Rubbish-Tip” of dreams (“Does Britannia
when she sleeps, dream?” one character asks, “Is America her dream?”), into a
densely populated social fabric and a meditation on historical decline. The fictive
energy of Pynchon seems inexhaustible, not least because it careers with tireless
energy between contraries. But to an extent, what drives it is summed up in one
simple question one central character asks the other in this novel: “Good Christ,
Dixon. What are we about?’
The narrator of John Barth’s second novel, The End of the Road (1958), begins the
story he is to tell with a sly parody of the opening sentence of Moby-Dick: “In a sense,
I am Jake Horner.” That use of language to set up distances is characteristic. The
distances are several: between reader and character (Horner is already asking us to
look at him as only “in a sense” what he names himself ), between the narrator and
character (who only “in a sense” form a negotiable, nameable identity) – above all,
between the world inside the text and the world outside. Barth has proved to be his
own best critic and commentator precisely because his is a fiction that continually
backs up on itself, subverting any temptation to link that fiction to reality by
commenting on form. His texts and characters are constantly commenting on
themselves, or inviting or insisting on such comment. His fourth novel, Giles
Goat-Boy (1966), for instance, begins with fictive letters of introduction by severalGGray_c05.indd 709ray_c 05 .indd 709 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM