GRGR (33) - The Glass Sphere

[Dave Monroe]

McHale does a chapter on Joseph McElroy's (and it's JmcE's birthday, by teh way,
today) Women and Men in Constructing Postmodernism, as I recall.  David Porush does
have a chapter on Plus, however, in his The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (also
covers Pynchon, as well as Barth, Roussel, Barthelme, Beckett, and, of course,
Burroughs).

But, while Gottfried is certainly a Christ-figure here, it certainly seems the case
that the attempt at "transcnedence" here, at least, does not transcend, leading
rather to that indeed both infinitesimally (("its last immeasurable gap," "the last
delta-t") and infinitely ('cos the book ends just before the unthinkable gets itself
thought, not to mention written, on that dash, "Now everybody--") deferred,
unrepresented, because unrepresentable, apocalypse (and here see Frances Ferguson,
"The Nuclear Sublime," Diacritics 14:2 [Summer 1984], for starters; cf. earlier
comments of mine in re: the problematics of representing the Holocaust.  For the
representation of fictional nuclear wars, see Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts:
Atomic War in Fiction,1945-1984, as well as his update @
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/nuclear/nh-supplement.html ).  Perhaps what goes up must
not necessarily come down (at least insofar as it reaches escape velocity), but it
sure does seem to here, that gravitic rainbow parabolic indeed ...

But I question whether or not transcendence is really (re)presented a a possibility
in the first place.  Even the attainment of that escape velocity, of a hyperbolic
vs. a parabolic trajectory, seems no escape here.  "Will our new Edge, our new
Deathkingdom, be the moon?" (V723/B843)   It seems to be a strong possibility
here.   "Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the
danger of falling" (ibid., and note the emphasis on the second half of that sentence
in the text).  Again, this seems a matter of Election vs. preterition, and one has
to keep in mind the deconstruction of that little binary throughout Gravity's
Rainbow, throughout that Pynchonian oeuvre ... and I'm still not so sure just how
Blicero's love (?--now THERE's an interseting topic in GR ...) for Gottfried is
"redemptive," as he does indeed seem to be sending his paramour to certain death
(his, ours. maybe even Theirs) ...

Again, the kenotic vs. the Gnostic, the incarnation vs. The Resurrection, the
thisworldly vs. the Otherworldly, life vs. Life-after-Death, perhaps the preterite
vs. The Elect, us vs. Them.  That Slothropite heresy seems to come down in favor of
the former, in any case (and the world being all the case there is?) ....  But what
of GRs deployment of gnosticisms, then?  "But the Rocket has to be many things [...]
it must survive heresies shining, unconfoundable ... and herestics there will be,"
and here are named Gnostics and Kabbalists and Manicheans (oh, my ...).  While the
novel indeed displays no small sympathy for such heresies, not to mention the
heretics who propound them ("But these heretics will be sought and the dominion of
silence will enlarge as each one goes down" [V727/B847] ... hm ... see Charles
Hollander on the covert political operations of the 60s in The Crying of Lot 49, as
well as Stephen Paul Miller's The Seventies Now: Culture a Surveillance), not so
sure it necessarily privileges (any of) them.   There seems to be a particular
antipathy towards manicheisms, excluded middles, as noted most succinctly, in The
Crying of Lot 49, being "bad shit"--an awful lot of binaries are deployed, but they
are ineviatbly complicated, problematised, hell, deconstructed, even, in the
(un)popular sense.  But all such interpretive schemes, even while being deployed
relentlessly, no matter how heterodoxical to each other as well as any sort of
orthodoxy, seem to be held in question as "paranoid," as paranoias, in GR, in
Pynchon's texts ...

But that other option, immanece, perhaps, indeed, incarnation, the kenotic ... on
that Slothropite heresy, that deconstruction of the Elect/preterite binary, "Copuld
there have been a fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped
the wrong way from?  Suppose the Slothropite heresy 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?"--and here see Jorge Luis Borges' "Three Versions of
Judas," who might even be seen to have been a sort of fall guy in the assassination
of Christ--"It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back."  Now, I'm
not so sure about that "route back," about that Hegelian and/or Romanticist
possibility of "return" (that gravitic rainbow might indeed, in theory, be a circle,
but one tends to run into solid facticity, no?), but am intrigued not only by GRs
periodic musings on what might be called "alternate history," but, in re: that
"glass sphere," "There are ways for getting back, but so complicated, so at the
mercy of language" (V723/B843) ... anyone?



jbor wrote:

> Brian McHale devotes a chapter to it, in *Constructing Postmodernism* I
> think, or it might be the earlier one.

> Gottfried's love is certainly redeeming on a personal level for Blicero I think.

> what Gottfried decides to do in the novel is exactly what Jesus decided back then.
> (An expiation of the sins of the Reich? Those sins including the persecution of
> the Jews/the
> Holocaust, absent though these may be from the text/Text?) Blicero thus
> becomes the absent *human* father/God in the Gospels whom Pynchon has made
> flesh. (Keep in mind also that in Mark it is with a kiss that Jesus is
> betrayed by Judas.)

> enthymeming

> by putting his lover/son into the 00000 in that final launch before the
> Allied push is Blicero perhaps "redeeming" the German V-2 program by
> restoring its space exploration potentialities

> moving it away from the Nazi (and Allied) plan(s) for world domination (which will
> actually entail world obliteration)?

> if Gottfried can survive in space for those few moments, transcend as Jesus did
> for those couple of days, then the course of human history might be changed again,
> apocalypse might be averted, the sins of humanity again deferred? If science is
> allowed to confer the illusion of
> immortality and transcendence (celluloid, space colonies et. al.) now that
> "God is dead" (c. Nietzsche) and personal mortality is certain and final
> then is there a possibility that that "crippled" and "doomed" human
> consciousness will be kept pacified for another swag of years?

> I think that there is perhaps another option being depicted in the
> Slothrop-situation (immanence, "the defection rate"), but it is the reserve
> of "a few"

> we (the readers, and future readers) are that audience at the novel's close, but
> it is the suspension of apocalypse rather than apocalypse itself which Pynchon is
> playing on

> One can't really *depict* apocalypse, after all, can one? But his warning is about
> just how close it is and has been in this century.