Berube, "Against the Avant"

[Dave Monroe]

... pardon me if this is more immediately applicable to Gravity's
Rainbow than V., but, on that Elect/preterite binary, from Michael
Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the
Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), Chapter 4,
"Against the Avant: Pynchon's Products, Pynchon's Pornographies," pp.
207-66:

Alec McHoul and David Wills ... have argued that Gravity's Rainbow
deconstructs the distinction not only between elect and preterite but
between "use and mention, serious and parasitic, normal and citational"
as well, creating in place of these distinctions a "material typonymy"
by which "a material equivalence between the signifiers replaces a
rhetorical difference between them" ([Writing Pynchon: Strategies in
Fictional Analysis] 1990, 53).... McHoul and Wills call [Gravity's
Rainbow] "post-rhetorical," in that it "handles or plays with dualistic
differences such that they are overcome by making any dilemma's dual
aspects appear identical, these then producing, cojointly, a new 'first'
term for a further, and qualitatively distinct, duality" ([WP] 54)....
these are some of McHoul's and Wills's examples:

    use/mention//material typonymy
    parable/parabola//rocket trajectory
    rocket/penis//Jamf
    penis/polymer//Imipolex
    reality/fantasy//cinema
    us/Them//Slothrop

The last two of these, I think, are the most "useful," in the sense that
they are capable of being reinscribed elsewhere; and to them I will add
two of my own:

    elect/preterite//cultural artifact
    production/consumption//transmission

For what is important about "fictions" in Gravity's Rainbow is not that
they can only mirror themselves as tehy attempt to represent a world,
nor that they give equal space (an apparently equal gravity) to the
Duino Elegies and King Kong, Tannhauser and underground comix ....
Rather, what is distinctive about Gravity';s Rainbow's postsomething
(-modern, -avantgarde, -rhetorical) treatment of culture is that its
emphasis is not on artifacts but on their transmission and
reinscription; not on overturning the hierarchy between canonical and
apocryphal but on examining how the canonical and apocryphal can do
various kinds of cultural work for variously positioned and constituted
cultural groups.  (229)

... not only does the novel imply [contra Frank Kermode, The Sense of an
Ending, and Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon]
that "myth" and "fiction" are merely two nearly indistinguishable kinds
of textual transmission 9in the McHoul-Wills formula,
myth/fiction//reading effect?), but it makes this implication by
demonstrating that the cultural and political force of fictions is a
vriable independent of our "belief" in them. (233)

This, then, is why it is so important to pay attention to the category
of 'cultural work" in Gravity's Rainbow: because the novel shows us time
and again that it is a gesture of political impitence, if not futility,
to critique macropolitical forces like the Third reich on the ground
that they have "misread" or "misappropriated fictions and made them into
"myths."  If it is actually the case taht we have doomed ourselves to
annihiliation by forgetting that our fictions are fictive, it is not as
if we can do anything about our condition by rechecking the criteria for
belife and use.... if we want to find out about ourselves, we must
plunge into tehse myths and scertain the status of their manifestations
... (233)

And this brings us finally to a crucial feature of Pynchon's cultural
politics: Gravity's Rainbow's myriad "deconstructions"--of myth and
fiction, use and mention, elect and preterite, original and replication,
Us and Them, reality and fantasy, war and peace--are not simply a matter
of indeterminacy and free play, for as Pynchon and Derrida know,
"deconstructed" dualisms are not made inoperative by their
deconstruction.... we are not absolved from determining the political
work performed by such ideas as "cause," "origin," and "war" just
because they do not "really" have the priority attributed to them ....
Rather, we are asked throughout Gravity's Rainbow to attend to the uses
and transmissions of Pynchon's fictions, whether we take "fictions" here
to mean things like ... films ... or things like residuess of a
metaphysics of presence.  (233-4)

Pynchon's emphasis on the sociopolitical transmission of cultural
artifacts leads us, tehn, to twin imperatives.  the first is that we
recognize teh political limits of deconstruction just as we recognize
the political limits of modernism... so too should we recognize the
critical difference between Nietzsche's deconstruction of causality in
The Will to power and the A4 rocket's deconstruction of causality as
part of Nazi Germany's will to power; so too should we recognize that
our (my, Pynchon's) rhetorical dismantling of 'cultural elect" and
"cultural preterite" does not so much a stouch the socioeconomic status
of teh world's elect and preterite populations.  What is possible in one
discursive register--undoing hierarchies of cause and effect or elect
and preterite--may be wholly inapproriate to another. (234-5)

It is not enough, then, to say that "Pynchon champions the preterite"
(Westervelt ["'A Place Dependent on Ourselves'"] 1980, 75); or that
Gravity's Rainbow is written as a "sustained piece of preterition"
(Mackey ["Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition"] 1981, 20); or that
Pynchon himself is somehow preterite ... (Mendelson ["Gravity's
Encyclopedia"] 1976, 173).... "preterition" may signify different things
in different contexts, each of which asks for relational demarcation:
what is preterite in relation to what? (236)

... which is, of course, to ask, in what context is the text being
deconstructed, well, being deconstructed?  And so forth ...