A sketch of Pynchonian politics

[Phil Wise]

Clearly a system as complex and successful as capitalism and/or the market system "works" to a greater or lesser degree.  The system has an internal logic, which produces benefits for some; a relatively free market in certain commodities is undoubtedly good for the economy, and is likely to have benefits for many of the economy's participants, however unevenly distributed these benefits are.  If there were no benefits, then the system would have to subject the population using absolute terror while it kept "what was desirable flowing Their way".  But absolute terror is clearly difficult to sustain, and might not survive a cost-benefit analysis.  It is also unlikely that anyone would disagree that some people tend to get more benefits out of market systems than others, or that this fact of life is likely to change (if the market system was able to produce "infinite", sustainable growth, then any and all incentives to be productive would, over time, disappear for its subjects).  But, to Pynchon...


Pynchon's "They" system in Gravity's Rainbow is undoubtedly totalitarian.  Not only does the paranoid/anti-paranoid structure of control They employ influence the thoughts and behaviours of all the characters, including the Counterforce, which is why the Counterforce fails, but this structure keeps the preterite forever looking upward with awe at those who have "succeeded".  Of Slothrop, the narrator notes,  "so well have They busted the sod praries of his brain, tilled and sown there, and subsidised him not to grow anything of his own...", while all of us, "as long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And how they know it - how often, under what conditions...".   The narrator, then, does not just restrict his observations to the characters, but brings in the world outside the text, suggesting that his readers are similarly susceptable.

That there is no escape from Their System is made difinitively clear at the end of the book as "all of us" sit in the Orpheus Theatre awaiting, completely oblivious, the Rocket that will destroy us.  "They" are responsible for the plummeting rocket. It is Weissmann's project; he now numbers among "the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors" (749). Pynchon comments that, in searching for his fate, we should "[l]ook high, not low" (749), high, where They are.  I wonder if his spirit haunts academic economists that have such faith in the economic system of free markets that they could believe that growth is "potentially" infinite, if only we loosen controls we have developed over it.  A system capable of infinite growth must, logically, first overcome all barriers, including the barriers that people have in their own minds that prevent them from being totally committed "enterprise personalities".

Molly Hite says about the Rocket and its path: "The parabola is also a metaphor for control and structure. It represents the kind of conceptual system that human beings use to circumscribe and rationalise their experiences in order to take charge of it. The irony that Pynchon explores in Gravity's Rainbow is that such a system always betrays its creators by claiming autonomy for itself. The more comprehensive the structure, the more likely it is to look like fate, so that humanity finds itself serving an antihuman Higher Purpose when it is seduced by the clarity and coherence of its own explanations. The implicit model for all such totalising systems is the myth of the providential plan, which purports to account for all aspects of human life by directing history to a predetermined end. With the development of science and technology, this myth has become increasingly ironised: historical processes remain inevitable, but the goal of the system is its own destruction. By unifying experience within a controlling vision, humanity has arrived at a model of universal coherence that makes freedom impossible and annihilation imminent" (Hite, Ideas of Order... 97).

The Rocket represents "any system which cannot tolerate heresy" (747), heresy being, as Hite points out, "unorthodox interpretation":

"...characters committed to totalising structures would rather erase [an "unsettling blackness"]. Blicero's murder of Gottfried is such an erasure, for Gottfried is sacrificed on the alter of the rocket, the principle of totalization and thus of hierarchy and subordination. The rocket dictates that the sweep of history arches over trivial human lives. As he careens towards death, Gottfried witnesses the whiting-out of his own personal experience as he is assimilated to the providential trajectory.

...what is this death but a whitening, a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite, what is it but bleaches,     detergents, oxidisers, abrasivesStreckefuss he's been today to the boy's tormented muscles, but more appropriately he is Blicker, Bleicherde, Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of pigment, of melanin[...](759)"

Pynchon's narrator applies this beyond the relationship between Weissmann and Gottfried.  Not only is a system that does not tolerate heresy figuratively plummeting onto our heads, but its dangers are described using other quite clear metaphors as well:  "Living inside the system", the narrator tells us, "is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide... though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker [...] you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you in blood, in shock, without dignitybut there is meanwhile this trip to be on..." (412-413).  

The question is, who wants to take that ride?  The problem is: you don't spot the insanity until you are committed to it.  Don't forget that the rocket is also the War, or that "the real business of the War is buying and selling.  The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.  The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways.  It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the war... (105)"

Remember that at the end of the book, "all of us" are distracted by the forthcoming spectacle of the movie in the theatre, one linked back to the novel's opening ("a screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now"), nothing to compare it because this is it, the finality: the system has gotten to a point where it can finally encompass all of humanity and erase us.  In addition, it is worth noting that in Vineland, the spectacle, which is portrayed in the novel as so effective in distracting the people from the real movements in Their war against them, has replaced a redundant Brock Vond - his funding pulled because he's embarrassing Them in public, risking resistence, exposing the system for what it is.

Pynchon's narrator continues: "It [the murdering and violence] provides raw material to be recorded in History, so that children may be taught History as a sequence of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.  Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that pie while they're still here to gobble it up.  The true war is a celebration of markets..." (105).  So, the little people, well below Their position, are given an incentive to play the market game and thus be implicated in the "true war": if they are not individualistic enough to try and grab a piece of that pie, the spectre of mass death faces them.  I wonder if that's similar to the structure of the free trade argument - that people the world over either they open up and grab some of that action or remain terrorised.  Of course, Pynchon is relatively silent on this, at least up to M&D, which I don't know well enough to comment on, but the similarity is quite striking.  

The war is a celebration of markets.  The war is a rocket, Their project.  The rocket is a culmination of Their "rational arrangements", the rationality of a self-perfecting system that cannot tolerate heresy.  Once it has "all of us" neatly circumscribed in its theatre, we are doomed.  The system is beautifully worked out, very persuasive, appears to have an almost scientific logic, almost seems like it is nature, so that we have to remove barriers to its perfect functioning and allow nature to take its course.  If this happens, providence will take over, history will be at an end.  "Capitalism" it was said here, and repeated, "is not an ideology".  Evidence of a totalising system's ideological nature would be erased, for that evidence invites heresy, disagreement, and contest, porovides an "unsettling blackness".

It is unlikely that Pynchon is an all-the-way Marxist, because the providential notion of the perfection of society through the rise of the proleteriat led to totalitarianism in the USSR.  The Counterforce in GR and the orthodox Marxist (at least Stalinist) in PR3, Rex, are too easy to co-opt or nullify; they stay on one or another side of a dichotomy.  The latent potential, however, of both the Counterforce and PR3 is that of an ad-hoc democratic movement, as Jeffrey S Baker has noted, that resists closure, a series of "ad-hoc" arrangements which are structured in so far as they are arrangements, but unstructured in so far as they do not belong to a larger, over-arching system.  Rex and Frenesi think they have to decide to either shut the door completely or leave it completely open - they end up shutting it (on Weed, on their principles) in the name of keeping it open.  The fact that the door to PR3 is open, that all the barriers to joining it have been let down, means that other, deeper doors are shut completely:

"You've been living on the same planet as all of us - they every night they pick us up, and they beat us, and they fuck us, and sometimes we die. Don't any of you kiddies understand, we either have 100% no-foolin'-around solidarity or it just doesn't work. Weed betrayed that, and it was cowardly because it was easy, 'cause he knew we can't shut anybody out, down the end of that road is fuckin' fascism, so we take 'em all, the hypocrites and double agents and summertime outlaws and all that fringe residue nobody else will touch. That's what PR3 started out as - so did we for that matter, remember? The All-Nite Shelter. The lighted doorway out in the Amerikan dark where nobody gets refused? Weed remembers". (235)
In order to maintain the structure of total open-ness, total conformity is required.  In my opinion, that is the most applicable lesson Pynchon's novels can teach us about attempts to completely free up a system, especially one that is also, let's face facts, a "celebration of markets".  

Phil