Derrida and Pynchon

[jbor]

Bodies incorporated: Scenes of agency panic in Gravity's Rainbow
Melley, Timothy. Contemporary Literature. Madison: Winter 1994.
Vol.35, Iss. 4;  pg. 709

[...]
A screaming comes across the sky. As Gravity's Rainbow opens, something is
approaching London. Whatever is coming, it is not quite a scream, nor is it
necessarily a screaming person or a screaming rocket; it is rather a
screaming, a bodily expression of panic so disembodied that it only hints at
a cause beyond itself. In short, the first line of the novel contains an
agency dilemma characteristic of those to follow: an unsettling bodily
phenomenon manifests itself; its cause has been obscured from sight; and the
difficulty of reading it has to do with the way a comforting metaphysical
separation between cause and phenomenon (or effect) has collapsed.(1)
Something is coming across the sky, but what?

Materially speaking, it is a letter. It is, as British agent Pirate Prentice
says to himself, "incoming mail" (6)--not just military slang for the Nazi
V-2 rocket about to arrive in London, but, quite literally, incoming mail,
for hidden in a capsule aboard that rocket is a letter, sent to Prentice by
a double agent in Holland. The considerable "bodiliness" of this
letter--which I will take up momentarily--is rivaled only by the bodily
correspondence which appears to mark its delivery: like every V-2 in
Gravity's Rainbow, this initial rocket arrives in London exactly where
American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop has had sex not long before. Not only,
then, does the rocket deliver mail; it appears to have been delivered as if
it were mail. This latter form of correspondence--the bizarre but
unmistakable geographical relation between Slothrop's penis and the
subsequent landing of the rockets--is the novel's most significant, and most
commented upon, agency problem. In the pages to follow, I will suggest that
this agency problem and others like it mark a new way of thinking about the
status of the body in relation to global communications and social systems,
a radical reimagining of the relations between persons, bodies, and
discursive structures. I will also suggest how agency panic--the crisis of
apparently imperiled individual autonomy--both registers anxieties about
threatening systems of mass control and helps to sustain the idea of
autonomous individuality against such threats.

[...]
Given all of this, it is significant that this little scene of agency panic
is provoked by the arrival of a letter "at its destination" (Lacan 53). That
trope was central to Pynchon's second novel, in which a subterranean postal
system, glimpsed through unsettling "chance" events and uncanny patterns,
appeared to be sorting and distributing secret information as if it had
motives of its own.(6) But the trope of arriving letters has also been
important to literary theory--particularly to a debate over the agency of
letters in Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter"--because it functions as a
figure for problems of agency in signification. Like Prentice's letter, the
purloined letter is what Jacques Lacan calls a nonfunctional signifier,
because "the tale leaves us in virtually total ignorance of the sender, no
less than of the contents, of the letter" (41); yet, Lacan notes, the
movement of the letter "determines the subjects in their acts, in their
destiny" (43)--again, in much the same way that Prentice and Slothrop appear
to be defined and controlled by the arrival of incoming mail. I say "appear"
because Gravity's Rainbow only puts into question whether persons are
controlled or "constructed" by discursive or social systems: the uncanny
sense of control conveyed by all of the novel's "mail" (rockets and letters
alike) may be only the result of a paranoid reading of accidents. Jacques
Derrida suggests largely the same thing about Lacan's reading of Poe:
Lacan's assertion that "a letter always arrives at its destination"
(53)--that certain patterns of meaning and behavior are inevitable--cannot,
in Derrida's view, account for the possibility of accidental, lost, or
residual meaning. Derrida goes on to accuse Lacan of "finding" the truth of
psychoanalysis (the "law of the signifier and of castration as the contract
of truth" [Post Card 441-42]) wherever he looks, by ignoring the
disseminating power of language.(7) Again, Gravity's Rainbow appears
uncannily to literalize the terms of this debate: Slothrop narrowly and
accidentally misses being castrated, only to be disseminated bodily across a
continent.

But I draw attention to these parallels less for thematic reasons than to
suggest that issues of bodily control and threatened individual autonomy in
Gravity's Rainbow are closely related to interpretive questions which have
been of interest to recent critical theory.(8) In the instances I just
sketched, the central interpretive question seems to be whether meaningful
events are directed by a supremely competent mailman--a symbolic order or a
"Them"--or whether they are merely made meaningful by a discourse
(psychology) or a psychosis (paranoia) which finds everything significant.
This problem--the absence of a "Real Text" (Gravity's Rainbow 520) or
metanarrative that would stabilize signification and control the endless
play of language--has been foundational for poststructuralism. Perhaps not
surprisingly, poststructuralist solutions to these problems have given rise
to melodramas of lost agency similar in structure to the one I outlined
earlier; in these theoretical dramas, poststructural accounts of signifying
systems come into conflict with accounts critical of the apparent transfer
of agency from individual authors and readers to texts or textuality in
general. As M. H. Abrams recently said in a defense of humanist criticism,
poststructuralist practice results in a "theory world, in which people are
not agents but agencies, not users of language but used by language, not
effectors but themselves only effects" (13). But to say that a discourse has
its own "secret workings" (Abrams 7) or "tactics" (Foucault 95)--that it
appears, in short, to be a "Them"--is only another way of formulating the
problem of agency dramatized bodily in Gravity's Rainbow. And this is not
simply because "there is nothing outside of the text" (Derrida, Grammatology
158) but because in Gravity's Rainbow the body is already a medium of
communication.
[...]

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