Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow

[Dave Monroe]

Continuing in Katalin Orban, Ethical Diversions: The
Post-Holocaust  Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo,
and Spigelman (New York: Routledge, 2005), Ch. 3,
"Pinpricks on the Ars(e) Narrandi: Liminality and
Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow," pp. 115-67 ...

   "It is precisely in this bizarrely marginal,
disapperaing way that Pynchon's novel, which has often
been read as a World War II novel and as an oblique
response to the cold war, is also a post-holocaust
narrtve.  Harold Bloom is one of the very few critics
who seem to attribute major significance to the
Holocaust in connecton with Gravity's Rianbow,
although he leaves extremely vague what that
significance is.   he writes: 'no one could hope to
write the first authentic post-Holocaust novel and
achive a total vision without fearful cost.'  Later
... 'Waht does concern me is the Kabbalistic winding
path that is Pynchon's authentic and Gnostic image for
the route throug the kelippot or evil hsuks that the
light must take if it is to survive in th ultimate
breaking of the vessels, the Holocaust brought about
by the System at its most evil, yet hardly at its most
perevalent.'  But both authenticity and the connection
with the Holocaust reaiin unexplained, cryptic or
axiomatic declarations....  I will try to offer a more
transparent examination                               
                                                      
                                                      
                                                      
                                                      
                                                      
                                                      
                                                      
            of the significance of the Holocaust's
absence and presence in this text in a way that will
perhaps account for its rare ocurrence in critical
readings. 
   "While the word 'Holocaust' appears metaphorically
in a few haunting descriptive passages of urban
landscapess, the Holocaust as an event is
conspicuously--even radically--missing from a text so
obessed with Western progress as a technology of
death.  This is a highly resonant absence (or rather
near-absence) to say the least, given the time,
setting and major themes of Gravity's Rainbow....  At
the same time, through a combination of textual
traces, striking co-optations into the economy of
rocketry, and extended representations of the
prehistory of modern extermination policies and
practices, the 'perfect ash ruins' of the holocaust
haunt this novel, but never more than liminally (GR
112).  As a particular historical event,it is only a
trace in the novel, but as a trace, now transformed
into a representational simulation, now refracted
through rocketry, now transfigured into metaphor, it
keeps abruptly surfacing at the oddest moments only to
vanish instantaneously.  Thus, the Holocaust as an
event is a singular textual event insofar as it is so
fagrantly kept from panoptic vision--not necessarily
by being intrinsically unrepresentable, but by being
imposed on peripheral vision as an allergic
irritation, 'prickling at [...] eyes and membranes lik
an allergy' (GR 428).
   "As in Pynchon's first novel, the holocaust becomes
a point of reference insofar as it is a point of
disappearance in the narrative (see V., p. 245, 'This
is only 1 per cent of six million ...'] ...

"In Gravity's Rainbow too, represented extermination,
panoptically visible systematic killing off is
reserved for the 17th century dodoes ... the Hereros
... and for the Indians of the Agentinian pampas .... 
None of tehse are brouight into explicit contact with
Zonal 'workplaces.'
   "While the novel includes plenty of exterminations
and 'structures favoring daeth' analogous to th
Holocaust, the Holocaust in it particularity remains a
dene black hole merely triggering and attracting
analogies ....   There is only one narrative moment
when the sudden liminal appearance of the Holocaust
unfolds into an emblematic encounter and gift-giving
that nearly reproduces Oedipa's encounter with the old
derelict ....  In this case, Franz Pokler walks into
the 'invisible kingdom' that is the other side of his
engineer's labyrinths--'as much labyrinth as required
between himself and the inconveniences of
caring'--emphatically unprepared, unknowng, and thus
suddely feeling obligated ....  The episode unfolds
into an encounter witha single, random woman in the
now visible, if dark kingdom"

[see GR pp. 432-33, "The odors of shit ... or a ride
home ..."]

"And in the sudden 'breathing of Dora,' the punch line
that will be so emphatically missing from the story
... appears in the death-grin of naked corspes stacked
in front of the crematoriums ...." (p. 161-3)

Bloom, Harold.  "Introduction."  Thomas Pynchon's
   Gravity's Rainbow.  New York: Chelsea, 1989.  1-9

WAY too many interruptions, both on and offlist, and,
esp., on and offline, today, so ...


                                                      
   
Hm ... just occured to me, you can't spell Kabbalistic
with ballistic.  Hm ...

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