Against the Avant

[Dave Monroe]

>From Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992),
Ch. 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 (in 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 belief 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, then, to twin imperatives.  the first is that we
recognize the 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 as touch the socioeconomic
status of the 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)

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