There's only one

[ish mailian]

 And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the
Brennschluss Point? Don't jump at an infinite number of possible
shapes. There's only one. It is most likely an interface between one
order of things and another. There's a Brennschluss point for every
firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation
waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it. . . but they
lie so close to Earth that from many places they can't be seen at all,
and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they
fall into completely different patterns. (P. 302) The Zone lying under
this rocket-constellation, like the text of which it becomes a
self-reflexive thematization, is a consistently fantastic domain in
that it both solicits and resists the claims of a representational
"plotting." It thwarts the iconic thrust of the map by paradoxically
"mapping" within the same heterotopian textual space discontinuous
domains.22 This also explains the ambiguity that this "zonal" map
provokes in both characters and readers for, while offering a site of
ontological plurality which demands ethical choice, it also contains
in embryonic proliferation that very mapping impulse that when tied
down to the demands of representational control pre-empts the
possibility of choice: "To expect any more, or less, of the Zone is to
disagree with the terms of the Creation" (p. 729). This is to say that
within the Zone some "maps" already appear to have greater
cartographical power than others, a suspicion intensified by the
suggestion that perhaps the control inherent to the notion of the map
is being extended to spheres that had previously proven impervious to
mapping. Part of the Zone's disturbing effect is derived from this
threat of the infiltration of the indeterminate itself, of the
"unmappable," by threateningly determinate structures. Labelled as
either the "War" or the "System," the War-as-System, these structures
of control apparently extend their simulatory maps over the fantasized
projections of the characters that are textually constitutive of the
Zone. But, in turn, the paranoid visions and hallucinations of
characters such as Slothrop, Enzian or Roger Mexico, themselves
underwritten by the teasingly validating "paranoia" of the narra? tor,
are the means of bringing into view this totalizing map and thus
initiating its possible contestation. This points to the hidden
complicities contained in the paradoxical expression of a "fantastic
map." The map as System is a "fantasy" of the real; it produces a
"dreamless version of the real" (p. 129) in its overweening
invasiveness; a truly fantastic map would respect the representational
intractability of the real by self-reflexively "fantasizing" the
notion of the map itself.

MAPPING THE "UNMAPPABLE": INHABITING THE FANTASTIC INTERFACE OF
"GRAVITY'S RAINBOW" Author(s): JOSÉ LISTE NOYA Source: Studies in the
Novel, Vol. 29, No. 4 (winter 1997), pp. 512-537
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