The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 24 (2013)

Rainbow’s Light: Or, “Illuminations”
in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Takayoshi Ishiwari*

Introduction
Walter Benjamin suggests that World War I is all about silence. To be
more precise, he suggests that the end of World War I is characterizedby silence, if not the war itself. “Was it not noticeable at the end of thewar,” he observes in “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai
Leskov,” “that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not
richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” (84). What he means by“silence,” then, has to do with the communicability of experience; in thecontext of the Great War, it means the incommunicability of its experience.
One cannot tell a story about or share with others one’s experience of a
war that is unprecedented and unparalleled—that is, a war that is simply
unbelievable. Thus “[w]hat ten years later was poured out in the flood of
war books,” he goes on to say, “was anything but experience that goesfrom mouth to mouth” (84). What became apparent after World War I toobservers such as Benjamin is, in short, its incompatibility with the art ofstorytelling, or even its share in an ongoing process of coming to an end of
Copyright © 2013 Takayoshi Ishiwari. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Associate Professor, Osaka University

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the art of “exchang[ing] experiences” (83). Now, he is not alone in talking
about World War I in terms not necessarily of “silence” but at least of abreak in the way people “tell stories” about their experience. Paul Fussell,
whose The Great War and Modern Memory examines exactly this point ofcontact between the war and narrative communication, sees Hemingway as
exemplifying this break. Before the war, and even during the war, Fussell
says,
Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant. It was not
until eleven years after the war that Hemingway could declare in A
Farewell to Arms that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage,or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, thenumbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments andthe dates.” In the summer of 1914 no one would have understood
what on earth he was talking about. (21)This postwar fall in value of abstract ideas, coupled with the shortageof exchangeable experience pointed out by Benjamin, means that
communicating one’s experience in such abstract terms was no longer
an option; it necessitated a way of narrative communication that was asunprecedented and unparalleled, that is to say, as new as the war itself. It
is no wonder then that such a break took the form of literary modernism—that literature responded to such a fall by becoming modern. For to bemodern, as Fussell defines it, is to be “post-Great War” (222). Before thewar, as he reminds us, “[t]here was no Waste Land, with its rats’ alleys,
dull canals, and dead men who have lost their bones: it would take four
years of trench warfare to bring these to consciousness. [. . .] There wasno ‘Valley of Ashes’ in The Great Gatsby. One read Hardy and Kipling
and Conrad and frequented worlds of traditional moral action delineated in
traditional moral language” (23).
Fussell’s observation regarding the post–Great War birth of “modern”
literature might lead one to wonder about postmodernism; at least, it
prompts one to reread Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity’s Rainbow
Fussell discusses in ways suggesting that Pynchon’s World War II is best
understood by treating it as if it is World War I. After quoting a passage
where Ned Pointsman and Roger Mexico (not Tyrone Slothrop) walk
down to a beach at Dover, Fussell says:
We recognize it as distinctly in the tradition. Yet it was written not inRainbow’s Light

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1914, nor as a recollection in 1929, but in 1973. The war is not theFirst but the Second; and the two who walk on the beach and listen
there to the guns of Flanders are Ned Pointsman and Tyrone Slothrop[sic] [. . .] of Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant Gravity’s Rainbow, in whose
pages persists the Great War theme—already mastered by Hardy even
before the war broke out—of the ironic proximity of violence anddisaster to safety, to meaning, and to love. (69)There is no denying that some elements of Gravity’s Rainbow are “inthe tradition” initiated by Hardy (who is exceptional in that he wasboth “traditionally moral” and “modern” even before the war), or that itconcerns the theme of ironic proximity. But it is also true that not a few
aspects in Pynchon’s masterpiece go beyond “the tradition.” Take thetheme of paranoia for example. Fussell is interested in Pynchon’s paranoia
only insofar as it seems to him a continuation of the delusionary mental
condition one saw everywhere in the trenches: “Prolonged trench warfare,whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I
take to be a primary mode in modern writing. Mailer, Joseph Heller, andThomas Pynchon are examples of what I mean. The most indispensable
concept underlying the energies of modern writing is that of ‘the enemy’ ”(76). Every reader of Gravity’s Rainbow knows, however, that what Fussell
calls “gross dichotomizing”—“‘We’ are all here on this side; ‘the enemy’is over there. ‘We’ are individuals with names and personal identities; ‘he’is a mere collective entity. We are visible; he is invisible. We are normal;
he is grotesque. Our appurtenances are natural; his, bizarre. He is not
as good as we are” (75)—applies to it only in a limited way. Pynchon’s
dichotomizing is not as “gross” as Fussell takes it to be, since for him whatmust be undone more than anything else is the idea of the “sides”—“we”
and “the enemy”—itself; his “gross” dichotomy between the Preterite andthe Elect emerges only after the “ironic proximity” of the Allied and the
Axis Powers is revealed (in this sense Fussell’s “gross dichotomizing” is
not “gross” enough). Pynchon’s paranoia forces Fussell’s “modern” irony
to go a step further and tells us that it makes sense, after all, to call him
postmodernist because, if to be “modern” is to be “post-Great War,” to be
postmodern is to be post-World War II.
In apparent contrast to Benjamin’s “silent” World War I, Pynchon’s
theater of war in Gravity’s Rainbow abounds in sound. Beginning witha V-2’s “screaming com[ing] across the sky” (3), it unfolds around thequestion of what happens when a rocket travels faster than the speed

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of sound. What happens is that one cannot hear it when such a rocket
comes in (one might say, in this respect, that silence also dominates in
Pynchon’s war). In other words, when a rocket travels faster than sound,it causes a “reversal”: “Imagine a missile one hears approaching only
after it explodes. The reversal! [. . .] [T]he blast of the rocket, fallen
faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching
up to what’s already death and burning . . . a ghost in the sky . . .” (48).
Remember, however, that in Pynchon’s war speed does not mean thatof sound alone: “Remember The Password In The Zone This Week Is
FASTER—THAN, THE-SPEEDOFLIGHT” (726). Light plays an equallycrucial role in Gravity’s Rainbow: the novel begins not only with soundbut also with light (“But it is already light” [4], we hear the inner voiceof “Pirate” Prentice say as he wakes from a dream of an evacuation that
resounds with the “screaming” sound), and the “rainbow” in its title refers
to, among other things, the arched course of the rocket’s flight (“breaking
upward into this world [. . .] breaking downward again [. . .] the Rocket
does lead that way [. . .] in rainbow light” [726]); it even contains the storyof a rebellious light bulb (“the light bulb,” it is said at one place, “hasbecome one of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the multitudes whoare passed over by God and History” [299]). My contention, then, is that
one can see what makes Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow postmodern, thatis, post-World War II, rather than “modern” or post-Great War as Fussell
claims it to be, by looking at the ways in which he uses light—if not lightitself, then at least the metaphor of light as it relates to waking, such as“Pirate” Prentice’s: waking at daybreak, or in the morning, and opening
one’s eyes so that one can look, and then see.

I. At the Break of Dawn
One way to approach World War II in Gravity’s Rainbow is to look at
how Pynchon treats it in his preceding work. Not only does he mention
Buchenwald and Auschwitz in The Crying of Lot 49, he already includes
the V-2 missile as part of his narrative at this earlier stage. What calls ourattention is the way in which he puts his reference to the war in the context
of Freudian psychoanalysis. “Freud’s vision of the world,” Dr. Hilarius, an
ex-Nazi psychiatrist who has turned Freudian in atonement for what he did
to Jews at Buchenwald, tells Oedipa Maas,
had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once theRainbow’s Light

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light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn
flower-arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms. At Auschwitz
the ovens would be converted over to petit fours and wedding cakes,
and the V-2 missiles to public housing for the elves. I tried to believe
it all. I slept three hours a night trying not to dream [. . .]. (137–38)
He tries to do with as little sleep as possible so as not to dream because
dreams—or more generally, the unconscious—are things to be analyzed,
interpreted, and brought under control, and so the less one dreams in thefirst place, the better. Now, what Oedipa’s Freudian psychotherapist istrying to do is to persuade her of the “vision of the world” implied by his
master’s theory: that the concentration camps and the V-2 are like dreams
and the unconscious because they are their products, and that, if so, all thatis required in order to deal with them is, as his Jewish master prescribes,“the light”—that all one needs to do to end such “nightmares” is to “let[it] in.” This reasoning is based on the assumption, as the psychotherapist
explains to his patient, “that the unconscious would be like any otherroom, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only
into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame itafter all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting” (135).
His reference here is to Freud’s famous remark in his New Introductory
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, “Where id was, there ego shall be” (80),which he translates, as it were, quite aptly into “Where darkness was, there
light shall be.” Pynchon’s “hilarious” psychotherapist reinterprets Freud’s
dictum concerning the struggle between the untamed in the psyche and thetaming forces of the social which is to end up with the triumph of the latter(that is, of modernity) in terms of the similar dichotomous relationshipbetween being in the dark and letting in light, or between “the dark shapes”
and seeing them for what they are (they are “like any other”). Of course, it
is light that eventually prevails in Hilarius’s version of the struggle, as theego and society do in Freud’s original theory.
It seems reasonable to say that Gravity’s Rainbow is all about this ideaof World War II as a dream, as one of those products of the unconsciousthat one experiences when one is in the dark—an idea that the preceding
work, not being a war novel, does not fully elaborate on but only hints
at. Indeed, this seems so much the case that one is almost tempted to saythat its “storyteller” is someone who is, as one minor character is said to
be at one place, “dreamstruck” (346): it begins with a dream, as statedabove (whether or not one wakes from this dream is the whole point of

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Pynchon’s war narrative, which I leave for later discussion in terms of his
narrative style); quoting Dorothy’s famous line in The Wonderful Wizardof Oz, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more,” he likens
the “Zone,” as an occupied Germany after V-E Day is called throughout
Gravity’s Rainbow, to Oz (279), a land where the “wonderful” reigns;
among innumerable stories he tells is that of Franz Pökler, a Germanrocket engineer, and his daughter Ilse, who are regular visitors to anamusement park, Zwölfkinder, that is called “this dream world, this lie”
(429); and he tells of another important dream, “the primal dream,” inwhich Slothrop finds the meaning of “Jamf,” the name of the physiologistturned-chemist who conditioned him as an infant, to be “I,” a fact that“will not bear that much looking into, will it?” (623). If it is the case that
Gravity’s Rainbow is all about World War II as a dream, then it seems thatthe passage just cited, which is a portion of one of Slothrop’s numerous
interior monologues, can be seen as self-referentially exposing the way
in which the novel treats its dreamlike war, since in it the war certainly
bears no “looking into.” If it had tolerated “a look into,” that is to say, if
light had been “let in” for the purpose of “the interpretaion of the dream,”
the readers of this gigantic encyclopedia of a second world war would
have seen the war for what it was—they would have seen the V-2 missiles
reveal themselves as “public housing for the elves.” They see no suchthing, however, because that is not what the novel intends to do. They find“the dark shapes” still dark and untamed; they find that one of the missiles
harbors within itself das Schwarzgerät, the “black” instrument. All they
have is not the interpretation of a collective neurotic case in the form of
a war, offered by a Freudian novelist (if there is ever someone like that)
who is concerned with the ego’s process of socialization, but paranoia, aparanoid vision of what the war looks or feels like, which, if necessary, has
yet to undergo analysis. Vision though it is, it does not conform to “Freud’s
vision of the world”: the dream that the readers are presented with knows
no interpretation. Seen in this light, the novel appears to follow Hilarius’s
instructions rather than Freud’s, for despite his master’s teachings heeventually prescribes for Oedipa’s paranoia or “fantasy” the exact oppositeof what he has been saying as a Freudian psychoanalyst: “Cherish it! [. . .]Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or
the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear [. . .]” (138).
One cannot but be aware, however, of a paradox that such an idea of “notletting light in” implies: how can one see anything if no light is let in, andhow can anything “look” (as in “what the war looks like”) in the first place

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if there is no light coming from without? One needs to look closely at how
Pynchon makes it possible for his paranoid vision of World War II to beboth visible and immune to “looking into” simultaneously. Here is how
Enzian, the leader of the Schwarzkommando, finds the truth about the war:
There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light
you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explainaway—there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary
understanding. This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into
now, this ex-refinery [. . .] is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working
order [. . .] modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that wasnever hostile, but part of a plan both sides—“sides?”—had always
agreed on... (520)
The “extraordinary” truth about the war he finally “understands” or seesis that “both sides,” or the Allied and the Axis Powers, are in collusion
with each other as part of “a conspiracy between human beings andtechniques” (521). “[T]his War was never political at all,” it occurs tohim, “the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . .
secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . .” (521).
One might say that this paranoid vision, which is all but asocial as wellas untamed because it postulates behind what is visible an “incalculableplot” (521) that connects those things never supposed to be connected,
is a sort of dream; one might also say that it is more than a dream, since
it is doubly untamed and doubly asocial: it is not only paranoid but drug
induced as well (“Well,” the narrator admits, “this is stimulant talk here,
yes Enzian’s been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins these days like
popcorn at the movies” [521–22]). Now, how does this “extraordinary
understanding,” which clearly serves to show how what the narrator calls“drug-epistemologies” work (582), take place? It “dawns” on him, or to be
more precise it “breaks,” just as day or light breaks at the break of dawn,
or daybreak. Elsewhere in the novel Pynchon uses the word “illumination”(611) when he refers to the same paranoid recognition or anagnorisis that
occurs in Enzian’s half brother, Tchitcherine: “A Rocket-cartel. A structure
cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it. [. . .]Oh, a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State
that spans oceans and surface politics [. . .] and the Rocket is its soul. IG
Raketen” (566). Pynchon’s paranoid vision “illuminates” because it comes
as a “flood” of light and glows by itself; it emits light as does a light bulb

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like Byron, and it has no need for any outside source of light because it isluminous itself.
Paul Fussell maintains that the “overheated, melodramatic” and “halfparanoid” way in which Enzian meditates on the true character of WorldWar II is characteristic of those whose experience has no alternative
but to be “modern,” and this idea of “modern experience” is what leads
him to assume the continuity between the first “modern” war and thesecond as Pynchon in his “half-paranoid” way depicts it in his novelistic
encyclopedia (or “anatomy,” to use a term popularized by Northrop Fryeand still useful for those who read Pynchon critically) of the war (187). It
must be noted, however, that Fussell fails to do justice to the way in which
the author attempts to undo the very idea of “the enemy” with his paranoid
vision in which the “sides” are in collusion with each other, and thus tomove beyond the “modern.” Nor does he perceive the important role thatthe metaphor of daybreak plays in Enzian’s “half-paranoid” illumination.
In that illumination, he realizes that things are wedded together thatare never supposed to be, in accordance with what the narrator says
will happen at the moment of paranoid enlightenment: “the discovery
that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary
illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected” (703).
“Secondary” as it is, when it is discovered that “everything is connected,”
the discovery is called “illumination,” in which there “floods,” as is thecase with Enzian, “an extraordinary understanding.” Is it too much tosay, then, that what this observation on the connectedness of everything
in the Creation implies is that everything is surrealistic, “sur-realistic” inits possible sense of “extra-ordinary” or “out of the ordinary”? Indeed,at one point Pynchon, while clearly in astonishment, explicitly speaks of
the war in terms of surrealism: “not to mention the Latin, the German? in
an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes[. . .] from acts of minor surrealism—which [. . .] the Empire commits by
the thousands every day” (129). Even where he does not use the term, hesuggests the same dominance of the logic of surrealism in World War II.
Thus his main focus is on a multinational company, “an outfit like Shell,
with no real country, no side in any war” (243), where, exactly as in the
English church, both “sides” of the war are suspected of coexisting; hethinks of the tunnels down in the Mittelwerke in terms of “an interface
between one order of things and another” (302); and the occupied Germanzones are “connected” in an ideal fashion because they are “blindingly
One”: “‘There are no zones.’ [. . .] ‘No zones but the Zone’” (333). (ButRainbow’s Light

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perhaps the place where the most “extraordinary” sort of surrealism takes
place in the novel is “the men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom,” where“Shit ’n’ Shinola do come together” [688].) It is no wonder then that thisZone, which might be thought of as every surrealist’s dream, the ultimate
goal that every artist of the type aims for, has appeal for an anarchist as
well, an Argentine named Francisco Squalidozzi, who longs for “a returnto [. . .] that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky” (264). “Decentralizing,back toward anarchism,” he tells Slothrop, “needs extraordinary times. . . this War—this incredible War—just for the moment has wiped out
the proliferation of little states that’s prevailed in Germany for a thousand
years. Wiped it clean. Opened it. [. . .] In the openness of the German
Zone, our hope is limitless” (265).
It is no wonder either that this “extraordinary” sort of surrealism, whichis the governing logic of Pynchon’s paranoid vision of World War II, hasmuch to do with another of his favorite concepts, the “miracle,” partly
because it is also an anarchist who finds himself fascinated by the conceptin The Crying of Lot 49. “You know what a miracle is,” Jesús Arrabaltells Oedipa, “Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into
this one” (120). Obviously, this definition of “miracle” echoes in what
the author says in his following work about surrealist illumination; thelatter is precisely what enables one to realize that “another world,” where
everything is connected, has intruded into, “touch[ed],” or “kiss[ed]”(Pynchon, Crying 120, 124) “this one” which is experiencing an all-out
war for the second time (this “intrusion” can certainly be considered, touse a line from a fictitious Jacobean revenge play inserted in The Cryingof Lot 49, to be “A wedlock whose sole child is miracle” [74]). But thisleads to a question: is Pynchon telling us to question this idea of the“miracle” that, precisely as does surrealism, suggests the connectedness,collaboration, and even “oneness” of the “sides,” or does he believe in
it? What is his attitude toward the idea? For, while it is undeniable thatwhat makes Gravity’s Rainbow such a powerful war narrative is the voiceraised by the author against the “miraculous connectedness” wrought bytechnology, elsewhere he treats the “miraculous” favorably. Not only does
he speak in favor of the concept in relation to the aforementioned anarchistin The Crying of Lot 49. In his 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” hetalks about the “deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time
which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles,” when “all kindsof things had been possible which were no longer so” in the eighteenth
century, or the Age of Reason. “All kinds of things” include “Giants,

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dragons, spells,” “magic,” “God and afterlife,” and “bodily resurrection,”and each of these “miraculous” phenomena expresses, says Pynchon, the“profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however ‘irrational,’
to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what
it was doing” (40–41). This inevitably leads one to wonder: what if the“technopolitical order” itself had become “miraculous”?
A picture of such an order that paradoxically defies “reason” is exactly
what Gravity’s Rainbow gives us. Therefore, one way of answering theabove question of whether the author believes in “miracles” or stands
against them would be to say that he is ambivalent. This does not mean,
however, that he is ambivalent toward the idea of the “miracle” so much asthat he is so toward the “technopolitical order” because he seems to be, as
it were, “fatally attracted” to it whenever it takes on qualities describablein “irrational” terms. Thus he says of the V-2 that what is “only an
Aggregat [. . .] an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter” can be “alive” (362)
like Frankenstein’s creature (in his “Luddite” essay he says that “[i]f there
were such a genre as the Luddite novel,” Frankenstein “would be the firstand among the best” [40]), and that “[i]t was impossible not to think of
the Rocket without thinking of [. . .] growing toward a shape predestined
and perhaps a little otherworldly” (416). “I think of the A4,” he even has
one character, Miklos Thanatz, say, “as a baby Jesus [. . .] it really did
possess a Max Weber charisma . . . some joyful—and deeply irrational—
force the State bureaucracy could never routinize” (464). This associationof the rocket with Jesus ought not to be taken as a mere hyperbolic wayof stressing the “deep irrationality” or “miraculousness” of the former,
since the latter plays a role that is by no means negligible in making theidea of “fatal attraction” relevant to the novel’s central theme: the Electand the Preterite. “Without the millions who had plunged and drowned,
there could have been no miracle” or Jesus’s “venturing out on the Sea
of Galilee.” “The successful loner,” he is among the Elect, but his “shape
had already been created by the Preterite” (554). Slothrop is taught this“Newtonian” way of looking at Jesus in terms of “action and reaction” by
the ghost of his first American ancestor William Slothrop, the author of
On Preterition and a pig operator who “must’ve been waiting for the one
pig that wouldn’t die, that would validate all the ones who’d had to, all his
Gadarene swine who’d rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed
not by demons but by trust for men” (554–55). Undoubtedly, Pynchon is
on the “side” of the multitude or “legions” of drowned men and womenand slaughtered swine—what he otherwise calls “the many God passes

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over when he chooses a few for salvation” (555)—without whose deathno exception such as Jesus or an immortal pig would be possible. But
if such is the case, there is no reason why the same should not apply to
the “technological order.” “So, when laws of heredity are laid down,” hesays toward the end of the second part, “mutants will be born. Even as
determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously
generating items like the ‘S-Gerät’ Slothrop thinks he’s chasing like agrail” (275). If the Calvinistic view that divides everything into the Electand the Preterite applies to the V-2, it is also, as is William Slothrop’s herdof swine, to be grouped into two classes: one which consists of only one
rocket, the elect 00000, that harbors within itself a “mutant” or the black
device, and the other to which belong all the others, the “many” that havebeen passed over. Is there any reason why this shoud not be taken as anindication that Pynchon might also be on the “side” of, partly because heis “fatally attracted” to, the rest of the “hardware”?
Despite what Fussell has to say about Pynchon’s “gross dichotomizing,”
which according to him is precisely what marks him as a “modern” writer,a careful examination of his text reveals that it has room for its own
undermining (we have identified this “room” as his “fatal attraction”).
To his ambivalence toward the V-2, we can add several instances fromhis other novels where we find at work the same “postmodern” undoingof Manichaean melodrama, the same attachment to the “enemy” who is
supposedly on “the other side.” In The Crying of Lot 49, Puritans called
the Scurvhamites, who are believers in “the will of God,” the “prime
mover” of Creation, and who therefore see the rest of it as “[running] offsome opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatismthat led to eternal death,” nevertheless somehow find themselves “looking
out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick andfascinated horror,” so much so that “this was to prove fatal. One by one
the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there wasno one left in the sect” (155); Vineland closes with Prairie daydreamingof “flirting” with Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor (384); and in Against
the Day, Kit Traverse, nose-diving in his Italian friend’s modified triplane
bomber and “approaching the speed of sound,” can “see the appeal. Of
course he could. Pure velocity. The incorporation of death into what
otherwise would only be a carnival ride” (1070–71). This last passage,
which offers a glimpse of Italy during the first war, tells us where to locate
the prototype of the Rocket 00000, a special model for Gottfried, “theyoung pet and protégé of Captain Blicero” (484), a rocket to “[s]tuff him

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in” so that “[t]hey are mated to each other” (750–51) as in a surrealist workof art. It also tells of the “appeal” of Fascism, of which Kit and his friend’s“nosedive” is “perhaps the first and purest expression in northern Italy”(1071). Pynchon’s ambivalence, or his capacity for “fatal fascination,”certainly suggests that there persists the theme that Fussell identifies as“ironic proximity” in his novels. What are so close to each other, however,as to make irony one of their principal rhetorical modes are not “violence”
and “disaster” on the one hand and “safety,” “meaning,” and “love” onthe other but “They” and “We,” whose eventual ironic proximity returns
us to the fact that in Gravity’s Rainbow he is, besides being an ironist, asurrealist, that he is a man of “extra-ordinary illumination.”

II. Jumping into the Mind of the Narrator
On his first morning on the French Riviera, Slothrop, soon after saving
Katje Borgesius on a beach from an octopus named Grigori that was
optically conditioned to attack her, suspects that something is going on.
His suspicion is described as follows:
So it is here, grouped on the beach with strangers, that voices begin
to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and thelight, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate . . . it’s a
Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known
as paranoia, filtering in. [. . .] Oh, that was no “found” crab, Ace—norandom octopus or girl, uh-uh. Structure and detail come later, but theconniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart. (188)
After this incident involving “no random octopus or girl,” he begins to“seek other orders behind the visible” like his Puritan ancestors who“heard God clamoring to them in every turn of a leaf or cow loose among
apple orchards in autumn” (281). But he begins to do so not because hehas faith in “the numinous certainty of God” (242) but because he senses“the conniving around him,” namely, because paranoia has “filter[ed] in”(although, as the narrator reminds us, “there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia” [434]). Now, what deserves
particular attention in this scene of Slothrop’s awakening to paranoia or
his loss of innocence—he now regards his friend Tantivy as “a messenger
from [his] innocent, pre-octopus past” (188)—is that the inception ofhis paranoia coincides with the diminishing of the ability of “the light,”

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though as bright as before, to “illuminate.” Here “illumination” does notrefer to the way in which an “extraordinary understanding” or surrealistic
paranoid vision “breaks” or “dawns” on one, as we have seen in theprevious section. All that this “light” refers to is the morning light shining
on the beach, and in this respect it has more to do, one might say, with
Freud than with his former adherent Hilarius or Byron the Bulb—it has to
do with “letting in the light” so that one can “look into” the dark corners of
the world thus made visible, rather than with cherishing one’s vision andparanoically seeking another world “behind the visible.”This Freudian (or Mediterranean, one should say) sort of “illumination”
provides a counterpoint in Gravity’s Rainbow to its paranoid counterpart,the “extraordinary understanding” or surrealistic vision that, like a lightbulb (and also a “projector at the planetarium,” as Randolph Driblette
explains the role of stage director in The Crying of Lot 49 [79]), glows
by itself. This does not mean, however, that the novel succeeds in doing
anything equivalent to analysis; as we have seen, “the dark shapes” have
yet to be revealed for what they are, namely, “toy horses and Biedermeyer
furniture,” and it is still uncertain whether or not the “room” called
the unconscious is “like any other room.” But if the unconscious anddreams—in short, World War II—are the last thing to have light shedon them in Gravity’s Rainbow, it does not mean that there is nothing init that “bears that much looking into.” That which does are the minds
of many of its characters. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Fryeremarks that “the novelist is freer to enter his characters’ minds” (308)than the romance writer. The means by which he achieves this purposeis the “stream of consciousness” technique, which, according to Frye,“permits of a [. . .] concentrated fusion of the two forms,” namely, thenovel and the confession: “the author jumps into his characters’ minds
to follow their stream of consciousness, and out again to describe themexternally” (307, 314). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon makes liberaluse not only of this technique but also of another that also allows one
to “jump into” or “look into”—that is to say, to throw light on, like themorning sun on a Mediterranean beach—characters’ minds, namely, freeindirect discourse, although in many cases it is not easy to distinguishbetween the two techniques since the novel is narrated in the present
tense. It may safely be said that one of his aims in writing the novel is to“illuminate” consciousness, which, “once light is let in,” exhibits to us
whatever interiority it possesses, even if it does not do the same with theunconscious (that is why the book can be said to follow Hilarius rather

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than Freud). Thus we have direct access to what is on Slothrop’s mind (“Oh,that was no ‘found’ crab, Ace—no random octopus or girl, uh-uh” and “itwill not bear that much looking into, will it?”) as well as to Enzian’s inner
awakening, drug induced as it is (“‘sides?’”). Moreover, if this “entry” intoa character’s mind is intended as a satire on “the primacy of the ‘conscious’self” that is said in the novel to be a belief held by “a Christian, a Western
European,” it makes sense that the novel allows us to peep into anotherof the self’s constituent parts: its “memories” (153). So, as in a modernist
novel, Pynchon enumerates Katje’s memories of her days with Blicerowith a particular focus on his “teeth,” letting us know “that inside herself[. . .] she is corruption and ashes [. . .] remembering now his teeth, long,terrible, veined with bright brown rot as he speaks these words, the yellow
teeth of Captain Blicero [. . .]. She recalls his teeth before any other feature[. . .]” (94).
If the paranoid or visionary sort of “illumination” is surrealistic, theother sort that leads us into the characters’ minds might be called, forwant of a better term, simply “realistic,” in its epistemological as well as“ordinary” sense of showing us a character’s stream of consciousness as it
is. Of course, this way of using the term suggests that Gravity’s Rainbow,
commonly viewed as a model of postmodernist fiction, has close ties withrealism and modernism in the novel genre. Yet, at the same time, it also
clarifies how closely related Pynchon’s “realist novel” is to the medium
whose use of light enables one to take a “close look,” not necessarily
at someone’s stream of consciousness, but at least at his or her “face.”
In Vineland, the power of the cinema as a means for throwing light ishighlighted:
They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal anddevastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written
into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could
withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system,
the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mug
shots of the bought and sold? (195)
Of course, commentaries on the connection of Gravity’s Rainbow with thecinema are numerous and as old as the novel itself. Fussell, too, touches
on “Pynchon’s identification, in Gravity’s Rainbow, of war with film” andviews the novel as an announcement that “modern life itself—equivalent[. . .] to modern war—is a film too” (221). In the present context, however,Rainbow’s Light

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what makes it uniquley cinematic—what makes it possible to rethink how
we read it in terms of how we see a film (and also a play)—can be locatedin the manner in which it is narrated.
How, then, is it narrated? First, it is told by a narrator who is most likely
the author himself and who, as Fussell stresses, repeatedly “steps to thefront of his stage, and speaks in his own [. . .] voice” (277). This is done,
however, without puncturing his paranoid vision, a fact that differentiates
him from the narrators in those works whose distinguishing characteristic
is their sustained use of romantic irony, such as Tristram Shandy andpostmodernist metafictional novels (the intruding narrator’s function, in
Pynchon’s case, is rather to reinforce his own vision). Second, it is narrated
in the present tense, effecting the practical loss of our sense of temporal
distance to the events being narrated so that a sense of immediacy prevails
throughout the novel. What is the overall effect of this narrative style?
In cinematic terms, it prevents us from “kick[ing] back and watch[ing]the unfolding drama,” or the author’s vision, as Frenesi is able to do
in Vineland (237). In dramatic terms, it contributes to abolishing what
Adorno calls “aesthetic distance” (34). “The traditional novel,” Adorno
explains, “can be compared to the three-walled stage of bourgeois theater.
This technique was one of illusion. The narrator raises a curtain: the reader
is to take part in what occurs as though he were physically present” (33).
What Pynchon does, to borrow Adorno’s words on Kafka, is that
he destroys the reader’s contemplative security in the face of what
he reads. His novels [. . .] are an anticipatory response to a state of
the world in which the contemplative attitude has become a mockery
because the permanent threat of catastrophe no longer permits any
human being to be an uninvolved spectator; nor does it permit theaesthetic imitation of that stance. (34)There could be no better commentary on Gravity’s Rainbow than this,especially in view of the way in which it ends with “this old theatre”
on which a V-2 is about to fall (760), thus removing the possibility ofan “uninvolved spectator.” But this impossibility of “the contemplative
attitude” or of “kicking back,” which is implied by the loss of our senseof distance, whether temporal or aesthetic, does not mean that we are toexperience or “take part in what occurs” in Pynchon’s “theatre of war”
in any literally immediate way (though something close to it is certainly
achieved) but that we are “physically present,” like the reader of “the200

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traditional novel,” to witness the author-narrator’s paranoid vision, that is
to say, his stream of consciousness. The entire novel might be read as anextended interior monologue by the narrator, and in that case it can be said
to concern itself with throwing light on or “illuminating” his consciousness
so that one can “look into” or “jump into” it (or at least its illusion). Thisis tantamount to saying that the narrative mode of the novel is “realistic,”
and it has to be so, since, although the narrator’s paranoid vision of WorldWar II is presented as a sort of dream, it has to make itself available toconsciousness if it is to become narratable or communicable at all. To
narrate one’s vision or dream means to adapt its spatial form to temporality
in order to make it accessible to conscious understanding. In this respect,
no better beginning of this novel is conceivable than “But it is alreadylight,” which announces both “Pirate” Prentice’s waking from his dreamand the onset or “dawn” of the narrator’s own dream, and which also
marks the beginning of the process of “illuminating” the latter dream as it
adapts itself to the temporality of his consciousness. This announcement,
however, as has been pointed out, poses a problem as to its source: it isdifficult to tell whether the voice belongs to the narrator, Prentice, or bothas in free indirect discourse.
If Gravity’s Rainbow can be regarded as “realistic,” it differentiates
itself from what Adorno calls “the traditional novel” in an important
way: in Pynchon’s novel we “spectate” what happens not so much tothe characters as to the author-narrator’s consciousness (this brings thebook closer to what Frye calls the confession, a distinct prose form thatwas invented, according to him, by St. Augustine and whose modern
type Rousseau established [307], and indeed Pynchon’s novel might be
subtitled, “The Extraordinary Confession of a Paranoid Visionary”). Or,
to be more precise, we see what “occurs” to him (in the sense of “to comeinto one’s mind,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it), that is, avision demanding to be communicated in narrative form and thus madecommunicable (but only barely, considering its practical unreadability),
where we are permitted entry, as if having opened a Chinese box, into stillother minds, namely, those of the characters. This mise-en-abyme, althoughsuch a common device among the postmodernists, is precisely what makes
Pynchon unlike any other. Take, for example, Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive, which is also a postmodernist war novel dealing with World War II.
In it the author-narrator says: “There are almost no characters in this story,
and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it
are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One

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201of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged frombeing characters” (164). This impossibility of “being a character” is also
implied by another postmodernist novelistic experiment (having nothing
to do with war, however), Barthelme’s Snow White, which directly asks
the reader in a midbook questionnaire: “Are the seven men, in your view,adequately characterized as individuals?” (83). In direct contrast to thesetwo contemporary examples, Gravity’s Rainbow assumes the authenticity,
at least to some extent, of the concepts of “character,” “individual,” and“consciousness,” if for no other reason than to exploit them for satiric
purposes. This uniqueness relates to Pynchon’s use of light, which is madepossible by an insight into how pertinent “illumination” is to one’s longing
to see World War II for what it is.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
Barthelme, Donald. Snow White. 1967. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken, 1969.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works.
1964. Trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London:
Vintage, 2001. Vol. 22 of The Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud. James Strachey, gen. ed. 24 vols. 2001.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1971.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006.
——. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1986.
——. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
——. “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review 28 Oct. 1984: 1+.
——. Vineland. 1990. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with
Death. 1969. New York: Dell-Random, 1991.