Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:11:52.161Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Lawrence C. Wolfley
Lawrence C. Wolfley*
Affiliation:
Berkeley-Oakland, California
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon shows his indebtedness to the school of psychoanalytic culture criticism best exhibited in the two major works of Norman O. Brown—Life against Death and Love's Body. Brown's neo-Freudian view of repression as the source of man's uniqueness in nature is mirrored in virtually every thematic aspect of Gravity's Rainbow. In one sense, the physical gravity of the title is a metaphor for the human repression that engages Pynchon on the psychological level. Pynchon's understanding of history, like Brown's, reflects “the slow return of the repressed.” Other themes include the hypertrophy of the death instinct as manifested in weapons of destruction, the pernicious influence of Calvinist dualism opposing true dialectics, the interdependent abuses of sexuality and power, and the need for an antirational conception of art based in transcendental symbolism. The novel enacts the struggle of life against death, and its style affirms man's freedom.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 5 , October 1977 , pp. 873 - 889
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 All page references to Gravity's Rainbow are given in the text and are taken from the standard edition (New York: Viking, 1973). The Viking hardcover and paperback versions are the same. I abbreviate Gravity's Rainbow as GR.

2 Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), abbreviated LAD, with all page references to the Wesleyan paperback edition, first printed in March 1970; and Love's Body (New York: Vintage-Random, 1966), abbreviated LB, with all page references to the paperback edition published in 1966.

3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, 1964), p. 18; see also p. 305.

4 Other relevant subplots have to do with Roger Mexico (Pointsman's associate) and Jessica Swanlake, two sides of a love triangle; triple agent Katje Borgesius, an exotic Dutch blond who vamps Slothrop and lets herself be used and abused in various decadent sexual arrangements; “Pirate” Prentice, a British officer whose capacity for fantasy and the dream world provides ominous overtones to the literal action; and a large number of associates in The White Visitation, including “cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians, Couéists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots,” etc. (p. 77). Minor subplots abound.

5 Richard Poirier, perhaps Pynchon's most sensitive critic, puts it well: “If in the structure of his books Pynchon duplicates the intricate networking of contemporary technological, political, and cultural systems, then in the style and its rapid transitions he tries to match the dizzying tempos, the accelerated shifts from one mode of experience to another, which characterize contemporary media and movement” (“Rocket Power,” Saturday Review of the Arts, March 1973, p. 60). This essay is still probably the best general introduction to GR. And it must be credited with providing the seminal suggestion for this study.

6 Edward Mendelson, “Pynchon's Gravity,” The Yale Review, 62 (Summer 1973), 631. Obviously I think that one can add the intervening four years (or even a longer period, though that's not necessary) to this statement and have it still hold true. It's strange, but in reading one gets the feeling that GR somehow qualitatively subsumes everything that has happened since its putative action of 1944–45. Mendelson's more recent essay on GR (“Gravity's Encyclopedia,” in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz [Boston: Little, 1976], pp. 161–95) provides an interesting basis for this feeling in its thesis that GR is not properly a novel at all but an “encyclopedic narrative.”

7 Frederick C. Crews, “Love in the Western World,” Partisan Review, 34, No. 2 (Spring 1967), 272–87. This influential spoiler essay has been reprinted as “Norman O. Brown: The World Dissolves,” in Frederick Crews, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975). Crews, who admits that he was disillusioned by the discovery that Brown is not “true” in a Marxian, positivist sense, complains that “psychoanalysis for Brown is not science but poetic philosophy, just as its harshest critics have always said” (PR, p. 277), and that in all important controversies Brown “never once deviates into petty considerations of evidence” (PR, p. 278).

8 Gravity is also important to Pynchon because it remains one of the most embarrassing mysteries in modern science. No one has yet produced, to everyone's satisfaction, a single set of equations uniting what we now know about gravitational and electromagnetic phenomena. There is no “unified field theory.” Therefore “gravity's rainbow” is also “the beauty of gravity's mystery.” The problem of gravity, in layman's terms, is action at a distance—a favorite of mystics in all ages.

9 Scott Sanders objects that “Pynchon's conspiratorial imagination tends to make our social organization appear even more mysterious than it really is, tends to mystify the relations of power which in fact govern our society” (“Pynchon's Paranoid History,” in Mindful Pleasures, p. 157; this essay was originally published in Twentieth Century Literature, 21, No. 2 [May 1975], 177–92.) Aside from the intriguing question of what “really is,” my analysis should demonstrate that Sanders has seriously misread Pynchon's strategy, partly through an assumption that the novel genre is really a branch of descriptive sociology.

10 Crews rightly stresses this shift, though he is hardly fair in viewing it as a moral transgression on Brown's part; but such is the burden of the reprint's subtitle (“The World Dissolves”) and of his general conclusion: “He eliminates our problems by eliminating us” (PR, p. 286).

11 In his book-length review of Pynchon's works, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1974), Joseph W. Slade gives to Weber something of the same prominence I give to Brown. But Weber's thought is more properly viewed as one more set of background materials for the historical narrative, though at times he is very much in evidence.

12 On p. 732 Enzian comments to the leader of the Empty Ones, Ombindi, “I'm projecting my own death wish, and it comes out looking like you.” And on p. 726 the narrator shouts, “Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only the peak that we are allowed to see….”

13 The three members of the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction recommended GR unanimously, but the fourteen-member advisory board decided to give no prize for 1973, certain members describing the jury's selection as “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten,” and in parts “obscene” (paraphrased and quoted from the New York Times, 8 May 1974, p. 38). Those who enjoy making paranoid connections (such as the one I made in noting that the date of the Times item just cited is also Pynchon's birthday) should see Mathew Winston's “The Quest for Pynchon,” in Mindful Pleasures. Winston's essay is a judicious and tactful exposition of the major public facts available about a writer who has always displayed an obsessive but quite understandable insistence on his personal privacy. An intimate, firsthand account of Pynchon the man was published by Jules Siegel in Playboy (March 1977) under the title “Who Is Thomas Pynchon … and Why Did He Take Off with My Wife?” Siegel's essay, unfortunately, lacks Winston's taste, but it is nevertheless of biographical significance.

14 In Blicero's monologue, pp. 723–24, Pynchon explicitly equates homosexual love with death and heterosexual love with life. Enzian's attitude toward the word “deviations” is ambivalent (p. 319). He does not like the term, but accepts its use.

15 A corollary of man's capitulation to his own creature (technology) is man's impoverishment of nature. See Webley Silvernail's fantasy of the lab as just a larger maze, and the important elegiac lament that follows, pp. 229–30.

16 Various episodes of the book are illuminated by this view of the novelist as dialectician. Thus, the fundamental intent of the Counterforce (aside from their immediate interest in trying to save Slothrop) is to introduce a dialectical element into the prevailing climate of dualism. Thus the ambivalence of the narrator's concluding attitude toward Slothrop may signal, not confusion on Pynchon's part, but rather a higher unity of opposing views, a conjunction of evaluations mutually exclusive and yet equally “true.” Only the law of contradiction insists that, if Slothrop is saved, he is not not-saved, and vice versa. And my reader can identify many more examples. But, however we interpret the various syntheses, we always return to one truth: “Dialectics rather than dualism is the metaphysic of hope rather than despair” (LAD, p. 84).

17 Mircea Eliade, in Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meaning of Initiation in Human Culture (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 127–28 and passim, establishes that the dream life and unconscious operations in general always express themselves in religious symbols. Thus Slothrop dreams of a woman who is found “at the bottom of the river. She has drowned. But all forms of life fill her womb.” He finds that 'This dream will not leave him. He baits his hook, hunkers by the bank, drops his line into the Spree“ (p. 447). He has become the Fisher King as described by Eliot, searching for fertility in a land now spiritually sterile. As Brown comments, ”to see symbolism is to see eternal recurrence“ (LB, p. 200).

18 A revealing example is provided by David Thorn-burn in “A Dissent on Pynchon,” Commentary, 56 (Sept. 1973), 68–70. He complains that Slothrop is not allowed individuality by his creator, and, if Slothrop is an “emblem” of “all white Americans,” then this answer “defines Slothrop yet again not as an individual but as a member of a class, a mere carrier of meanings outside himself …” (p. 70). The overall objection concerns “Pynchon's failure to allow his characters an imaginative space of their own” (p. 70). There is no answer to this sort of criticism, except that of irrelevance. The real question is whether Pynchon understood the irony of his godlike creation and manipulation of everyone—manipulators and manipulated alike—in a novel so much concerned with questions of free will, determinism, and control. I think that in writing he did understand this irony and that he and his fragmented narrative persona play on it in numerous ways—though to establish this properly would take far more space than I have here. But I also think that the particular romantic esthetic of this novel dictated that such formal concerns as this not be very central to the novel's purpose.