CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
THOMAS PYNCHON
AND THE LIMITS OF COMMUNICATION
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in
English
by
Daniel Mark Scott
May, 19 82
The Thesis of Daniel Mark Scott is approved:
Arthur Lane, ·Advisor
Lar)r GibMn ,"Advisor
R~ert
Chianese, Chairperson___
California State University, Northridge
ii
-------
My heartfelt thanks to my mother and father for continually
giving their loving support and for always believing in me.
My appreciation to Dr. Chianese for his guidance and
assistance. His in·sights and perceptive criticism were
indispensable to the completion of this project. My thanks
also to Dr. Lane and Dr. Gibson for their helpful suggestions and close reading of the text.
My thanks to Marcie for her kindness and love.
111
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
iii
Abstract
v
Introduction
1
Chapter
1.
2.
3.
"Entropy" and V.:
Communication
One-Way
6
The Crying of Lot 49:
C1rcu1t of Television
Gravity's Rainbow:
vs. Control
The Closed
17
Communication
33
Notes
54
Bibliography
57
ABSTRACT
THOMAS PYNCHON
AND THE LIMITS OF COMMUNICATION
by
Daniel Mark Scott
Master of Arts in English
Thomas Pynchon, in the span of just fifteen years,
has made an indelible impression on the field of American
literature.
He wrote seven short stories between 1959 and
1966; some of these he later incorporated into
his novels.
po~tions
of
Pynchon's first novel, V., was published in
1963; this was followed three years later with The Crying
of Lot 49.
Then in 1973, he published Gravity's Rainbow,
the novel that is considered to be his masterpiece.
Although these three novels differ in style, length, and
execution, there is a continuity of theme from novel to
novel and a strong recurrence of motifs.
One major theme '
is that technology overshadows humanity:
in all three
novels and in the short story "Entropy," significant communication is severely restricted by technology itself and
v
by people warped by the dehumanizing effects of technology.
By surveying Pynchon's use of the advances in technology that World War II produced and by borrowing insights
about technology from the fields of cybernetics, entropy,
and information theory as background, I will lay the
groundwork for an examination of Pynchon's assessment of
the state of commun-ication in a post-industrial, hightechnology society.
I will begin with a study of
"Entropy," a piece that contains many of the themes that
recur in his later work and then discuss the novel, V.
The main thrust of the paper will focus on the theme of
blocked communication and some disastrous consequences to
communication that communication technology itself contributes in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow.
vi
Introduction
The events described in Pynchon's last novel,
Gravity's Rainbow, actually occur before those of the
previous two novels.
Gravity's Rainbow is set in Europe
during the last years of World War II.
The developments in
technology during this time not only directly affect the
action of this novel but also influence all of Pynchon's
other writing.
During World War II, technological advances
were pushed ahead at an unprecedented rate.
Because of the
war, all the social and economic restraints that had been
holding back technology were withdrawn.
The urgency of the
war spurred the creation of more and more sophisticated
weapons.
Some of these advances included the jet-propelled
plane, the helicopter, radar, and the German V-2 rocket.
During the war, radar was advanced to the point where it
could accurately guide bombing planes to their targets and
release the bombs at the right moment.
Michael Seidel, in an article on Gravity's Rainbow,
maintains that the V-2 rocket epitomizes the difference
between the two World Wars.
1
In Germany, Werhner von Braun,
a member of the German Society for Space Travel, became
Technical Director at the Peenemunde Rocket Center.
Under
his leadership, the vehicle intended for space travel was
turned into the V-2 rocket.
In 1942, the first experimental
V-2 was fired and in 1944, the bombardment of London and
1
other cities began.
A year later, on August 6, 1945, the
first atomic bomb was exploded at Hiroshima, destroying an
area of five square miles and killing about 80,000 people.
Three days later, another bomb was released on Nagasaki,
killing 40,000 more.
After World War II, the development of computer
technology was phenomenal; it affected every aspect of
American society.
Marshall McCluhan speaks of this
occurrence in terms of the shift from the mechanical and
industrial world to the electric world.
The processing and
moving of information became the dominant business and
means of wealth in the electric world.
As McCluhan states:
"Information itself became the basic economic commodity of
the electric age."
2
The growing importance of information to technology
was manifested by the proliferation of computer terminals,
computer services, and data communications equipment in
industry.
The first major scientific use of computers was
in nuclear
weapon~
research; the military also used
computers to monitor aircraft movement.
David Hamilton,
author of Technology, Man and the Environment, states that
the amount of accumulated information in the world doubles
every fifteen years or less. 3
Consequently, the world's
major industries had to develop methods of producing,
storing, retrieving, and presenting information. :In all
fields of communication, technology was being adjusted to
transmit more messages and store more data.
In the wake of this massive flow of information, the
science of cybernetics, the study of control and communication in man and machines, was developed.
This science,
which emerged during World War II, began with efforts to
improve anti-aircraft defense and grew partly in response
to developments in radar.
The field of cybernetics not
only organizes disparate kinds of information but it
synthesizes parts of other scientific disciplines,
including communication theory and automata or complex
machines, such as telephone switching systems and electronic computers.
It encompasses the fundamental bases of
most modern technology.
Norbert Wiener, who coined _the
term "cybernetics," states in The Human Use of Human Beings
that the two functions of control and communication are
necessary. for any systematic action.
Wiener believes that
"society can only be understood through a study of the
messages and the communication facilities which belong to
it." 4
Pynchon shares Wiener's belief in the importance of
communication and examines the effect on society when the
transmission of messages breaks down.
Wiener was also interested in entropy, a concept found
in thermodynamics that refers to a measurement of static
disorganization that molecules reach in closed systems.
Entropytends to increase when hot and cold molecules
interact,
(the Second Law of Thermodynamics).
Since heat
will always be transferred from the hotter to the colder
body, molecules will become uniformly cold and there will
not be any energy available for work.
parallels between heat systems
Wiener also saw the
and the universe:
As entropy increases, the universe and all
closed systems in the universe tend naturally
to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness,
to move ... from a state of organization and
differentiation in which distinctions and
forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. 5
The world that Pynchon's novels describe is just such a
closed system, a state in which no real exchange of energy
or information is possible.
The relationship between entropy and information leads
to information theory, a field concerned with the transmission of information and the analysis of communication
systems.
During and after World War II, scientists began
studying communications systems.
Claude E. Shannon, a
mathematician, became interested in the problem of
communication and published A Mathematical Theory of
Communication in 1948, the same year that Norbert Wiener
published his book, Cybernetics.
Communication (or information) theory measures the
rate at which a message source, such as a speaker,
generates information.
Any communication system has at
least three parts: the transmitter source, the channel
(over which the message is sent), and the receiver.
A
message source may produce any one of many possible
messages.
In communication theory, messages are measured
by the quantity of information they possess,which is the
originality present in the message.
In any message source,
choice is continually exercised, otherwise the messages
would be predetermined and predictable.
All communication systems or channels are imperfect.
When using the telephone or listening to the radio, one may
hear the desired signal against a background of noise or
static.
In communication, noise imposes limits on the
performance of the system.
Any disturbance of the signal
in its passage from the transmitter to the receiver is
called noise, which causes messages to be distorted or
altered.
While nature promotes uncertainty, information
helps reduce it, but the information must reach its
receiver in order to combat the entropic forces.
In an
entropic world, intensified by sophisticated though
alienating technology, people tend to become closed systems,
unable to communicate with one another effectively.
In
the following analysis, these ideas will be shown to be a
major thematic concern in Pynchon's work.
Chapter 1
"Entropy" andy_.: One-Way Communication
In the short story "Entropy", Pynchon uses the
scientific term in its title for the first time as a
metaphor for the decadence, chaos, and imminent collapse of
modern civilization.
Entropy measures the progressive
disorganization of a closed system.
The Second Law of
Thermodynamics states that a closed syste_m will always
lose energy because its heat will be dissipated and will
no longer be available for work.
In "Entropy", Pynchon
presents two counter forces to the collapse of culture and
the exhaustion of the energies of the universe.
The action of the story takes place in Washington,
D.C. in 1957.
Downstairs, in Meatball Mulligan's
apartmen~
a leasebreaking party, in its fortieth hour, is raging out
of control.
One of Meatball's friends, Saul, tells him of
an argument that he has had with his girl friend over
communication theory.
Saul understands that information
disintegrates through transmission from the sender to the
rece1ver.
The intrusion of noise or distortion into the
circuit will alter any message.
phenomenon a "language barrier",
Meatball calls this
6
but Saul disagrees:
If anything it's a kind of leakage.
Tell a
girl: 'I love you.'
No trouble with twothirds of that, it's a closed circuit.
Just
you and she.
But that nasty four-letter
word in the middle, that's the one you have
to look out for.
Ambigu1ty.
Redundance.
6
Irrelevance, even.
Leakage. All this noise.
Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit (E, p. 29).
Saul articulates one of the major reasons why
communication fails in Pynchon's works: the messages,
during transmission, are overwhelmed by noise, in the form
of ambiguity, redundance, and banality.
Meatball, in
response to Saul's remarks, provides a fitting example of
the prese-nce of noise in a message: "Well, now, Saul," he
muttered, "you're sort of, I don't know, expecting a lot
from people.
I mean you know.
What it is is, most of the
things we say, I guess, are mostly noise" (E_, p. 30).
The noise content of any message changes according to
the particular receiver and sender and to the message
being sent.
The Duke di Angelis quartet is aware of being
trapped by conversations devoid of meaning.
The jazz group
tries to skirt the problem by playing without instruments,
merely thinking the music; but one of their members plays
"I'll Remember April" while the rest of the group plays
"These Foolish Things".
Their attempt to perform and
communicate on a purely mental level fails.
the party is overcome by entropy.
At this point,
A fight breaks out in
the kitchen and skirmishes occur throughout the room: "the
noise in Meatball's apartment had reached a sustained,
ungodly crescendo" (E, p. 34).
Upstairs, above Meatball's apartment, Callisto, a
middle-aged intellectual, lives with a girl named Aubade.
Intent on isolating himself from the outside world,
Callisto has turned his apartment into a hothouse:
"Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity
1n the city's chaos, alien:to the vagaries of the weather,
of national politics, of any civil disorder" (E_,
p.
24).
Callisto, who lives primarily in his mind, dictates his
memoirs to Aubade.
He recalls that Willard Gibbs, a
pioneer 1n the study of thermodynamics, predicted that a
heat death would occur when everything in the universe had
reached the same temperature.
He realizes that "an isolated system -- galaxy,
engine, human being, culture, whatever -- must evolve
spontaneously toward the Condition of the More Probable"
(E_, p. 27), and there is nothing more probable than
molecular calm.
He is also aware of the theorem of Rudolph
Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated
system continually increases.
Callisto (like Pynchon)
finds in the concept of entropy a metaphor for certain
phenomena in his own world: Callisto perceives in the
political climate of the late 1950's a similar tendency
"from the least to the most probable, from differentiation
to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos"
(E_, p. 28).
He fears that with the impending heat death,
ideas and communication, like heat energy, will no longer
be transferred and that "intellectual motion would,
accordingly, cease" (E, p. 28).
His fears are validated
by the chaos flourishing in Meatball's apartment.
Callisto, existing in his own personal closed system,
does not apply Clausius' theorum to himself.
However, the
enclave that he has created to resist chaos and disorder is
also subject to entropy, just as is Meatball's apartment.
Aubade must constantly readjust to the chaos that threatens
to rush in "lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray
of discrete and meaningless signals" (E_, p. 27).
She
attempts to maintain that "precious signal-to-noise ratio"
(E_, p. 31).
But, the noise from the street and from the
apartment below increasingly penetrates their world until
Aubade in desperation smashes the window, allowing
equilibrium to occur between their room and the outside
world.
Downstairs, Meatball is faced with the same situation,
that of increasing entropy in the form of disorganization
and chaos.
He can either retreat to a closet and wait for
everyone to leave or he can attempt to create order by
one-to-one communication.
Meatball takes action, choosing
to keep his party from deteriorating into total chaos and
attends to each of his guests individually.
By not
allowing himself to become a closed system, by leaving a
channel open through which to communicate, Meatball
counteracts the forces of entropy.
In Meatball Mulligan's
three-day party, Pynchon creates a powerful example of the
breakdown in communication and the increasing chaos that
plagu:es the modern world.
In V. , he expands this theme to
encompass the lives of Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil.
V., Pynchon's first novel, contains many of the themes
that will appear in his later novels.
reviewers of V. in
Atl~ntic
While some of the
and The New Republic feel that
it is merely a pastiche of unconnected images, in reality,
the novel has a coherent core: the effects of entropy link
its disparate parts.
Pynchon also details the increasing
inability of the characters to communicate anything of
substance to one another.
This collapse of communication
is linked to the increasing dedication of modern society
t_o dehumanizing technology.
world's systems.
In~.,
chaos has overtaken the
As nature's energies decline, man
approaches the inanimate.
Joseph Slade, author of Thomas
Pynchon, remarks that Pynchon views Western Civilization
as blighted by all aspects of decadence: "Decadence is
simply an exhaustion of tradition, a decay of values, which
leads to inertness and to death; ·it is the cultural
equivalent of entropy."
7
In V., the culture has become
sick and the inhabitants are reflections of a culture
dominated by death-oriented technology.
The action of the novel, which occurs in New York in
1956, follows two paths.
One path focuses on Benny Profane
and his group of friends, "The Whole Sick Crew".
The other
path follows Herbert Stencil on his quest for a mysterious
female, referred to only as V.
Profane is a perfect example
of a person whose life is controlled by entropic processes.
Profane imitates the movement of a yo-yo as he drifts from
place to place, content to shuttle aimlessly back and forth.
He is a passive figure, who forms no lasting relationships,
although at least three women offer him love and companionship.
Profane, by his refusal to become involved with
life, has become a closed system.
He has blocked off all
the channels used for communication with other people.
One
of the women who try to enter his life, Fina Mendoza,
wonders why they never talk to one another:
"Wha," said Profane, who was watching a
Randolph Scott movie on television.
"Wha.
I talk to you."
"Sure. Nice dress. How about more coffee?
I got me another cocodrilo today~
You know
what I mean."8
Although he wishes that he was able to say only the
right things, Profane's vocabulary is made up of nothing
but the "wrong words" (V, p. 123).
Rachel Owlglass, another woman in his life, reaches
out to Profane, but he merely yo-yos out of reach.
Paola
Maijstral, another admirer, asks Profane if he and Rachel
are "in love," but he replies that the word doesn't mean
anything to him.
In~.,
communication has broken down to
the extent that language no longer holds any verifiable
meaning.
Later in the novel, Paola is talking to McClintic
Sphere, a jazz musician, about their future.
tells her: "There's no magic words.
magic enough.
McClintic
Not even I love you 1.s
Could you see Eisenhower telling Malenkov
or Khruschev that?'' (V, p.
34~.Language,
instead of aiding
communication, hampers it; it has suffered a decline, just
like the universe.
The increasing world disorder also afflicts the
members of The Whole Sick Crew.
The Crew spend their time
drinking in bars and riding back and forth on the subway,
a process they refer to as "yoyoing."
Yoyoing exemplifies
the closed system, movement for movement's sake, devoid of
all purpose.
The Crew lead stagnant, inanimate lives,
obtaining the substance of their conversations from Time
magazine.
One of the Crew, a painter named Slab, belongs
to the School of Catatonic Expressionism, "the ultimate in
non-communication" (V, p. 45), and paints endless pictures
of cheese danishes.
Another crew member, Fergus, hooks
himself up to his television set with two electrodes.
When he drops below a certain level, a switch is triggered,
turning him back into his TV-saturated world.
Fergus has
degenerated into an extension of his television set, a
closed circuit system.
Like Profane, the Crew barely manages to converse.
Some Crew members, while crossing a crowded room at a
party, utter a total of three words:
"Man," said Raoul.
"Scene," said Slab, waving his arm to
indicate the unwinding party.
"Later," Stencil said and moved on out
the door (V, p. 46).
One of the Crew's activities is gathering at the
Rusty Spoon, a local bar, to discuss life and art:
"Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than
proper nouns, literary allusion, critical or philosophical
terms linked in certain ways"
(~,
p. 277).
The use of
p
language has deteriorated to the point where the Crew
simply arrange words into appropriate patterns.
They are
left with mutterings, emptied of all significance.
The act of communication continuously fails
in~.,
yet
there are moments when even characters as intentionally
silent as Profane achieve some kind of communication with
other people.
While waiting in an employment agency,
Profane notices a messenger and their eyes meet: "There
was a little half-smile and a kind of half-telepathy and
it was as if this messenger had brought a message to
Profane too, sheathed to everybody but the two of them in
an envelope of eyebeams touching" (V, p. 135).
As will be
seen in the other two novels, some of the most important
acts of communication take place without a word being
spoken.
Without the inherent problem of misunderstanding
that accompanies language ("noise"), occasionally people
are able to communicate with each other on some non-verbal
level.
The character who is most opposed to the detached and
aimless Profane is Herbert Stencil.
Stencil searches for
information about V ., a female whom he believes has
appeared at various places across the continent since the
turn of the century.
Yet in reconstructing clues scattered
throughout history, Stencil may perceive patterns in V.'s
appearances where none exist.
Since he was not present at
any of the events that he recounts, the authenticity of
the information is questionable.
As he pieces together his
'
clues, it is impossible to tell what is true because all
of the information has already been filtered through his
consciousness and thus "Stencilized" (V, p. 211).
Stencil
becomes so fascinated with the pattern he himself has
created that he is unaware of what is happening in the
outside world.
(Similarly, Oedipa Maas, who must also
sort through countless pieces of information, is so overwhelmed by the patterns she sees forming that she momentarily loses touch with reality.)
In search of clues pertaining to V., Stencil is
introduced to Bloody Chiclitz, the president of Yoyodyne,
Inc.
Yoyodyne (which will figure prominently in The
Crying of Lot 49) is responsible for "systems management,
airframes, propulsion, command systems, ground support
equipment"
(~,
p. 211).
With the impetus of the war,
Chiclitz made his fortune turning harmless gyroscopes into
agents of destruction for the government.
was applied to a multi-phase system
One simple gyro
to govern communica-
tions, management, and production of war components.
Fascinated by Chiclitz' story, Stencil tours one of
the Yoyodyne plants, where he meets Kurt Mondaugen, an
engineer who had worked at Peenemunde, developing V-2
rockets.
In 1922, Mondaugen was sent to Africa to study
atmospheric radio disturbances or "sferics"
(~,
which were first discovered during World War I.
p. 213),
Mondaugen
was forced to take refuge in a villa, where he constructed
a crude sort of oscillograph to record signals received
during his absence.
After monitoring these recordings, he
detected a regularity or patterning that resembles a code.
Lieutenant Weissman, a guest at the villa who had been
spying on Mondaugen, breaks his "code."
By removing every
third letter and rearranging the letters, he obtains the
name, Kurt Mondaugen.
The remainder of the message read
"The world is all that the case is"
(~,
p. 259), a
reference to one of the basic tenets of Ludwig
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Weissman
is able to find some logic and order, however enigmatic,
in the most jumbled and random atmospheric noises.
~bndaugen's
sferics parallel the noise and distortion that
plague the transmission of messages in Pynchon's novels.
Similarly, some readers approach Pynchon as author
expecting enlightenment, often finding only "noise" 1n his
dense prose and surreal style.
Like Weissman, the reader
must actively participate in the novels and try to break
the "code" of the language.
The world of V. is trapped in decadence.
character states:
"A
As one
decadence is a falling away from what
is human and the further we fall the less human we become"
(~,
p. 380).
V. 's inhabitants have become the "highly
alienated populace" that Sidney Stencil prophesied in 1919.
They are dehumanized, obsessed with t"echnology, and unable
to communicate or love.
Out of.· this populace, there are
very few people who hold out any promise of counter-acting
the forces of entropy.
Although outwardly different, both
Profane and Stencil are closed systems, unable or unwilling
to take action and involve themselves with others.
Stencil's life, although one of outward order, is removed
from reality.
He has channeled all his energies toward
his obsessive quest for V., while Profane and The Whole
Sick Crew lead lives of chaos, dedicated to the experiences
of the moment.
Only Rachel and Paola offer some hope of transcending
V. 's world of entropic
decl~ne.
Bright and sensitive,
Rachel cares about people and understands that one must act
with responsibility; otherwise, one just contributes to
the general disorder of the world.
Paola is open and
resourceful, following McClintic's advice to "keep cool
but care"
(~,
p. 343).
These two women can be seen as the
precursors of Oedipa Mass in The Crying of Lot 49.
Yet
they only hint at the qualities that are needed to combat
the entropic forces in the modern world.
Chapter 2
The Crying of Lot 49:
The Closed Circui~of Television
While The Crying of Lot 49 was published in 1966, the
action of the novel takes place fifteen to twenty years
after the events in Gravity's Rainbow (1973).
The
technical advances initiated for the war effort had
revolutionized many industries by the 1960's.
Moreover,
the chaos, terror, and uncertainty of the years during
World War II found a parallel in the 1960's.
The
escalation of the nuclear arms race, the war in Vietnam,
and Communist China's test of an atomic missile created an
atmosphere of heightened paranoia in America.
As the
climate of apocalypse grew, so did America's technological
expertise.
The aerospace industry began building Nike X
anti-missile systems that could provide defense against a
large scale attack.
It was a time of insecurity with the
constant fear of annihilation through nuclear explosion.
Both the United States and Russia had more than enough
ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) to eradicate
each other.
As the power of the military industrial complex grew
daily, the power of the individual seemed to decline. The
massive increase in technology had a very sinister social
aspect to it.
Herbert Marcuse, author of One Dimensional
Man., envisioned the end result of the advanced industrial
17
society as "a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic
unfreedom." 9
He theorized that mass production and mass
distribution claimed the entire individual, producing a
pattern of one dimensional thought and behavior.
The technology of the 1950's and 1960's took the form
of "extensions of man," as Marshall McCluhan, one of its
early apologists, phrased it in his book, Understanding
Media.
However, the new technology dictated the indiv-
idual's needs and aspirations and television, the prime
medium for communication, controlled thought and behavior.
Pynchon presents television as a perverted form of
technology, an "extension of man" that debilitates people.
In The Crying of Lot
~'
America to a closed system.
Pynchon again likens
The world, as a closed system,
obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the tendency for
entropy (a measure of disorganization) to increase.
As we
have seen, entropy is a steady state in which no real
exchange of information or energy is possible.
In the
novel, the dehumanizing effects of technology increase the
tendency for individuals to become closed systems as well.
By cutting themselves off from the outside world, by
leaving no channels open for communication, the characters,
with the possible exception of Oedipa Maas, have all
become closed systems. As a result, significant communication has become almost non-existent.
The increase in
technology, especially the medium of television, is a
significant, contributing factor.
Oedipa
Mass, the protagonist of the novel, is an
isolated housewife, living in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines.
Her life is one long chain of Tupperware parties, supermarkets playing Muzak, and evenings alone nursing whiskey
sours, watching Huntley and Brinkley on television.
Oedipa
is named co-executor for the estate of a California
financier, Pierce Inverarity.
While attempting to
untangle the confusing strands of his will, she stumbles
upon what she believes is a secret organization called
Tristero, which might maintain a transcendent pattern of
order in a world plagued by entropic decline.
Oedipa, who
is married to Mucho Maas, a disc jockey, feels emotionally
abandoned, as if she were held captive in a tower.
With
little regret, she leaves Kinneret and drives to San
Narciso, a town
ne~r
Los Angeles.
As Oedipa gazes down at the undifferentiated mass of'
buildings, tract homes, and factories,
it reminds her of
the printed circuit of a transistor radio.
It looked as if
it held "a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an
intent to communicate," 10 an
own novels.
intent implicit in Pynchon's
She views San Narciso as "less an identifiable
city than a grouping of concepts" (CL, p. 12).
As she
will discover, San Narciso is just that, a concept,
engineered, built, and maintained by Pierce Inverarity.
Inverarity, in his "need to possess, to alter the land, to
bring new skylines, personal antagonisms, growth rates into
being" (CL, p. 134), is a symbol of corporate America in
the 1960's.
The ordered sprawl of the city promotes a
regulated, controlled existence for a society of undifferentiated human beings. The increasingly technology-oriented
society is becoming a system in which inertia and homogeneity flourish, a condition illustrated by the endless
tract homes of San Narciso.
At the "Echo Courts" Motel, Oedipa notices that she
resembles the nymph on the sign.
The Greek myth of
Narcissus and E~ho relates to the state of the characters
in the novel.
When Narcissus mistook his reflection in
the water for another person, he fell in love with it.
Marshall McCluhan's comments about how man becomes
fascinated with extensions of himself directly apply to the
Greek myth: "The nymph Echo tried to win his love with
fragments of his own speech, but in vain.
He was numb.
He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become
a closed system." 11
Like Narcissus, the characters in the
novel are narcotized, numb to any feelings or emotions.
Like Echo, they are not able to communicate on a meaningful
level; they merely repeat fragments of speech they have
heard.
To keep all one's love inside oneself, like the
narcissist, is to create a closed system.
Only by keeping
a channel of communication open to the outside can one
hope to communicate and love.
Norbert Wiener states that
there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to
that of the universe, in which there is a limited and
.
.
.
temporary ten d ency f or organ1zat1on to 1ncrease.
12
As we
will see, Oedipa is such an enclave; she is not a closed
system.
Her ability to make distinctions, to evaluate
information, and to keep the system running allows her to
resist entropy.
In contrast to Oedipa, the rest of the characters in
the novel have become mesmerized by the extensions of
themselves that technology provides.
One of these
extensions, television, projects a controlled, artificial
world via images, creating an entire cosmos of reconstructed human experience.
Jerry Mander 1n Four Arguments
for the Elimination of Television states that television
"isolates people from the environment, from each other, and
from their own senses."
13
Television is a visual medium;
the images that it presents are disassociated from all the
other senses.
Mander feels that television is an accelera-
tion of a condition that began with our artificial environments.
Because of the overwhelming influence of TV,
Mander asserts that "our whole culture and the physical
shape of the environment, no more or less than our minds
and feelings, have been computerized, linearized,
suburbanized, freewayized, and packaged for sale."
14
The people that Oedipa encounters are all living out
endless variations of the scripts that television has fed
them over the years.
They are trapped in the behavioral
patterns and arbitrary realities that television creates.
Some of them even relish it.
When Oedipa first meets
Metzger, the lawyer assigned to handle Inverarity's will,
she assumes that he is an actor.
As it turns out, he was
an actor twenty years ago, starring as the child, Baby
Igor.
At the motel, Oedipa turns on the television while
Metzger is talking; on the screen appears the movie,
"Cashiered", featuring Baby Igor.
Metzger, for the
duration of the conversation, shifts in and out of his
roles, playing both lawyer and actor at once and, scrambled,
loses any single identity, except as seducer of Oedipa.
Television has altered human reality so pervasively
that many of the characters have dual TV/real-life roles;
they have become incapable of distinguishing fantasy from
reality. After Metzger seduces Oedipa, what she thought had
been an emotional commitment, an act of communication,
turns out to be just more role-playing.
Another lawyer,
Roseman, has a deep jealousy of the fictionai television
character, Perry Mason.
When he finds that it is
impossible to be a successful trial lawyer like Mason, he
seeks to destroy Mason's professional career.
The
television show has taken over his entire reality and now
dictates his life.
Manny di Presso.
Metzger has an actor/lawyer friend,
Di Presso hovers back and forth between
being an actor and a lawyer, using them as totally interchangeable roles, mirroring both Roseman and Metzger.
In a bar near the Yoyodyne plant, Oedipa meets Mike
Fallopian, a member of the Peter Pinguid Society, a group
that communicates through an alternate mail system.
Since
each member of the society must send at least one letter a
week through the system, most of the letters are devoid of
any information: "Dear Mike," it said, "how are you?
thought I'd drop you a note.
Guess that's all for now.
italics in_ original).
Just
How's your book coming?
See you at the Scope (CL, p. 35;
Just that day, Oedipa had received
a similarly newsless letter from her husband, but hers had
been delivered through the official mail system. While in
the bathroom at the Scope, she notices the WASTE symbol
and the posthorn for the first time, emblems that represent
the alternative mail system that the alienated and exiled
of America use to communicate with each other.
The next day, while at Fangoso Lagoons, Oedipa learns
of a lawsuit concerning some decorative bones on the bottom
of the lagoon.· One of the Paranoid's girl friends remarks
on the similarity between the use of human skeletons and
the play,
The Courier's Tragedy, that they had just seen.
Intrigued, Oedipa goes to the play, where she hears the
word "Tristero" for the first time.
As she tracks down the
text of the play, she feels "as if the more she collected
the more would come to her, until everything she.saw,
smelled, dreamed, remembered would somehow come to be woven
into The Tristero" (CL, p. 58).
Oedipa writes in her
notebook, "Shall I project a world" (CL, p. 59) and that
is exactly what she does.
She weaves a pattern that will
contain the entire Tristero conspiracy.
In The Crying of Lot
~'
patterns abound.
Oedipa
desperately searches for patterns and the meaning behind
the patterns.
Communication is an ordering into significant
patterns; for Marshall McCluhan, "The speed up of information movement creates an environment of 'information
overload' that demands pattern recognition for human
survival." 15
Messages are a form of pattern.
Radio
transmits patterns of sound, and watching television
requires pattern recognition; it is the phosphorescent glow
of three hundred thousand dots, a pattern of light.
But
Oedipa worries that she will be left with only "clues,
announcements, intimations, but never the central truth
itself" as if the truth must always blaze out, "destroying
its own message irreversibly" (CL, p. 69).
all context and perspective have been lost.
For Oedipa,
She is swept
up in the information flow itself, caught in the spiralling
vortex of overlapping patterns and hidden meanings.
Inverarity's will leads Oedipa to a stockholder's
meeting at Yoyodyne.
(The plant is part of the same
industry pioneered by Bloody Chiclitz, described in V.)
Stanley Koteks, a Yoyodyne employee, explains to Oedipa
about the company's imposed teamwork policy: "What it
really is is a way to avoid responsibility.
It's a symptom
of the gutles-sness of the whole society" (CL, p. 61).
At
Yoyodyne, there is no room for inventors; the individual
had to sign over the rights of the invention and then was
"stuck on some 'project' or 'task force' or 'team' and
started being ground into anonymity" (CL, p. 64).
To
illustrate his point, Koteks mentions the Nefastis Machine.
The Nefastis Machine was a revision of Maxwell's Demon
with a 'real' sorting demon inside.
James Clerk Maxwell,
a nineteenth century physicist, theorized that there was a
molecular intelligence which he called a demon (in Theory
of Heat, 1871).
In Maxwell's theoretical machine, a demon
sits in a chamber among air molecules moving at different
speeds.
The demon can distinguish between the slow and
fast moving molecules.
By opening and closing a door, it
can concentrate the faster molecules 1n one chamber and the
slower molecules in another chamber.
Since heat can be
converted into work, the difference in temperature between
the two chambers can provide the energy to power a heat
engine.
It could create a perpetual motion machine,
violating The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Nefastis machine contains an "actual" demon.
All
one had to do was to stare at a picture of Clerk Maxwell
and concentrate on having the demon raise the temperature
in either the left or the right chamber.
The air in the
chamber would then expand and push a piston, providing
work.
Koteks comments that only "sensitives" can
communicate with the machine.
Oedipa later visits
Nefastis, who explains that the world of thermodynamics
and the world of information flow are connected at one
point -- Maxwell's Demon: "As the Demon sat and sorted his
molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose
entropy.
But somehow the loss was offset by the
information the Demon gained about what molecules were
where" (CL, p. 77).
As Nefastis tells Oedipa, "Communication is the key"
(CL, p. 77).
He explains how a "sensitive" communicates:
The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive
and the sensitive must reply in kind.
There
were untold billions of molecules in that box.
The Demon collects data on each and every
one. At some deep psychic level he must
get through.
The sensitive must receive
that Staggering set of energies, and feed
back something like the same quantity of
information. To keep it all cycling (CL, p. 77).
Oedipa concentrates on Maxwell's picture, leaving herself
open to the Demon's message, but she can't seem to
communicate with it.
it, is a sensitive.
Oedipa, although she_doesn't realize
In the novel, she may be seen to
resemble Maxwell's Demon, as she sorts through countless
clues and comes out with energy in the form of greater
information-patterns.
As Oedipa receives more and more information, it
becomes increasingly difficult for her to make sense out
of any of it.
As Norbert Wiener states: "In control and
communication, we are always fighting nature's tendency to
degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful."
16
The tendency for entropy to increase causes information to
disintegrate through transmission.
The intrusion of noise
or distortion may alter any message.
When Oedipa meets
Roseman, the lawyer, to discuss Inverarity's estate, they
talk but no communication takes place:
"I have to execute a will," she said.
"Oh, go ahead then," said Roseman," don't
let me keep you."
"No," said Oedipa, and told him all.
"Why would he do a thing like that,"
Roseman puzzled after reading the letter.
"You mean die?"
"No," said Roseman, "name you to help
execute it" (CL, p. 9).
The messages being transmitted are hopelessly crossed.
When Oedipa visits Mr. Thoth, an old man who used to
ride for the Pony Express, there is a similar breakdown in
communication. While he is talking ahout his grandfather,
she notices that he wears a ring bearing the WASTE symbol.
Shocked, she exclaims: "My God."
"And I feel.him, certain days, days of
certain temperature," said Mr. Thoth,
"and barometric pressure.
Did you know
that? I feel him close to me."
"Your grandfather?"
"No, my God" (CL, p. 67).
Noise has entered the system, warping the message flow.
Mucha Maas, who works at a radio station, understands the
realities of transmitting information.
Oedipa and calls her Mrs. Edna Mosh.
He interviews
Afterwards, he
explains: "It'll come out the right way.
I was allowing
for the distortion on these rigs and then when they put it
on tape" (CL, p. 104).
In The Crying of
as Nefastis remarks.
Lot~'
"communication is the key,"
Yet everywhere in the novel,
communication fails because Pynchon's characters act like
their media counterparts, using language emptied of all
meaning.
Television has dictated a wholly unreal life to
these characters.
Even in the last telephone call that
Oedipa receives from Inverarity, his intonations range from
Transylvanian Consulate to Pachuco to Gestapo officer to
Lamont Cranston. There is no communication:
"Pierce, please," she managed to get in,
"I thought we had--"
"But Margo," earnestly, "I've just come
from Commissioner Weston and that old
man in the fun house was murdered by the
same blowgun that killed Professor
Quackenbush" (CL, p. 3).
Pierce is living in radio-land, switching characters, as if
they were stations.
Similarly, for Mr. Thoth, the
television, that "filthy machine" (CL, p. 66), invades his
dreams at night, mixing in cartoons of Porky Pig and Bugs
Bunny working in a defense plant.
The influence of television in the novel is omnipresent.
The Paranoids' rock group, who model themselves
after the Beatles, watch English movies to perfect the
accent, which prompts them to use phrases like "Lord love
a duck" (CL, p. 24) and "Hey, blokes, let's pinch a boat"
(CL, p. 37).
camera?"
At one point, Metzger asks: "Are we on
Di Presso replies: "This is real" (CL, p. 38).
But the reality is that these characters are always on
camera.
They merely mouth the words; there is no content
behind the syllables spoken.
As Oedipa discovers, Nefastis is yet another character
who lives in the gibberish world of Yogi Bear, Magilla
Gorilla, and Peter Potamus.
He suggests having sexual
intercourse with Oedipa while watching a TV show about
China:
"You think of all those Chinese.
profusion of life.
Teeming.
That
It makes it sexier, right?" (CL, p. 79).
He relies on television in order to generate human feelings
and emotions.
Media images overcome his every response;
Oedipa leaves him "snapping his fingers in a hippy-dippy,
oh-go-ahead-then-chick fashion he had doubtless learned
from watching the TV also" (CL, p. 79).
Nefastis uses the
television as a how-to-live primer, mistakenly believing
that people actually live like TV characters.
Oedipa searches for a way out of the closed system in
which she is trapped, where no communication occurs.
In
desperation, she roams around San Francisco and enters a
bar, The Greek Way, where she meets a member of IA,
"Inamorati Anonymous" (CL, p. 83), a society of isolates
dedicated to never falling in love.
He explains to her
that all these isolates communicate by the WASTE system,
an extensive underground of failed suicides.
When he
leaves, Oedipa is left in a room full of drunken homosexuals, unable to communicate with any one.
She thinks:
"Mucha won't talk to me, Hilarius won't listen, Clerk
Maxwell didn't even look at me, and this group, God knows"
(CL, p. 86).
Completely isolated, she walks along the
street, finding the post horn symbol wherever she looks.
She wonders if it is compensation for "having lost the
direct, epileptic Word,the cry that might abolish the
night?"
(CL, p. 87).
Inundated with information, she
worries that all the labyrinthian clues might only be
nonsignificant patterns, devoid of meaning.
As the
information that she accumulates increases, so does. the
level of disorder around her.
She finds an old man huddled on the sidewalk, one of
America's discarded masses.
Up in his room, Oedipa thinks
of what will be lost when the mattress that he is lying on
goes up in flames: "the stored, coded years of uselessness,
early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the
set of all men who had slept on it" (CL, p. 95).
The
entire record of the old man's life, all the information
that he possessed would be destroyed forever, without any
way to communicate it. All the people who communicate by
WASTE, the helpless, alienated people, have stored messages
encoded in their lives that will never be transmitted.
Oedipa visits Professor Emory Bortz to discuss The
Courier's Tragedy.
When she learns that Driblette, the
play's director, had committed suicide, she locates his
grave and attempts to reach him.
Unable to communicate
with ·him while he was alive, she feels that it might be
possible now that he is dead.
Her signal goes "echoing
down twisted miles of brain circuitry" (CL, p. 122), but
she cannot contact him.
As with Maxwell's Demon, "either
she could not communicate, or he did not exist" (CL, p.
12 2) .
Oedipa can no longer communicate with anyone.
In
desperation, she calls The Greek Way and speaks to the
mysterious IA member.
At this point, Dr. Hilarius, Mucha,
Metzger, Driblette, and Fallopian have all left her. An
anonymous person on the other end of a telephone connection
is all that she has left.
She begs him for some informa-
tion about Tristero:
"It's too late," he said.
"For me?"
"For me." Before she could ask what he
meant, he had hung up (CL, p. 133).
Oedipa's efforts to communicate finally result in her total
isolation.
In her search for the key to the Tristero, Oedipa
empathizes with all the alienated people of America.
By
the end of the novel, she has become one of them, alone,
lost, and disillusioned.
Either she is paranoid or she
has stumbled onto a "network by which X number of Americans
are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies,
recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual
poverty, for the official government delivery system"
( CL, p. 12 8) .
Implicit -in the promise of the Tristero
might be an opportunity for genuine communication, which
would "someday call into being the trigger for the
unnamable act, the recognition, the Word" (CL, p. 136).
As Oedipa awaits the crying of lot 49, the number
assigned to the Tristero "forgeries" of Inverarity's
estate, she realizes that either there is "some Tristero
beyond the appearance of the legacy America" or that there
is just America, in which case the only way that she can
continue is to be "an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full
circle into some paranoia" (CL, p. 137).
Nonetheless, Oedipa, because she takes in information
and acts on the data received, resists becoming a closed
system, like so many characters in the novel.
In
attempting to obtain information, she encounters a society
where the extensions of man that technology has created
actively contribute to the increasing chaos and disorder
of the world.
In The Crying of Lot ±2_, Oedipa alone holds
out the promise of counteracting these entropic forces.
Oedipa is a true sensitive, able to make connections with
people, as she demonstrates when she comforts the dying
old man.
Because of her openness to revelation and her
willingness to communicate with others, she possesses the
needed qualities to break through the "language barrier."
In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop embarks on a similar
quest for information, but his search fails as he becomes
overwhelmed by a chaotic universe.
Chapter 3
Gravity's Rainbow:
Communication vs. Control
In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon goes far beyond his
previous two novels and opens up an entire world for the
reader, a world where communication generally fails.
Yet,
Pynchon, as author, writes novels about this lack of
communication.
of Lot
~was
Herein, lies a paradox.
When The Crying
published, because of its seemingly straight-
forward prose and brevity, it appeared to some critics as
if Pynchon were succumbing to his own cynicism and despair,
as if he had nothing more to say.
But seven years later,
another novel arrived, which soon prompted the same speculation.
The exhaustive and apocalyptic nature of these works
makes one think that each novel will be the last.
Frank McConnel states:
As
"No other writer, except, perhaps,
Samuel Beckett, has created a series of works which give
such strong and authoritative voice to the reasons for
not writing, not struggling at all. " 17
But McConnel, in
comparing Pynchon to William Burroughs, finds that
Pynchon at least admits the possibility of freedom and
escape "within the social and passional purview of the
novel form itself." 18
Two years after the publication of
The Crying of Lot 49, critics proclaimed the death of the
33
novel.
Jerome Klinkowitz explains:
By 1968, John Barth had claimed the
elements of traditional fiction
scene-by-scene construction, realistic dialogue, third-person point of
view, and the exploitation of symbolic
detail -- were exhausted and of no use
to the novelist except in parody,
burlesque, and ironic commentary.19
Yet Pynchon continued writing, using the traditional elements of fiction in non-traditional ways, making the
experience of living in contemporary society comprehensible in the process.
In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon explodes the form of
the conventional novel, gambling within the limits of
fiction writing.
The novel is a combination of plots,
subplots, parables, cartoon strips, flashbacks, and
digressions.
Over four hundred characters fade in and
out of the narrative and the protagonist disappears
entirely, 150 pages before the end of the novel.
Although Pynchon uses an omniscient narrator, he also
directly addresses the reader and interjects authorial
judgments on the actions in the work, constantly reminding the reader of the author's presence.
But above all
else, Pynchon's prose contains a life of its own.
He is
able to communicate with the reader by using language in
new ways, by subverting all reader expectations of the
standard sort.
He circumvents banality by the sheer
perversity and freshness of the arrangement of the words
on the page.
Pynchon's communication is itself a counter-
force to the dearth of communication he depicts.
While V. and The Crying of Lot
~present
individual
examples of the world as a closed system, in Gravity's
Rainbow, Pynchon broadens his scope to encompass all of
Europe during World War II.
In this novel, which chron-
icles the adventures of Tyrone Slothrop, Pynchon
examines the political, economic, cultural, and technological consequences of the war.
While the novel is full
of connections, patterns, and ambiguities, I cannot hope
to touch on all of its intricacies.
The novel's scope
is so massive that my approach will focus on selected
portions that directly bear on key matters of communication.
In Gravity's Rainbow, the trinity of technology,
information, and control reign supreme.
Communication 1s
once again the key for controlling people.
a sociologist, states:
Denis McQuail,
"Communication is increasingly an
instrument for the exercise of power and control within
societies and in the global society."
20
The communication
process, in the novel, has been warped to further the
goals of a technology-oriented society.
In an entropic
world, breakdowns in communication are intensified as
people tend to become closed systems, unable to communicate with one another.
The technological advances that were discussed 1n V.
and The Crying of Lot 49 were made possible because of
America's involvement in World War II.
In Gravity's
Rainbow, Pynchon details the early beginning of the new
technology, whose symbol was the Rocket.
The Rocket infil-
trates every corner of the novel, which opens with a
rocket in flight over London:
the sky .
"A screaming comes across
. There is no way out.
still and be quiet.
Lie and wait, lie
Screaming holds across the sky."
21
The novel also ends with a rocket positioned over the
Orpheus movie theater in Los Angeles.
The rocket offers
both the potential of space exploration and the frightening possibility of human destruction,
Pynchon presents a "Corporate City-state where technology was the source of power" (GR, p. 673).
Control
over events of life and death is held by "Them," the Firm,
a cartel composed of corporations like General Electric,
Siemens~
Shell and Staridard Oil, I.G. Farben and many
other companies.
The Firm, multinational and accountable
to no government, had become a business state, ignoring
all values except money, control, and power.
The Firm
exists to further technology, invention, and production:
"The real crises were crises of allocation and priority,
not among firms -- it was only staged to look that way
but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood
only by the ruling elite" (GR, p. 607).
Herbert Marcuse,
in One Dimensional Man, outlines the dangers of "the
closed operational universe of advanced industrial civilization with its terrifying harmony of freedom and
oppression, productivity and destruction, growth and
repression."
22
Marcuse's description applies to the world
in which Pynchon's characters live.
At one point, Walter Rathenau, prophet and architect
of the cartelized state, has a vision of the postwar
state.
He sees the war in progress as a world revolu-
tion out of which would rise "a rational structure in
which business would be the true, the rightful authority"
(GR, p. 192).
The war is merely a front for the needs of
technology, as Slothrop later discovers.
everything is used by the Firm.
Everyone and
In any technological
system, information is the primary resource.
In a sur-
realistic dream sequence, a character called Mr. Information suggests that human beings have become subservient
to technology.
He states:
keeping things alive.
"The truth is that the War is
Things" ( GR, p. 7 51) .
Information is the energy that keeps any system
functioning.
The narrator uses the term "Entropy Manage-
ment" to describe how Slothrop is being managed by others
for the purpose of gathering information.
Like Oedipa
Maas, Slothrop is searching for information.
His quest
involves Rocket 00000 and a mysterious component called
the Schwartzgerat.
Like Stencil in V., it is sheer
momentum that keeps Slothrop, for a time, from lapsing
into inertia.
During the novel's progress, he travels all
over Europe searching for bits of information until he
begins to thin, to scatter.
By the end of the novel, he
JO
is "scattered all over the Zone" (GR, p. 830), as if
annihilated by the disorder all around him.
With the
onset of World War II, chaos had overwhelmed the entire
theater of Europe and America.
In the novel, Tyrone Slothrop, an American Army
lieutenant stationed in London in 1944, investigates V-2
rocket incidents for the Allied forces.
As a pasttime,
Slothrop places stars on a map of London to indicate the
location of his frequent amorous encounters.
CWhile this
is an important subplot which is connected to the theme
of love and communication in the novel, it will not be
discussed in detail in this study.)
In the same office,
Roger Mexico, a statistician, predicts rocket strikes by
plugging figures into a Poisson equation, a process based
on probabilities.
The impact points of the V-2 rockets
happen to coincide with the stars on Slothrop's map.
His
seeming ability to predict the fall of V-2's comes to the
attention of PISCES, "Psychological Intelligence Schemes
for Expediting Surrender" (GR, p. 39).
PISCES is part of a larger agency called "The White
Visitation," which conducts intelligence operations to
increase the Firm's control.
The head of The White Visi-
tation, Edward Pointsman, is determined to find out what
the correlation is between Slothrop's erections and the
V-2 landings.
The Firm has already kept Slothrop under
surveillance for years because of an experiment performed
on him as an infant by Dr. Lazlo Jam£.
He was conditioned
to respond sexually to Imipolex G, a chemical substance
created by Jam£.
When Jam£ attempted to extinguish the
response, he didn't succeed, for Slothrop still achieves
erections just before a V-2 rocket strikes.
The Firm, who want to maintain control of the rocket,
are also aware that Oberst Enzian, a South West African
Herero, who was trained as a rocket technician under
Captain Blicero (Lieutenant Weissman from V.) has
fo~med
his own black rocket corps, the Schwartzkommando.
Pointsman transfers Slothrop to France and has one of his
spies, Katje Borgesius, supply him with information about
the V-2 rocket.
The Firm plans to use Slothrop to lead
them to the Schwartzkommando, who are searching for
rocket debris in the war zone.
Unaware of "Their"
intended uses for him, he sets off on a quest for information about Imipolex G and the Rocket, which he feels
are somehow connected to his fate.
In Gravity's Rainbow, the war and the new technology
use up human lives at an alarming rate.
Blicero, commander
of Gottfried's V-2 battery, supervises the firing of
Rocket 00000, the rocket that is his dream and obsession.
He callously exploits his men to further the cause of war,
treating them as interchangeable parts in a machine.
y_.,
Blicero/Weissman, tells Kurt Mondaugen:
need you for something or other, I'm sure.
In
"Someday we'll
Specialized
and limited as you are, you fellows will be valuable"
(V., p. 224).
Mondaugen now builds rockets for Blicero.
Also enlisted under his command is Franz Pokler, a former
chemist, who was drafted for weapons development in preparation for the war.
During this time, Pokler's wife and daughter are
arrested.
Blicero arranges to have the daughter brought
to him for two weeks every year; in exchange, Pokler
installs the Imipolex shroud in Rocket 00000.
Pokler's
life had been devoted to science and to the rocket as a
symbol of man's most noble ambitions, yet his dedication
is warped by Blicero into aiding death and destruction.
Pokler is incapable of speech until it is too late:
as usual Pokler chose silence.
"So,
Had he chosen something
else, back while there was time, they all might have saved
themselves.
Even left the country.
Now, too late, when
at last he wanted to act, there was nothing to act on"
(GR, p. 477).
Communication, offering the hope of change
and action, is not used in time.
Both Pokler and Mondaugen
are consumed by Blicero's obsession with war.
In the technology-oriented environment, Marshall
McCluhan states that even the very concept of nature is
altered:
"'Nature' is now content, as it were, in a man-
made environment."
of nature.
23
Technology has violated the cycle
The dream that inspired Kekule, a chemist, to
discover the benzene ring, which led to the aromatic
chemical industry, is a symbol of the natural power that
man perverts.
The narrator mentions Kekule's dream of the
great serpent with its tail in its mouth:
The Serpent that announces, 'The World
is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant,
eternally-returning,' is to be delivered
into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving
baCK, demanding that 'productivity' and
'earnings' keep on increasing with time,
the System removing from the rest of
the World these vast quantities of
energy to keep its own tiny desperate
fraction showing a profit:
and.not only
most of humanity -- most of the World,
animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid
waste in the process (GR, p. 480).
As Herbert Marcuse states:
"Only in the medium of tech-
nology, man and nature become fungible objects of organization."24
Human beings, through technology, have
harnessed the powers of nature for their own destructive
purposes.
Set against this background of technology, the plot
of the novel unfolds.
Slothrop, like Oedipa Maas,
exhibits a "peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in
the sky" (GR, p. 26).
His openness to revelation provides
him with opportunities to gain information and communicate
with others.
Slothrop feels as if there is a rocket out
there with his name on it:
it will be "a Word, spoken
with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever
. .
. the one Word that rips apart the day .
p. 28, 29).
." (GR,
Even though Slothrop searches for information
about Imipolex G, the narrator comments:
"The Schwartz-
gerat is no Grail, Ace, that's not what the G in Imipolex
G stands for.
And you are no knightly hero" (GR; p. 424).
The quest for a significant revelation is
denied~
Slothrop travels to Zurich, where he meets a Russian
who has the information he needs.
incensed:
women?
"Information.
But the Russian becomes
What's wrong with dope and
Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with
information come to be the only real medium of exchange?"
(GR, p. 300).
He continues, correctly predicting the
onset of the war's incredible technological advances:
"It'll get easier.
Someday i t ' l l all be done by machine.
Information machines.
(GR, p. 300).
You are the wave of the future"
Herbert Marcuse also predicts the new
direction of information use, asserting that information
will increasingly become a commodity that will be b.ought
and sold.
25
Since the real war is a war for information, Katje
Borgesius, a double agent, provides crucial data to the
Allied forces including "squadron numbers, fueling stops,
spin-recovery techniques and turning radii, power settings,
radio channels, sectors, traffic patterns" (GR, p. 122).
Communication has been perverted to the extent that people
can relay aircraft coordinates but they cannot talk to one
another.
Katje wonders if there is "a real conversion
factor between information and lives" (GR, p. 122).
And
there is, evidenced by the countless people consumed by
the war; for all the lives and energy lost, the return is
more information gained.
"Messages weave into a net of information that no one
can escape" (GR, p. 193) in the novel.
The information
't.J
network stretches in all directions.
The White Visitation
has one division of its work force involved with communication with the Other Kingdom, the world of the dead.
The epigraph to the first section of the novel, a quote
from Wehrner von Braun, the father of the V-2 rocket, is
ironic in the context of history:
"Nature does not know
extinction; all it knows is transformation.
Everything
science has taught me, and continues to teach me,
strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual
existence after death" (GR, p. 1).
Since communication
among the living is constantly inhibited by entropic
forces such as distortion and noise, contacting the dead
may potentially circumvent the blocked paths of communication.
The living are less valuable sources of information
than the dead.
In one of the seances held at The White Visitation,
the medium Peter Sachsa contacts the spirit of Walter
Rathenau, who speaks to a group representing Nazi corporate interests.
He attempts to communicate with them:
"Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe
real is illusion?" (GR, p. 193).
his message:
But they do not heed
"Whatever comes through the medium tonight
they will warp, they will edit, into a blessing.
contempt of a rare order" (GR, p. 193).
It is
Their desire for
information is so great that they actually attempt and
succeed in establishing contact with the Other Kingdom.
Another member of The White Visitation, Edwin Treacle,
44
tries to explain to Roger Mexico how the Hereros, a tribe
of South West Africans, communicate with the dead:
"There
are peoples -- these Hereros for example -- who carry on
business every day with their ancestors.
real as the living" (GR, p. 179).
The dead are as
When the Hereros
revolted against German rule, eighty percent of their
population was exterminated.
As the narrator explains,
their history is indelibly linked to communication:
The history of the old Hereros 1s one
of lost messages.
It began in mythical
times, when the sly hare who nests in
the Moon brought death among men, instead
of the Moon's true message. The true
message has never come.
Perhaps the
Rocket is meant to take us there someday,
and the Moon will tell us its truth at
last (GR, p. 374,5).
The Hereros regard the Rocket as a text, as a message that
will finally deliver them from a history of death and
destruction.
Many of the characters in the novel are waiting for
messages to arrive.
The potential for communication is
present, although the messages must be received intact.
Carroll Eventyr and Peter Sachsa are called to The White
Visitation "whenever there are messages to be passed
across" (GR, p. 171).
Ronald Cherrycoke also receives
emanations, impressions, "the cry inside the stone" (GR,
p. 176).
He often thinks that the "sheer volume of infor-
mation pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn
him out" (GR, p. 175).
munication occurs.
At one end of the war zone, com-
There is a schizophrenic at The White
...,. ....
Visitation who believes that he is World War II.
The
narrator comments that if he is not, then he is its child
surrogate:
"What message, what possible greeting or
entente will flow between the king and the infant prince?"
(GR, p. 153).
While communication exists between this world and the
Other Kingdom, communication is breaking down at an alarming rate amidst the chaos of the war zone.
In the Zone,
as Slothrop continues to search for information, he finds
it increasingly difficult to communicate with people, until
he starts to disintegrate.
Slothrop never finds Rocket
00000 or the Schwartzgerat, the payload of the rocket, which
contains Blicero's lover, Gottfried; the importance of the
quest seems to evaporate along with Slothrop.
As he begins
to disintegrate, he can hardly hold a conversation:
"Uh," he turns slackmouth to Narrisch,
·"what are we.
"
"What are we what?"
"What?"
"You said, 'What are we .
you stopped."
. . , ' then
"Oh.
Gee, that was a funny thing to
s·ay" (GR, p. 593).
In this passage, no communication takes place for the two
speakers, Narrisch, a rocket guidance technician, and
Slothrop are on two separate planes, unable to communicate.
Similarly, Roger Mexico and Dr. Pointsman have difficulty communicating.
As the two try to converse, the
language that they use breaks down; noise and banality are
introduced into the circuit.
Pointsman exclaims to Roger:
"Mexico, I think I am hallucinating."
"Oh, really? You think you are?
are you seeing?"
What
"Mexico, I see . . . I see . . . What
do you mean, what am I seeing, you nit?
It's what I'm hearing."
"We~l, what are you hearing, then."
A touch of peevishness to Roger now.
"Right now I'm hearing you, saying
'What are you hearing, then.' And I
don't like it!"
(GR, p. 319).
Roger and Pointsman are engaged in a misunderstanding,
aggravated by the use of language itself.
The messages
are received, but they are not being understood.
Noise,
always an undesirable signal, interferes with the transmission of the message.
In this case, noise becomes the
message.
There are signals of spiritual redemption, messages
to be received in the novel, but few of the characters heed
them.
Most of the messages are counteracted by the
entropic forces of the war.
However, Roger Mexico and
Jessica Swanlake are two people who, in spite of the war,
find each other:
"Roger and Jessica were merged into a
joint creature unaware of itself . . . Roger's only a
statistician.
Never had a prophetic dream, never sent or
got a telepathic message, never touched the Other World
directly" (GR, pp. 44, 45), yet they are able to communicate.
The war actually brings them together, though it
ends up tearing them apart.
It is significant that Roger and Jessica do not rely
on language to communicate their feelings:
"past all words" (GR, p. 147).
he loves her
He feels that for once
there is a possibility for a new life, for change, even
for joy.
Theirs is an inner communication that draws on
the power of love.
When Jessica leaves him, Roger still
does not trust his emotions to words:
"He had no words,
no technically splendid embrace, no screaming fit that can
ever hold her" ( GR, p. 7 32) , and so she slips out of his
life forever.
At one point, the narrator comments on the
countless people uprooted, displaced or killed by the war:
"the War had shunted them, earthed them, those heedless
destroying signallings of love" (GR, p. 155).
One can
only hope for transitory moments of communication or love
in Pynchon' s world.
There is a greater chance for communication in regions
where technology has not yet reached.
In South West
Africa, Old Tchitcherine, a gunner on a Russian flagship,
deserts his ship after it has docked off the coast and
travels into the bush where he finds a Herero girl, who
had lost her husband in the war.
Although neither one
could speak the other's language, "By the time he left,
they had learned each other's names and a few words in the
respective languages -- afraid, happy, sleep, love . . .
the beginnings of a new tongue, a pidgin which they were
perhaps the only two speakers of in the world" (GR, p. 409).
Without familiar language, they were able to communicate
directly by their emotions and a new language evolved out
of their special needs.
Language also plays a role in Tchitcherine's son's
life.
Vaslav is assigned to a political task force with
the job of imposing a new Turkic Alphabet on the Kirghiz
of Central Asia.
Their job was to replace pure, unwritten
speech, gesture and touch with a formalized alphabet.
The narrator remarks that words and letters are molecules
which "can be modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined,
co-polymerized one to the other in worldwide chains" (GR,
p. 414).
While Pynchon takes full advantage of the
malleable qualities of language in writing the novel, for
his characters, language obscures and restricts effective
communication.
By imposing an alphabet.on the Kirghiz,
the politicians are quite likely robbing them of their
only chance of genuine communication.
Once the alphabet takes hold, communication becomes
twisted, perverted:
On sidewalks and walls the very first
printed slogans start to show up, the
first Central Asian fuck you signs,
the first kill-the-police-commissioner
signs (and somebody does!
this alphabet is really something!) and so the
magic that the shamans, out in the
wind,. have always known, begins to
operate now in a political way .
, (GR, p. 414) .
The alphabet will be used to control people, to manipulate
the populace; the word-molecules can be arranged in many
profitable ways for those in control.
South West Africa seems to hold out the promise of
genuine communication.
Kurt Mondaugen goes into the bush
and lives with the Ovatjimba, the poorest of the Hereros,
in Africa.
While there, he thinks of himself as a radio
transmitter, broadcasting messages across the ocean.
He
understands that thoughts are just like "signals, sensedata, feelings" (GR, p. 470).
He believes that "we live
lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time,
now positive, now negative.
Only at moments of great
serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero" (_GR, p. 470).
Mondaugen claims
that man is a form of information machine, taking in
information, processing it, and acting on the data
received.
He implies that one can escape the network of
mechanical communication at a zero point of informationless
intuition.
Closest to the zero point, that noiseless state of
pure communication, is Enzian.
Katje's first meeting with
Enzian is described 1n terms of messages:
smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings:
to is we will never know each other.
la-la-la
" (GR, p.
772).
the two of them without words.
"Feedback,
what it damps out
Beaming, strangers,
All is communicated between
When they do speak, inev-
itably, noise enters the system and distorts the message.
Enzian explains a strategy to Christian, a rocket technician, as Katje listens.
Enzian remarks:
"Lure your enemy to a desert. The
Kalahari. Wait for the wind to die."
"Who would fight for a desert?" Katje
wants to know.
"In," Christian squatting down .
"not 'for.' What he's saying is 'in.'"
Saves trouble later if you get the
Texts straight as soon as they're
spoken (GR, p. 850).
Sometimes it is only one word that causes the problem in
transmitting a message.
Yet, no one can escape from the
inhibiting net of messages that envelops the novel.
Blicero, who supervises the firing of Rocket 00000,
wants to transcend the limitations of communication with
the rocket's flight.
He places his lover, Gottfried,
wrapped in an Imipolex G shroud, into the rocket as the
payload.
A tiny speaker has been surgically implanted in
his ear; Blicero will communicate with Gottfried to the
end.
He hopes to transcend the boundaries of the earth
and the boundaries of language, but "there's no return
channel from Gottfried to the ground.
The exact moment of
his death will never be known" (GR, p. 877).
there is only a one-way transmission.
Once again,
Although Blicero's
obsession results in Gottfried's death, there is still hope
implicit in the rocket's flight:
betrayed to Gravity.
"This ascent will be
But the Rocket engine, the deep cry ,
of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape.
victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a
prophecy, of Escape .
II
(GR, p. 885) .
The
Gravity's Rainbow is a novel about the War as system
and the energy that makes the system run, information.
It
examines how the system affects the characters' lives, how
significant communication is shoved aside by the needs of
the war effort.
The accumulation of information takes
precedence over human emotions.
Even the Schwartzkommando
have evolved to the point where "their power now lay not
in absolute weaponry but in information and expertise"
(GR, p. 49 8).
There is literally nowhere to escape the
web of information.
The "system" prevails in Pynchon's world.
Mexico says to Pirate Prentice:
"We don't have to worry
about questions of real or unreal.
expediency.
As Roger
They only talk out of
It's the system that matters.
arrange themselves inside it" (GR, p. 743).
How the data
In the Zone,
Slothrop's quest comes to a premature end; he is consumed
and scattered, another victim of the system.
If there is
any hope in the novel for communication, it rests with a
character like Roger Mexico who can give himself totally
to another person, willing to take chances in order to find
love, even when surrounded by the futility and destruction
of war.
Even though Gravity's Rainbow is filled with death,
even though Pynchon's conception of the world is one of
blocked, stagnant communication, Pynchon, as author, surmounts the dilemma by relying on language and, more
importantly, on style.
Lawrence C. Wolfley points out
that the novel is filled with images of death, yet the
style affirms life.
He states:
"Nothing really matters
but individual freedom and Pynchon knows that the best
defense is not Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy or
even dialectics, but the miracle of language itself -language, an irreducibly intuitive symbolic process."
26
By using a radically modified approach to the novel form,
Pynchon tries to overcome the problem of communicating.
His prose, alternately bewildering, ambiguous, and illuminating, pays the price of "attempting to articulate the
inarticulate, of attempting to make present to us what our
language will not let us see."
27
Although words can no
longer help Slothrop, Pynchon still relies on them to
structure his vision.
Pynchon's mission in Gravity's Rainbow and, to a
lesser extent in the other novels, is a new re-seeing of
western culture in order to make it comprehensible.
Edward Mendelson, referring to Gravity's Rainbow as an
"encyclopedic narrative," feels that these narratives
"attempt to render the full range of k;nowledge and beliefs
of a national culture, while identifying the ideological
perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets
its knowledge."
28
In his novels, Pynchon makes experience
comprehensible by his use of a vast range of allusions to
popular culture, social and political history, science,
religion, and literature.
meaning and form.
Through his art, he creates
He involves the reader in the process
of his art by having the reader organize the data of the
novels in order to understand them.
Pynchon's novels are
an impressive achievement in language and imagery and,
above all, in the very art in which he finds many of his
characters wanting -- communication.
Notes
1 Edward Mendelson (ed.), Pynchon: A Collection of
Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Inc., ,1978), p:20'4.
2Marshall McCluhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: The Am~r1can Library, 1964), p.
185.
3
David Hamilton, Technology, Man and the Environment
(London: Faber and Faber Lim1ted, 1973y;-p~52.
4
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (New
York: The M.I.T. Press~950), p~5-.5rbid., p. 20.
6 Thomas Pynchon, "Entropy," in Twelve From the
Sixties, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (1967; rpt. New York:
Dell Publishing Company Inc., 1974), p. 29. All subsequent references to this work will apply to this specific
edition and will be cited in the text as E, with the
appropriate page number.
7
Joseph W. Slade, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner
.Paperback Library, 19 7 4), p. 80.
8Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963; rpt. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott Company, 1968), p. 271. All subsequent references to this work will apply to this specific edition and
will be cited in the text as V., with the appropriate page
number.
9Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964), p. 1.
10
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966;
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972), p.
subsequent references to this novel will apply to
specific edition and will be cited in the text as
the appropriate page number.
rpt.
13. All
this
CL, with
11McCluhan, p. 51.
12w.1ener, p. 34.
13
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimina1 on of
Television (New York: William Morrow and Company Inc
1978)' p. 168.
14 Ibid., p. 152.
15
Arthur Porter, Cybernetics Simplified (Londor
English Universities Press Ltd., 1969), p. v.
The
16lAT.
rvlener' p. 17.
17 Frank D. McConnell, Four Postwar American
Novelists: Bellow, Mailer,~th, and Pynchon (Chic go:
The University of Ch1cago Press, 197/T, p. 163.
18
Ibid., p. 164.
19 Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: ThE Making
of a Post-Contemporary Amer1can F1ction (Chicago : - l 1 versity ~ll1nois Press, 1975), p. 22.
20
Denis McQuail, Communication (London: Longmar Group
Ltd.,1975), p. 201.
21 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973; rpt .. New
York: The Viking Press Inc., 1973), p. 3. All subsE uent
references to this work will apply to this specific clition and will be cited in the text as GR, with the
appropriate page number.
-22
23
24
Marcuse, p. 4.
Porter, v. vi.
Marcuse, p. 168.
25 Ibid., p. 103.
26 John 0. Stark, Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas P) chon
and the Literature of Information (Athens: Ohio Uni\ rs1ty
Press;-1980), p. 38-.-
27 navid Leverenz and George Levine (eds.), Mindful
Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Company Ltd., 1976), p. 135.
2 8 Ibid. , p. 16 2 .
Bibliography
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delphia: J.
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-----=v~l~king
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