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The End of History? Thomas Pynchon and the Uses of the PastAuthor(s): Steven WeisenburgerReviewed work(s):Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 54-72Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441400 .Accessed: 21/06/2012 07:23

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The End of History? Thomas Pynchon and the Uses of

the Past

STEVEN WEISENBURGER

Begin with the irrational pleasure of pure coincidence. During the morning hours of May 8, 1945, a quarter-million

people spilled into Times Square, off-duty workers and furloughed servicemen generally, many of them quite drunk. Beneath a threaten- ing sky, the New York City Police managed to control this restive crowd for an hour after President Truman's V-E Day proclamation, then they turned it loose.

In Washington, the President himself spent a more abstemious day working into the afternoon, when he retired to the Executive Mansion to share birthday cake with aides, secretaries, and family. As the world toasted victory over Hitler's Germany, Harry Truman turned sixty-one years old.

Somewhere out on Long Island, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior also celebrated a birthday. He was just eight years old. No one appears to have recorded what he did on May 8, 1945.

Twenty-seven years later, in December of 1972, Harry Truman lay dying and Pynchon's long-awaited novel about the closing months of the war and the chaotic first months of the postwar period was going to press. Pynchon had spent a great deal of time wandering the labyrin- thine corridors of history during those intervening years, and Gravity's Rainbow is packed full with the scraps and minutiae he had found lying about. But the composition of these scraps in the narrative takes place, as Pynchon is constantly reminding us, according to the competing claims of a suprarational order and a mindless entropy upon them, the

54

PYNCHON AND THE USES OF THE PAST

claims, in other words, of paranoia and "anti-paranoia." Like the coin- cidences with which I've begun, the fragmentary scraps out of historical time have no formal composure about them aside from that which the act of intellection may give, and the creative intellect best transforms such old junk when free to play between order and chaos. There was Picasso, a bicycle seat, and handlebars; welded together, the two pieces of scrap became a bull's head.

Picasso got by with a single weld. In contrast, the feverish welding and soldering that went into the composition of Gravity's Rainbow is extraordinary in its scope. With so many soldered connections, the book is like a data bank.' Pynchon found, for instance, that there was a potato shortage in postwar Germany, not because of the ravaged countryside, but chiefly because the German High Command had chan- neled all recent potato crops into the production of alcohol to fuel the V-2 rockets. When it is linked up with other events in the novel, this datum, which we may verify, becomes another small example of the "routinization" of people's lives. We may also verify that where the rockets were assembled at Nordhausen there were indeed two tunnels running parallel beneath the mountain, and see with Pynchon that by a stretch of the imagination their shape might be said to resemble two letter S's-as in the German SS, or signifying the double integral in calculus, or calling to mind two lovers curled together, asleep.

Recollections of such facts as these came to Pynchon at second, third, even fourth hand, as we will see. And so Ned Pointsman's fearful questions, which he asks in the context of the supersonic rocket's shattering of the cause-and-effect relation, are seen to be groundless. "Will Postwar be nothing but 'events'," he wonders, "newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?" (p. 56).2 To Pynchon, the corridors of history do not simply "end" at 1945, and in Gravity's Rainbow, as nearly everyone has remarked, he pursues the coincidental remnants of Time with a compulsion. The novel was painstakingly written from the standpoint of historical accuracy.

But Pynchon does not read history in its customary forms. He is also learned in the history of science, in mathematics, the cinema, electrical engineering, literary history, and Rocketman comics. (This list could doubtless go on.) Awed by the breadth of his knowledge, Ter- ence Malley has written in his Preface to Thomas Pynchon that the novelist "seems to know virtually everything."3 Flattering as that may be, Pynchon ought to squirm at the phrase; he is not Faust, hasn't made a pact with Mephistopheles. Such learning as he made use of in writing Gravity's Rainbow, by whatever fortuitous circumstances it was found,

55

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

was nonetheless won by human labor and a profound sense of care for the importance of engaging oneself, as a witness, before the night- marish spectacle of recent history. One begins to feel that Pynchon's descendence from a Puritan heritage is more telling than his satire of Tyrone Slothrop's ancestors implies. One also begins to ask how Pyn- chon came to be Mr. Know-it-all. Where can he have found the historical detail with which Gravity's Rainbow is so packed?

In the chapter devoted to Franz Pokler we may glimpse Pynchon at work with his source material. This chapter is very nearly at the novel's center, is the longest in the book, and is crucial to our grasp of several of Pynchon's major themes; as Joseph Slade has written, Pokler's story represents the "interlocking of rocket mathematics, cinema techniques, and human lives."4 P6kler is also a significant counterpart to Slothrop. While influenced by the rocket's charismatic "routinization," his per- sonality begins to undergo many of the same rearrangements as Slo- throp's does. Pokler is linked to Slothrop through his estranged wife, Leni, who has intercourse with Slothrop under the guise of Solange, a prostitute. Lastly, Pokler stands in much the same relation to his daughter Ilse as Slothrop does to the young Bianca Erdmann. But this is not to say that Pokler is stenciled from the Slothrop prototype; the importance of Pokler is that, in contrast to Slothrop, he exits from the novel with some awareness of his involvement with other human beings and a sense of his responsibility for following certain courses of action during the war years. He is one notable example of a character in Gravity's Rainbow on the verge of learning, in the words E. M. Forster used epigraphically, to "only connect." For him to do so, Pynchon had to take him beyond the limited ethical vision of the historical source from which he was drawn.

Much of the atmosphere and several of the major events of Pokler's life are based upon a book entitled V-2, by Walter Dornberger, who was the German Army Chief of Staff at Peenemunde and Nord- hausen.5 Dornberger's book, published in this country in 1958, begins with a description of the first successful flight of the "Aggregat-4," or V-2. The body of the book then sets forth Dornberger's involvement with the program from its early days in Berlin, when an amateur group known as the "Verein fur Raumschiffart" was experimenting with small rocket devices and dreamily planning interplanetary space flights. The "VfR" provided the Army with its first civilian volunteers to the rocket program, and the Army reciprocated by supplying them with the vast sums of capital that had earlier been impossible to obtain. Dornberger then describes their move to Peenemunde in 1937 and the ominous

56


pressures for more rapid development of the weapon after the out- break of the war two years later. These pressures become one of the major tensions of his account; as the war progressed, SS officers became more desirous of the rocket for their own, and began to intimi- date Dornberger, Von Braun, and others in an effort to obtain virtual control over it. In this Dornberger seems to be speaking mostly in defense of himself and the "regular army" staff, attempting to establish (first) the legitimacy of the V-2 as a weapon of war, and (second) their divorce from the fanaticism of the SS. He closes with a description of the efforts of Von Braun and himself to preserve records of their research for anyone other than the Russians, and with a narration of his capture and internment by the Allies.

In V-2, types comparable to Pokler, Mondaugen, and Weissman are ever present in the background as faceless technicians and SS subalterns. Pokler is one of those who joined the VfR in its early days, before its absorption by the Army. Perhaps because he remains con- vinced that "the VfR was special, preserved against the time" (p. 401), and against politics, and death as well, he stays with the original group until the war's end. His recollections of this period of about fifteen years, though, are for the most part Dornberger's.

For example, in a passage that opens a chapter, a narrative aside actually, Dornberger describes the transfer of their tools and equipment in 1937 to the island at Peenemiinde known as the Greifswalder Oie:

That spring the tranquility of the islet had been interrupted. One day a number of small motor launches filled with building personnel and surveyors had arrived in the little harbor. Next came a large vessel of unusual appearance, such as had never been seen before on the Baltic. She carried building materials and equipment. Halliger recollected that he had come across that antediluvian craft once before, in Stralsund. She had been a car and passenger ferry then. A typical example of mid- nineteenth century shipbuilding, she possessed large cabins with decrepit furniture upholstered in red plush, a quantity of gleam- ing brass fittings and mountings, towering upper works, and high funnel. As she was further distinguished by shallow draught and extensive cargo space, she was now serving as our transport from the mainland to the Oie. (pp. 42-43)

In Gravity's Rainbow this "antediluvian craft" is more sensuously realized:

They used an ancient ferryboat for cargo runs between the mainland and the Oie. Pokler remembers the red plush and

57


scratched lacquer inside the dim cabins, the neglected brightwork, the asthmatic cry of her steam-whistle, odors of sweat, cigarette smoke and diesel fuel, the trembling arm and leg muscles, the tired Joking, the exhaustion toward the end ot the day, his new callouses struck to gold by the late sun . . . (pp. 404-05: Pynchon's ellipsis)

Ironically, Pynchon manages here to improve on the written history. His imagery is more consistent with Dornberger's original subject-a well-used old ferry leased to carry cement mixers and sand.

Pokler also "remembers" the "busy work at Peenemiinde and good company at Herr Halliger's inn on the Oie-all marking time 'til good firing weather" (p. 405). It is a notable recollection, because Pynchon derived it from a pallid and trite expression of gratitude by Dornberger that only stands out due to its superlatives: "One Herr Halliger, owner of the island, attended with inexhaustible good humour to our bodily needs and to the warmth of the outer and inner man, a matter of dire necessity at this cold season of the year" (p. 42). In the strictest sense, such details are not historical at all; they are local color, part of a free-form memory that is never constraining to Pyn- chon. From a similar recollection comes "mad Fahringer," one of the technical staff at Pynchon's Peenemiinde who is "the only one of the club who refused to wear the exclusive pheasant-feather badge in his hatband because he couldn't bring himself to kill" (p. 454). Dornberger had remembered that "there was an extraordinary number of pheas- ants on the islet. They couldn't fly away; the sea surrounded the coasts. Soon all members of the staff on the island wore a distinguishing badge, a pheasant feather in the hat" (p. 45). If there was a pacifist mystic or two at Peenemiinde, though, no one so far as I can tell has thought to remember one like Fahringer. But the interesting thing is that characters like him develop so easily out of the historical milieu; even local color breeds character.

Pokler's chapter, like the rest of the novel, is silted with similar examples. By a process of gradual accumulation the details evolve a fictional account that cross-references the historical record at many points. This has always been the basis of prose fiction, but in Gravity's Rainbow the process is remarkably willful; facts that are trivial in one context seem to strive for the greater significance given them in fiction. In turn, reality in the novel often seems to the characters to be an elaborately scripted fiction put together by "Them" with the intention of deflecting the characters' concern away from the very real night-

58


mares around them. The process, in short, may be useful, exploitative even, in either direction.

In this sense, some of Pynchon's most interesting adaptations of material from Dornberger's book have to do with the photographing of the rocket in flight. Here the interplay of fact and fiction is so closely wrought that Pokler is nearly torn asunder by it. At Peenemunde, we learn from Dornberger, the technical crews used motion pictures in their search for solutions to two problems; the first had to do with the stability of the rocket at supersonic speeds, the second with the problem of premature "airbursts" of the V-2 before it had reached its target. In the first instance, iron models of the rocket were dropped from airplanes flying at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, and their fall was recorded on film for analysis. (Pokler "recalls" this on page 407.) In the second case, the crews attempted to discover the source of the airbursts by a risky and unusual expedient. All else had failed, so they placed themselves in trenches "exactly at the spot" the rocket was targeted for in order to observe its final moments in flight, the statistical probability of a direct hit on them being infinitely close to zero.

To Pokler, who is in the shallow trenches dug for these observers, the occasion takes on the semblance of a grand conspiracy by Weissman, who has put him there, to finally do him in:

The airburst, if it happens, will be in visual range. Abstractions, math, models are fine, but when you're down to it and everybody's hollering for a fix, this is what you do: you go and sit exactly on the target with indifferent shallow trenches for shel- ter, and you watch it in the silent firebloom of its last few seconds, and you see what you will see. Chances are astronomi- cally against a perfect hit, of course, that is why one is safest at the center of the target area. Rockets are supposed to be like artillery shells, they disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse-the Ellipse of Uncertainty. But Pokler, though trusting as much as any scientist in uncertainty, is not feeling too secure here. It is after all his own personal ass whose quivering sphinc- ter is centered right on Ground Zero. And there is more to this than ballistics. There is Weissman. (p. 425)

"As the records tell it," Pynchon writes later (and it is a loaded phrase, that), the rocket came down and burst in the usual way, sending fragments all around Pokler. He is never sent out on such duty again, but there looms the specter of "new varieties of torture" by Weissman.

The new tortures are comprised of a strange mixture of film and calculus, which for Pynchon are both analogous to pornography insofar

59


as their function is to transect a flowing reality into still frames, again and again, for observation. Pokler participates in the effort, continuing in the long tradition of the German mathematicians who originally learned to analyze motion by breaking a missile's trajectory into spatial compartments. This is also a distinctly paranoid thing to do, Pynchon notes later in the book, as the imposition of a false stasis on motion is the real urge behind such analyses, and "isn't that every paranoid's wish," he asks, "to perfect methods of immobility?" (p. 572).

Like Tyrone Slothrop immobilized at the Casino Herman Goering with Katje Borgesius and a horde of documents, Pokler is at first only aware of applying the methods of analysis to problems the rocket presents them. He pores over wind-tunnel tracings, drawings, films (all of which derive from Dornberger), and fails to see what is at the same time happening to him. He begins to fall apart-"Pieces spilled into the Hinterhof, down the drains, away in the wind" (p. 402)-and thus an inanimate persona begins to obtain within him, one made up of "veloci- ties, pressures, fin and body configurations, stabilities and turbulences" (p. 402). In this way Pokler becomes an "extension" of the rocket, an aggregate of' modules both-observed and manipulated by Weissman. He leaves to Weissman the delineation of his life script, one recurrent scene of which is the visit with his daughter Ilse for two weeks each summer, at Zwolfkinder. With only these "summertime frames of her," Pokler is not sure if it is the same child each summer, and out of this doubt and a vaguely realized need to connect, a sexual liaison develops between Pokler and each successive "Ilse." Reality, for Pokler, has assumed the dynamics of film; it was in response to the imagery of the film "Alpdrucken" that Ilse was conceived, and his visits with her at Zwolfkinder are like scenes shot in Fairyland.

Pokler's awakening from this confusion of fact and fiction comes at the end of the war. Leni, he comes to believe, had been next door to him at Nordhausen, in the concentration camp known as "Dora." This is only partially so. For a time she had been held in the "re-education camp," but by now, as Solange, she has become used to "riding" a kind of underground "network" through the Zone. Pokler does not find her in the camp; still, in Dora he does stumble upon a burdensome truth. He had blocked his responsibilities to others who care for him by means of his engineering skill, "the gift of Daedalus that had allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring" (p. 428). As he walks through Dora he at last confronts the very concreteness of Hell which had been shielded from him by the fictions he and countless others had contrived:

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Where it was darkest and smelled the worst, Pokler found a woman lying, a random woman. He sat for an hour holding her bone hand. She was breathing. Before he left, he took off his gold wedding ring and put it on the woman's thin finger, curling her hand to keep it from sliding off. If she lived, the ring would be good for a few meals, or a blanket, or a night indoors, or a ride home. .. (p. 433: Pynchon's ellipsis)

Out of randomness comes recognition, linkage of events across time, and responsibility.

At the end of this chapter Pokler verges upon a complete recognition of the extent to which he has been betrayed by his imagination. He has dwelt in a paranoid Fairyland, as one of his co-workers at Peenemiinde charges.6 Yet recognition comes simultaneously with an act of compassion, an act of imaginative entrance into another's hellish suffering. Had Pokler realized the meaning of this reversal, imagina- tively, of that long betrayal fostered by a mind twisted inward upon itself, he might not only endure, but prevail, in Postwar. As it is, when Slothrop meets up with him months later, at Zwolfkinder, the man is lost in nostalgia and old films.7

Nonetheless, Pokler has gone a great deal further in the acceptance of responsibility than Walter Dornberger, from whom he derives, because not once in his autobiographical account does Dornberger have the courage or honesty to "recall" that it was the inmates of Dora who built the rocket he and his fellow technicians designed. The past, therefore, is not just the source for some curious pieces of atmosphere or local "inscape" in Gravity's Rainbow. To Pyn- chon, the novel is a means of bridging the epistemological gap between the past we reconstruct with language and the actual events we narrate, rearrange, transform, even forget. Its purposes are ultimately political. The novel may, as in Pokler's story, embody an ethical reversal whose recognition renews the possibilities for action in the present.

Pynchon himself learned about the Dora camp through other sources, for V-2 is but one of the books on Hitler's revenge weapons that he turned to. Published in this country at the outset of the Space Race, Dornberger's book was followed by several more in the years 1964-65, and Pynchon certainly read two of them: Basil Collier's The

Battle of the V-Weapons and David Irving's The Mare's Nest.8 Both are more properly researched, historical books; for that reason Pynchon did not use them in the development of character, as he did with V-2. The books, though, did provide him with some interesting detail.

Collier's book contains a vivid description of London under V-2

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attack, and it appears to me to have furnished some of the atmosphere of Part One of Gravity's Rainbow. Both Collier and Irving also recount the intelligence work that, in spite of a large measure of bungling along the way, did manage to piece together a picture of the German rocket program. Irving's book also contains two maps of southeastern Eng- land: the first shows the distribution of V-1 flying bombs over the city; the second shows the "Mean Points of Impact" of V-2 rockets over the entire southeast. The maps were probably the inspiration for Slothrop's notorious mapped coordination of erections and rocket strikes, and for Roger Mexico's statistical calculations of rocket distribution patterns over the city. Here again, the historical record can be seen cross- referencing the fictional narrative at significant points.

In another instance, David Irving writes that an intelligence break- through occurred when some captured documents confirmed the sus- picion that the rocket was fueled by an alcohol-oxygen mixture. The Russian Army had overrun a test firing site at Blizna, Poland, in September 1944, and by the time Polish underground specialists could infiltrate the area on behalf of the British, the Russians had evidently removed anything of value. Nonetheless, one of the agents placed himself in the position of the original German field troops and thought to check the latrines for papers: "Sure enough," Irving writes, "in a pit which had been fouled by Russian militia no less than by German troops, he found a portion of a rocket test sheet, whose provenance was apparently the nearby field store."9 The document listed liquid oxygen and a "B-stoff' in proportions corresponding precisely to those the Allies had calculated for an oxygen-alcohol mixture. In Gravity's Rain- bow, Slothrop, secluded in the Casino Herman Goering with Katje Borgesius and a mountain of documents whose meanings he must penetrate, pores over these same soiled pages and finds that "there is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily transcribed from the German-brokenly mimeographed, even a few salvaged by the Polish underground from the latrines at the training site at Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss" (p. 211).

Given the significance of toilets in Gravity's Rainbow, it is easy to see why Pynchon would recall the anecdote from Irving's book. Scavenging through the bomb ruins one night in search of stray dogs, Pointsman gets his foot stuck in a commode; in a drug-induced stupor Slothrop imagines himself squeezing down the pipes of the same toilet that he himself, John F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X could conceivably all have defecated into, at the Roseland Ballroom in 1939; and the image later develops into a full-blown "toiletship." Beyond that, Pynchon's use of

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the anecdote is also emblematic of the historical process, which is in this sense a latrine filling under the effects of gravity. The fouled and castoff scraps in the shithole of history become meaningful only if they float to the surface again, are recovered by some stroke of wit and luck, then brought into the light. During the process, chance and coincidence play roles equally as great as those of their counterparts, ana- lytical skill and imagination. Given the way in which Pynchon uses bits and pieces from his sources-now randomly, now with some organizing motif in mind-Gravity's Rainbow can be seen to have been composed with the same precept in mind.

If unbounded memory makes such a composition possible, it is also true that memory is nonetheless layered, like a palimpsest, in Gravity's Rainbow. The oldest and most obscured text contains such details as Halliger's recollections, which have in turn been overlaid by others, as when Dornberger adds his own impressions to Halliger's. At the inter- mediate level of P6kler's recollections, the links between significant events are inadequately visible and without a whole context-hence Pokler's lack of insight. The final layer is ethically based. It holds, in Pokler's chapter, that types such as Mondaugen, Weissman, and Pokler were blinded by their "gift of Daedalus" to a grossly irresponsible extent. Again, the implication of Gravity's Rainbow is that this final text will be written text by the historical novelist, the earlier attempts being plainly insufficient.

It follows, then, that a character's awareness of the connections between his own life and the larger movements of Time is one criterion by which he may be judged. Pynchon's metaphor for this is the radio dial, or "bandwidth." He elaborates on the idea during his discussion of "Mondaugen's Law," which holds that "personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth" (p. 509). Pynchon goes on to say that

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "At" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even-as Slothrop now- what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment... (p. 509; Pynchon's ellipsis and emphasis)

One fruitful way of reading this passage, which has already become a focal point in the debate on Slothrop's disappearance, 10 is to see the

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"At" (denoting the rate of change, in calculus, by the distance between two points on a time-line) as a "dependent variable" to the extent that it does depend upon the character in question.

One's grasp of the Now as a moment having links to the past and future is, in Pynchon's view, a willed action, and quite free. There is no compulsion to make the effort. One can easily do as Henry Wilcox does, in Howards End, and live like "a concentrated light upon a tiny spot, a little Ten Minutes" made of the five minutes just past and the next five to come.1 This is the same myopia Pokler and Slothrop are troubled by, and it would be harmless if only it did not lead to a failure of compassion and responsibility. In contrast, the characters in Gravity's Rainbow who stand out as models for action, such as Roger Mexico and Leni Pokler, are distinguished by their ability to live with and in successive moments of random, cataclysmic change (delta T infinitesimally small) at the same time that they manage to keep their compassion, their responsibilities, and a broad sense of Time's movements intact.

Keeping the "bandwidth" or radio dial wide open is also a primary aesthetic value to Pynchon, who often seems capable of listening to an impossible cacophony. The remarkable thing is that in Gravity's Rainbow he never insists on keeping the different channels discrete, for all of them (literary, historical, scientific, pop-cultural) partake in a gargan- tuan whole that is fearfully inclusive. Each channel is history, in the most open sense of that word, and in the novel its contours blend with ease into those of fiction.

Of history, Henry Adams abruptly realized that "the thing moved." At that time, in 1903, it became for him a dynamic process with continuity and a component of acceleration. Yet what if the continuity should break, he wondered, the rate of acceleration having risen so swiftly as to leave cause and effect behind? Adams' opinion was that prior to 1900 there were nearly two such moments, one ending in "the catastrophe of 310," and the second dating from around 1500. But the continuity never broke at either point. "Only in 1900," he writes, "the continuity snapped." The acceleration of forces newly released by the machines exhibited that year in Paris was Adams' proof that this was so.12

To Pynchon, the Second World War forced another discontinuity on the historical stream; as Adams saw the earlier break symbolized by the rocket, so the rocket symbolizes a more radical break to Pynchon. Even cause and effect are thrown away in Gravity's Rainbow. When the rocket strikes, it first explodes, then the sound of its coming in can be

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heard as "a screaming" that "comes across the sky." This reversal comprises the chief terror of Part One of the novel.

How does one adapt to the contingencies of this new world in which whole city blocks may be obliterated without warning? The Polish undertaker adrift on the Baltic is one parody of Adams' attempt to "imagine an education" that might fit the person born in 1900. Borrowing key terms from The Education of Henry Adams ("continuity" and "cataclysm"), Pynchon explains how the lightning-struck are able to merge their inner perception of cataclysm with the upheavals taking place without:

Well, it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life-do you know what the rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh? Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed in reverse, all in the gnat's-ass or red cunt hair of the At across the point. That's getting hit by lightning, folks. (p. 664)

Beyond the absurdity of the lightning-struck, and greater also than "the lightning" of a rocket strike, war embodies the most violent rates of change known to human societies considered in general. It is lightning on a massive scale. The German concept of the Blitzkrieg fits Pynchon's explanation well.

Pynchon's interest throughout his career in the Herero undoubtedly stems from this view of cataclysmic history. The Herero wars, which began in 1904 (just as Adams began to trace his "Dynamic Theory of History"), are a striking example of the education of a whole people in the random, violent changes of this century. The cultural history of the Herero in Pynchon's novels is also an instance of continuity between V. and Gravity's Rainbow; to trace its origins, we first need to look at the earlier novel.

Chapter Nine of V., "Mondaugen's Story," is set in Southwest Africa eighteen years after the Herero uprising against the troops of General Lothar von Trotha, whose "Vernichtungs Befehl" commanded the systematic annihilation of all Hereros refusing capture and en- slavement. The protagonist of the chapter, Kurt Mondaugen (who urges Pokler to join the VfR in Gravity's Rainbow13), has been sent to Africa to keep a record of the region's "sferics," noises on the low- frequency end of the radio bandwidth attributed to sunspots, Pynchon

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writes, and "lightning bursts" (p. 231). Mondaugen arrives at Foppl's villa sick and delirious, and while asleep one night, he dreams. In this surrealistic story, framed by the rest of the chapter, Mondaugen re- creates the uprising of eighteen years earlier through the persona of an anonymous German cavalryman identified only as the rider of a horse named Firelily. The cavalryman joins the Twentieth Century, in a metaphorical sense, when he follows von Trotha's counsel, putting aside guilt and responsibility and contributing to "the assertion of the inanimate" through rape, mutilation, and random murder. Yet he tries to counter the pull toward the inanimate by taking as his concubine a Herero girl named Sarah, who has been held in the thorn enclosures and whipped until her back is a "text' of scars. He hides her in his hut, chained there, as if this privacy will help him maintain a sense of self. It fails. The other soldiers in his company discover the girl and rape her. She escapes afterward, but only to drown in the ocean nearby. The following day the cavalryman discovers her corpse: "her body was washed up on the beach. She had perished in a sea they would perhaps never succeed in calming any part of. Jackals had eaten her breasts." The entire coast, he realizes at the same time, "was actually littered each morning with a score of identical corpses" (p. 273).

The cavalryman's recognition of the totality of nightmare around him is similar to Pokler's in the Dora camp, but he seems by contrast to have given in completely to despair as his story ends (and with it, Mondaugen's dream). Looking along the South African coast after finding Sarah's body, he perceives only a disconnected, inanimate world about him, a world filled by objects:

a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, and frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns: the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of a strand wolf in the fog. (p. 273-74)

The "structural unreliability of thorns": this is the death camp state of mind in its nascence. The cavalryman has joined the century of Ausch- witz, Treblinka, and Nordhausen.

The death of the young Herero woman derives from a book with the unlikely title South African Cinderella: A Trek through Ex-German Southwest Africa, by an Englishman named Rex Hardinge.14 Pynchon's use of this book is one of the better examples of his receiving a truly remote channel on the temporal bandwidth, because the book is basi-

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cally a travelogue. Hardinge starts at Cape Town, heads northward by bicycle, and arrives eventually in the territory once held by the Ger- mans. The country, to him, is a Cinderella-land of immense potential that has been stifled by colonial mismanagement and apartheid. About midway through the book, Hardinge begins to write a political tract; he makes the journey in 1936, the book went to press one year later, and he is well aware that in Nazi Germany there is considerable sentiment in favor of reclaiming the former African colonies that had been made into English protectorates at Versailles.

The strongest evidence Hardinge offers on behalf of the ter- ritories' need to remain in English hands comes from witnesses to the uprising of 1904-06. Their recollections of German atrocities convince him that "the past raises itself like a wall between Southwest Africa and Germany" (p. 207). As proof, Hardinge recounts several of the witnesses' stories, sometimes quoting at length. They describe many of the variations on field execution Pynchon tells of in V.-hangings, disem- bowelings, and the slow strangulation of victims by stringing them up between the (yes) v-shaped branch of a tree. One of Hardinge's witnesses, an Englishwoman named Leslie Bartlett, recalls that many of the young women held in the thorn enclosures and violated at random by the German men "are said to have attempted escape by swimming, and I have seen corpses of women prisoners washed up on the beach. ... One corpse, I remember, was that of a young woman with practi- cally fleshless limbs, whose breasts had been eaten by jackals" (p. 227). It was, as Mondaugen imagines it to be, evidently a common sight at the time. The contours of history merging with the smallest folds of the fictional narrative: in V., during one of the more self-consciously fan- tastic portions of the narrative, a dream, the outlines of the episode are nonetheless verifiable as historical fact.

The Hardinge book probably also supplied much of the atmosphere of "Mondaugen's Story," for example the descriptions of the countryside and of Foppl's villa. Later, when writing Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon may have turned to Hardinge again for his description of the Herero creation myth. The fact is that the number of sources on the Herero that Pynchon could have turned to is fairly limited; many of the books are in German, and were printed in Germany or Cape Town around the turn of the century. But Pynchon is, above all, eclectic and thorough. Edward Mendelson has shown that Pynchon's familiarity with the Herero lexicon derives from F. W. Kolbe's An English Herero Dictionary (1886).15 Pynchon probably also used I. Irle's book, Die Herero (1906), for its description of the "Erdschwein" or aardvark and its place

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in Herero mythology.16 There were also a number of autobiographical accounts of the Herero wars printed in Germany during the first quarter-century, and I suspect that one of them is responsible for the anonymous rider of "Firelily."17

In Gravity's Rainbow, the "Zone Hereros" have becone increasingly European, having been separated from Africa for two generations. A rootless people, they are "moved," according to Pynchon, "by accelera- tions unknown in the days before the empire" (p. 316). As such they are rocket men to a greater extent than any other group of people in the novel. Their experience of cataclysm is near total. Yet there is schism amongst the Herero; the split is part of their becoming Europeanized, and it deeply implicates them in the antinomies of European culture that Gravity's Rainbow undertakes to describe.

To one group of Zone Hereros, "The Empty Ones," the Days of Von Trotha are now a collective nightmare of annihilation, a memory transformed by myth into a narrative that encompasses both their genesis and eschaton as a people. What they do is subordinate to com- pleting the process begun by Von Trotha: "Their program is racial suicide. They would finish the extermination the Germans began in 1904" (p. 317). For the Empty Ones, time is utterly linear; "they calculate no cycles, no returns" (p. 318), and to hasten their end they have become "prophets" of all forms of sterile perversion. Their provisional symbol is the "Erdschweinh6hl," or aardvark-hole, which had been a powerful symbol of fertility and life in Southwest Africa. In the Zone, it seems to represent entropy and dissolution in connection with a maternal earth gone stale. Their leader is Joseph Ombindi, whose name derives from the aardvark, for that is what the term signifies in Herero, according to Irle.

To the opposing group of Zone Hereros, the Schwarzkommando, the tribal center will be found again: "the center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place" (p. 319). Their leader, Enzian (whose name derives from Rilke's Duino Elegies, thus connecting him with the transcendence of that poem), has become the first "high priest" of the rocket. His troops study the drawings he furnishes to them as if each were a Mosaic Tablet filled with "revelations." The rocket, to them, may be inanimate like the Erdschweinhohl, but it is nevertheless an "entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained mother nature" (p. 324).

These, then, are the two opposing groups of Hereros in Gravity's Rainbow. They maintain contact with each other because Enzian realizes

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that the Eternal Center of his Schwarzkommando and the Empty Ones' Final Zero are basically the same, or, if not, the attaining of them is: "Names and methods vary," he reasons, "but the movement toward stillness is the same" (p. 319). The same, and yet altogether different. For in becoming European, the Zone Hereros came to embody the two predominant, and opposed, attitudes toward time and history handed down by nineteenth-century German philosophy-the historicism of Hegel and the anti-historicism of Nietzsche.

The Empty Ones adopt a wholly linear, Hegelian point of view, believing that only in time will they throw off the burdens of the past. The result is that they are more or less epigoni, hurrying the process slightly through sexual perversion, but above doing nothing contradic- tory to their self-conceived, predetermined destiny. Now, in the sense that all they can do is imitate (specifically, Weissman's construction and launch of rocket number 0000), the Schwarzkommando are also epigoni. But the imitation itself derives from their belief in a cyclical time scheme which makes it possible for them to imagine moving toward what Nietzsche refers to in The Use and Abuse of History as a "singular point" outside the stream of time. The Schwarzkommando thus seek to gain from the point of view of myth what the Empty Ones have come to expect by virtue of their dialectical interpretation of history. It is noteworthy, therefore, that as the novel draws to a close and Enzian finally discovers the true trajectory of rocket number 0000 and the nature of the mysterious Schwarzgerat, the Empty Ones join the effort to launch rocket number 0001. There is no question of their having yielded to the world view of the Schwarzkommando (the Hegelian yielding to the Nietzschean, in other words) because either point of view is, paradoxically, both denied and reified by the rocket.

Amongst other things, the rocket symbolizes certain philosophical shifts necessitated by recent discoveries in physics. One result of these discoveries, as Milic Capek has argued, is that both deterministic and cyclical notions of Time's movements have become indefensible. An- other very serious challenge to the Classical world picture, he goes on, is that time-space cannot be said to have a component of infinitely divisible continuity. You can't divide space or time into smaller and smaller compartments, as Zeno did, and thereby prove motion to be predictable and fixed. Instead, motion, even the possibility of completely random motion, must be accepted as one of life's deepest quan- daries.18 Pynchon is very much aware of these developments, and seems content enough, as Sir James Jeans long ago claimed we would have to be, with the fact that space-time "events," random or not, have

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superseded the old universe of solid pieces, the movements of which are open to analysis through the application of certain laws.19 In such a universe novelty and becoming have assumed their rightful places again. History, we find, does not march inexorably forward by goose- steps, nor does it gyrate in circles.

The triumph of Gravity's Rainbow is that this realization is not seen

presaging "the end of history" at all. If anything, it frees us from the tyranny of prewar historicism, the old dispensation which simply can't account for contingencies like Slothrop's teeming "garden" of erections and the pattern of random rocket strikes apparently linked to it. The old dispensation wants to show, as Pointsman urges, "the stone deter- minacy of everything, of every soul." Instead, it weaves the wind. Something, some soul or another will slip by.20 Gravity's Rainbow is full of those that did.

They slip by because even though the tyrants "know how to use nearly everybody," as Peter Sachsa grimly observes of the Nazis, they never consider "what will happen to the ones they can't use" (p. 155). Since 1945 we've found out what did happen to many of the "useless" souls, those who were shipped off to the death camps and, finally, to the ovens and trenches where they died. Others slipped away on the underground "network" that carries Leni and Ilse Pokler beyond "their" control. Through coincidence, wit, imagination, Pynchon finds them tucked away in the folds of the historical record.

Undoubtedly, the attractiveness of such characters, reconstructed as they often are from the smallest of details, is that they do not (cannot) say "welcome to our system." They remain closer to the realities of the individual events to which they bear witness, beyond the clutches of abstract systems. And yet at the same time their appearance in the narrative insists that there remain "systems" of timely compassion and caring from which one cannot escape--and this is surely the strongest judgment against Slothrop-and come through with one's memory, vitality, and humanity still in place. Gravity's Rainbow alleges that for too long the human corporation has purchased time and self-assurance by running to myth, to determinism, or to any makeshift stratagem whose purpose is distance and denial. The gates of pearl, meanwhile, have turned to horn, and Pynchon's use of the historical record implies, indeed this is the significance of the rocket's last appearance, that we run to such illusions at our own peril.

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Although he does not use the term, it is consistent with Edward Mendel- son's view of the novel in his essay, "Gravity's Encyclopedia," which is included in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz (New York: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 161-95.

2 All quotations from Gravity's Rainbow refer to the Viking Edition (New York: 1973).

3 In Joseph Slade's Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1974), p. 11.

4Ibid., p. 220. 5 Walter Dornberger, V-2, trans. James Clough and Geoffrey Halliday

(New York: Viking Press, 1958). All subsequent references are to this edition. 6 "How was fairyland, P6kler?" asks one of his colleagues when Pokler

returns from Ilse and Zwolfkinder to find that an Allied raid has leveled part of Peenemiinde and left a "Doctor Thiel" dead (cf. p. 423-24). All of the details from this scene, including the name of the dead doctor, came from Dornberger, V-2, pp. 165 ff.

7 Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 577 ff. 8 Basil Collier, The Battle of the V-Weapons (New York: Viking Press, 1965),

and David Irving, The Mare's Nest (London: Kimber and Co., 1964). 9 Irving, The Mare's Nest, p. 285. 10 For two contrary opinions on the conditions and significance of Slo-

throp's disappearance, see Slade, Thomas Pynchon, pp. 209-10, and Lance Ozier, "The Calculus of Transformation: More Mathematical Imagery in Gravi- ty's Rainbow," Twentieth Century Literature, 21:2 (May 1975), 195-99.

1 E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Vintage, 1921), p. 249. 12 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1961). All quotes here are from pp. 465-68, in the chapter headed "The Grammar of Science."

13 Cf. Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 161-62. Lieutenant Weissman is also at Foppl's villa, where he nurtures his Nazi Socialism and considers the possibility of Germany retaking her African colonies. He also tells Kurt Mondaugen, after they meet, that "Someday we'll need you ... for something or other, I'm sure. Specialized and limited as you are, you fellows will be valuable," cf. V. (New York: Lippincott, 1963), p. 242. All subsequent references to V. are from this edition.

14 Rex Hardinge, South African Cinderella: A Trek through Ex-German South- west Africa (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1937). All references are to this edition.

15 Mendelson, "Gravity's Encyclopedia," p. 193n. 16 I. Irle, Die Herero (Berlin: Guttersloh, 1906). 17 The best bibliographical compilation of these is Jon Bridgman's German

Africa: A Selected Checklist (Stanford: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, 1962). Bridgman lists no less than eighteen books printed in Germany between 1906 and 1925, all of them written by ex-soldiers.

18 Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York: Van Nostrand, 1961), pp. 383-84.

19James Jeans, The New Background of Science (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 228.

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20 This assumption finds its way into Gravity's Rainbow by way of Murphy's Law, which Pynchon calls "that brash Irish proletarian restatement of G6del's theorem-when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us ... something will" (p. 275). G6del's Proof holds that "any sufficiently strong formal axiomatic system must contain a proposi- tion such that neither it nor its negation is provable and that any consistency proof for the system must use ideas and methods beyond those of the system itself."

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