pynchon's postmodern sublime

Pynchon's Postmodern SublimeAuthor(s): Marc W. RedfieldSource: PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 2 (Mar., 1989), pp. 152-162Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/462501Accessed: 05-02-2019 03:06 UTC

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MARC W. REDFIELD

Pynchon's Postmodern Sublime

R ECENTLY THE DEBATE surrounding

the definition of "postmodern" culture has

occasioned remarkably enthusiastic

appeals to the eighteenth-century aesthetic category

of the sublime. As a vehicle of cultural critique, the

sublime has usually remained the property of schol-

ars who interpret modernity as a late, if not belated, version of Romanticism (see, e.g., Weiskel, esp.

3-12). Theorists of the postmodern, however, oc-

cupied by semiotic concerns, have often bypassed

the questions of interiority, empowerment, and af-

fect that a notion like the sublime customarily ad-

dresses. But at least one recent essay has set itself

the ambitious project of theorizing a more or less

specifically postmodern sublime. In an influential

study, Fredric Jameson invokes the "fashionable

current theme of the 'sublime"' to recover for anal-

ysis an experience structurally compatible with that

recorded by Burke or Kant but fundamentally con-

ditioned by the historical event of postmodernity. ' On the one hand, Jameson suggests, the "derealiz-

ing" effect of postmodern representations-their

ability to make the world threaten to "become a

glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic

images without density" (77)-seems to promise a

blend of terror and exhilaration that classical aesthetic theory is well equipped to explain. On the

other hand, the euphoria this sublime experience

produces is qualitatively different from Kant's or

Burke's pleasurable pain: in the decentered world

of the postmodern, "there is no longer a self .

to do the feeling," and affect itself becomes "free- floating and impersonal" (64).

In this essay I take Jameson's suggestion seri-

ously and test it at length against the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon: an author whose citation in such

a context probably needs little justification. Jame-

son's suggestion, however, would benefit from

closer examination. It raises problems that his own explanations leave unexplored, in part because Jameson has little time to spare for the complex topic of the sublime. But I want to recall his argument in a little more detail, since on a nonthematic level his text can deliver a dramatic sense of the sub-

lime's complexities, insofar as it repeats the rhetorical patterns of the very discourse it examines. The

sublime, within the Romantic tradition, always closes with a consolation, and that tradition in-

forms both the tone and the structure of Jameson's

concluding remarks on the postmodern sublime:

. something else does tend to emerge in the most ener-

getic postmodern texts, and it is the sense that beyond all

thematics or content the work seems somehow to tap the networks of reproductive process and thereby to afford us some glimpse into a post-modern or technological sub-

lime. . . I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of

something even deeper, namely the whole world system of present-day multinational capitalism.. . . It is there- fore in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that in my opinion the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized. (79, 80)

That the phenomena spurring this sublime should

derive from economic relations rather than from "Nature" or the mind itself is unexceptional

enough. But the heightened tone and totalizing energy of Jameson's closing cadences work to trans-

form a conclusion into a revelation. The economy of the Romantic sublime typically consists in sacrificing perception in order to produce a super- sensory truth structured like a perception; and Jameson's progression from the chaos of those "networks of reproductive processes" to the "whole world system," and then to the "dimly perceivable other reality" of a socioeconomic totality, bears more than accidental resemblance to Wordsworth's loss of the "light of sense" within the luminosity of "a flash that has revealed / The invisible world" (Prelude 6.600-01). A sketchy oedipal drama rein- forces this progression: energetic postmodern texts are first said to give "us" a "glimpse" into the sublime; then a subsequent movement introjects and appropriates the energy of those texts: it is "our" faulty representations that provide those distorted but ultimately truthful figurations. I examine the logic of the sublime in greater detail later, but perhaps these introductory comments can suggest the tenacity and the general trajectory of sublime figures of recuperation, as well as the complexity of

152


Marc W Redfield 153

articulating such figures with a notion of imper-

sonal or "free-floating" affect. Jameson is not

unaware of these problems. He takes care, for in-

stance, to remark that what we "glimpse" is a mystification-a technological sublime that, as a

figure for capital, requires interpretation. But his

perceptual metaphors are of a piece with the logic

of his essay as a whole: the final transparency of

capital's false signs enables the subject, or the ques-

tion of the subject, to meet capital's truth. Ap- propriately his last sentence implies that capitalism

should be somehow visible, hence intuitable, as an

industrialist or a slum might be.2 To discover truth in the sublime is to read the sub-

lime sublimely, and it is convenient for my purposes

that Jameson's style and methodology grant

genuinely sublime urgency to that hermeneutic impasse. But the twist in such scenarios is that the

constitution or recuperation of selfhood is also

never, uniquely or exhaustively, the self's private problem. Jameson's highly personalized style is

reaffirmed here within a structure impersonal

enough to be animated by sheerly figurative entities: one could, for instance, construct a scenario

in which the sublime would labor to domesticate the

postmodern condition that inspired it. Jameson,

typically enough, grants that very scenario considerable relevance and pathos-though again only by implication. Vague intuitions of "the end of this or

that" mark the advent of the postmodern, he an-

nounces in his opening paragraph: "The enumer- ation of what follows then at once becomes

empirical, chaotic, and heterogenous," and here he

enumerates a thrillingly chaotic list of postmodern phenomena, a list that "might be extended in-

definitely" (54). If thinking about the postmodern landed us right away in the sublime and if thinking

about the sublime offered one way to repeat and

control that predicament, then we would be in a po-

sition to understand why critics of the postmodern might be interested in the sublime-were it not for

an additional twist: it would be part of the problem,

and rather naive as well, to imagine that the terms sublime and postmodern refer to entities or events

ontologically stable enough to support such a narrative. The difficulty of producing "theory," under

such conditions, lodges in the act of theorization itself.

In Pynchon's fiction this cluster of problems- the imperatives and limits of totalization, the com- merce between subjectivity and impersonality, the

economy of the sublime within a postmodern

condition-finds expression on dramatic, thematic,

and rhetorical registers. And in addition to period- ically bringing imaginative force to these questions, Pynchon's work lends itself to critical narrative, since it provides at least the illusion of progressive complexity, from the short stories to V and

Gravity's Rainbow. Gravity's Rainbow seems a log-

ical place to discover a postmodern sublime; but because my focus of interest is the sublime's

dramatization of relations between author and text

or, more generally, between narrative and discon-

tinuity, I devote most of this essay to stringing to- gether passages from Pynchorn's earlier, less overtly apocalyptic fictions.

More than once, Pynchon's short stories align important narrative or thematic articulations with

perceptual crises suffered by the main characters.

In "The Small Rain," the protagonist experiences

his journey into a macabre wasteland in terms set

by, or at least set off by, the "peculiar atmospheric effect of gray sun on gray swamp, the way the air

felt and smelled" (Slow 47).3 In "Low-lands," Dennis Flange reflects at greater length on a simi-

lar reduction or potential collapse of differences in his field of vision. Entering a literal wasteland-a city dump-he recalls another, the "gray and glaucous desert" of the sea, on which (when in "a mood

conducive to metaphor") he has always been tempted to try to walk:

Anyone who has looked at the open sea under a special

kind of illumination or in a mood conducive to metaphor will tell you of the curious illusion that the ocean, despite its movement, has a certain solidity; it becomes a gray or glaucous desert, a waste land which stretches away to the horizon.... [Flor Flange that immense clouded-glass plain was a kind of low-land which almost demanded a single human figure striding across it for completeness; any arrival at sea level was like finding a minimum and dimensionless point, a unique crossing of parallel and meridian, an assurance of perfect, passionless uniformity. . . . (Slow 65-66)

That vision prompts the fleeting recall of Flange's shrewish wife and an internalizing turn: "Whenever he was away from Cindy and could think he would picture his life as a surface in the process of change,


154 Pynchon's Postmodern Sublime

much as the floor of the dump was in transition:

from concavity or inclosure to perhaps a flatness

like the one he stood on now." A fantasy of exposed vulnerability follows: "What he worried about was

any eventual convexity . . . so that he would be left

sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling" (66).

Pynchon is not read on the strength of these sto-

ries, but this passage is a good early example of his

ability to bind libidinal energy to the projection and

dissolution of spatial configurations. He generates that energy in the mode of the "sublime," in the

specific sense that the term obtains in Thomas

Weiskel's analyses of the "negative" Romantic sub-

lime and in Neil Hertz's characterizations of sub-

lime "end-of-the-line" scenarios. A seductive, but

dangerous, dream of power-walking on water- turns almost immediately into something more like

a hermeneutic difficulty. Though the lowland ini- tially demands a human figure for "completeness," it rapidly becomes denaturalized into a "dimension-

less point," "an assurance of perfect, passionless

uniformity." Neither a two-dimensional plain nor

the one-dimensional line of a horizon would satisfy this description: the text's language here is working

to resist visualization, calling attention to its own

activity through assonance and alliteration ("perfect, passionless"). That dense moment then yields

to intrasubjective drama, the lowland suggesting it-

self as a figure for the self ("he would picture his life

as a surface"), and a more violent scenario finally refigures that "surface" as a threatened, "projected

radius."

Weiskel would have no trouble representing this

movement as the superimposition of "the sec-

ondary oedipal system" onto the less focused pre-

oedipal anxieties he associates with the hermeneutic

or mathematical sublime (106). And in these terms,

it might be noted, this passage and the Jameson

paragraphs we considered earlier are structurally

parallel. Both move from a threatening diffusion of signs toward a more structured conflict, which ena-

bles a self to prop itself up, so to speak, on its own

anxiety, reading the confirmation of its existence in the image of its threatened destruction.

Pynchon's narrative can bear closer reading,

though, and here the work of Neil Hertz-whose rendering of Weiskel's thought I have more or less

reproduced above (Hertz 49-53)-provides an in-

structive set of signposts for readers interested in understanding the salience of preoedipal anxiety

in such affective economies. In an end-of-the-

line scenario, a subject, threatened by near-

indistinguishable differences, empowers itself, or at least holds onto the possibility of its own coherence,

by invoking a difference that appears minimal but

ontologically sound; sometimes, in addition, the subject turns out of its attenuated condition by

scapegoating a maternal figure. The explanation derives from Julia Kristeva's metapsychological in- vestigations into the origins of infantile narcissism.

Not yet an "ego," the infant must "abject" what is

not yet an "object"-the mother-to gain the pos-

sibility of acquiring language and acceding to subjectivity; it does this by "identifying" with the gap, the vide, between itself and the mother, which also functions, for Kristeva, as the gap between signifier

and signified that makes language possible. This

theory appeals to Hertz because of its "emphasis on the rudimentary nature of both 'subject' and 'object' in narcissistic configurations" and in its "ac-

count of the vicissitudes of this nonobject," the mother:

We should notice the equivocation inherent in the gesture

Kristeva describes: the casting out of the "abject," of

"that which could have been a chaos" would seem to be

the magical complement of that identification with a gap,

with residual difference, that she takes as enabling. To

identify with that gap, to link one's narcissism to the vide,

is, in Kristeva's account, to acknowledge difference by defusing it of the terrors of primal separation, by seem- ing to choose separation, as if one might endorse "the ar-

bitrary nature of the sign." (Hertz 232)4

I am setting out this material in some detail be-

cause I am specifically concerned with the status

and gestures of rudimentary subjects and because the drift of Kristeva's theory serves to make Hertz's more responsive to Pynchon's text. The end of the

line is a moment predicated on a minimal, but legi-

ble and consoling, difference-on "doubleness"; Flange's drama, in contrast, exploits something em-

phatically singular, "a minimum and dimensionless

point," "the dead center, the single point" (Slow

66). One might have expected his musings, like

those of the protagonist in "The Small Rain," to turn on the near indistinguishability of sky and water, whereas that is exactly the sort of natural im-

agery this passage leaves behind, focusing instead on a less visualizable fantasy of a zero point-a fantasy that occurs repeatedly in Pynchon's fiction.


Marc W Redfield 155

But narcissistic configurations achieve various pos-

tures. One more time, consider the movement of the

passage. It begins by drawing attention not just

to a perceptual illusion, a trick of the eye, but to

linguistic figuration: 'Anyone who has looked at

the open sea . . . in a mood conducive to meta-

phor will tell you of the curious illusion that the

ocean, despite its movement, has a certain solidity.

. " This is, of course, a dangerous illusion; but

as we have noted, the passage rapidly loses interest

in providing phenomenal referents, and its anxiety

about drowning or affronting a deity finally makes

sense only insofar as these worries function as figures for the pitfalls of figurative language. Call-

ing the ocean a "glaucous desert" or a "clouded-

glass plain" thus spurs the production of a

hypothetical literal unit, "a minimum and dimensionless point," which would be something like

difference "itself"; and because that (non)unit, the

second half of a simile, could not be more figura-

tive, the text turns on Flange's wife, Cindy, before

it settles into the terms of oedipal melodrama. I am,

in other words, suggesting that we think of this

minimum and dimensionless point as something

like Kristeva's vide. The burden of the passage is to

identify in some sense with that vide, to seem to

"endorse," as Hertz puts it, the ungrounded figurativeness of language-an unending, potentially chaotic figurativeness that only an "abject" can

bear away. ("Whenever he was away from Cindy

and could think, he would picture his life. . . . ") Pynchon is well aware of the seductiveness and

potential violence of dramas of differential collapse. Visions of uniformity translate into thematic terms in his much anthologized story "Entropy," a text that laboriously and self-consciously associates semiotic chaos with a reduction to zero and then

uses that conjunction as the occasion for an apocalypse. While a neighbor's party downstairs tests the limits of communication theory, Callisto, an early version of Stencil in V, dictates third-person auto-

biographical ruminations about a "tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos." The "adequate metaphor" of entropy, as Callisto calls it, figures the threat of "a random factor which pushed the odds to some unutterable and indeterminate ratio which he found himself afraid to calculate" (Slow 88). This story presents for the first time a version of the epistemological difficulty that Pynchon's texts have become famous

for dramatizing, which is in essence a difficulty of

reading: a confrontation-like Oedipa Maas's or

Tyrone Slothrop's, for instance-with the potential

illegibility of overdetermined signs. At certain

charged moments, the thematization of this her-

meneutic impasse will lend itself to being figured

as a thematization of the sublime.

One such moment occurs at the end of "En-

tropy." When Callisto's girlfriend, Aubade, breaks

the window of their hothouse apartment, ther-

modynamic equilibrium looms with fugal sonority

and much i-assonance:

Suddenly then, as if seeing the single and unavoidable

conclusion to all this she moved swiftly to the window be-

fore Callisto could speak; tore away the drapes and

smashed out the glass with two exquisite hands which

came away bleeding and glistening with splinters; and

turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him un-

til the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37

degrees Farenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their

separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and

the final absence of all motion. (Slow 98)

The great formal care Pynchon brings to highly lu- rid scenarios is worth noting: such passages are

repeating thematic imperatives on the level of style. If Pynchon's characters, not to mention his readers,

often find it impossible to distinguish between over-

determination and randomness, the patterned and

the patternless, the intended and the accidental, then it follows that at no point should language be

more painstakingly honed than when it is used to invoke the proximity of semiotic chaos. In the pref-

ace Pynchon wrote for his short-story collection in 1985, he commented with engaging severity on the

"undergraduate mood" this story serves (Slow 12);

but a certain interrogation of that mood, of its costs and consequences, is legible in the mutual reinforce- ment of thematic, dramatic, and stylistic elements. What is being mounted for inspection is the pathos

attendant on ambivalent subjective agency. This ambivalence takes dramatic form as Aubade's blow,

which, by way of affirming the inevitable, blurs the

difference between inevitability and choice.

Entropy-like the arbitrariness of the sign-would not be a condition one could, strictly speaking,

choose; and Aubade's mutilation suggests itself as a figure for the costs of Wagnerian pathos. We are now in a position to understand why such apocalyp-

tic closure might distribute violence along gender lines, while all other differences fade.



II

In "Entropy" the focus shifts from minimal

differences-or "difference" itself-in a character's visual field to the removal of that scenario from a

simple mimetic register and its encoding as a theme.

What had, in "Low-lands," been imagined as a

character's internal drama is here available as lan-

guage for narrative closure ("the final absence of

all motion"). The dramatic action is manifestly fic-

tional or figurative to the degree that it literalizes

the "adequate metaphor of entropy." Such em-

phatic fictionality does not prevent affective invest-

ments, but it disturbs any simple model of

identification, and Pynchon's subsequent texts fur-

ther interrogate that disturbance.

I turn now to Pynchon's first novel, V; though

I want to recall briefly some of its thematic and nar-

rative characteristics, my object is a passage that

closes the text's third chapter-a salient chapter on several counts, given Pynchon's career to date. As a reworked version of "Under the Rose," a story

published a year before the novel, it provides a unique instance of public or exposed revision in Pynchon's oeuvre.5 Arguably it also represents his most schematic metafictional experiment. The

chapter, which divides into eight episodes of vary- ing legibility, is ventriloquized by Herbert Stencil,

the parodic author surrogate whose quest for V. or- ganizes the text's more or less postmodern evacua-

tion of the categories of identity, signification, and desire. An exemplary twentieth-century narrator

("the century's child" [42]), he always refers to himself in the third person, because "this helped 'Sten- cil' appear as only one among a repertoire of identities" (51). But though "Stencil" names a

parody of projection and identification, a strangely pathetic, almost peevish remark immediately follows this burlesque mise en abyme of the self: the

search for V., we are told, demands "forcible dislocation of personality" into a past Stencil "didn't

remember and had no right in, save the right of

imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is

recognized by no one" (51). The possibility of sub-

stituting Pynchon's name for a character's an- nounces itself here with atypical insistence; it is the

play of investments implied by this momentary lit-

tle quaver that I want to explore.

The chapter, and the novel as a whole, thematizes

vision and "revision" in ways that would discourage

the use of "Under the Rose" as a narrative guide to

Stencil's considerably less coherent "impersona-

tions." His subjectivity is not to be understood as

simply distorting objective data; the novel goes to

some length to disqualify both terms of that oppo- sition. His identity is supposed to consist in a pure

narrative or interrogative drive that retells tales by impersonating voices ("he was quite purely He Who

Looks for V. [and whatever impersonations that might involve]" [210]), with the character called

"Stencil" being in no way privileged but only "one among a repertoire of identities." Thus it becomes difficult to tell when Stencil stops or starts narrat-

ing, even though what he retells undergoes "consid-

erable change" in being "Stencilized" (211). As his name implies, he figures the embodiment of figuration; the spatial and temporal axes of his quest are

on one level no more than metaphors for narra-

tive.6 This deconstructive allegory interests us because the third chapter extends the play of Stencil and narrator "outward" to include author and

reader. Stencil is "stencilizing" a coherent, omnis-

ciently narrated short story bearing Pynchon's name, "rereading" and "rewriting" material that

Pynchon is visibly-publicly-reworking. The reader, meanwhile, in the words of one critic, "tears

at the surface of these episodes" (Schaub 79); the chapter is often cited as exemplifying the way Pyn-

chon's texts both demand and defer interpretation, thus making interpreters feel like Stencil (for simi-

lar observations see Slade 55-59, Cowart 65-74, and Tanner 153-80). An unstable, repeating pattern of potential substitutions attains striking focus and elaboration.

The chapter's eight episodes-Stencil's eight

"impersonations" of characters who might or

might not have caught a glimpse of V. in Egypt in 1899-degenerate more or less steadily in their in-

terrogative capacity. Seven out of eight are narrated

around the consciousnesses of named characters, most of them servants ("features of the topogra-

phy," "automata" within "the Baedecker world" [59]) who have a marginal relation to an espionage

drama that might have involved V. and who experience this plot as an intrusive and not entirely legible occurrence, a plot imported by tourists. The

thematic and rhetorical recurrence of one of the novel's central preoccupations-reification-lends

a degree of unity to these perceptual fragments, as does the increasing disfigurement of the (sun- burned) face of the principal spy, Porpentine. The chapter's tropological field becomes organized


Marc W Redfield 157

around the reification of the reading subject and the

progressive defacement of the text. This pattern cul-

minates in the chapter's eighth and final episode,

which is narrated from the point of view of an im-

personal "vantage":

The corridor runs by the curtained entrances to four

boxes, located to audience right at the top level of the

summer theatre in Ezbekiyeh Garden.

A man wearing blue spectacles hurries into the second

box from the stage end of the corridor. The red curtains,

heavy velvet, swing to and fro, unsynchronized, after his

passage. The oscillation soon damps out because of the weight. They hang still. Ten minutes pass.

Two men turn the corner by the allegorical statue of

Tragedy. Their feet crush unicorns and peacocks that re-

peat diamond-fashion the entire length of the carpet. The

face of one is hardly to be distinguished beneath masses

of white tissue which have obscured the features, and

changed slightly the outlines of the face. The other is fat.

They enter the box next to the one the man with the blue

spectacles is in. Light from outside, late summer light now

falls through a single window, turning the statue and the figured carpet to a monochrome orange. Shadows be-

come more opaque. The air between seems to thicken

with an indeterminate color, though it is probably orange.

Then a girl in a flowered dress comes down the hall and

enters the box occupied by the two men. Minutes later she

emerges, tears in her eyes and on her face. The fat man

follows. They pass out of the field of vision.

Let me break the quotation here and direct atten-

tion to some of its peculiarities. Pynchon's habitual repertoire of styles includes nothing remotely akin

to these "reified" cadences; in this feature the style is repeating Stencilian self-dislocation, even as it

mimes Stencil's impersonation of impersonality. Whatever characteristic Pynchon prose may be, it

is not this. And the text has been working to trans-

form that observation into a paradox, aligning "Pynchon" and "Stencil" within a narrative perfor-

mance of self as self-dislocation. Meanwhile, the troubled labor of seeing and the teasing homogeni- zation of the visual field suggest that we are back within the grip of the sublime. Once again, but this

time with a self-consciousness proper to parody, a

perceptual drama figures the disfiguration of language, as an indefinitely colored light ("probably orange") turns to "monochrome orange," a

"figured" carpet, and an "allegorical" statue. Lan- guage once more outstrips its mimetic function as

the scene builds to a surreal close. The "red-and- white-faced man," presumably Porpentine, emerges

from his box to wrestle with the man with the blue

spectacles:

The man with the white-blotched face removes the blue

spectacles; snaps them in two and drops them on the

floor. The other shuts his eyes tightly, tries to turn his

head away from the light.

Another has been standing at the end of the corridor.

From this vantage he appears only as a shadow; the win-

dow is behind him. The man who removed the spectacles

now crouches, forcing the prostrate one's head toward the

light. The man at the end of the corridor makes a small

gesture with his right hand. The crouching man looks that

way and half rises. A flame appears in the area of the

other's right hand; another flame; another. The flames

are colored a brighter orange than the sun.

Vision must be the last to go. There must also be a

nearly imperceptible line between an eye that reflects and

an eye that receives. The half-crouched body collapses. The face and its

masses of white skin loom ever closer. At rest the boy is

assumed exactly into the space of this vantage.

(81-82)

That implosion closes the chapter. If we map the

scene onto the T-on-its-side model of the sublime

that Hertz proposes, Pynchon's self-conscious ma-

nipulation of such a structure becomes evident.

Repeated notations of perceptual difficulty (or-

ange, brighter orange) receive reflexive comment

as the text mediates on the difference between see-

ing and not seeing, a living eye and a dead one.

Translating Pynchon's text into the terms of Hertz's

"end-of-the-line" diagram (217-39), we obtain the following:

orange;

reflecting eye

[Pynchon/reader]-- --Stencil/vantage -

brighter orange;

receiving eye

"The lure of (this) structure," Hertz explains, "is in

its suggestion that the two axes, the two modes of

difference, are not unrelated." The redoubled object serves as "an emblem of the tensions that join and separate the viewer [or author] . . . outside the frame from their surrogates within the frame, as well as from the 'scene itself"' (218). Pynchon's text, however, parodies that lure in its final paraba-



sis, deforming the tropology of the sublime by col- lapsing the body into the vantage, and the viewer into the frame.

Stencil/vantage

(=0) [Pynchon/reader]-- ---Stencil/vantage

body

The vibratory power of those closing sentences has partly to do with the way they solicit but incapaci- tate mimetic correlatives. The allegorical delinea- tion of character that marked the closure of "Entropy" here becomes nonhuman, and finally nonreferential, figuration: only if a vantage and a body were impossibly identical in shape could the body be "assumed" to fit without residue. The theological echo enriches the paradox of subject and object, narrator and story, signifier and signified, meeting "exactly" in a "space" that is both a parody and a charged refiguration of those earlier zero points in Pynchon's fiction.7 If his imagination has fueled itself on a fantasy of the proximity of a version of Kristeva's vide, here he produces that fantasy as the ironic telos of a decentered self- portrait. The clenched drama between rudimentary agents or subjects that marks the narcissistic scenario attains theatrical reenactment as the possibility or condition of Stencil's "narcissism," which, in the logic of this fiction, is the possibility or condition of fiction itself.

In accounting for the insistence of parody, then, I am not merely accounting for a frame, or a separ- able voice or tendency; Pynchon has "reified" the sublime, though the concept of reification has become inadequate to the extent that the text's closure can no longer be understood through reference to a world of things. The word parody may not best describe this predicament, but at least it suggests the simultaneously self-conscious and washed-out tex- ture of the passage.8 It may seem difficult to decide whether or not a self is genuinely at stake here, even though Pynchon has mapped out the terms of self- representation carefully enough to invest a short story in the game. And the scene is certainly not without imaginative force, even violence-a subject I return to below. At this point, however, I want to examine a little longer the tenor of the passage's self-consciousness, its double insistence on flashy technical control and ascetic impersonality. Pyn-

chon puns on his word for Stencil's hermeneutic activity and makes that pun stick: his own powers underwrite the encrypting of the "impersonal" in the activity of "impersonation." And if the pathos earlier commanded by this reduction to zero has been elided or, as Jameson would have it, in some way emptied out, we need to pursue further the im- plications of "impersonality." That notion has sufficient force in Pynchon's text to recall its deployment in texts by Maurice Blanchot. From most perspectives Pynchon and Blanchot would certainly have little in common, but at this juncture the relevance of Blanchot's thematization of the "impersonal" goes beyond a simple coincidence in terminology.

Consider a passage from L'amitie in which Blanchot is concerned not-or at least not immediately-with the terror of impersonality or neutrality but with what seems like the opposite: the "terror of identification" (all translations are mine unless otherwise indicated):

Here is the point of departure: the profound, constant terror of being identified by an other with an I that has come

from an other [autruil, the refusal, for fear of adhering to this strange I, of any I; then the rejection of all character, the objection to all affective preference....

(241)

and finally a constant, highly intellectualized effort to "se desidentifier." Blanchot, engaged in a po- lemic against Sartre, is characterizing a text-a memoir by an Austrian refugee-that would bear comparison with V in only highly schematic ways; yet within those limitations the comparison becomes suggestive. The economy of self-preservation Blanchot identifies is similar in its logic to the ones we have been considering: a self threatened by its own radical inauthenticity would pretend to endorse or choose impersonality. The ascesis of the vantage, the reification of the sublime, would thus emerge as the most desperate of defenses-but for Blanchot there is more to the story. Though the intellectualized, self-conscious assumption of impersonality is indeed a defense, it is a profoundly inadequate one, responding as it does, in a Blan- chotian narrative, to an earlier and even more radical loss of self. The choice of impersonality is inauthentic because impersonality cannot be af- firmed; at the same time, according to Blanchot, inauthenticity is exactly what is proper to the impersonal, the "neutre," which incessantly speaks through literature. The affirmation conceals a


Marc W Redfield 159

defensive gesture that, despite itself, exacerbates the

approach of the Other.

Blanchot's counter-Heideggerian vocabulary

does not encourage psychologism, but neither do

elements in psychoanalytic inquiries like Kristeva's,

and her theorization of narcissistic disorder would

arguably remain pertinent here. Describing one of

her exemplary patients (whose symptoms included

a sense of "false self," fragmented speech, and an

obsession with the play of the signifier), Kristeva re-

marks that he gave the impression, "after having lived so much and talked so much, of being empty

[vide]" ("L'abjet" 27). One might think of such

emptiness as a mourning for the loss of affect itself-for an emotion one could properly call one's

own. Mourning is inadequate because what one

mourns, finally, is the loss of the ability to mourn.9

One should not minimize the cost of accommodat- ing the approach of such anxiety. Blanchot's next

paragraph in fact, reflects on his Austrian author's

need to escape "le funeste objet maternel" 'the dis-

astrous maternal object,' source of all those in-

authentic identities (242); and of course a similar flight is written all over V, played out both in the

narrative and, less directly, in scenes such as the one we have been examining. The formalizing drive that

we have traced through Pynchon's early work has

eliminated manifest gender coding from the third

chapter's ferocious parody of closure, apart from the fleeting appearance of "a girl" with "tears in her eyes and on her face," a pale avatar of V. in-

voked and rapidly ejected from the scene of male

combat that she may or may not have inspired. Less

easily dismissed, however, is the V composing and

forestalling the vide-the V posed in or by the van-

tage that frames and figures, crops into reified lines

of sight and fetishizes the unnameable, ambiva- lently sexed, but insistently feminine object of quest

"V.," troped here as the uncanny approach of a

defaced face. While that quest is not best under-

stood as a "psychological" problem, it is a signify-

ing insistence that carries libidinal and ideological

freight. 10

But however dubious V's ethical control over its

own interrogation of such issues, the text's gesture here can and should be read as something considerably more complex than a mere defense. Blanchot is most valuable to readers of Pynchon in fostering

an appreciation of what is being gained: not self- coherence so much as the transformation of a certain loss of self into a mode of literary power. One

could imagine that transaction as entailing a post-

modern novelist's payment for the powerful, fluid,

multiple identifications making up the kind of

bleak, intoxicated "sublime" writing that propels

V.'s South-West African scenes or much of

Gravity's Rainbow-for the right, as it were, to be a Stencil in good faith. In this highly figurative sense, then, Stencil is a portrait and V's third chap-

ter is a signature, recording the blank agony of its own achievement. The curiously, even deliberately naive humanism that guides Pynchon's evaluation

of his own work in the preface to Slow Learner is

best read as that signature's complement, marking the loss of self-knowledge that enables that signature's inscription."'

III

If, as I have argued, the sublime operates to con-

sole and empower a subject threatened with being

decentered, a postmodern sublime would imply a double gesture of illusion and demystification or,

perhaps better, a double affirmation of inevitability: the inevitability of both totalizing pattern and

its failure. My reading of V proposes itself as an

account of such a sublime. The double gesture exacerbates not only the coercions of specular struc-

tures of identification but also the rudimentary

quality of the scene's participants, forcing them past the possibilities of representational language. The dynamics of identification pursue their course,

leaving us to confront purely linguistic entities. Pyn-

chon's oeuvre performs that gesture persistently and deliberately, returning repeatedly to a zero-point fantasy that grows increasingly more theatrical, more manifestly figurative, without sacrificing the libidinal or linguistic energy that terms like the sub-

lime seek to describe. Whether that energy is indeed libidinal or simply linguistic is another way to for-

mulate the question these scenes pose. But in their

tenacious assimilation of the language of subjec-

tivity to language about language they suggest the impossibility of either ignoring or resolving such a

question: if linguistic patterns emerge as irreducible to the referential task of rendering subjectivity, the illusion of this referentiality is nonetheless built into language. The pathos implicit in discovering a "de-

personalization" of affect in such scenes is an ap- propriate, as well as an erroneous, response to their power. We rejoin Jameson's remarks on the postmodern's affective structure by way of formulations that would give Jameson little pleasure but that at least have the merit of describing the technical oper-



ations of one novelist's impersonality. Pynchon's attention to the exigencies and exhila-

rations of closure is so acute in Gravity's Rainbow that a brief consideration of the novel's famous opening paragraphs may be useful, despite the text's extraordinary complexity and mass. Probably few scenes deliver more persuasively or economically the sense of a postmodern sublime:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all

theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light any- where. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall-soon-it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crys- tal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing. (3)

The experience of overload to which Pynchon's readers often testify arises from the interference between the propulsive drift of this narrative "Evacuation" -here, the "screaming" dissolving into a threat of falling glass-and the rhetorical difficulties that retard or check comprehension. The screaming, an apocalyptic rendering of earlier zero points, promises a transcendence of tropological substitutions ("there is nothing to compare it to now"), but it is disturbingly sandwiched between

competing temporal markers ("It has happened before"; "It is too late"). As the difficulty of that figural cluster yields to narrative, the screaming attains representation as a problem of perception, and a minimal subject emerges to relay the fetishistic anxieties that problem spurs: glass in the dark may fall-a menace of double invisibility, yet a narrat- able menace nonetheless. We might qualify this sublime scenario as affectively postmodern on the basis of the text's hyperbolic mobility of perspective. Nar- rative itself becomes a palpable force animating the voices and viewpoints it deploys, granting those brief naturalizations of the source of its affect a de- personalized vacancy.

If we can say that this postmodern sublime presents narrative itself as its source or truth, we are in fact repeating in different terms Jameson's dis- covery of the "whole world system" in the heart of the sublime. But the logic of Pynchon's mode of ex- penditure, as well as the structure of this text, suggests a final qualification. Narrative submits in turn to allegorization through the V-2 Rocket, which, in providing a referent for the text's initial "scream-

ing," both naturalizes the scream as an effect and denaturalizes the effect as a metaleptic metonymy. Audible only after it has fallen, the supersonic rocket precedes its scream according to the narrative's referential code but follows it in the text's rhetorical organization. The referential code under- writes the narrative inversion of cause and effect by assimilating that inversion to the world of phenomena: since this rocket can only be perceived as a scream, the text will open under the sign of a phenomenal effect that is "too late." Itself unpresent- able, the rocket as referent makes presentation possible. But the presence of this "screaming" is not only recoded as phenomenal illusion. Since, in its most rigorous instantiation, the Rocket is aimed at us, we hear the screaming only when we are already dead. The narrative's referential code thus becomes legible only as figuration that insists on its own mis- reading as phenomenality. The Rocket becomes the force producing figuration and its error. Certainly, and inevitably, nothing could be more sublime than such an allegory of the sublime. Pynchon does not need to freeze the Rocket's fall theatrically on the novel's last page to confirm the delusiveness of that allegory; but in generating this final, magical space of closure, his text, I think, is paying one more trib-

ute to the dense imagery controlling Stencil's more modest apocalypse:

The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. ... And in the darkness and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see . . . it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know-

And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t. (760)

"There can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero," Pynchon's novel quotes through the medium of a suitably untrustworthy character ("Italics are Mr. Pointsman's" [85]). The fictional space opened for closure by the "last delta-t" is an ironic concluding tribute to the linguistic predicament that such zeros dramatize and evade. And to take this fiction seriously is to affirm that the threat posed by such a Rocket is not any less real for being, in a certain sense, imaginary.

University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland


Marc W Redfield 161

Notes

1 In part Jameson is responding to Lyotard's counterhis- torical and explicitly Kantian use of the "sublime" to qualify the "postmodern." Several critics have been drawn to put the sub-

lime into touch with nuclear, if not specifically with postmodern,

culture: see Ferguson and, most recently, Schwenger.

2 Related disturbances afflict Jameson's brief, idiosyncratic

account of the sublime's eighteenth-century geneology. In Kant's Critique of Judgment, sublimity results from the imagination's failure to deliver a representation adequate to reason's demand

for a totality: painfully but blissfully, the mind then yields to the

recognition of its own sovereignty. Natural objects trigger the sublime, but the sublime itself exists "only in [the] mind" (Kant 104). The difficulties or even contradictions afflicting Kant's ar-

gument at this point need not concern us (for one challenging

study, see de Man); I only wish to note how oddly Jameson renders what canonical critics like to call Kant's "subjectivism" (Monk 4). Jameson contends that Kant "refined" Burke's em-

piricist model by accounting for "the limits of figuration and

the incapacity of the human mind to give representations to such

enormous forces," as though those forces had uncomplicated

empirical existence (77). I would suggest that, in empiricizing the Kantian sublime, Jameson is tempting us to enjoy its powers: the

suppression of Kant's transcendental economy (or "subjectivism") reads like a slightly displaced, and overcoded, defense

against the potential willfulness of the empirical, Burkean model of the sublime that Jameson is working to preserve.

3 Slow Learner includes almost all Pynchon's early fiction: "The Small Rain," 1959; "Low-lands" and "Entropy," 1960;

"Under the Rose," 1961; and "The Secret Integration," 1964, Pynchon's last short story to date and the only one published

after V He chose not to include in this collection one of his earli- est stories, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," published in Ep-

och 9 (Spring 1959).

4 For Kristeva's own account, see "L'abjet d'amour"; see also her Powers of Horror (esp. 32-55).

5Pynchon excerpted sections from The Crying of Lot 49 for prepublication as "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs Oedipa

Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity," Esquire Dec.

1965, and as "The Shrink Flips," Cavalier Mar. 1966, but without

making any substantial changes. "Under the Rose" is the only

published text he reworked in the production of another text. In turning the story into chapter 3 of V, he slightly modified the events and utterly transformed the presentation: the omnisciently

narrated short story is fragmented into the perceptions of charac-

ters who, if they appear at all in "Under the Rose," do so as impersonal and minimal narrative functions (e.g., "the waiter"). Only one of the short story's paragraphs reappears more or less intact (cf. V 54 and "Under the Rose," Slow 106).

6 According to the OED, a "stencil" signifies (1) the perfo- rated sheet, (2) the coloring matter, (3) the letter or design that is produced. A stencil results from stencil being brushed over a stencil. For a conveniently symmetrical Romantic epigram, consider Shelley's account of humanist representation- representation, that is, composed as humankind's reflection on

itself: "language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony" (481).

Logically every word in Pynchon's text would show the effects of being "Stencilized." No literal quotation marks frame Sten-

cil's narratives; Stencil, who is always (wrongly) "quoting" a prior narrative and who in his quest for V. figures the production of V, thus puts quotation marks around the novel. Prag- matically, of course, things are less dire. But the identity of the text's narrative voice is repeatedly ambiguous. See, for instance, Slade: referring to chapter 7, he remarks parenthetically that "it is not even clear who recounts the tale, Stencil or the narrator" (59), and though he identifies a narrative voice for chapter 14, considerable grounds for doubt remain. A surrealistic section of chapter 9 also poses practical problems of this sort (see Slade 65-67).

7 A similar blend of parody and gravity marks the rebuslike play on zeros in Gravity's Rainbow. One critic claims that "approaches to zero are metaphors throughout Gravity's Rainbow

for approaching a destiny" (Friedman 74). In a sense my essay is a gloss on that sentence.

8 Jameson prefers the term pastiche: "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives.. . . Pastiche is thus blank parody" (65). For a different articulation between parody and the postmodern, see Hutcheon.

9 Or, in Emerson's words, "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing" (29).

10 For a more sustained and thematically attentive examination of V's gender politics, see Stimpson. Perhaps I should stress that my argument does not lend itself readily to the sort of ethical

judgment that would convict or acquit "Thomas Pynchon" of "being" a "misogynist"; all those terms are in question. Yet the last thing such questioning implies is that conscious or thematic material is simply irrelevant. In disqualifying the "psychological," I am directing attention to a structure that is not simply Pynchon's and also, given its semiotic dimension, not simply a law of the mind; such impersonality, however, envelops and enables the "personal," rather than excludes it. The "sublime" defense against this predicament consists in presenting the conscious, ethical subject as the hapless plaything of occult forces. The arguments being pursued here, however, would suggest that notions such as "will" and "consciousness" need to be resituated and rethought instead of being abandoned to an ultimately recuperative dramatization of helplessness. In this context, Stimpson's ethical valorization of Gravity's Rainbow at the expense of V, while open to argument on its own terms, is per-

fectly plausible and would in fact find considerable indirect support from our heuristic premise that Pynchon's work has grown progressively more radical in its self-interrogation.

11 "It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, to force characters and events to conform to it"; "get too conceptual, too re- mote, and your characters die on the page" (Pynchon, Slow 12, 13). Such practical advice is remarkable for its almost ironic ba- nality and its distance from the stylistic and structural priorities of Pynchon's mature work, but even more curious are the aesthetic judgments it at least pretends to underwrite. Consider, for example, the explanation Pynchon offers for regarding his Satur-

day Evening Post story, "The Secret Integration," as his first sig-



nificant fictional effort: "for the first time I believe I was also

beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around

me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a

look at American nonverbal reality. . . The next story I wrote

was 'The Crying of Lot 49,' which was marketed as a 'novel,' and

in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then" (Slow 22). At this point, blindness and irony

are indistinguishable, the difference between them becoming provocatively irrelevant.

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