In the last chapter, we discussed James Wood’s claim that mega-novels often become gratuitously overrun with arbitrary stories. Wood, however, does not stop there, proceeding to make a more serious attack on the very process through which mega-novels aspire to greater significance. Wood illustrates his complaint with this parody:
If, say, a character is introduced in London, call him Toby Awknotuby (that is, “To be or not to be”—ha!) then we will be swiftly told that he has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt, which is an anagram of Toby, of course), who, like Toby, has the same very curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell’s Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell’s Angels group it is, devoted only to the fanatical study of late Wordsworth), and that Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979 and has not spoken a word since. And all this, over many pages, before poor Toby Awknotuby has done a thing, or thought a thought!1
This pastiche (which, we should agree, isn’t far from what many mega-novelists have produced) is characterized by relentless but quirky mythologizing: the cataclysmic bombing of Hiroshima becomes an occasion for the origin of a literary family, the silencing of the Left during the 1980s is made supernaturally literal, and cultural touchstones from the postwar period are paralleled liberally and coincidentally to events in a fictional world. Wood implies, though, that such writing merely plays at myth. Myths, after all, require a coherent, integrated mythology in which to function, and this near-random collection of oddball events does not qualify. They may gesture at the idea of a larger worldview, but they do not create one. Summing up this critique in his dismissal of Thomas Pynchon, Wood claims, “his novels behave like allegories that refuse to allegorize. [ . . . ] [T]here are scenes that mean too much and scenes that mean too little.”2
In some ways this is an argument not merely about mega-novels, but about the contemporary viability of figural narrative. In an era during which writers cannot take for granted what T. S. Eliot called a “framework of accepted and traditional ideas” to ground their cosmic artifices, any attempt to give a narrative figural significance threatens to be rendered silly.3 If we agree that Toby Awknotuby’s father’s birth at the exact moment of the Hiroshima explosion is a strained conceit, how can we say any differently about the birth of Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children at the exact moment of Indian independence? If having Toby’s aunt being struck mute upon Thatcher’s election is a transparently overdetermined metaphor, why should Toru Okada’s receipt of a blue mark on his cheek when afflicted with the psychic malady plaguing postwar Japan in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle be any less so? And if twinning the fates of the British and Indian nations through Toby and Boyt’s shared genital deformation appears frivolous, isn’t Don DeLillo’s attempt to intertwine white and black America in Underworld via Nick Shay and Cotter Martin’s mutual attachment to Bobby Thomson’s home run ball similarly empty?
To address these questions, we will need to look at mega-novels’ relationship to the two oldest and most venerated genres of figural narrative, the allegory and the epic. By doing so we may better understand how those forms create their semic structures and, consequently, determine to what extent mega-novels can make use of those structures. In fact this chapter will argue that allegory and epic essentially merge in the contemporary mega-novel, producing a volatile hybrid whose resulting abundance of both signification and cruft pressures to its greatest extent our ability to imagine ourselves with respect to the contemporary nation and world.
The definitions of allegory and epic have long overlapped.4 They are both associated with the union of narrative and figuration: allegory is primarily distinguished from other figures by its emphasis on narrative, and, as Georg Lukács argued, the epic may be distinguished from other narrative forms because its hero “is, strictly speaking, never an individual” but a representative of the community.5 Moreover these figural narratives tend to be grounded in an explicitly mythic system, which allows them to gesture toward the universal.6 Deborah Madsen argues that in allegory “[n]arrative truth and absolute truth are conflated in the same quasi-transcendental source of legitimation that is invoked for both culture and society,” while Lukács believes that epic asserts a “transcendental structure” that provides its readers with a metaphysical “home.”7 This capaciousness allows them to be drawn out to substantial scale, observed in epic as early as Aristotle and as true, though less obviously, in allegory.8 Furthermore both epic and allegory access this figural-narrative fusion via rifts in temporality. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, the epic, for all its pseudohistoricity, is really set in an “absolute past,” while allegories, as Honig writes, tend to begin with a dreamy excursus into a timeless environment.9 Upon entering this suspended temporal space, both tend to focus on generative, momentous conflict.10 Using a temporal rift to depict figural conflict, of course, recalls Claude Lévi-Strauss’s definition of myth as “both a sequence belonging to the past [ . . . ] and an everlasting pattern which can be detected in the present,” which allows a narrative conflict from history to become relevant to the contemporary moment.11
If allegory and epic are to be distinguished, it is by the way readers are supposed to process their own personal relationships to the work’s large-scale concepts. In epic readers are to understand the narrative as expressing their place in a nation—the “absolute past” to which Bakhtin refers is a “national epic past”—while in allegory readers are supposed to conceive the story as expressing the truths of a theophilosophic system, such as Christianity.12 As a result the epic leans toward the exemplary rather than hermeneutic. When Philip Sidney praises Virgil’s Aeneas, he claims not that the Trojan signifies Virtue but asks, “Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?”13 Allegory, on the other hand, in Angus Fletcher’s straightforward definition, is text that “says one thing and means another,” requiring the reader to interpret a deeper truth that is not literally stated.14
Regardless, though, in recent decades critical theory treated both genres as politically compromised. Since Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives”—the latter defined as any all-encompassing “discourse of legitimation,” among which Lyotard groups epic and allegory—scholarly consensus has joined his critique of the potential “totalitarian effect” of such “unitary and totalizing truth.”15 Consequently epic or allegorical elements in narrative are often accepted by contemporary critics only when they are construed as subverting the transcendent concepts traditionally associated with those genres. Famously Paul de Man construed allegory as dramatizing the gap between textual figure and meaning, rather than allowing access from one to the other, and a similar argument regarding the epic was suggested by Linda Hutcheon’s elucidation of postmodern “historiographic metafiction,” a genre within which “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs” is used to undermine the “narratives or systems that once allowed us to think we could unproblematically and universally define public agreement,” rather than to exemplify them as epics do.16
This rejection of metanarratives, however, is theoretically problematic. As many critics have pointed out (I cite here Fredric Jameson), “the disappearance of master narratives has itself to be couched in narrative form.”17 That is, one cannot not have a metanarrative, because any overarching opposition to metanarratives itself creates a new metanarrative. Furthermore it is ethically questionable. As Eric L. Berlatsky argues, refusing all metanarrative erases the grounds on which groups against whom historical injustices have been committed can articulate that the injustice committed against them should be universally regarded as unjust or that its occurrence is historically true.18 Moreover the argument that “totalization” is oppressively exclusionary seems to entail a contradiction: if one does not seek to encompass as much as possible, isn’t one, by definition, excluding something?
Fundamentally this is a cognitive problem. How is a mind designed to process only the organism’s immediate surroundings and kinship network supposed to understand its place within a globe of billions of people? Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that human neocortex size likely limits us to around 150 social relationships at a given time, which means that an accurate understanding of one’s place even within a town as small as a few thousand people is beyond our capacities.19 Jameson has called this the problem of adequate “cognitive mapping,” the goal of which is “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”20 He (predictably) proposes Marxism as the answer, but cognitive linguists like Mark Turner have argued for the role of figural narrative more generally, as the “[t]he projection of one story onto another [. . . is] a fundamental instrument of the mind,” allowing us to convert complex global action into cognizable space, whether by spatializing a recession “taking away” jobs or a cosmic struggle treated as a dark night’s journey.21 But how can we determine which figural narratives are the right ones?
This conceptual tension is among the chief subjects engaged by allegory-epic mega-novels. Primarily they address it via a contemporary example of figural narrative, the conspiracy theory. On the one hand, the conspiracy theorist is an allegorist on an epic scale, explaining how events that appear to speak only to a local situation really refer to some historical metanarrative. As Richard Hofstadter writes in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theorists “regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power.”22 One would think, then, that literary critics opposed to totalizing metanarratives would be opposed to paranoid interpretation. Yet precisely the opposite is often the case. Consider, for instance, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which many characters attribute much of what happens in Europe’s immediate postwar moment to a conspiracy perpetuated by a shadowy military-industrial cabal dubbed “Them.” For critics like Paul Maltby, this paranoia “is an appropriate response,” because it is the only way to uncover the “total system” seeking to subject the world to its domination.23 This apparent contradiction derives from the fact that paranoia is, as Eve Sedgwick noted, “reflexive and mimetic” as well as “a strong theory”: if one wants to oppose all-encompassing systems, then one must adopt a paranoid interpretation capable of seeing such systems anywhere and everywhere they might instantiate themselves, which can quickly lead to the kind of cosmic dogmatism one is trying to critique.24
There are understandable neural bases for this kind of paranoia. Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko have demonstrated that, given the limitations of our perceptual apparatuses, we have an inevitable cognitive bias toward spuriously linking unrelated stimuli to potential threats.25 If rustling grass in our evolutionary past occasionally indicated a predator, then our species will retain long-term instinctive fear of all rustling noises, because the survival cost of having wrongly ignored such a noise was historically far greater than the cost of wrongly reacting to it. Our cognitive tendency toward generating patterns from our immediate environment is, moreover, frequently necessary for our mental health. A number of researchers have argued that human pattern-making tendencies are linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine, and for some mentally ill patients (e.g., schizophrenics), increased dopamine can engender more coherent perceptions of the world, even though it also increases receptivity to paranormal theories in others.26 Along the same lines, paranoia makes the world easier to conceive by compressing innumerable particulars into several overarching forces. In an editorial praising paranoia, Salman Rushdie remarked that, “If the crimes of the past are only now being uncovered [ . . . ], how long will it take before we know about the crimes of the present?”; we can see in his comment the way that paranoia allows epistemological stability in the face of acknowledged ignorance.27
Similarly paranoia strengthens the self’s sense of importance. Since attempts to realize the world in its totality will inevitably impress on the individual mind its own crippling insignificance, paranoia can rejuvenate it by allowing privileged access to a reality invisible to others. As Paul Ricoeur pointed out in describing the theoretical “hermeneutic of suspicion” (which Sedgwick identifies with critical paranoia), even writers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who “look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness,” suspend their suspicion for one act of credulity, because “liberation is inseparable from a ‘conscious insight’ which victoriously counterattacks the mystification of false consciousness”: in other words they believe nothing in culture is free from the corrupting force of ideology except their own minds in theorizing that ideology.28 This specialness is especially pronounced for those paranoids who believe themselves at the center of the conspiracies they articulate: reflecting on The Truman Show, whose protagonist is the hero of a 24/7 reality show, Patrick O’Donnell notes that paranoia may be “the last refuge of identity.”29 Conceiving oneself as a combatant against an all-powerful Them in this manner makes one’s life more meaningful.
However, paranoia also has serious drawbacks. Krummenacher and his colleagues show that, though the paranormally inclined and dopamine-elevated see more patterns, their pattern-detection is less accurate, because they tend to identify patterns out of stimuli that are gibberish.30 Other empirical research has demonstrated that conspiracy theorists are especially vulnerable to confirmation bias, since they fill in informational gaps with whatever invented facts best suit the ideological patterns they have devised.31 This is likely why Jameson refers to conspiracy as “a poor person’s cognitive mapping.”32 The “conspiracy” to which the pejorative “conspiracy theory” refers, after all, isn’t the one necessary to execute a plot, but the much vaster conspiracy required to plant all the evidence suggesting there isn’t one. Holocaust deniers, for instance, are unbelievable not because the Allied forces couldn’t have conspired to propagandize against Germany, but because they imaginatively summon an improbably efficient bureaucracy seamlessly generating millions of physical records and survivors’ testimonies. Competing conspiracy theories can often prompt their partisans into games of paranoid one-upmanship, each new theory proposing ever more encompassing paranoid schemes, as Sedgwick implies is the case with Jameson’s (to her, paranoid) Marxist critique of conspiracy theory.33
What is most important, paranoids’ self-aggrandizement tends to isolate them, preventing either empathy or collective action. The fatalism of conspiracy theorists’ paranoia has been found both to reduce their political activity and to cause them to otherwise make poor social decisions: for instance those who believe that AIDS is a government plot to exterminate African Americans are less likely to practice safe sex.34 This is particularly so for total paranoia. As Jonathan Schell once commented, “The world of undiscriminating cynicism, where no one is trusted and nothing is believed, is in many ways a comfortable one. Every citizen enjoys the automatic right to a sly, knowing, and superior attitude toward all authorities but has no obligation to do anything about them.”35 Such a position renders the most ridiculous theories equally plausible to those deserving real attention, eliminating anyone’s ability to do anything about them. For this reason, as Scott Sanders noted in an early essay on Pynchon, “a nation of paranoiacs would be a totalitarian’s dream.”36
This problem of establishing what constitutes an adequate cognitive mapping in the contemporary world, then, is among the mega-novel’s major subjects, as its characters must manipulate and alter their figural narrative systems in search of a structure that can effectively conceive it. It is for that reason, then, that allegory and epic tend to merge in the mega-novel. Since allegory has traditionally relied on abstract ideologies like Christianity, then in an era when even nominal Christians often do not subscribe to many major tenets of the faith, allegory must find a different system on which to base its figuration. As Benedict Anderson has observed, the nation is the strongest such available system.37 Similarly, while a classical epic might conceivably have spoken to all of a modestly sized city-state through one exemplary event from the absolute past, for larger modern nations, epics require the more elaborate figuration found in allegory to encompass the citizenry. In other words contemporary epics require allegory to achieve epic scale, while contemporary allegories require nationalism to provide a sufficiently solid conceptual structure. The resulting narratives, however, are unstable, because their tendency toward universal meaning is tempered by a suspicious recoiling toward particular event, and vice versa. As a result this process produces lengthy narratives in which any given element might, at any moment, be imbued with great significance, but also might be reduced to meaningless cruft.
The exemplary cases of how this process works involve the mantra Timothy Melley calls “the official slogan of postwar paranoia”: “everything is connected.”38 As Brian McHale notes, the sentiment appears in many mega-novels, including Gravity’s Rainbow and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.39 Its appeal likely derives from its simultaneously affirmative and terrifying connotations, suggesting both that the most humdrum elements of our lives might be tremendously important and that even these mundane things might be complicit in some pernicious scheme to which we are oblivious.
It is also, however, a basically meaningless statement. To claim that “everything is connected” is trivially true: semiotically Eco showed long ago that one can hop from any linguistic sign to any other given enough connections.40 What it fails to address is how closely everything is connected. As the paranoia of, say, the American right wing ought to remind us, that two things can be “connected” in some way does not mean the connection is meaningful: for instance that President Obama once had a professional connection with the middle-aged academic Bill Ayers should not cause us to interpret Obama’s politics as akin to the younger Ayers’s violent antigovernment Marxism. “Everything is connected” can be a dangerous maxim, then, suggesting that those who speak it bear some special wisdom even though it conveys no real knowledge.
The phrase’s contradictions might be explicated well via its appearances in Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The first occurs in a conversation between waste management specialist Nick Shay and his colleagues Simeon “Big Sims” Biggs and Jesse Detwiler regarding a mysterious container ship nicknamed the Flying Liberian that has supposedly been traveling for years unable to dock. The men somberly theorize the ship could be the key to conspiracies involving anything from Mafia incinerator waste to a heroin shipment overseen by the CIA.41 Aware, though, that they have no particular evidence for these speculations, Detwiler decides to justify their paranoia by saying, “You know why [we believe this]? Because it’s easy to believe. We’d be stupid not to believe it. Knowing what we know.”42 The irony, of course, is that they construct these junk theories precisely because they don’t know what, if anything, is going on, which Detwiler implicitly admits when he elaborates that “what we know” is merely that “everything’s connected.”43 As with Nick’s brother Matt’s later use of the phrase, they simply don’t want to seem naive.44 As Wood remarks, though, “If what you start out from is what you do not know, this is an infinitely extendable mystical spectrum. One can always not know more.”45
These speculations, though, are complicated by the men’s parallel discussion of their profession’s central concern, which is also the great recurring motif of allegory-epic mega-novels, namely garbage. Superficially, garbage is “connected” to “everything,” since every aspect of human life generates it, but as Nick and Sims’s discussion of the enormous amount of food waste produced by the restaurant industry shows, it is connected only in the weakest way, since garbage comprises largely the elements unimportant enough to each endeavor to dispense with.46 However, Detwiler argues that this attitude has “everything backwards”: instead of garbage being a by-product of civilization, he thinks, “garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense.”47 Waste is so voluminous, he points out, that it requires one to devise a holistic response to keep oneself from being overwhelmed by it, and such a response would necessarily generate a system of connectivity out of which society could be made. Detwiler suggests, then, that there might be something both socially valuable and aesthetically creative in finding new ways to connect trash to our lives, which is why he suggests we “[m]ake an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage”—a goal shared by characters like Klara Sax, who in an earlier scene makes an art installation out of junked World War II bombers.48 Perhaps, then, composing junk theories out of the unverifiable rumors floating through the cultural atmosphere might be a valuable way to manage an otherwise incomprehensible geopolitical climate.
However, just because junk can be connected doesn’t mean it should be. As Wood points out, most garbage comprises “objects of indifference, convenience, and hatred”—and, we might add, toxicity.49 As we discussed in chapter 2, the scholar-protagonist of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum insists on gathering as much trivial data as possible for his index-card system, and to avoid boredom at his menial publishing job, he and his friend Jacopo Belbo use a computer program to randomly combine fragments from conspiracy-theory manuscripts into their own master allegory explaining all European history. This proves not to be difficult, because as Casaubon, notes, “Concepts are connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree everything is connected to everything else.”50 Though their results are amusing (e.g., “the specter haunting Europe” being the Illuminati), they are entirely arbitrary: as Casaubon’s lover Lia points out, the most obvious interpretation of the puzzling medieval document that starts off their quest is that it is a shopping list.51 Moreover such gratuitousness, no matter how entertaining, does not come without cost. The Plan ends up not being redemptive, but destructive, because the circle of conspiracy theorists from whom the scholars had taken these materials becomes convinced of its truth and convenes an ad hoc ritual at the Paris Conservatory of Arts and Crafts that ends up murdering Belbo.52 As Lia earlier insists, “Your plan isn’t poetic; it’s grotesque.”53
Are the efforts by Underworld’s characters to suggest that “everything is connected” similarly ill conceived? The answer is not clear. The ambiguity is most pronounced in the memorabilia collector Marvin Lundy, who believes in the “dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is available if you analyze the dots,” which leads him to paranoid theories about Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard ’Round the World and the prophetic significance of Gorbachev’s birthmark.54 These theories are as ridiculous as anything in Foucault’s Pendulum. Yet Nick’s friend Brian Glassic feels “shamed” upon visiting Lundy, because these theories “exposed his own middling drift.”55 Glassic, like many of the characters, feels lost in the haze of conflicting paranoias characterizing the Cold War era and had indeed earlier tried to use the Thomson home run to locate himself in national history, claiming, “When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together.”56 But he is not able to develop this thought much further, and from the unmoored perspective in which it leaves him, even Lundy’s near-absurd belief in the significance of his detritus looks appealing.
Where is the boundary, then, between a poetic allegory of trash and a grotesque one? DeLillo’s essay on the novel’s creation, “The Power of History,” suggests that, for him at least, his characters’ theories lie on the poetic side. He valorizes the Thomson home run as “beautifully isolated in time—not subject to the debasing process of frantic repetition that exhausts a contemporary event before it has rounded into coherence.”57 When he claims that fictional re-creations of such moments are “all about reliving things,” he implies that, if we were only able to connect up all the junk of the past again, we might finally understand our place in “the sweeping range of American landscape and experience.”58 His protagonist, however, is not so confident. Nick purchases from Lundy the home run ball, hoping it will lead him back to “the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real,” but as time passes, he notes, “I tend to forget why I bought it,” and it sits on his bookshelves in a tenuous gray area between icon and trash, “wedged between a slanted book and a straight-up book [ . . . ] a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spalding trademark and bronzed with nearly half a century of earth and sweat and chemical change.”59 As with many of Nick’s meandering adventures through the book, it’s not clear now what meaning it has.
So how do we interpret the ball? We could be cynical, with Catherine Morley, and call the ball’s apotheosis a “political construction” that “works to aestheticise and erase international politics,” like the crowd’s racial tensions and the Soviet nuclear test occurring at the same time.60 Certainly the historical significance Nick and Glassic attribute to it seems more impressionistic and idiosyncratic nostalgia than robust cultural theory. Yet it’s hard to read DeLillo’s description of the game’s conclusion, with “[p]eople climbing the dugout roofs and the crowd shaking in its own noise”; Leo Durocher in “an ascetic rapture, a thing they do in mosques in Anatolia”; and Russ Hodges repetitively hollering, “The Giants win the pennant!” and be so steel-hearted.61 The opening of Underworld might be the most spine-tingling chapter DeLillo has ever written—it feels wrong to call its occasion a scam. As David Cowart writes, “Underworld’s baseball [ . . . ] is at once McGuffin and grail, and the author presents it with considerable ambiguity.”62 To understand it would require a much more cogent understanding of how and why individuals imbue particular objects with larger meaning than I believe yet exists.
This conundrum is brought to its climax by the book’s last use of “everything is connected,” toward the conclusion, in which the batty Bronx nun Sister Edgar perceives the mystic apparition of a martyred Hispanic girl named Esmeralda on an overpass billboard, then dies and is absorbed into the nascent World Wide Web, where she becomes “open—exposed to every connection you can make,” having in the process several visions: a nuclear explosion, J. Edgar Hoover, and the eyes of God.63 They culminate in her realization that “[e]verything is connected in the end” and this final passage:
And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it’s your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick live tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it’s only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive—a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards of the solitary hills.
Peace.64
There is a certain breathless magic to the one-sentence paragraph, propelling us to the book’s end with the feeling that we might have been given the key, finally, to understanding the novel’s missing connections. Yet that sense of ecstasy is manufactured almost out of sheer syntax, because when we read it closely, it is obvious that nothing it lists is connected at all. Much of it, in fact, is literally trash. It is difficult to imagine that these words were meant to be read at any depth at all, but rather giddily raced past in hopes of communicating the idea of connectivity, rather than any specific connections. How Nick and the other characters relate to America, then, or how we might imagine such a relationship for ourselves, is left unresolved amid this final pile of cruft.
McHale once argued that the paranoid interpretation he associates with modernism ought to be scrapped in favor of “counter-paranoiac” reading, which he associated with Lia’s approach to Casaubon and Belbo’s project.65 However, Lia is not really counterparanoid: she connects everything, too, just more plausibly than Casaubon does. This final page of Underworld is what counterparanoia would really look like, juxtaposing a bunch of objects without any apparent figural relationships. There has been some debate as to what degree Underworld is properly paranoid, “an extended demonstration of the hypothesis—at times even the faith—that everything is connected,” or “post-paranoid,” depicting a world in which people “don’t have to believe, that what they don’t know is the deep, secret, missing truth.”66 The answer to that question is probably that it is not so much either paranoid or postparanoid as it experiments across the spectrum of paranoia, examining the relationship between what James Wood refers to as the “centrifugal” tendency of theories like Lundy’s and scattered “centripetal” text like the final page.67 There are moments that follow each approach exclusively, and many others that vacillate back and forth between them, trying without success to find a place to settle.
What, then, is the role of cruft in the paranoia-laced allegory-epic mega-novel? It emerges on the extremes of both tendencies. As Wood notes, the paranoia of Underworld’s characters does not resemble the “private paranoia” of, say, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, which grows organically out of a specific psychological state and can be contrasted against what we are told of a real external world surrounding him. Instead it is a “political paranoia,” targeted less at one subject’s imagined conspiracy than vague musings shared more or less by many characters on the world at large.68 The fact of the characters’ paranoia might be important, but the specific form their paranoia takes is arbitrary. While private paranoias are inextricable from the narratives they spawn, most paranoid theories in Underworld (e.g., Lundy on Gorbachev’s birthmark) might be substituted, moved, and sometimes even excised with no impact on the larger narrative. Such theories, moreover, are often adjacent to contrasting passages that lack much connectedness (e.g., the last paragraph), rendering them unassimilated and illegible within the novel’s larger texture. In between these two poles of cruft, the novel presents a gray area of possible modes of connectedness with greater or lesser plausibility. Though Wood is right to note the incongruity in how mega-novelists’ critics can never decide whether they are “great occultist[s]” or “visited hoaxer[s],” there is value in the cruft they produce.69 By pressuring us from opposite directions, they call into question what would constitute an adequate figurative understanding of the world. Repelling us from a too-paranoid position, the narrative might push us toward a relatively counterparanoid attitude, but that perspective will likely render us incapable of managing other narrative elements and encourage us to develop a different form of paranoia. This sequence of feedback and calibration is the distinctive cognitive process provoked by the allegory-epic mega-novel.
This instability within the allegory-epic mega-novel probably derives from the unraveling of traditional figurative ideological systems over the past seventy-five years. This is probably why World War II often serves as the generative moment of epic conflict grounding them. Given how the war generated or upended so many national narratives, as well as significantly advancing internationalist sensibilities, it should not be surprising that it has substantively shaped ensuing epic narrative. Interestingly, in contrast to how World War I is often considered the defining event for modernism, World War II has never been associated as strongly with postmodernism, even though many of the great global postmodern novels, especially mega-novels, are responses to World War II.70 If one were, for example, to describe a long, challenging novel in which a male protagonist—sympathetic in his way, but naive and unreliable in matters both perceptual and ethical—wanders across the strange landscape created in the war’s wake, driven at any given moment by specific goals but unsure about what he ought to be doing in any larger sense, one might be discussing Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum if that nation were Germany; but if it were Japan it could be Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; India, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the United States, not only Underworld but Gravity’s Rainbow or William Gass’s The Tunnel.
World War II and its legacy, however, have long defied straightforward artistic treatment. For World War I, as Samuel Hynes notes, there had been a unified “Myth of the War” about communal terror at modern military technology and the betrayal of innocent young men by doddering generals.71 No such myth exists for World War II. While novelists who had witnessed the fighting often wished to resist any easy narrative of Good against Evil in characterizing the Allies and Axis, simply appropriating World War I’s myth in the new postwar era would create an unpalatable equivalence between, say, the Nazis and their victims.72 In attempting to write about the conflict, authors from different countries are faced with distinct difficulties: for writers in Axis countries, acknowledging their nations’ role in the war at all has proved difficult; for those in Allied nations, admitting the human tragedy of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and Tokyo into the war’s larger narrative has been problematic; and for writers in nations decolonized after the war, finding a balance between the lineages of Allied universalist humanism, with its attendant imperialist heritage, and self-determined local values, with their sectarian and regressive tendencies, has provided serious challenges.73 This weakening of national narratives contributes significantly to difficulties in cognitive mapping. That is probably why Jameson mused hopefully that “third-world” literature might show a path out of this conundrum, because, he believed, it was always written “in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”74 This position was immediately critiqued as a dramatically inadequate simplification, of course, leaving the question of how to figure one’s place in the contemporary world lacking any clear answer.75
This might be what makes paranoia-drenched postwar mega-novels so interesting. They tend to present their characters (and readers) with several potential mappings of a complicated international situation, ranging from rigid allegory to near-total disconnection. In some cases the national allegories turn out to be valuable to the characters’ construction of a coherent sense of place, but in many cases they merely generate cruft. The characters’ quest becomes how to distinguish modes of interpretation that are too paranoid to be cognitively tenable from those that are not paranoid enough, an exceedingly difficult task given how often apparently ridiculous theories end up being justified while apparently stable conceptions of communal identity easily disintegrate. The rest of the chapter will examine the different ways in which these books deploy and dismantle figuration, forcing us to develop more cogent ways of responding to the situations to which they are applied.
The first kind of allegorical cruft we will examine is the empty figure. Conventional rhetoric does not have a term for an apparent figure that does not actually figure anything, but the closest is probably catachresis. In contemporary use it refers to any figurative connection between two concepts “marked by the feature of illogicality, often close to absurdity, and generates far-fetched, strained associations,” and empty figuration seems like a reasonable extension of this principle.76 As Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska notes, catachreses’ “lack of definite reference and interpretation” has led them to be associated with “certain experiments in twentieth century modernist, but especially postmodernist, prose.”77 Yet there is clearly a point beyond which such disjunctions become more wasteful than illuminating. Mark Turner calls this the “invariance principle,” the rule that, for the sake of our cognitive stability, “Conceptual projection [ . . . ] shall not result in an image-schematic clash in the target.”78 What makes catachreses especially difficult to manage, though, is that they usually cannot be identified immediately as catachrestic: in fact they often seem potentially intriguing until one has had time to play out their implications and determine how strained they are. That is frequently the case with their use in conspiracy theories, wherein signs are often attributed meanings that seem plausible at first but eventually break down into incoherence upon analysis. When they reach this stage, they become cruft.
Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the author’s response to criticism that his work had not engaged directly enough with the politics of postwar Japan, provides a case study in this phenomenon.79 In some ways the book seems neatly allegorical. For example the narrator, the recently unemployed Toru Okada, has become estranged emotionally and literally from his wife, Kumiko, who has herself long felt an inner psychic split associated an abortion several years prior, contributing to the fact—observed by Toru upon receiving a serious of anonymous dirty phone calls—that the pair have not had sex in some time. Several supporting characters face similar psychological troubles, like the quasi-telepathic Creta Kano, a “mental prostitute” with a history of psychosexual dysfunction, as well as the psychic healer Nutmeg Akasaka and her son Cinnamon, the latter of whom has been mute ever since an enigmatic childhood dream involving a wind-up bird and two men burying something in his backyard. As the novel proceeds, these psychological holes are linked to World War II. Literal holes are often the figurative vehicle: Toru, for instance, receives a bequest from his late friend Mr. Honda by way of a Lieutenant Mamiya, who recounts how he has suffered from existential emptiness ever since being thrown down a dry well while stationed in Manchuria, prompting Toru to venture into the dry well across the alley behind his house. The personal and political are further linked when we discover the involvement of Kumiko’s economist brother Noboru Wataya—who has just inherited the Diet seat held by his uncle Yoshitaka, the logistician in charge of Japanese imperial strategy during the war—in both Creta and his sister’s sexual trauma, suggesting the hidden abusive tendencies in Japan’s current political system.
The narrative, then, might be interpreted figurally as suggesting that World War II created a national psychic rift, with the cultural diseases expressed by prewar imperialism and postdefeat capitalism combining to impede the political and psychosexual functioning of its citizens. This sense of malfunction coalesces in the image of the wind-up bird itself, which shows up not only in Cinnamon’s dream but in his grandfather’s account of an episode from the war and in Toru’s strolls through his neighborhood: as a paradoxical figure for both the world’s orderly functioning and the artificial nature of that order, it tends to vanish when characters are stricken by the psychic rift. That the book climaxes with Noboru suffering a stroke in Nagasaki and Mamiya forging a new life with Creta as farmers in Hiroshima seems to resolve this allegory neatly, with the two cities destroyed by atomic bombs figuring the nation’s rebirth.
Yet things are not quite so pat as this account suggests. Between the initial publication of the original edition’s second and third books, in fact, Murakami’s Japanese critics pointed out that many of the novel’s apparent figures, rather than tying themselves up cleanly, were “hang[ing] aimlessly like threads in an unfinished tapestry.”80 Though by the end of the novel many of those apparently illegible figures are incorporated into the allegory—for instance Toru’s anonymous caller is finally identified as a splintered element of Kumiko’s psyche—others are catachrestic, presented as if they will eventually acquire clear figurative meaning without ever doing so. One example is the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, from which the novel’s first book takes its name. The overture plays on the radio during the novel’s first page, causing Toru to unconsciously whistle it several chapters later; its emblematic nature is apparently confirmed when it is hummed in the dream realm Toru visits while meditating in the well by a waiter walking toward a mysterious hotel room.81 However, the opera itself does not seem to relate to the novel’s allegory: even the two title birds have little in common, as one is an emblem of vulnerability and the other a mischievous trickster. For that matter Toru neither has nor particularly wants any personal associations with the piece. Late in the novel, he ponders, “If things ever settled down, I would have to go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia of music. I might even buy a complete recording of the opera if it was available. Or maybe not. I might not care to know the answers to these questions by then.”82 As Jay Rubin writes, “The opera features prominently in the book not because its plot provides a key to the novel but precisely because it is just out of reach. [ . . . ] [F]or Toru The Thieving Magpie will always be something he hasn’t quite understood. It is familiar, and yet its meaning eludes him.”83 Like Toru’s missing-then-retrieved polka-dot necktie, or the bequest from Honda that turns out to be an empty box, it is connected to the allegory only very weakly.
These disjoint connections are intriguing because Wind-Up Bird’s characters otherwise adhere to the paranoid principle articulated by the Sheep Man in Murakami’s earlier Dance Dance Dance, that “[i]t’s all connected.”84 Late in the novel, for example, Toru thinks:
[Nutmeg and Cinnamon’s] “clients” and I were joined by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather (Nutmeg’s father) and I were also joined by the mark on my cheek. Cinnamon’s grandfather and Lieutenant Mamiya were joined by the city of Hsin-ching. Lieutenant Mamiya and the clairvoyant Mr. Honda were joined by their special duties on the Manchurian-Mongolian border, and Kumiko and I had been introduced to Mr. Honda by Noboru Wataya’s family. Lieutenant Mamiya and I were joined by our experiences in our respective wells—his in Mongolia, mine on the property where I was sitting now. Also on this property had once lived an army officer who had commanded troops in China. All of these were linked as in a circle, at the center of which stood prewar Manchuria, continental East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan.85
Yet many elements in the novel don’t quite fit into this pattern. Finishing the above passage, Toru asks, “But why Kumiko and I should have been drawn into this historical chain of cause and effect I could not comprehend. All of these events had occurred long before Kumiko and I were born.”86 He is not the only one to feel that way, either, as his teenaged neighbor May Kasahara writes, upon dropping out of school to work in a wig factory, that her life seems as if “one disconnected thing led to another disconnected thing, and that’s how all kinds of stuff happened. [ . . . ] I don’t have any idea what’s happening to me.”87
The characters are not satisfied with establishing that “Everything is connected,” then, but ask “How is everything connected?” When we have put together what would otherwise seem like a plausible network of figurative connections, yet cannot fit into it many apparent figures, we should ask, as does Matthew Strecher, “whether these connections are real, imagined, or coincidental.”88 The elaborate connections Toru constructs may merely exist, after all, to cover up his own sense of emptiness and expendability. Early in the book, when discussing with Kumiko the mysticism of Malta Kano and Mr. Honda, he suggests that all such explanations are essentially arbitrary: “I mean, the world’s full of things we can’t explain, and somebody’s got to fill that vacuum. Better to have somebody who isn’t boring than somebody who is. Right?”89 His allegorical narrative, intertwining his own malaise with that of millions of other Japanese, could well be elaborate nonsense. It may not bore him, but it might bore readers when they discover there’s nothing behind it.
Amitrano, I think, articulates the best way to approach this problem when he notes in Murakami, as Wood does in DeLillo, a “tension between a centrifugal tendency towards the values of exactness and clarity [ . . . ] and the centripetal force that leads characters, events, themes so far from the center of narration as to become virtually invisible or disappear altogether.”90 Yet while Amitrano believes this serves largely to reflect the contemporary condition, I believe it serves an interesting cognitive effect, as well. A better way of putting it is that as we read, we come across any number of potential emblems, some of which might be meaningful and some of which are simply cruft, but we don’t know which is which until we have finished the book. As a result we need to be prepared to read any figure as possibly having deep resonance but also as possibly being a waste of our attentional resources. As in Underworld, the opposing centrifugal and centripetal tendencies create a spectrum of meaningfulness among the novel’s potential figures, requiring that we be primed to invest substantial attention in any one at any point, but also that we distribute it in such a way that we do not become too invested in something that ends up being meaningless.
For instance, at first we might interpret Toru and Kumiko’s cat, who is named after Kumiko’s brother Noboru, as figuring the same malignant forces the economist represents, especially when the cat vanishes at the novel’s start and helps precipitate their psychic maladies. As the book proceeds, though, the connections between the human and feline Noborus grow weaker: the Okadas, after all, see their pet representing “something good that grew up between us.”91 Though the human Noboru’s actions continue to figure larger societal ills and prolong Toru’s anguish, the cat not only does not add further injury to the Okadas but suddenly reappears at the book’s midpoint without resolving anything. This crashes the metaphor into the invariance principle. As if to admit the cat’s limited figurative function from this point forward, Toru renames him “Mackerel.”92 To insist either that the cat reveals the novel’s deeper figurative structure or that he subverts all such structures would be to miss the point: instead he possesses an important figurative resonance to Toru for some time, until he doesn’t anymore. The abundance of such pseudo-emblems, whose relevance alters as our conception of the larger allegory changes, shows how difficult it is to maintain a coherent idea of our place in the world.
How we interpret the individual figures will also have an impact on how we interpret the larger figural narrative system about Japanese national identity of which they are part. Many of the book’s characters, for instance, are mystified about their relationship to Japan, none more so than Mamiya. Being Japanese, for him, is not exactly determined by geography, because prior to the war, the land officially part of the Japanese empire waxed and waned with the state’s imperial fortunes. While posted in Manchuria, he had felt that “[t]o protect my homeland, I too would fight and die. But it made no sense to me at all to sacrifice my one and only life for the sake of this desolate patch of soil.”93 Nor is his national identity exactly determined by shared ethnicity or culture, as the postwar shift in global power relations causes many of the nation’s institutions and allegiances to be westernized, partly exemplified by how after being captured on the Soviet front, Mamiya attempts a realpolitik alliance with a Russian power broker that alienates him from his fellow Japanese prisoners of war.94 When his last tie to Japan, kinship, dissolves upon his family’s deaths in the nuclear strike on Hiroshima, Mamiya becomes incapable of relocating himself within Japan. His lack of nationality does not liberate but cripples him, and his inability to feel resonance with anything upon his return makes him think that “real life may have ended for me deep in that well in the desert of Outer Mongolia.”95 The catachrestic nature of his Japaneseness, then, should make us think through what would constitute a meaningful attitude toward the nation.
Similarly the novel’s catachreses should make us wary about how we interpret the resolution of the novel’s allegorical national crisis. At the novel’s climax, Toru enters the dream world, locates the lost Kumiko in the hotel room, sees a TV news report about how a baseball-bat-wielding man resembling him has bludgeoned Noboru Wataya into critical condition, then takes a blood-stained bat from Kumiko and kills an invisible monster who challenges him, apparently prompting Noboru’s real-world collapse.96 As a subconscious figure, Toru seems to have received the bat—a complex symbol of both Japanese nationality and westernization—from Cinnamon’s account of his grandfather’s role in the war’s late stages, which depicts a Japanese officer ordered to execute an escaped Chinese prisoner using the baseball bat that the escapee himself had used to kill his jailers.97 When Kumiko gives the bat to him, then, it appears to complete a circle of connections to World War II. Yet the bat also has a literal existence that is almost total cruft. Near the novel’s midpoint, Toru is followed by a guitarist who proceeds to attack him with a bat until Toru wrests it away and knocks him unconscious, subsequently keeping the bat and bringing it with him to the well.98 Just before he enters the well for his climactic battle, though, the bat inexplicably disappears.99 Any attempt we might have made to tie the literal bat into the figurative web is destroyed, as its existence is revealed to be entirely gratuitous. However, the figurative opaqueness of Toru’s actual bat might prompt us to consider more closely, when attempting to find a meaning for it, the murders committed with the other bats. After all, the World War II execution is pointlessly brutal, the act of an imperial power too inflexible to acknowledge its impending defeat—not to mention totally ineffective, as the prisoner revives and has to be shot anyway. Is Toru’s own ritual violence, then, merely an extension of the same cultural disease he attempts to eradicate? Or can it still serve its purgative function despite this association?
The uncertainty these questions leave may be why the novel’s conclusion only partly resolves the myriad problems raised elsewhere in the book. On the one hand, a malevolent politician dies, Toru locates Kumiko and begins to resume written communication with her, and several minor characters experience happy endings. On the other hand, the fates of May Kasahara and the disappeared Malta Kano are left unresolved, and we do not know whether Toru and Kumiko’s relationship will ever be fully restored: Kumiko is imprisoned after she removes her brother’s life support and is not yet ready to speak to Toru in person.100 Similarly it is not clear to what extent Noboru’s death will actually cleanse Japan of its postwar malaise, or whether the psychic rift will persist. It is tempting to be clunkily Lacanian about such gaps, but the book’s final words suggest that the problem is, fundamentally, a cognitive one. Pondering his situation as he takes the train home from visiting May, Toru tells us, “I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”101 The novel’s events have given Toru a stronger sense of local and national connections, but his continued inability to maintain a figural framework establishing his relationship to the rest of the world leaves him unable to sustain consistent focus. He remains “far away from anyone or anywhere” because his mind is still adrift, not quite able to process the many recalcitrant elements of his world.
The narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, has no such lack of conviction about his place within the nation. His introduction to the autobiographical chronicle about the first decades of Indian independence claims, after all, that “there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well.”102 Being born at midnight on August 5, 1947—the exact moment of independence—means, he believes, that his “destinies [are] indissolubly chained to those of my country.”103 This is an ambitious claim, but it is not totally unfounded. For one, his heritage is a near microcosm of India’s history: though he is raised by the well-off Sinai family, who comprise both western-educated professionals and Muslim traditionalists, he was born of a poor Hindu woman and a departing British officer, himself descended from the founder of Bombay. Furthermore Saleem’s face is reminiscent of the Hindu god Ganesh, to whose scribal role he aspires.104 Last, his moment of birth has given him telepathic abilities, allowing him to communicate with the thousand other supernaturally endowed children born during the first hour of independence, whom he dubs Midnight’s Children. When Prime Minister Nehru addresses Saleem as “the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young,” it seems quite plausible to suggest that his life might allegorically represent the entire history of India and its hope for the future.105
Early on, though, Saleem begins to worry about how to manage the scope of such a narrative. While recounting how his mother Amina’s lover Nadir Khan fled the assassination of Mian Abdullah, Saleem tells us a brief story about Nadir’s roommate, a painter whose works “had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art,” causing him to wail “I wanted to be a miniaturist and I’ve got elephantiasis instead!” Subsequently, and with no other explanation, the painter commits suicide.106 Saleem likely means to communicate by this excursus anxieties regarding his own elephantiastic endeavor. Those worries become clearer a few chapters later, when he ruminates on whether the spectacular, but apparently coincidental, events that shape his life are motivated by chance or fate: “if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might—as pessimists—give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?”107 Believing everything is strongly connected, that is, may provide a sense of collectivity but does so at the price of emphasizing one’s own insignificance to the enormous, predetermined pattern of fate. Yet Saleem cannot refuse fate, either, because its absence would render his actions insignificant for the opposite reasons, the lack of larger context to which to relate them. As Neil Ten Kortenaar writes, “what frightens Saleem is not excess or incongruity but rather the probable lack that excess can imply.”108 It is no coincidence, then, that Jameson’s “national allegory” framework has been both enthusiastically applied and emphatically rejected by Midnight’s Children’s critics: the book both prompts such a large-scale approach as necessary for conceptualizing an immense nation like India but also resists it as fatalist and potentially dogmatic.109
Consequently Midnight’s Children is concerned less with showing that “everything is connected” than with the question “how far should everything be connected?” As the narrative proceeds, Saleem has increasing difficulty determining the lengths to which he should extend his allegory. For instance, when explaining why his ten-year-old self had sent a letter to Commander Sabarmati revealing the latter’s wife Lila had been sleeping with the film producer Homi Catrack—leading in sequence to Lila and Homi’s murder, the commander’s imprisonment, and Saleem’s filmmaker uncle Hanif committing suicide—Saleem assigns blame to fated narrative archetypes: “Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors. When Lila drover her Hindustan to an address off Colaba Causeway, she was Juliet coming out on to her balcony; when cream-scarfed, gold-shaded Homi sped off to meet her [ . . . ], he was Leander swimming the Hellespont toward Hero’s burning candle.”110 None of these love stories, however, is a remotely adequate figure for the relationship of Lila and Homi, as none involves love triangles. The overextension of Saleem’s figuration suggests his struggles with conceptualizing personal agency in a larger context, as at first he tells us, “As for my part in the business, I will not give it a name,” using the power of fate to erase his culpability, but only a few pages later he uses it for precisely the opposite reason, declaring himself the commander’s “puppet-master.”111 Neither is true—he has some, not total, responsibility—yet for someone who feels the importance of understanding his life as imbricated in the national future, but also acutely realizes his own smallness as only one citizen among hundreds of millions, that idea is difficult to articulate.
An even greater overextension occurs when Saleem notes, after his grandfather Aadam Aziz collapses on the road to Pakistan to mourn Hanif, that Nehru has fallen sick at around the same time. Recapping the past hundred pages, Saleem thinks:
If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of the nation was Nehru. Nehru’s death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault?112
Despite its position at the end of several somewhat more plausible connections, the answer to the last question is obviously “no,” especially since Nehru dies some months after Aadam anyway. The passage demonstrates in miniature Saleem’s difficulties with circumscribing the Jamesian web of endless relations, as a plausible set of local connections gradually extends into a paranoid effusion of cruft too overdetermined to be coherently sustained.
The problem, however, is not simply an excess of figuration. Though Timothy Brennan argues that “Saleem is a culprit not because he fails to resist, or because he conspires for personal gain, but rather because he proliferates metaphor,” the narrative’s problems cannot be solved by simply rejecting Saleem’s figurative impulses.113 Granted, an overuse of figuration does cause real problems for Saleem, most visibly through his allegory’s competition with (and similarity to) Indira Gandhi’s totalitarian view that “India is Indira and Indira is India.”114 However, a Saleem who refused to understand his actions’ figural place within the state would likely end up like The Tin Drum’s Oskar Matzerath, the lifelong Danzig resident who similarly narrates the twentieth-century history of his city in autobiographical terms.115 Notably, Oskar refuses to adopt conscious Polish nationalism: he insists there is no connection between his antiauthority agitation, such as his literal refusal to grow up and his disruption of government gatherings with his drumming, and any political motivation, but that he is motivated purely by “private and what is more esthetic reasons.”116 His deliberate innocence does keep him from helping the Nazis, but it also makes his resistance to them narcissistic and destructive, prompting him toward theft, vandalism, and a near-sociopathic lack of empathy. Such negative consequences might illustrate why Roger Clark writes that Midnight’s Children’s national mythos is not “a mere postmodern game. Rather, it derives from the great hope of a nation finding its way toward harmony and tolerance, and from the great fear of collapsing into chaos.”117 And figuration sometimes does provide real insight for Saleem. As Berlatsky writes, “Saleem’s explicit references to metaphor imply that they have the potential to reveal reality, not obscure it,” such as with “literalized metaphors” like Saleem’s observation that the skin of India’s businessmen grows whiter as the nation’s economy integrates with western capitalism.118
The debate over whether Saleem’s figuration is good or bad, then, misses the point. As an abstract concept, metaphor has neutral value: it can be extremely beneficial or quite dangerous, depending on how it is used. An extremely expansive figuration, like that between Midnight’s Children and India itself, might be valuable through the way it imagines how native Indian abilities might guide the country toward an otherwise unimaginable independent identity and prosperous future. However, other similarly scaled allegories, like Saleem’s account of Nehru’s death, lead only into nonsense. Saleem addresses this problem near the novel’s midpoint, upon receiving a form letter from Nehru: “‘Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,’ the Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of the nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term ‘modes of connection’ [ . . . ]: actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.”119 Saleem acknowledges shortly afterward, though, that “the Midnight’s Children Conference [ . . . ] never became what I most wanted it to be; we never operated in the first, most significant of the ‘modes of connection.’ The ‘active-literal’ passed us by.”120 That the active-literal mode is the most difficult to achieve, in fact, suggests why Saleem’s figuration is both necessary and dangerous. Since very few individuals in a nation of India’s size can ever have a direct active-literal impact on the whole, conceptualizing and effecting change becomes feasible only if one reduces the nation to figurative concepts embodied in specific persons and events.
This leads to the basic paradox of modern democracy: giving voice to hundreds of millions of individuals creates a disorienting cacophony that no one can adequately attend, but restricting those voices to a small number of representatives inevitably concentrates power in a hierarchy. It is not for nothing that several of the novel’s characters are desperate for the country to contain its exploding population, as with Dr. Narlikar’s antifertility proselytizing and tetrapod venture, Indira and Sanjaya Gandhi’s sterilization program, and Saleem’s own vision of being “trample[d . . .], the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust.”121 Not only does population pose logistical and humanitarian problems, but it makes the nation impossible to coherently conceive. Even the allegorical representation of India’s hundreds of millions via the hundreds of surviving Midnight’s Children cannot evade this problem, because the reduced number still well exceeds Dunbar’s 150-person limit for meaningful social relations. In blurring their voices upon describing them to us, Saleem admits that “my narrative could not cope with five hundred and eight-one fully-rounded personalities,” which is probably why the telepathic meetings Saleem orchestrates for the group quickly dissolve into a “hundred squalling rows” over objectives, leadership, and personal agendas.122
Saleem’s failure either to be a representative leader or to cognize a vast multiplicity of voices causes him to vacillate between unstable figural systems through the novel’s latter stages. As Ten Kortenaar notes, Saleem sometimes gets turned around to the point where he “insists that national history is as often an allegory of his life as his life is an allegory of national history.”123 For instance consider his analysis of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war. There is nothing inherently wrong with relating the war figurally to his family, as the trauma of their own displacement from India to Pakistan puts them in good position to experience the divisive and destructive nature of this conflict. However, bombarded with both the official Indian and Pakistani media’s allegories of national invincibility, each so overextended as to totally revise reality—“Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more aircraft than India had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the Pakistan Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man”—Saleem is left no coherent space into which to project his own self, causing him to create another unsustainable allegory in response: “Let me state this quite unequivocally: it is my firm conviction that the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my benighted family from the face of the earth.”124 He is so unmoored that he believes this claim is a fully objective one, arguing that anyone who would “examine the bombing-pattern of that war with an analytical, unprejudiced eye” would agree.125 This is transparently not true, of course, but devising a sounder theory under Saleem’s cognitive conditions is not easy. Since not only has his own national allegiance been forced to waver between India and Pakistan over the course of the book, but the countries’ own national narratives have grown alien and unacceptable to him, it is no wonder that his personal figuration becomes horribly distorted.
A brain injury caused by an explosion-propelled spittoon, however, causes Saleem to be “cleansed” of his “yearning for importance” at the war’s end, turning him into a meditative Buddha figure with a supernatural sense of smell but no other acknowledgment of worldly or political matters.126 Yet instead of leading him to enlightenment, this antifigural attitude prevents him from understanding the larger implications of his actions. When he is inducted into the Pakistani army prior to the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, he blithely follows his unit’s orders to covertly kidnap Sheikh Mujib, leader of the independence movement, without any consciousness of what he is doing.127 His inability to conceive himself as a Muslim Pakistani mindlessly hunting down a fellow Muslim Pakistani—or, for that matter, as a patriotic Indian further fragmenting an already fragmented subcontinent—allows him to be used for pernicious nationalist purposes.
Saleem understands this when narrating his tale years later, but by that point it is too late. Reflecting on a passing vagrant who brags that he can generate a fifteen-inch turd, Saleem tells us, “Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I’d have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; but now I’m disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write.”128 Though any figuration can be taken so far as to become nonsense, the flexibility to extend and contract figures, to consider different blends of concepts before deciding on one, is extremely valuable. By the novel’s end, though, Saleem has exhausted this ability, his cognitive powers so decimated by three decades of attempting to manage the problem of his country’s size that he lacks the focus to continue his efforts.
Given the wildly divergent evaluations of Saleem’s narrative, the book’s critics don’t seem to have figured out how to manage that problem either. There is an odd contrast between the near unanimity in critical evaluation of Midnight’s Children as an aesthetic success, culminating in its victories in the 1993 and 2008 “Booker of Bookers” competitions, and the substantial disagreement over what it actually succeeds in doing. In particular there is widespread disagreement over whether Saleem, in composing his epic, satisfies the subcontinent’s “national longing for form.”129 John Su, for instance, believes that Midnight’s Children succeeds only inasmuch as Saleem fails, claiming that the novel “rejects the heroic myth as the basis for an epic of India” and “locates in the unrepresentability of the future the possibility of unraveling deterministic national narratives and discovering political formations that are presently unimaginable.”130 However, despite this, Ten Kortenaar points out that the book “is most often read, inside and outside of India, as a triumphant celebration of the nation and as the first novel commensurate with India.”131 Perhaps Michael Gorra lays out this problem best, as he on the one hand celebrates how Rushdie presents a new “way to deal with politics on a large scale, rather than in terms of individual ethical dilemmas” but on the other worries that “the whole narrative of Midnight’s Children remains so firmly under the thumb of [Rushdie’s] self-regarding style that at times I find it hard to distinguish because the writer’s fantasies on the one hand and the Widow’s [Saleem’s avatar for Indira Gandhi] on the other.”132 Just as Saleem is so overwhelmed by his nation’s size that he cannot find his place within it, his readers are so overwhelmed by the range of possible figurations he presents that they cannot decide which are or are not adequate to the problems of mapping the contemporary world.
What the book does do is present acutely that predicament, in which the expanding networks that make up our society continue to outpace our ability to conceptualize them. Its cruft is emblematic of all the national figurations possible in the contemporary world, and how many of them quickly descend into absurdity. Midnight’s Children requires us to consider how far we must allegorize any given event to make it comprehensible, but also where we must cease to allegorize so as not to make nonsense of its individual meaning. As the “two three, four hundred million five hundred six” souls that crush Saleem in its final pages increase to billions, that task only grows more difficult.
If it were inevitable that this book’s last chapter would be about allegory and epic, it may have been similarly inevitable that the chapter would end with Gravity’s Rainbow. Though any of the preceding five chapters could’ve addressed Pynchon’s masterpiece, it is a book that demands to be addressed terminally, and with a breadth of scale to which only the allegory and epic are appropriate. This is not merely because of its eschatological nature or its sizable cottage industry of commentaries, but because it has that rare property shared by only the greatest books: it turns us all into hypocrites. It does so by vacillating so rapidly between profound allegory and absurd conspiracy theory that it reveals how frighteningly inadequate are our cognitive apparatuses for distinguishing the two.
As with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Midnight’s Children, Gravity’s Rainbow’s backdrop is the aftermath of World War II’s demolition of preexisting national structures. It involves an epic quest, namely American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop’s journey through lawless postsurrender Germany (“the Zone”) in search of a mysterious, apocalyptic rocket called the 00000, which is made up of a synthetic material (“Imipolex-G”) to which he may have been sexually conditioned during infancy by a representative of an evil military-industrial cabal he dubs “Them.” While fleeing Their pursuit, Slothrop becomes enmeshed in the Zone’s numerous cultures and subcultures, as well as their attendant mythological systems, ranging from the Puritan eschatology of elect and preterite to Nordic tales of Tannhäuser to invented legends like that of “Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero who, sometime back in the 10th century, routed a Viking invasion.”133 In this way the novel figures the shifting borders and uncertain trajectory of the postwar global moment through Slothrop’s own struggle to establish his identity. The narrator quips that “Slothrop [ . . . ] is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days,” and the American later imagines that, “maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up” might emerge.134
This allegorical sensibility, however, leads him toward extreme paranoia. Anticipating the narrator’s famous claim that paranoia is “the leading edge of the discovery that everything is connected,” Slothrop feels even before he enters the Zone that Their “plot against him has grown” even beyond the “monolithic, all-potent” one he’d imagined, turning into something that encompasses everyone he meets.135 The gradual expansion of Slothrop’s plotting of this conspiracy against him onto ever higher levels of organization is exemplified well by the passage in which he and Blodgett Waxwing infiltrate Shell’s British headquarters to investigate the multinational’s role in the creation of Imipolex-G, finding there “not [Minister of Supply] Mr. Duncan Sandys cowering before their righteousness [ . . . ]—but only a rather dull room, business machines arrayed around the walls calmly blinking, files of cards pierced frail as sugar faces.” Subsequently he thinks:
Duncan Sandys is only a name, a function in this, “How high does sit go?” is not even the right kind of question to be asking, because the organization charts have all been set up by Them, the titles and names filled in by Them, because
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Slothrop finds he has paused in front of the blue parts list that started all this. How high does it go . . . ahhhh. The treacherous question is not meant to apply to people at all, but to the hardware!136
Even hardware, Slothrop believes, might be conspiring against him. By entering the Zone, he seeks to investigate the very nature of connectedness itself, hoping to better understand the nature of a world that seems to be conspiring against him more and more each moment.
However, how to go about interpreting this vast network of connections has caused the novel’s critics four decades’ worth of headaches. One established tradition of Pynchonists interpret this omniconnectedness in a traditionally epic and allegorical manner, respectively exemplified by Thomas Moore’s and Kathryn Hume’s claims that Gravity’s Rainbow generates, respectively, a “style of connectedness” based in Jungian archetypes or a syncretic “mythography” of Western culture.137 The other major tradition, however, suggests that if there is value in the Zone’s ontology, it is in how, as Leo Bersani puts it, it “resists analysis” by means of interpretation, such as those that allegory and epic presuppose.138 Calling critics like Hume and Moore “good paranoid readers,” for instance, McHale claims that while Gravity’s Rainbow “engages our paranoid tendencies as readers,” it “also solicits our participation at a higher, reflexive level of reading [. . . by] confronting us with irreducibly ambiguous, or, better, multiguous features.”139 Either the novel generates the postwar era’s most rigorously structured figural narrative system, that is, or it is a quintessentially uninterpretable postmodern text. Even Deborah Madsen’s book on Pynchon’s allegories cannot decide whether Gravity’s Rainbow figurations constitute “a construction or a cryptomorph.”140
Yet this division reflects not so much two distinct interpretations as two starting points tending toward the same contradiction. On the one hand, those in the poststructuralist camp, like Peter Cooper, claim that the book “defies a 1 or 0 method of reading” yet often end up inscribing a rigid allegorical binary anyway by buying into the battle of Us versus Them, insisting there is “clear internal evidence of an evil and manipulative cabal.”141 Conversely those in the first camp often claim that paranoid reading is most valuable for how it promotes an unstructured subversiveness that “does not proceed rationally [ . . . ] but [ . . . ] appears to function, at least on one level, simply by violating the behavior They would predict.”142 This makes little more sense, because as Hofstadter wrote, “the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities. It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic.”143 Indeed generating schemes heroically pitting oneself in a cosmic battle against a demonized Other is characteristic not of those seeking to sympathize with a downtrodden preterite, Hofstadter points out, but “the megalomanic view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted.”144
Regardless of the position with which we begin, that is, Gravity’s Rainbow tends to twist it back against itself. I have written elsewhere about how this emerges in critical treatments of the novel’s preterite-versus-elect pairing.145 To address these issues in the novel as a whole, though, will require a bolder claim about how to approach the novel’s paranoia, one that, though it has been gestured toward by a number of critics, has not been fully embraced: “They” do not actually exist.146 This might seem a ridiculous assertion, as They are referred to by many characters throughout the narrative, but nevertheless They are only, as Slothrop puts it, “pasteboard images,” and being able to acknowledge that while still navigating the book is probably the most serious challenge for Gravity’s Rainbow’s readers.147
Few critics have actually been able to explain exactly what is meant by “Them.” Most are forced to describe Them as did one of Pynchon’s best early readers, Tony Tanner:
What emerges from the book is a sense of a force and a system—something, someone, referred to simply as “the firm” or “They”—which is actively trying to bring everything to zero and beyond, trying to institute a world of nonbeing, an operative kingdom of death, covering the organic world with a world of paper and plastic and transforming all natural resources into destructive power and waste: the rocket and the debris around it. “They” are precisely nonspecific, unlocatable. There is always the possibility of a They behind the They, a plot behind the plot; the quest to identify “Them” sucks the would-be identifier into the possibility of an endless regression. But, whatever Their source and origin, They are dedicated to annihilation.148
I am reminded of Foucauldians discussing “power,” wherein a critic’s acknowledged inability to define a term does not limit the confidence with which it is wielded. This fuzziness, though, leads Tanner, and many other Pynchonists, into error. For example Tanner wrongly identifies Them with the Firm, even though the latter is used only to refer specifically to the British intelligence bureaucracy, while Them is used to refer not only to the Firm but to several other real or hypothesized power structures, including the German military bureaucracy.149 The distinction is important, because while the Firm is up to all sorts of objectionable activities, their objectives are often directly opposed to those of their German counterparts and to other supposed branches of Them.
In other words, while there are clearly “conspiracies or plots here and there,” in Hofstadter’s words—for example Slothrop’s uncle Lyle Bland definitely conspires with German scientist Laszlo Jamf to perform experiments on the infant Slothrop—and while those individual conspiracies are often “connected” via military-corporate entities like IG Farben, whether these connections can be mapped as a conspiracy of Them constituting “the motive force in historical events” is not nearly so clear.150 Even in passages where it seems like “the existence of the opposing They-system and We-system is asserted” by the narrator himself, the evidence is not as straightforward as it might seem.151 Consider the assault on Shell quoted above. As with most of the novel, the narrator does not speak directly here but uses a loose indirect discourse, melding his voice with the characters’ thoughts.152 The final paragraph confirms that the passage’s characterization of Them comes primarily not from the narrator but from Slothrop’s imagination, which is often barely reliable even for perceiving what’s directly in front of him. In fact Slothrop explicitly refers to Them here not to exhibit any precise epiphany about Their true nature, but simply to admit he has no idea who or what They are.
The slipperiness with which Slothrop refers to “Them” increases when he enters the Zone. For instance, when he takes up with a bohemian Berlin collective led by Säure Bummer, he begins making wildly off-base political readings of objects he encounters, such as that a poster of Stalin is really of his ex-girlfriend and that the Reichstag is a defecating King Kong.153 Looking at photos from recent Allied conferences, he thinks:
Whoever it was, posing in the black cape at Yalta with the other leaders, conveyed beautifully the sense of Death’s wings, rich, soft and black as the winter cape, prepared a nation of starers for the passing of Roosevelt, a being They assembled, a being They would dismantle. . . .
Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows all going the right way and lengthening with the day—but no, Säure can’t be real, no more than these dark-clothed extras waiting in queues for some hypothetical tram, some two slices of sausage (sure, sure), the dozen half-naked kids racing in and out of this burned tenement so amazingly detailed—They sure must have the budget, all right. Look at this desolation, all built then hammered back into pieces, ranging body-size down to powder (please order by Gauge Number), as that well-remembered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human decay, is puffed on the set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley, pumping its giant atomizer. . . .154
Even the most paranoid critic ought to admit that reading the ruins of Berlin as a staged manipulation for Slothrop’s benefit is dangerously narcissistic. It derives not from real knowledge about how “everything is connected” but from Slothrop’s scrambled mental state. And in fact, if we look through the novel, nearly every mention of Them similarly derives more from the psychological needs of specific characters rather than any reliable narrative statement. That goes for the mentally broken German physicist Franz Pökler’s suspicion that his superiors are replacing his daughter Ilse with lookalikes on her annual visit; Herero Oberst Enzian’s methamphetamine-driven speculation that “this War was never political at all [; . . .] secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology,” which is usually quoted without his subsequent rejection of this belief; and even Mexico’s rationalization of his ineffective resistance to his superiors on the grounds that “[t]he Man has a branch office in each of our brains.”155
Given their outspoken distaste for “binary thinking,” why do so many of the novel’s critics go along with this Us-versus-Them framework? A telling hint might come through Slothrop’s worry that the manipulative, well-connected Bummer might be one of Them, a thought he rejects a moment later because he feels Bummer “can’t possibly be on the Bad Guys’ side. Whoever They are, Their game has been to extinguish, not remind.”156 That logic is quite flimsy—Hilary Bounce’s reminders about Shell’s political connections helped Slothrop theorize Them in the first place—so it ought to draw our attention to the phrase “the Bad Guys,” a term that, like so much of Slothrop’s consciousness, derives from cheap genre novels and Hollywood movies.157 In such narratives, stereotypically, all persons, instead of possessing the complex mix of motivations common to real life and literary fiction, may be neatly divided into Good Guys working for society’s best interests and Bad Guys working against it. This worldview is almost always condemned by literary critics as oversimplified, liable to encourage violent jingoism and decrease empathy. However, as this passage should make clear, it maps directly onto the Them-Us division assented to by most critics. Pynchonists believe that They exist, in other words, because amid the otherwise incomprehensible web of competing actions in the postwar Zone, they need to designate a set of Bad Guys to ground their understanding of the novel.
Given his situation, Slothrop may be forgiven for that desire. After all, he has just discovered his father and uncle have “sold [him] to IG Farben like a side of beef,” learned from Stephen Dodson-Truck that he’s being used by the British intelligence community, and gotten chased from Nordhausen by his own country’s military under the command of Major Marvy.158 His only real ally in the Zone has been the German Geli Tripping, lover of the Soviet officer Tcitcherine.159 Since his sense of national and kinship allegiances have totally collapsed, it’s understandable that he would merge the multiple agents exploiting him into one group and subsequently imagine himself at the center of their conspiracy. It is not until late in the novel, when Seaman Bodine tells him, “Everything is some kind of a plot, man,” and Solange (really Franz’s wife, Leni, in disguise) adds, “And yes but, the arrows are pointing in all different ways,” that he is capable of realizing that “the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself.”160 Elaborating on Solange/Leni’s point, we might imagine the forces against Slothrop as several converging vectors, each characterized by opposed x-y components and a small but uniformly downward z component: the vectors themselves are quite distinct, but as experienced at the point where they converge, the x-y components cancel each other out and resolve into one strong downward force that acts as if it were a vector on its own. As critics, though, we cannot mistake this abstract resolution for the actual source vectors.
Yet in a novel as elaborate as Gravity’s Rainbow, we will often need to simplify that which is complex. Refusing to allegorize entirely, indulging instead Fran Mason’s view that “there may be no moral and that the events were ‘just a bunch of stuff that happened’” leads to equally serious cognitive problems.161 For instance, after leaving Bummer to head for Cuxhaven seeking a discharge, Slothrop witnesses this “great frontierless streaming”:
Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by the Poles and headed for the camp at Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin regime, others going back home, the eyes of both parties, when they do meet, hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what’s forced them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians trekking north again, all their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes in tatters, songs too hard to sing, talk pointless, Sudetens and East Prussians shuttling between Berlin and the DP camps in Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks, Croats and Serbs, Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians, Magyars, Vlachs, Circassians, Spaniols, Bulgars stirred and streaming over the surface of the Imperial cauldron, colliding, shearing alongside for miles, sliding away, numb, indifferent to all momenta but the deepest, the instability too far below their itchy feet to give a shape to, white wrists and ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped prison-camp pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl’s in this inland dust, caravans of Gypsies, axles or linchpins failing, horses dying, families leaving the vehicles beside the roads for others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns, trains full of their own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead, squeezing aside for army convoys when they come through, White Russians sour with pain on the way west, Kazakh ex-P/Ws marching east, Wehrmacht veterans from other parts of old Germany, foreigners to Prussia as any Gypsies, carrying their old packs [ . . . ]162
I imagine most readers skim this passage. (You probably did just now.) Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger write that it “gives one the feeling of being buried under a rubble of words naming things, concepts, techniques, and peoples; words with no clear reason for being tumbled together.”163 With the exception of a few vivid images, it is little more than a list of twenty-three Central and Eastern European ethnicities in stock images of displacement. That it is described so flatly in one sentence (which continues for a few more lines) seems to characterize it as Slothrop’s pure perception, devoid of paranoid simplification or figuration. This descriptive approach does prevent Slothrop from committing his earlier paranoid absurdities, but it also keeps him from finding any meaningful patterns in this scene of displacement. When the narrator uses this list format elsewhere, in fact, it is primarily to describe waste products—for example, “rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile”—about which he laments our inability to “make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste. . . .”164
This antiparanoid way of perceiving the landscape appears to be a backlash to the cognitive unsustainability of Slothrop’s earlier paranoia. After several weeks in which his desire to discover the truth about the 00000 is overtaken by moment-to-moment survival on his assorted journeys with Bummer, he realizes that he’s forgotten what he’s doing in the Zone at all:
Slothrop perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the west Sky.
Either They have put him here for a reason, or he’s just here. He isn’t sure that he wouldn’t, actually, rather have that reason . . . .165
Antiparanoia, in other words, is as mentally destructive as paranoia. Slothrop’s perception that he is losing his mind is, in that sense, quite accurate.
Considered as an abstract dilemma, of course, paranoia and antiparanoia present something of a false choice. As Molly Hite has argued, “the contradictory of ‘everything is connected’ is ‘not everything is connected,’ a proposition that leaves ample room for the possibility that some things are connected, and in innumerably different ways.”166 There are indeed options available for us on the continuum between paranoia and antiparanoia: it is quite possible to start moderately paranoid and become more or less so as the situation warrants. However, Slothrop faces not just an epistemological problem regarding his paranoia but a cognitive one: he must decide not only where to place himself on the paranoid continuum but also how to determine where he is on that continuum at any given moment. To discover in adulthood that one had been used in infancy as a test subject for a notorious psychological experiment might suggest that one has gone through life insufficiently paranoid, but to subsequently assume paranoid links regarding everything one sees will quickly lead to madness. Consequently Slothrop’s level of paranoia vacillates wildly in response to feedback from his environment, and he is unable to find an approach that consistently works.
These fluctuations are what cause Slothrop’s eventual disintegration, not any direct aggression by Them. When we are told midway through Slothrop’s journey in the Zone that he “has begun to thin, to scatter,” the proximate cause is explained in terms of Mondaugen’s Law, that “[p]ersonal density [ . . . ] is directly proportional to temporal bandwith” or that “[t]he more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”167 Fundamentally this principle is about attention: the longer one maintains focus, the more stable one is, but as attention span diminishes, “[i]t 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.”168 Paranoia, conversely, extends temporal bandwidth by locating one within a long-standing geopolitical framework. Many Pynchon critics valorize Slothrop’s scattering as a victorious evasion of the System, but to my knowledge, none have sought to, like Slothrop, “spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain, getting to know shrikes and capercaillie, badgers and marmots.”169 Logistically there is nothing difficult about living this way: it is simply cognitively intolerable, a state of dissolution so total that one might as well have been hit by the 00000.
The sense of national and spiritual identity provided by epic and allegory, of course, has long been a method of avoiding these problems. That is probably why “the one ghost-feather” of Slothrop’s self that is last to dissolve is “America. Poor asshole, he can’t let her go. She’s whispered love me too often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with come-hitherings, incredible promises.”170 While there are any number of potentially pathological things about nationalism, it is also the most powerful concept through which, as Anderson notes, “pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.”171 Though Sascha Pöhlmann is not incorrect to claim that “the Zone as a textual device can be used as an exemplary space for postnationalism,” he is also right to add that this is not necessarily a positive thing, because “[t]he Zone is born out of war, the migrants that traverse it are far from migrating by choice, and its openness is only the result of continent-wide destruction.”172 The only thing separating the “great frontierless streaming” from pure paratactic gibberish, after all, is its residual national divisions, which may also be all that makes it bearable for those traversing it.
Can one conceive an allegorical system adequate to these challenges that does not turn into an overdetermined paranoia? The “We-System” created by Slothrop’s fellow functionaries in British intelligence, the Counter-Force, seeks to do so by creating a counterweight to Them. However, as Pynchon’s source R. D. Laing once remarked, “The invention of Them creates Us, and We may require to invent Them to re-invent Ourselves.”173 In other words the Counter-Force does not rebel against a preexisting Them but allegorically constructs Them as its own raison d’être. This self-definition, though, dooms the Counter-Force to be “schizoid” and “double-minded,” as Mexico reflects, though not for the reasons he thinks: since the Counter-Force constructs Their rationality as the enemy, its paranoid rebellion forces it into performing a stilted and hypocritically rational irrationality, as when Osbie Feel tells a fellow member of We, “They’re the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements,” while belly dancing for no particular reason.174 This tension is likely why the Counter-Force tries to stabilize its figural cosmos via the disintegrated Slothrop, whose recovery is one of its formative acts. However, as a spokesperson for the Counter-Force says decades later, “Opinion even at the start was divided. It was one of our fatal weaknesses. [ . . . ] Some called [Slothrop] a ‘pretext.’ Other felt he was a genuine, point-for-point microcosm.”175 They agree that he is to be considered figuratively but cannot decide what use to make of him, as epic hero or allegorical figura. The Counter-Force’s inability to resolve its contradictions dooms it to incoherence.
A more successful approach may not exist, but if it does, it must be based in a method of figuration adequate to the book’s complexities, able to consistently follow meaningful connections while ignoring those that descend into cruft. I am not sure there are general principles to be articulated regarding how to do that, so close in appearance are the meaningful and meaningless figural narratives characterizing the book’s treatment of the postwar world. The role of criticism on Gravity’s Rainbow, then, ought to be how to slowly and collectively explain how to determine which of the book’s figurations are valuable for understanding our place in the contemporary world and which are not, as well as which of those moments that refuse figuration productively disassociate us from totalitarian allegory and which simply render themselves unreadable.
For instance how should we interpret the book’s use of tarot? As with all fortune-telling, tarot is based in a highly figurative system that promises its subject access, via apparently unrelated signs, to a larger pattern. Also as with all fortune-telling, it is utter nonsense. As professional psychic Ian Rowland writes, tarot and other forms of “cold reading” are “the biggest, most enduring, and most popular scam of all time.”176 Consider, for example, the tarot drawn up for Major Weissmann, the mastermind behind the 00000: his cards include the Tower, which we are told resonates phallicly with the Rocket’s destructive portents; the Queen of Swords, which alludes to his queerness; and the King of Cups, which previews his future as a von-Braun-like sage in America.177 This reading feels insightful, but as Rowland notes, “the actual significance each card is deemed to have is irrelevant. A serious book on interpreting tarot cards may tell you that ‘The Tower’ signifies change in existing relationships. However, the cold reader can attribute whatever significance she wants to any card [ . . . ]. All that matters is that it sounds convincing.”178 That Weissmann’s spread is actually meaningless might be best seen in the card representing his future, the World. Though according to A. E. Waite’s standard guide this card represents “the state of the soul in the consciousness of Divine Vision, reflected from the self-knowing spirit,” Pynchonists generally interpret the World to mean precisely the opposite of that—“there is no escape, no transcendence”—because to associate the World’s positive transcendence with Weissmann would be contrary to their view of him as the concatenation of western evil.179 If the cards may simply be interpreted to reinforce whatever preconceived notions either narrator or reader holds, they tell us nothing. It would be simple enough, after all, to create a convincing reading about Weissmann from almost any tarot spread, or to reread these cards as describing characters with nothing in common with him.180 As the passage acknowledges, tarot’s allegories, like Slothrop’s hallucinated Them, are “pasteboard.”181
Yet we cannot entirely dismiss the tarot session as mere mumbo jumbo, because some cards do present intriguing lines of thought. For instance we are told that the card representing Weissmann himself—the industrious Page of Pentacles—is identical to that of his enslaved lover from his days as a colonial administrator, Enzian.182 This is counterintuitive, at odds with a rigid Them-Us division, but there are real links between the two, dramatized in their parallel quests to understand the meaning of the Rocket. Furthermore, if we dismiss the tarot, should we do the same for references to the mythic-religious system from which much of it derives, kabbalah? As with many esoteric systems, much of kabbalah appears ridiculous to the uninitiated: when we read “Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman,” high on Thorazine, tell us that “although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehend all at once, together, in parallel,” we probably ought to roll our eyes and skim ahead to the actual launch.183 Yet having earlier heard Ensign Morituri’s story about how German actress Margherita Erdmann, one of Slothrop’s contacts in the Zone and among those connected to the 00000, had nearly sacrificed a small Jewish boy under the guise of “Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God,” we might take more seriously the relationship of mythic archetypes and human behavior.184
The problems with evaluating such figurative systems come to a head in the final scene, in which the Imipolex-G-coated 00000 (loaded with Weissmann’s sex slave Gottfried) is fired from Germany on Easter 1945 and reappears in 1970s California. The rocket is launched parabolically upward until its fuel runs out, at which point its trajectory quickly decays, freezing the rocket at its highest point momentarily before it begins to fall. This arc is determined by real and unavoidable physical laws, which, inasmuch as they unite all action into a universal pattern, might justly be called allegorical. However, the narrator builds further allegories on top of these. He states, “This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity,” echoing earlier, apocalyptic allegorizations of scattering and heat death as portending the species’ collapse, and his subsequent declaration, “The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape,” characterizes the rocket’s propulsive force as a figure for humanity’s attempts to surmount that collapse, with the moment of suspension in between (“The first star hangs between his feet”) serving as something like enlightenment.185 These additional figurations, though, are not so ineluctable as the physical equations. The feeling of transcendence is rooted at least as much in purely biological unease at the complex natural and synthetic forces working in concert on Gottfried’s body. Similarly the destruction of one theater by one rocket does not necessarily portend the destruction of the whole world. On the other hand, when asked to imagine the planet from a heretofore unseen perspective, it is hard for us not to think about what beautiful or terrible knowledge might be newly gained. After all, the 00000’s real-world rocket analogues are postwar America’s two most sublime creations, the space shuttle and the ICBM (“a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide”), bearing within them many of our postwar era’s greatest hopes and fears about who we are and how we relate to the universe.186
In considering this final image, we should keep in mind that, despite the long line of Pynchon criticism that blames the destruction that the 00000’s landing heralds on synthetic military-industrial control, the novel’s two most common tropes for apocalypse—gravity and increased entropy—are entirely natural. It is not any rationalist analysis, but nature itself, that is the true source of death, in which none are elect and all are preterite, everything destined to be reduced eventually to undifferentiated particles. What exists otherwise are competing allegories that attempt to circumvent this principle. They are not all equally valid: some are so necessary to conceiving the world that we might as well call them true, while others are so contradictory, constricting, or destructive that we must call them false. Managing the spectrum between the two is the great challenge of human civilization, and as society becomes increasingly complicated, we need to become increasingly adept at filtering which of these allow us to orient our attention and which to dispatch.
Famously McHale claimed that the greatest difficulty in reading fiction like Gravity’s Rainbow is its irresolvable ontological conflicts between different diegetic planes.187 However, if Gravity’s Rainbow’s reality were simply indeterminate, the book could be dismissed as incoherent. Instead the book presents us with a more difficult set of contradictions: not those within the semantics of a fictional storyworld, but those within our own modes of cognizing any world at all. Whether we perceive reality through the frames of religious or scientific epistemology, through universalist or relativist morality, through the Left or the Right, no matter how sound this apparatus appears when we are not reading the book, it will appear all too visibly inadequate when we do, its inconsistencies and holes dragged into the open and exposed. Though McHale has at times implied that postmodern fiction is “post-cognitive,” this problem is very much a cognitive one, and no book raises it more profoundly than Gravity’s Rainbow, the exemplary experiment in figural narrative systems, the subtlest distributor of cruft in our fiction, and the greatest of mega-novels.188