"A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt": The Reader-trap of Bianca in Gravity's Rainbow

No matter how much we work on Gravity’s Rainbow, our most important interpretive discovery will be that it resists analysis—that is, being broken down into distinct units of meaning. To talk about Bianca is to talk about Ilse and Gottfried; to try to describe the Zone is to enumerate all the images of other times and places that are repeated there. Pynchon’s novel is a dazzling argument for shared or collective being—or, more precisely, for the originally replicative nature of being.

—Leo Bersani

Leo Bersani is right about Gravity’s Rainbow’s resistance to analysis, yet if we pursue the “dazzling argument” in the particular case of Bianca, we find not only more than Bersani acknowledges but also elements for a strategy for reading Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern text. This strategy rests on the formal element of the “reader-trap”: stylistic and thematic techniques that on the one hand court the conventional readerly desire to construct an ordered world within the fictional space of the text, but that on closer examination reveal the fundamental uncertainty of postmodern textuality. Rather than reducing a reader-trap to a “distinct unit of meaning,” readers must adopt for GR a postmodern strategy of reading in which the reader avoids privileging any specific piece of data because the text, in its implied poststructuralist theory of reading, thematically attacks the tyranny of reductive systems for knowing the world. The reader must engage the play of differance encoded in GR’s textual signs to avoid falling into traps of premature narrative closure.

What makes Bianca a reader-trap? First, she is part of a matrix of intersecting stories that could be labeled the “Tales of the Shadow-Children,” a matrix which produces the stories that readers construct about Bianca, Ilse Pokler, Gottfried, and by analogy Tyrone Slothrop. She becomes simultaneously a represented character(complete with genealogical relations) and a trace of textuality (an arrangement of semiological relations that is never totally fixed). This double nature of her character is figured the first time we hear of her when Slothrop, under the alias of Max Schlepzig (Bianca’s putative father), reenacts with Margherita Erdmann the moment of Bianca’s conception during the rape scene at the end of the movie Alpdrucken (393–97). As a shadow- or movie-child, Bianca maps onto these other children; thus what we know about one (both from referential and semiological epistemologies) depends on what we know about the others. Bianca’s mother, for instance, sees “Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure...clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero” (484). As readers, if we want to avoid the trap of correspondences, we must mark the intersections and the double exposures, even though the effect produced is often an increased undecidability.

Second, Bianca is coded as one of Pynchon’s examples of the dehumanizing effects of perverse fetishism:

Of all her putative fathers—Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrucken Night, on the other—Bianca is closest [. . .] to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, [. . .] you whose interdiction from her mother’s water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker... She favors you, most of all. You’ll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.¹

(472; bracketed ellipses added)

As is often the case in GR, the passage closes off by shifting to a second-person address that may be directed at Slothrop, who has just left her after their sexual encounter, but also seems to address—through images of sexual imperialism and a reference to Pokler that could not yet be part of Slothrop’s consciousness—the text’s male narratees and ultimately its male reader/voyeurs. I will defer until the final section of this essay the significant questions of gender and reading presented by this...