Pynchon's "Zone": A Postmodern Multiplicity

JOHN JOHNSTON Pynchon's "Zone": A Postmodern Multiplicity Since its publication in 1973, Thomas Pynchon's third novel, Gravity's Rainbow, has elicited more praise and critical attention than any American work of fiction since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, published twenty-one years earlier. Indeed, many critics have ranked it in importance alongside Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Joyce's Ulysses. Underlying such claims is the assumption that Gravity's Rainbow quickly transcends its striking contemporaneity, and stands in a relationship of comparable complexity to the present age. Yet is is precisely in the particulars of how these novelists evince a concern with contemporary history that Pynchon reveals a historical distance from his modernist forebearers. Generally speaking, history for both Joyce and Faulkner is contingency, and must be set against the larger, structural frame that myth provides. Myth thus functions as a limit condition , against which the infinite variety and detail of particular historical experience appear in outline. Pynchon, on the othet hand, investigates the historical determinations of the contemporary world in order to show how deeply enmeshed in history out experience has become, as if history now functions as our myth, and thus as our limit, and forces us to locate our own particular contingencies in relation to its increasingly ominous logic. In short, as a novelist Pynchon is both deeply committed to history as a form of understanding and deeply suspicious of what our specific history has become. Since myth now seems too complicit with history to function as a counter term, and perhaps can no Arizona Quarterly Volume 46 Number 3, Fall 1990 Copyright © 1990 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 161 o 92John Johnston longer be conceived in stable opposition to it, I propose that Pynchon's historical anxieties may be more fruitfully explored in relation to the concept ofmultiplicity. This relationship can be justified in two ways: in Gravity's Rainbow the contemporary world is registeted or inscribed as a multiplicity, and the novel itselfbecomes a multiplicity through its various orderings and arrangements of heterogeneous kinds of information. In order to render and link together an extraordinary array of diverse material—the development of the V-2 rocket and the technologies that made it possible, the history of colonialism and genocide in German Southwest Africa, the growth of petro-chemical industries producing synthetic products, especially plastic and mind-altering drugs, the rise of multinational corporations, the evolution of German expressionist cinema, and the development of Pavlovian and behavioristic psychology , not to mention constant allusions to Hollywood films, primitive myths, and pop culture stereotypes—Pynchon constructs an encyclopedic narrative, at once overarching and kaleidoscopic, that shifts without warning from one point of view to another, from present to past, from one place or country to another, and from reality to fantasy or drug-induced hallucination. This mixed or hybrid narrative form, which displays affinities with what Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque novel, Frye the prose anatomy, and Jameson the satire-collage, achieves a furthet distinctiveness through Pynchon's deployment of concepts from alien or at least non-literary realms such as calculus, physics, topography , and cartography. While this last feature of Pynchon's fiction has of course received due attention, the motives usually advanced to explain it have for the most part been eithet expressive or thematic. Richard Poirier, for example , argues that Pynchon's fiction takes the shape it does because it responds directly to how ways of perceiving and imagining are already inscribed in current technology. ' I want to pursue a somewhat different approach, taking as my starting point Gilles Deleuze's notion of writing as an agencement or "assemblage." Deleuze defines an assemblage as a multiplicity made up of many heterogeneous terms and relations that somehow function togethet, as in a symbiosis or 'sympathy. ' In contrast to a structure, which defines relations among homogeneous elements and functions, an assemblage is formed of relations, liaisons, and affiliations among and across an array of elements and processes which are completely different in kind. An assemblage therefore can never possess Pynchon's "Zone"93 a structural unity 01 totality, but only a kind of consistency or 'jelling togethet.'2 As Deleuze describes it, every assemblage...