Telluric Texts, Implicate Spaces

We ought to have topographers...

—Montaigne I, 31

If we are to believe Montaigne, what is near masks a foreignness.

—Michel de Certeau¹

Where am I?

—Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

The publication of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 has proved an object lesson for many in the deferring and repetitious temporal structure of trauma or, put a little less psychoanalytically, catastrophe. Gravity’s Rainbow was catastrophic in the sense that it jammed in advance the hermeneutic apparatuses that might read it, flooded the system Cs of interpretation to such a degree that it could not synthesize its object in time and space—that is, the novel could not properly be an object of interpretation.² Gravity’s Rainbow, in a sense that is not altogether metaphoric, did not happen; a non-event in a non-place, its effect in literary and social circles has been much like the auto-detonation with which it ends. The novel exploded and disappeared: it cleared a space in which its canonization would be instantly assured and, like the flowers that bloomed in the Ota estuary after the atomic blast incinerated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, left us wondering just what it meant.

The metonymic relation between the (non)event of Gravity’s Rainbow and the post-World War II period (non-period? post-period?) to which it belongs can be identified in the novel’s subsequent reception. It is a commonplace by now that many people “know” Pynchon but hardly anyone “reads” him (or, a variant on this theme, no one reads him “anymore,” as if some historical transformation has occurred which renders his brand of ironic fiction obsolete—a sentiment recently echoed by novelist David Foster Wallace in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show). The dissymmetry this implies verges on the bi-polar. Gravity’s Rainbow has generated, on the one hand, a plethora of more or less “bad” readings clustered around the academic banner of “Pynchon studies” and, on the other, a throng of fans who substitute for reading an exercise of nominalist decryption, asking who, what or where the “real” Pynchon might be, either in his books or out.³ The symptom under consideration here is this: a failure to read brought on by an unreadable flash, a vacuum into which readings that are non-readings (and readers who cannot or will not read) rush with all the resistless pressure of air or gas. Gravity’s Rainbow presides, from its 24-year-old vantage point, over a spectacle to which in fact it gave its best metaphors: equilibrium, inertia, entropy, a discursive practice (of writing and reading) implicated in the non-discursive field it modifies, a crisis of meaning indexed in the force with which the vacuum is filled or the “message” heard in a distinctly cybernetic society. In this society, systems of control, be they political, economic, technological or otherwise, take on a life of their own (become self-moving) and transform the subjects who manipulate them into manipulated “operators” in a fully functional technocratic order. The genius of Gravity’s Rainbow was that it grasped this transformation in “scriptural” terms, as a social inscription of inscription itself, a writing of the writer/reader that immobilizes us in the “text” of technical reason. Reading Gravity’s Rainbow is traumatic because it cannot be read without reference to this double writing that “frames” its reception and condemns us to a reflexive textual practice bent on discovering within itself the mark of its own historical location, its “place” within a period inaugurated by the traumas of the Second World War (Gravity’s Rainbow, it will be recalled, takes place nominally in the years 1944 and 1945).

To judge by the early reviews of Pynchon’s new novel, Mason & Dixon, not much headway has been made in resolving the antinomies of this peculiar catastrophe, and Pynchon has once again managed to drop a literary bomb on America, even if this time it’s not exactly thermonuclear in scope. The rhetoric in these reviews is characterized by a relief at the apparent retreat in Mason & Dixon...