Time
Father, why did you work? Why did you weep, Mother? Was the story so important?
(Simpson 37–38)
Since the publication of V., and particularly since the adoption of Gravity’s Rainbow as a central postmodern text, critics have attributed to Pynchon a denial of causality. The contributing factors to this denial are many: textual, cultural, and, insofar as the literary-critical world is hegemonic, institutional. For the most part, critics have assumed that Pynchon’s tacit rejection of cause and effect is consonant with that perennial poststructuralist project, destabilizing the bourgeois humanist subject, presumably in an effort to arrive at a less deceptive relation to subjective experience. Let Molly Hite, whose Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon was one of the earliest book-length studies of Our Author, articulate the now orthodox view:
[I]n order to link the atoms of experience together, Pynchon’s characters and narrators look for causes. In this enterprise they resemble the classical physicist who aims to trace all the phenomena of his world to a system of laws [...]. The inhabitants of Pynchon’s worlds continually try to exchange their freedom for the security of a wholly coherent causal explanation. (38)
Hite’s choice of language could not be more deliberate. By referring to “atoms of experience” which cannot be held together, she reflects the essential indeterminacy of a world view predicated on quantum physics. If only we could make ourselves resemble quantum physicists, Hite seems to say, we could, by abandoning causal explanation, secure our freedom. Although this critical approach would appear difficult to reconcile with either Vineland or Mason &
Dixon, it has nonetheless persisted. As a more recent example of such wistful analysis puts it:
Nowadays many cultural critics and philosophers of science coincide in pointing out that the twentieth century has brought about a new interpretive paradigm. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics [...] represented the first attempts of the century to warn humans that reality could no longer be explained by the mere recourse to “common sense,” Newtonian physics, and sensorial data [...]. In a sense, it can be argued that quantum mechanics entails such a tremendous shift from classical Greek and Newtonian notions that many people are not yet ready to accept it. (Collado Rodríguez 475)1
I admit to being one of the “many” not yet ready to accept metaphors from Relativity theory and quantum mechanics as models for living,2
1 A page later, Collado Rodríguez reveals the depth of his longing even more directly: “It seems clear that people are not ready to get rid of traditional common-sensical views about the character of a stable reality, but Pynchon’s readers know better: randomness, indeterminacy, fractal cartography, unstable selves, and early cultural announcements of the coming of chaos into common-sensical Aristotelian reality are all constantly repeated motifs in his fiction”
(476). See also Collado Rodríguez’s essay in this collection in which he analyses Pynchon’s “latest attempt [in Mason & Dixon] to disrupt the still existing Newtonian confidence in categorical thinking” (72).
2 Alan J. Friedman emphasizes that the three historical models of the universe are – and this is true even for scientists – only metaphors. Asking whether these metaphors have been helpful to their various adherents in Gravity’s Rainbow, Friedman admits that they have not been. Taking Slothrop as his test case, since
“he has been exposed to each of the alternative world views from paranoia [the clockwork universe] to anti-paranoia [the universe described by quantum physics],” Friedman notes that Slothrop “reaches no ultimate conclusions” and reminds us that “we last see him with ‘not a thing in his head.’ None of the metaphors from science has remained with Slothrop” (95, quoting Gravity’s Rainbow 626). Friedman is careful to warn against the adoption of too narrow a
In which “Acts Have Consequences” 51 particularly as applied to questions of morality and individual responsibility. More, I argue that Pynchon also rejects these models, and that he has gone out of his way in Vineland and Mason & Dixon to correct such mistaken critical explications. It is not that Pynchon fails to see the contradictions between historical methodology and the human desire for order, but that those philosophical objections are ultimately overridden because to refuse to make such causal connections is finally to exist in a moral vacuum. In “a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized,” Vineland’s Frenesi Gates understands that she “must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect” (90, emphasis added). Since Frenesi obviously views her impending return to the earlier conception of the universe with such distaste, we should weigh carefully the “freedom” she is offered by the quantum model against the “responsibility” demanded by its clockwork counterpart.
But it will first be helpful to rehearse some background regarding the status of cause and effect in Pynchon’s fiction. Postmodern challenges to historiography are at the core of the discrediting of cause–effect, and for readers of Pynchon such challenges appeared most directly in 1973. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon offered a historical novel that, strangely, defied traditional historical method and chastised its own readers: “You will want cause and effect” (663), the narrator says at one point, forcing us to acknowledge our own desires for order and then pandering to us: “All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis ” (663). Many critics were caught off guard by such passages, but for the most part consigned themselves to using the novel’s various statements about cause and effect as metaphors to help
world view: “Alternatives to the world views with science as metaphor are many, and are expressed by other characters [...]. No predominant pattern of earthly success follows any of the theoretical approaches, and neither salvation nor success is identified with any one theoretical system in Gravity’s Rainbow”
(95–96). Finally, says Friedman, “The metaphors from science [...] reinforce the importance of the choices of world view made by the characters. It is harder to dismiss an unpopular choice [such as Pointsman’s mechanistic, Pavlovian world view] when we see that it is parallel to a major theme in the development of science” (99–100).
account for its dizzying array of voices, narrative modes, and rapid shifts in time and space.
Molly Hite, for instance, took her cue from Leni Pökler’s often quoted “Not produce [...] not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems” (Gravity’s Rainbow 159), and argued for
“relations of resemblance” as a “structural principle in Pynchon’s novels and in the worlds of those novels” (40). But Hite’s thesis – that events need not be ordered through causality or chronology but can be ordered equally well through correspondence and metaphor – carries with it a moral problem, in that it removes time’s arrow, not only from Pynchon’s novels but from the real world to which they bear some mimetic relation:3 Hite’s idea of order conveniently leaves out magnitude. Though there may be no causal connection between the Germans’ extermination of “about 60,000 people” (V. 245) in 1904 and of six million during World War II, there is a chronology, and it is accompanied by an undeniable increase in magnitude.
Hite’s “relations of resemblance” thesis has, unfortunately, taken on a life of its own, and despite passages in Vineland and Mason &
Dixon which would seem to preclude the application of such a scheme, critics show no sign of abandoning it. Other alternative structuring principles have also been proffered, but these too short-circuit Pynchon’s insistence on individual responsibility. In “Visible Tracks: Historical Method and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,”
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, applying a typological model, argues that
“Vineland’s historical method becomes something outside linear, causal history” (100), concluding that “what Pynchon’s history does not enact [...] is the historicizing gesture that places the past behind and subordinate to the present” (101). But what Douglas Keesey a decade ago dubbed “Pynchon’s newly explicit political activism”
demands such a historicizing gesture (110).
3 This mimetic relation is, I would argue, an essential component of the experience of reading Pynchon. What’s terrifying about Gravity’s Rainbow is that the reader proceeds with foreknowledge of the V2’s evolution into the ICBM. What is tragic about Mason & Dixon is that the reader knows that the Line will eventuate in the Civil War.
In which “Acts Have Consequences” 53 Although Hinds argues that Pynchon’s technique is to present his narrative in such a way that the past and present effectively coexist,4 the passages she marshals as evidence occasionally underscore the fact that Pynchon’s characters have no trouble distinguishing between past and present (e.g., “As DL acknowledges early on, ‘Brock ain’t in the past right now, he’s in the present tense again’” [99, quoting Vineland 103]): the one who pretends to have difficulty with this exercise is the critic.
A close reading of the novel reveals the limits of the typological approach.5 An examination of Hinds’ discussion of the novel’s final scene will illustrate my point. I quote at length, to dispel any notion that I am being editorially unfair:
As she has done throughout her search for the past through iconic screen media, Prairie-the-historian has formulated a method of history that actuates the past upon the same plane as the present. The temporal variants are literally
4 “Prairie’s historical quest,” Hinds writes, “does not invoke her own position as a progression from past history, but in fact ‘discovers’ a past that still exists.
This past, further, is ongoing, both prefiguring and reflecting the present. Her historical method is based in reflexivity over time, bypassing the causality inherent in ordinary historiography” (94). In one of the most stunning revelations, which sounds like either the set-up or punch line for a hillbilly joke, we learn that “Prairie has indeed moved back to a time during which she can not only know her mother but can actually be her mother” (99).
5 In “Sari, Sorry, and the Vortex of History: Calendar Reform, Anachronism, and Language Change in Mason & Dixon,” Hinds offers yet another scheme. Here, she offers persuasive evidence (the text’s profusion of anachronistic details) to support her claim that “Pynchon’s version of temporality resists the linear bias of ordinary historiography, and [...] this temporal structure, rather than partitioning data into isolated and manageable portions, instead links and complicates experience into webs of more complicatedly connected meaning”
(205). Shortly thereafter, however, Hinds, who cannot resist playing a round or two of academic games, argues that “[w]ith his anachronisms fleshing out Mason & Dixon’s temporal compressions, Pynchon thickens this dialectic of time by reversing causality: the present interacts with the past, too” (207). That such statements are mere posturing becomes obvious when Hinds completes her inquiry by drawing a clear line of cause and effect: “Mason & Dixon makes the argument [...] that the machinations and mechanization of early market capital – political, economic, and psychic – have come to result directly in the postmodern culture of increased disorientation” (209).
indistinguishable, just as Prairie is now indistinguishable from her mother and grandmother. “Obliged” or predestined, Prairie fulfills Frenesi’s early sugges-tion of a biological basis for typological interpretasugges-tion; Frenesi has “felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men […] and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence.” (100, quoting Vineland 83)
Note that Hinds accepts Frenesi’s suggestion of “some Cosmic Fascist [...] splic[ing] in a DNA sequence” – she must accept it, for this is the only way in which Prairie can be said to be “indistinguishable” from her mother and grandmother. If, like Hinds, we take Frenesi’s belief seriously, how then do we account for it? Are we to believe that the stipulated “Cosmic Fascist” simultaneously inserted this genetic trait into every generation of the Becker-Traverse-Wheeler line? No, and this is the whole point of Frenesi’s consideration of heredity, of DNA.
Such a DNA sequence would be an effect of evolution and could be traced along the maternal branch of the family tree, not only from Prairie to Frenesi to Sasha, but back on into pre-history. What more direct causal link between past and present could there be than a genetic one? The “temporal variants” are not only distinguishable, they are chronologically and causally ordered.
But two other passages in Gravity’s Rainbow also devalued the currency of cause and effect among Pynchon’s readers. Early in the novel, Roger Mexico tells Pointsman that
there’s a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less ... sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle. (89, emphases added)
Then, near the end of the novel, the narrator assures us that Pointsman will be “left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium...” (752–53, emphasis added).6
6 Another, more poetically just, meaning suggests itself here. As an oblique reference to the conditioned erections of Infant Tyrone, this late invocation of
In which “Acts Have Consequences” 55 Although Edward Mendelson noted as early as 1976 that “[i]n Gravity’s Rainbow, as in life, people think about the world in ways related to the work they do much of the day” (179), this important observation has been forgotten. Despite Roger Mexico’s occupation (his work as a statistician would preclude consideration of cause-effect), and despite the explicitly limited subject matter of his remarks to Pointsman, critics have attributed an implicit authority to the above statement, as if Mexico is not merely one more subjective point-of-view character, but is really (heh! heh!) Thomas Pynchon. Taking
“science” as signifier for humanity, they have too-often concluded that for “Postmodern Postman” to “carry on,” he must abandon the
“sterility” of cause and effect.
But what is really sterile, Pynchon makes clear in Vineland, is Frenesi Gates’s willingness to “go along in a government-defined history without consequences” (354). Here, in his fourth novel, Pynchon returns to the earlier model of the universe, applying it, significantly, not to the onto-epistemological framework adopted by his characters, but to – imagine, of all things – a moral system. When, roughly seventy pages into Vineland, we are first introduced to Frenesi and granted access to her point of view, we meet a character who has for all practical purposes been living according to a moral system constructed on the principles of the new physics. The result is far from ennobling. It would be difficult, in fact, to mistake this mode of existence as one that is in any way endorsed by Pynchon.
Having “understood her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them” (71–72), Frenesi becomes Pynchon’s dramatic presen-tation of someone who lives in a continuous present characterized by the absolute absence of cause and effect – that is, according to the world view based on quantum physics and championed by so many poststructuralists. The result? Nearly every reason human beings find it possible to get up in the morning and make it through another day
the detestable Pavlovian suggests that Pointsman is impotent, thus his “sterile armamentarium.”
has been sucked out of her existence, which has become an inter-minable series of disconnected moments. Far from being liberating – much less uplifting or transcendentally spiritual – Frenesi experiences the freedom of causal constraints as merely another form of
“servitude.”7
In this regard it is interesting to see what has happened to the ideology espoused by Leni Pökler in Gravity’s Rainbow. Leni rails against being a “mother” to her daughter Ilse, because
they want a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its shadows. [...] “Mother,” that’s a civil-service category.
Mothers work for Them! (219).
The radical arguments set forth by Leni, however, are essentially the same as those picked up by Brock Vond in Vineland; Brock, of course, uses the arguments with Frenesi not to free her from social mores but to bind her to himself. In the midst of a deep postpartum depression, and feeling guilty for her resentment against the newborn Prairie, Frenesi hears Brock’s voice assuaging her guilt,
leaning darkly in above her like any of the sleek raptors that decorate fascist architecture. Whispering, “This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells...” (287)
This is a clear reversal of the position set out in Gravity’s Rainbow.
While Leni sees the maternal relation as a social construction aimed at
7 Dixon similarly experiences anti-Newtonian reality – emblemized by the watch given him by Emerson before his voyage to America – as constraint and servitude. As he or the narrator reflects, “If this Watch be a message, why, it does not seem a kind one” (318). As emblem for anti-Newtonian reality, the watch becomes “a Burden whose weight increases with each nontorsionary day” (320), until at last Dixon experiences it as a “curs[e]” (320), and shortly thereafter finds that “his only Thoughts are of ways to rid himself of it” (321), an event which Mason styles “release” (324). When at last RC, a “local land-surveyor employ’d upon the Tangent Enigma” (321) internalizes anti-Newtonian reality by swallowing the watch, his personal relationships suffer;
his wife “moves to another Bed, and soon into another room altogether” (324).
In the end, the watch colonizes RC’s stomach.
In which “Acts Have Consequences” 57 constraint and militates against it, Brock understands familial love, and perhaps particularly maternal love, as a bond that threatens state control. Employing a variation on the radical rhetoric of the earlier period, Brock encourages Frenesi to see the biological relation as a constraint; by severing it, he can reassert his own control. Thus the radical ideal of an earlier age (the child’s freedom from the maternal relation) has been twisted into the mother’s freedom from maternal duties. But because Frenesi has been released from these duties only in order to work for Brock and the State, her “freedom” translates into just another form of “servitude.”
In contrast to Frenesi, Pynchon gives us DL Chastain, whose major action throughout Vineland is accepting responsibility for having mistakenly applied the “Vibrating Palm” to Takeshi Fumimota. And at the end of the novel, while assenting that human life consists of struggling against the inexplicable, against “un-relenting forces [...] simply persist[ing], stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect” (383), Pynchon counterposes an assertion of free will, highlighting a conscious choice made by DL and Takeshi. The annually renewed contract in which they dedicate themselves to each other bears certain affinities to a marriage contract. Their decision at the novel’s end to forego the no-sex clause in the contract signifies
In contrast to Frenesi, Pynchon gives us DL Chastain, whose major action throughout Vineland is accepting responsibility for having mistakenly applied the “Vibrating Palm” to Takeshi Fumimota. And at the end of the novel, while assenting that human life consists of struggling against the inexplicable, against “un-relenting forces [...] simply persist[ing], stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect” (383), Pynchon counterposes an assertion of free will, highlighting a conscious choice made by DL and Takeshi. The annually renewed contract in which they dedicate themselves to each other bears certain affinities to a marriage contract. Their decision at the novel’s end to forego the no-sex clause in the contract signifies