DUYFHUIZEN, 'SUSPENSION FOREVER AT THE HINGE OF DOUBT": THE READER-TRAP OF BIANCA IN _GRAVITY'S RAINBOW_', Postmodern Culture v1n3
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"A SUSPENSION FOREVER AT THE HINGE OF DOUBT": THE
READER-TRAP OF BIANCA IN _GRAVITY'S RAINBOW_
by
BERNARD DUYFHUIZEN
<pnotesbd@uwec>
Univ. of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.1 (September, 1991)
Copyright (c) 1991 by Bernard Duyfhuizen, all
rights reserved. This text may be freely shared
among individuals, but it may not be republished
in any medium without express written consent from
the author and advance notification of the
editors.
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
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] 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. (472; bracketed ellipses added)^1^
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 passage
and others like it.^2^ Indeed, this issue may itself be one
of the most problematic aspects of Pynchon's writing. The
question--Who are the narratees of this text?--cannot be
left unanswered.
[4] Lastly, Bianca is a reader-trap because of her
relationship with Slothrop. If _GR_ has, besides the V-2
rocket, a "central" protagonist around whom readers try to
construct systems of meaning by following his picaresque
adventures, Slothrop is it. Bianca is one of his many
sexual experiences, one that is doubly coded by its analogy
to Gottfried's launch in rocket 00000 and her alignment with
the "lost girls"--the Zonal shapes he will allow to enter
but won't interpret (567)--who haunt his journey through the
Zone. Bianca must be read, therefore, within yet another
play of representational and semiological doubling--a
mapping onto that is both the same-and-different from
shadow-child mapping--as she maps onto Darlene, Katje
Borgesius, Geli Tripping, and even her own mother,
Margherita. The text underwrites this process of mapping
when Bianca is viewed as "silver" (484), the same color as
Darlene's star on Slothrop's map (19) and as her mother's
"silver and passive [screen] image" (576), or with Greta's
(Margherita's) mapping onto or merging into "Gretel" and
finally "Katje" within Blicero's sado-masochistic fantasy
(482-86), which maps in turn onto Slothrop's relations with
both women. Bianca holds a special place within this
metonymic play of sameness and difference, because her loss
produces the most profound change in Slothrop's behavior--he
is finally freed of the %will to erection% that has
dominated his psychological life ever since his childhood
conditioning by Laszlo Jamf. Paradoxically, however, at the
moment he might have a chance to formulate %his own%
identity, Bianca's loss prefigures Slothrop's ultimate
dissolution--indeed, after his encounter with Bianca,
"Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era,
has begun to thin, to scatter" (509). His experience with
Bianca and his subsequent loss of her bring him, as we will
see, face-to-face with his unconscious fears of his own
death and bring the reader to confront the deconstruction of
the semiotic codes that form Slothrop's and Bianca's textual
representations.
[5] Bianca appears on the stage of the narrative in two
consecutive episodes of _GR_ (3.14-15). We meet her aboard
the _Anubis_ as seen through Slothrop's eyes:
He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but
there is a density of orgy-goers around them that keeps
him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than
he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons
it's just as well, because Bianca's a knockout, all
right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon
gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair
swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a
string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal
twinkling from her tiny lobes...help, help. Why do
these things have to keep coming down on him? He can
see the obit now in _Time_ magazine--Died, Rocketman,
pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust. (463)
The text's focalization through Slothrop codes Bianca as a
fetish, a "Lolita" if you will, and we later learn these
heels are "spiked" (466), and the %silk% stockings are
connected to "a tiny black corset" with "Satin straps,
adorned with intricately pornographic needlework" (469). As
the narrator comments later--in a passage metonymically
structured to connect Bianca, Margherita, Blicero, the
S-Gerat (a rocket part Slothrop has been seeking), Laszlo
Jamf, Imipolex (the plastic from which the S-Gerat was
made), and the Casino Hermann Goering (where Slothrop lost
Katje)--"Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know
about, and he doesn't" (490).
[6] Yet from a different perspective, Bianca's fetishized
outfit is a repetition of her mother's outfit during her
first encounter with Slothrop, when they reenact Bianca's
conception on the torture-chamber set of the film
_Alpdrucken_:
All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming,
black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled
up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the
boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the
penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to
the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's
stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and
suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about
Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any
underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can
tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology:
of nodes and cusps as points of osculation,
mathematical kisses...%singularities%! (396)
But the transition to the mathematical context leads this
meditation on fetishism to an unsettling metaphor: "Do all
these points imply, like the Rocket's, an annihilation?
[. . .] And what's waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant
surprise, past the tops of Greta's stockings here?"
(396-97).^3^ What's waiting first is "his latest reminder
of Katje"--whose sexuality is figured in the text as both
metaphor and metonymy of the rocket: "Between you and me is
not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life," Katje told
Slothrop (209)--but more significantly, it is Bianca who
waits to teach Slothrop and the reader something about the
trajectory of annihilation.
[7] Slothrop's vulnerability "to pretty little girls" is
foregrounded early in _GR_ when he comforts a little girl
rescued from a V-2 hit, comfort she returns by smiling "very
faintly, and he knew that's what he'd been waiting for, wow,
a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all
they'd found her down in the middle of" (24). The moment of
kindness, so crucially redemptive in Pynchon's fiction,
figures as Slothrop's primal response, and while in London,
before his paranoia has gone out of control, Slothrop can
care directly. Once he reaches the Zone, however, his
ability to connect becomes problematic as in the opening of
part 3 when, by burning human/doll's hair, he conjures out
of the shadows a dancing child he maps onto Katje: "he
turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the
lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run
down. She had vaporized from his arms" (283). Both these
children prefigure Bianca, but the empirical reality of the
first has been replaced by the hallucination of the second,
a slippage between fantasy and reality that dogs Slothrop
through the rest of the text and especially in his encounter
with Bianca. Neither is the reader immune to this slippage
which s/he may seek to repress by evoking the trap of an
overtly mimetic strategy of reading.
[8] However, before Bianca takes center stage, Slothrop
wanders off to listen to some gossip about Margherita, told
by the woman whose handy cleaver almost dumped him into the
river. But what he hears sounds like the voice of the
text's narrator offering a simple binary solution to the
problems of narrativity and signification in the text:
"Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries
its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade as
God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But
still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as
a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The
members have names, like the Archangels. More or less
common, humanly-given names whose security can be
broken, and the names learned. But those names are not
magic. That's the key, that's the difference. Spoken
aloud, even with the purest magical intention, %they do
not work%."
"That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's
elbow, "tells it worse every time." (464)
If the "silly bitch" can be seen dialogically as a reflexive
figuration of the narrator, then this "voice" may be, for a
brief and estranged moment, Pynchon dialogically and
reflexively commenting on his own text. We soon discover
that the voice belongs to Miklos Thanatz who serves as a
figure of narrative intersection: Margherita's husband,
Bianca's stepfather, and--though we don't know it yet--
witness to the firing of rocket 00000. Indeed, Thanatz
begins to tell Slothrop precisely what he and the reader
have been desiring to hear, the magical names of Gottfried
and Blicero, but....
[9] "About here they are interrupted by Margherita and
Bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child" (465).
Margherita forces Bianca to perform a Shirley Temple
imitation, and when she refuses to perform again, Bianca is
publicly punished with a steel-rulered-bare-bottomed
spanking--which triggers one of _GR_'s set pieces: the
%everything's connected% orgy on board the _Anubis_.
Bianca's representation of "Shirley Temple," in
contradistinction to that "Shirley Temple smile" that warmed
Slothrop's heart in London, is a grotesque infantilization
that ironically seeks to erase the war years and their
horror, yet its perverse eroticism (accentuated by cultural
contexts of sexual vulnerability that come through
Slothrop's point of view) precisely makes manifest the
war/perversion dynamic explored in various other scenes that
test the edge of a reader's erotic tolerance. Clearly
Bianca's exploitation as a sexual object is a
same-but-different version of Katje's exploitation by
Blicero or Pointsman, or Bianca's mothers by von Goll for
the film _Alpdrucken_.
[10] The public humiliation of Bianca is one of _GR_'s many
moments of theatre. Indeed, Slothrop wonders whether
"somebody [is] fooling with the lights" as Bianca "grunts"
through her Shirley Temple routine (466). The lights are,
in fact, being fooled with: Slothrop's perceptual creation
of Bianca as an overtly fetishized Shirley Temple is the
emblem in the text of errant reading. Slothrop's specular
projection of Bianca as infantile nymphet is a %mise en
abyme% for the reader-trap the text is about to spring, a
trap that this piece of theatre--focalized so thoroughly
through the gaze of a male spectator--helps to mask.
[11] Throughout _GR_ Pynchon demarcates the public and the
private stages. On the public stage the character performs
for others, even when the character is unaware of an
audience (Slothrop under surveillance, for instance). The
public performance usually originates from some form of
coercion, manipulation, or exploitation. Since many of
these performances align with what prevailing cultural
formations would define as deviant sexuality, we can discern
an analogy with "pornography," but only at the level of
story (although occasionally Pynchon has been accused of
pornography at the level of discourse) and with a clear
recognition of how conditioned Western patriarchal culture
is to the semiotics of pornographic representation.
Although "Pavlovian conditioning" may explain part of the
dynamics of response to the pornographic, unwholesome
pornography in _GR_ is not necessarily in the sexual act
itself or in its textual representation; it is, instead, in
the systems of power and control that motivate the act--the
ubiquitous "They" who operate just outside of view. This
public stage is contrasted with the private moment, the free
exchange of comforts--but this too is a conflicted stage, as
the conventional entrapped reading between the private
moment of Slothrop and Bianca makes clear.
[12] When Slothrop wakes up the next day (and in the next
episode), Bianca is with him, offering herself as a manifest
wish-fulfillment to his lust. This private "performance"
for Slothrop nearly closes the "distance" between himself
and Bianca, who now replaces her mother in a liaison that is
not free from metaphoric and metonymic overtones of incest
(Slothrop, impersonating Max Schlepzig, has already
reenacted Bianca's conception). But Bianca's gift of sexual
intercourse is also a plea for help. She suggests they
"hide," "get away," quit the game which for Slothrop has
ceased to be fun. For him, this act of kindness activates
his socialized guilt--to be offered "love" is more than the
Zone will allow. So Slothrop "creates a bureaucracy of
departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas
stamped with love-bites" (470). In leaving Bianca he makes
a mistake that he will not realize until after he hears
"Ensign Morituri's Story" (474-79), but by then it is too
late.
[13] Importantly, before he leaves Bianca, Slothrop's
consciousness is the nearly exclusive narrative filter for
this tryst in which something "oh, kind of %funny% happens
[. . .]. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while
it's going on--but later on, it will occur to him that he
was--this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well,
%inside his own cock%" (469-70). Of course the mediated
narrative discourse that shifts Slothrop's "later" thoughts
into the present of this scene estranges the text and marks
it as more hallucination than representation. Yet this
startling image has trapped more than one reader into a
perspectival blindness. Because Bianca's character is
primarily focalized through Slothrop, she functions at that
edge of textual consciousness between fetishized
objectification and hallucination. Bianca may "exist" (470)
for Slothrop at this moment, but she, more quickly than
Slothrop himself, soon slips into the textual unconscious,
only to be recalled by dream and hallucination.
[14] If we grant that we cannot know Bianca because of the
narrative filters of fetish and hallucination, can we even
be sure--in a perfectly pynchonian paradox--of the certainty
of our fantasy? It turns out we cannot because the text set
this reader-trap long ago, and it is only by reading the
cross mapping of her textual representation that we can see
how the reader might misperceive Bianca and why many critics
have misread her. More significantly, uncovering this
reader-trap also uncovers the questions of gender and
reading in _GR_.
* * * * *
When Bianca first appears, Slothrop calculates her age--an
amazing feat in itself, given her get-up at the time--as "11
or 12." Many readers hardly question this incongruous
perception because the fetishistic plot, its theatrical
representation, and its semiotic codes overdetermine the
narrative at that moment. Moreover, the narrative
concretizes our perception of a "preadolescent Bianca" by
its descriptive references to her: "the little girl," "a
slender child," "little Bianca [. . .] tosses her little
head [. . .], her face,round with baby-fat," and her "baby
breasts working out the top of her garment" (469-70).
Bianca is not the only female character who is perceived by
Slothrop and other men in child-like terms. From the very
first references to Slothrop's map--"perhaps the %girls% are
not even real" (19; emphasis added)--to his meeting again
with Darlene (115), to his first sight of Katje (186), to
his first awareness of Geli Tripping (289), to Trudi and
Magda (365), to Stefania Procalowska and others aboard the
_Anubis_ (460, 466-68), and eventually to Solange/Leni
Pokler (603) Slothrop encounters females as girls. Even
Margherita, who is clearly older than Slothrop, is
introduced as "his child and his helpless Lisaura" (393).^4^
In the semiosis of reading, these "girls" engage in a play
of mapping that lays bare the repetition compulsion of the
narrative as it underwrites the sexual politics of the Zone
which finally come to a crisis in Slothrop's encounter with
Bianca, and it underwrites the sexual politics of reading.
[15] What does this infantilization signify? Could it be a
collective fear of coming-to-age during the war and the
later post-war systems of arrangement? One reading, a
rather romantic one, might have it that to be young is still
to hold a piece of innocence, but examined more closely,
even this hopeful image rings hollow. If we accept Bianca's
age as Slothrop gives it, an incongruity emerges: Bianca's
erotic and sexual maturity (she, like many of Slothrop's
lovers, is more active than he is) dislocates these
child-like representations. On the one hand, these images
may be exaggerations projected from Slothrop's fetishizing
focalization; on the other hand, Bianca symbolizes the
"child of the War," the darling of those permitted to view
Goebbel's private film collection (461). She is one of
Pynchon's most poignant emblems of the human destruction
caused by war. However, if we dislocate our reading and
consider Bianca through cross-mapping with Ilse,her shadow
sister, we discover that she was most likely born in 1929
and is much closer to 16 or 17 than she is to "11 or 12."^5^
[16] If uncovering her likely age resituates our reading in
one direction, freeing us from the trap set by Slothrop's
peculiar point of view, Bianca's disappearance from the
fictional universe after her liaison with Slothrop is
equally vexed; indeed, McHoul and Wills state that "The fate
of Bianca highlights the problem with reading _Gravity's
Rainbow_.... One will never know just what does happen to
her" (31).^6^ Bianca has told Slothrop she knows how to
hide (470), but her next "appearance" is brief and
problematic:
Slothrop %will think% he sees her, %think% he has found
Bianca again--dark eyelashes plastered shut and face
running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on
the slimy deck, just as the _Anubis_ starts a hard roll
to port, and even at this stage of things--even in his
distance--he will lunge after her without thinking
much, %slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky
lifelines% and gone, stagger trying to get back but be
hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy
over the side. (491; emphasis added)
What actually happens here is hard to say--Slothrop does end
up over the side, but does Bianca? Slothrop only "think[s]"
he sees her--she is becoming insubstantial already--and her
vanishing is a symbolic erasure. But is it she who
"vanishes under chalky lifelines" or Slothrop who
"slip[s] . . . under" while she "vanishes"?^7^ As McHoul
and Wills note, it "hinges on how one reads the syntax"
(31).
[17] All %life lines% in _GR_ are subject to erasure, but
traces are left in the mind--especially Slothrop's--
and in the text. The traces are sometimes known only by
their absence; for instance, 170 pages after this scene, in
a passage that challenges how readers produce meaning in
_GR_, we read: "You will want cause and effect. All right.
Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took
Slothrop from the _Anubis_" (663). Bianca is missing from
this passage if one wants a textual construction (a
statement from the here dramatically foregrounded narrator)
that will affirm that Bianca did indeed go over the side
during the storm; at the same time this passage suggests a
natural causality--"the same storm"--for Slothrop going
overboard, putting into question but not necessarily
overturning the likely possibility that someone had
"flipped" him over the side. However, in the
deconstructionist logic of the reader-trap, Bianca's absence
from this textual representation cannot definitely tell us
whether she remained on the _Anubis_ either.
[18] Bianca's traces always test our readerly desire for
causality. After Frau Gnahb rescues Slothrop from his trip
overboard, he falls asleep and "Bianca comes to snuggle in
under his blanket with him. 'You're really in that Europe
now,' she grins, hugging him. 'Oh my goo'ness,' Slothrop
keeps saying, his voice exactly like Shirley Temple's, out
of his control. It sure is embarrassing. He wakes to
sunlight" (492-93). Momentarily we breathe a sigh of relief
"thinking" that she has made it, but her speech pattern is
identifiably Slothrop's and he has adopted her Shirley
Temple voice. Something's not right, and when "he wakes,"
he is alone, and we see this trace of Bianca as a dream.
Later that morning, when Slothrop meets von Goll, he "fills
von Goll in on Margherita, trying not to get personal. But
some of his anxiety over Bianca must be coming through. Von
Goll shakes his arm, a kindly uncle. 'There now. I
wouldn't worry. Bianca's a clever child, and her mother is
hardly a destroying goddess'" (494). Meant to "comfort"
Slothrop, von Goll's characterizations allow Slothrop to
repress his anxiety for the moment, but as we will see, the
return of the repressed is not far away. Given the text's
compulsion to repeat within a same-but-different logic of
mapping, the reader aligns this Bianca/Slothrop escape
fantasy with the Ilse/Pokler escape fantasy (420-21). In
that startling scene at Zwolfkinder, the narration does not
signal its shift into a fantasy mode, and some critics have
been trapped and have taken literally the scene of "amazing
incest" that precedes the escape fantasy--a reading that
would seriously undermine Pokler's eventual moral position
in the text.
[19] The most disturbing trace of Bianca re-enters the
narrative when Slothrop returns to the _Anubis_ to pickup a
"package" for von Goll (530-32).^8^ As he returns to the
site of his tryst with Bianca, Slothrop descends into the
private hell of his own consciousness. Motivated by a
return of his repressed "Eurydice-obsession" (472), Slothrop
seemingly discovers the dead Bianca's body, but like Orpheus
he cannot bring his Eurydice back from the dead. But does
he discover her? Nearly the entire scene takes place in
total darkness (the specular image is unrepresentable), but
the psychic reminders force Slothrop to confront his
betrayal of Bianca and his fears of her death, and his
possible implication in that death. Through a gauntlet that
metonymically repeats Brigadier Puddings ritual approach to
the Mistress of the Night (Katje)--"the pointed toe of a
dancing pump," the "ladder," "stiff taffeta," "slippery
satin," "hooks and eyes [. . .] lacing that moves,
snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger."
He rises to a crouch, moves forward into something
hanging from the overhead. Icy little thighs in wet
silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea.
He turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by
long wet hair. No matter which way he tries to move
now...cold nipples...the deep cleft of her buttocks,
perfume and shit and the smell of brine...and the smell
of...%of%... (531)
[20] "When the lights come back on" (532) (recall Slothrop's
earlier concern that someone was "fooling" with the lights),
we receive no confirmation that the text represented
whatever actual events Slothrop experienced--indeed, I would
argue he only experiences this nightmare psychologically.
The confusion of sensory images conflates two deaths for
Bianca: death by drowning and death by hanging. But the
text never deploys the signifier "Bianca" in this scene;
instead, the text offers a set of metonymies that may or may
not signify the "presence" of Bianca's body. "When the
lights come back on," Slothrop does not directly see her; he
sees only the "brown paper bundle" he was sent to retrieve,
its enigmatic contents a %mise en abyme% for his experience
and an emblem for the best way to read this scene. The
scene closes with a last challenge to specular acts of
reading: "But it's what's dancing dead-white and scarlet at
the edges of his sight...and are the ladders back up and out
really as empty as they look?" (532). As with the two
ellipses that mark the close of the longer passage just
quoted, the ellipsis points here mark the site of absence,
the dead-white page showing through the text and yet another
site of repetition if we recall the opening of Bianca and
Slothrop's tryst: "In the corner of his vision now, he
catches a flutter of red" (468). But can the text and its
reading, linear like a ladder "back up and out," be "really
as empty" as it looks? The reader can let this scene either
remain enigmatic or decide the undecidable--to paraphrase
Tchitcherine much later in the text: "[It] could be
anything. %I% don't care. But [it's] only real %at% the
points of decision. The time between doesn't matter" (702).
Bianca last "existed" for Slothrop at the moment of decision
when he climbed the ladder to leave her (470-71) and at the
moment on deck when he "lunge[s]" to save her (491) only to
lose her--does she %exist% elsewhere?
[21] Many readers read mimetically the scene of Slothrop's
return to the engine-room of the _Anubis_, stating that he
does in fact discover Bianca's body; some are even convinced
that Margherita has murdered her daughter. Yet reading in
this way misses the psychological dynamic the text builds
around Slothrop's anxiety over the intersection of sexuality
and death that haunts his experience. It misses the text's
implicit questioning of Western culture's perverse
fetishization of the child. It is no stray detail that
Slothrop dreams of a conversation with the White Rabbit of
_Alice in Wonderland_ when Bianca comes to him--as Henkle
observes, "we all know about Lewis Carroll's supposedly
illicit feelings toward little girls; we all understand what
Shirley Temple's fetching little dance steps aroused"
(282).^9^ Moreover, a mimetic reading misses the postmodern
narrative function of Bianca's decharacterization to the
level of a cipher and trap for readers who want
teleologically to complete her story by a represented death
scene.
[22] After Slothrop's return to the _Anubis_, Bianca's trace
enters the narrative only four more times. The first trace
appears when the text lists some of the wishes Slothrop, now
headed for Cuxhaven, makes upon evening stars. The seventh
wish is "Let Bianca be all right [. . .]" (553). Either
Slothrop has no certainty of Bianca's fate or he is
repressing what he knows; the case is complicated by the
coupling of the Bianca wish with "[. . .] a-and--Let me be
able to take a shit soon." The text seems to be laying a
trap for the Freudian reader--the ass-bites of their first
encounter (469) and the smell of "perfume and shit" that
Slothrop calls up in the engine room (531)--who may want to
argue that Bianca's memory has become cathected with
Slothrop's anal fixation. Can any reader ever forget
Slothrop's hallucinatory journey down the toilet in 1.10?
That drug-induced nightmare, which occurred because of
Pointsman's involvement, connects back to Slothrop's
childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf (when he should have
been moving through the anal stage of his psychosexual
development, Jamf may have been displacing the smell of
Slothrop's own feces with the smell of Imipolex--if indeed
that was the stimulus used).^10^ I suggest this set of
connections may be a trap because reading _GR_ through Freud
calls for paradigms of totalization that the text will
inevitably undercut even though structures of
wish-fulfillment and dreamwork proliferate in the narrative.
Interestingly, however, the Bianca wish is preceded by a
significant Slothrop wish, although it is at the same time a
bad pun on the shit-wish: "Let that discharge be waiting for
me in Cuxhaven." This wish (ultimately to return home to
his mother?) will not come true in its literal form, but the
quest for it leads Slothrop almost into Pointsman's plot for
his castration and to his last dream of Bianca.
[23] The second trace of Bianca occurs when Slothrop meets
Franz Pokler:
Well, but not before [Pokler] has told something of
his Ilse and her summer returns, enough for Slothrop to
be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca's
dead flesh.... Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann's
silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the
filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as
Pokler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm--how could
they not be the same child?
She's still with you, though harder to see these
days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a
twilit room...still she is there, cool and acid and
sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your
deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams.
(576-77)
This time Slothrop's memory contravenes his wish only 23
pages earlier as he is "taken again by the nape and pushed
against Bianca's dead flesh." This passage appears to
confirm Bianca's death. However, while %we% come upon this
cross-mapping alert to the alignment of Ilse and Bianca, for
Slothrop this is a new coincidence that, because of Pokler's
significance to the S-Gerat plot, instantly feeds his
paranoid paradigm of reading: "how could they not be the
same child?" Moreover, "She" (Bianca/Ilse) will now, if
not already, "work among your [Slothrop/Pokler/the reader's]
saddest dreams."
[24] The third trace is in the cross-mapping dreams of
Slothrop and Solange/Leni Pokler: "Back at Putzi's," after
Slothrop has unwittingly escaped castration but not received
his wished-for discharge,
Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside
Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwolfkinder, and
Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their
compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room
in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose
corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets:
trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees.
And "Solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca
too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own
child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long
freight train that never seems to come to rest. She
isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her
father. But Leni's early dream of her is coming true.
She will not be used. There is change, and departure:
but there is also help when least looked for from the
strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the
accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be
extinguished, a few small chances for mercy....
(609-10)
This is one of the text's most positive images--Leni's early
dream (156) seems to be moving from the story to the
discourse as the dialogic narrative erases the distinction
between the character and a narrator who appears to extend
to the reader the small comfort of knowing Ilse will be all
right. Ironically, Leni will never know within the space of
the text what the narrator says (nor will Franz know it),
but the small chances for mercy are crucial to holding back
the bleakness that is otherwise so pervasive in this
fictional universe. If Ilse makes it, does Bianca? It
depends on how much plot producing power we grant to textual
cross-mapping and dreaming in our readerly formation. As we
will see with Thanatz's ordeal riding "the freights," this
hopeful image of "a few small chances of mercy" might
vanish. We'll never know for certain either way; our
reading decisions on such points may say more about our
readerly desires than about what the text says.
[25] Slothrop's dream clearly maps onto Pokler's experience
with Ilse at Zwolfkinder in 3.11, but its shift into the
unknown room (significantly not where "Once something [the
Imipolex conditioning?] was done to him, in a room, while he
lay helpless" [285]) seems to be a shift to a life-affirming
set of natural images--trees and singing birds. Slothrop's
greater attention to nature and its restorative powers has
been building since the time of his wishes on evening stars
("Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally" [552]), and
it will become his distinctive emblem in the fourth part of
_GR_. Lastly, Bianca maps onto Leni's dream because, in a
passage I will examine in the next section, she too has a
dream that shares the central image of the "passage by
train" (471), but the narrator here has no discourse of
comfort and we know Bianca has been "used." Her traces are
problematic because they cannot be disentangled from
Slothrop's psychic processes of coping with his experience
of betraying her confidence and not providing her a small
chance for mercy. Thus the experience takes different
shapes in his mind, which is then mediated for the reader
by the narrative discourse that arranges sets of textual
associations and intersections that establish paradoxes at
best. The last traces of Bianca, however, do not come to us
through Slothrop's consciousness--Thanatz, Bianca's
step-father, provides the last traces, and although these
cannot confirm her life or death, they deepen her character
and extend the textual network of her narrative function as
shadow-child.
[26] Thanatz first recalls Bianca while he "rides the
freights" with other DP's and longs to molest "a little
girl"--he fantasizes the event using Bianca as a reference:
"pull down the slender pretty pubescent's oversize GI
trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding
him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of
thighs pull long hair throat back Bianca make her moan move
her head how she loves it" (669-70). The passage recalls
Slothrop's encounter with Bianca (469-70), though it may
represent only Thanatz's desire to molest and not a memory.
Thanatz then recalls his experiences with Blicero on the
Heath and the firing of rocket 00000 (the story he tried to
tell Slothrop), but this leads him to make a connection
Margherita had also made: "He lost Gottfried, he lost
Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see
that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now
he's forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn't know which
child he lost first, or even [. . .] if they aren't two
names, different names, for the same child [. . .] that the
two children, Gottfried and Bianca, %are the same%"
(671-72). As his confusion grows he conjures up one last
(and the text's last) specular image of Bianca, returned to
the fetishistic coding of a masculine gaze: "a flash of
Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth
powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one
small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and
cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose
lifting you pray for...will she see you? a suspension
forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of
her love--" (672). The shift to the second person
problematizes this last image; is it addressed to Thanatz or
to the reader?
[27] What do we gain by discovering Bianca's age,
questioning her textual appearance and disappearance, and
reading her last traces--her "suspension forever at the
hinge of doubt"? First we see that characters in _GR_ are
semiotic systems as much as they are represented entities
produced by characterological reading. Moreover, they are
constructs produced by other characters; Bianca is always a
hallucination, a movie-child of others' fantasies and
fetishes. Second, individual plots are the result of
characters mapping onto one another to form a semiotic
matrix of representation. Third, we must reread Slothrop's
relationship to Bianca and to the other women in the text.
And lastly, the concept of the reader-trap allows us to read
the %differance% at play in _GR_ and to see conventional
strategies of reading deconstructing as patterns of stable
meaning dissolve amid fragmented and conflicting traces.
The reader-trap reveals Pynchon's text as multi-layered and
multi-dimensional, proclaiming its aesthetic and narrative
richness in the uncertainty generated by its complexity, but
the question of gender and reading, of GR, still remains.
If we grant that _GR_ encodes a narrative transaction
between mimetic representation and fantasy, then we must
also ask whose fantasies are these? and, Do these fantasies
evoke different reading responses? As the example of Bianca
shows, Slothrop's (and in the end Thanatz's) fantasies and
hallucinations overdetermine her representation until she
loses personality and becomes a fetish, a figure of cultural
formation: the child as erotic object. Although recognizing
and avoiding the reader-trap allows a reader distance to
read beyond the fetish, to attempt to read character as a
system of signs that mean only in relation to other signs,
we must ask how this strategy of rationalizing
textualization engages the reader's sensibility, and
specifically how it interacts with the reader's gender
formation.^11^
[28] If the reader-trap of Bianca's representation in _GR_,
as I have argued, is to read her as a fetish--a
representation similar to those associated with her mother
and with Katje--then we must also recognize the
predominantly masculine gender perspective in the text.
Cast in the role of male voyeur (figured in the text by
Ensign Morituri), the reader is presented with the dilemma
of becoming complicit or resistant. The textualization that
limits Bianca to only the role of fetish underwrites a
sexual politics that operates at different levels in our
acts of reading. There is no denying that Bianca gets
"used" in and by the text, but in the power struggle between
fetishistic and resistant reading, a struggle the
reader-trap helps to stage, we can discover a dialogic
strategy of reading _GR_.
[29] Although reading _GR_ teleologically can lead to
misreadings, it is hard to ignore the power of plot as a
means of organizing textual material. Thus one way of
reading Bianca is to see her as a projection of Slothrop's
needs--innocence and fetish all mixed up. His abandonment
of her after their encounter (just as he has abandoned all
the other women before) is in a metonymic sequence that
underwrites the dysfunctional nature of his sexuality caused
by his childhood conditioning. He stays longest with
Margherita because she represents a mother who both
satisfies his Oedipus complex and satisfies his need--
through a logic of transference--to punish his real mother
for the conditioning she allowed his father ("pernicious
pop") to submit him to. The subtext of incest in his
encounter with Bianca overloads his psyche to the point that
he recalls the event as a moment of becoming totally phallic
and being fully incorporated into the object of desire.
Their mutual orgasm symbolically represents a rebirth for
Slothrop though he realizes this (if at all consciously) too
late to save Bianca.
[30] Slothrop must first hear Ensign Morituri's story
(474-79), which tells him of Margherita's pre-war alter ego
of Shekhinah--a destroying Angel who psychotically murdered
Jewish boys--an alter ego Morituri believes Slothrop has
resurrected when he was brought on board the _Anubis_.
Slothrop's immediate response is to worry about Bianca:
"'what about Bianca, then? Is she going to be safe with
that Greta, do you think?'.... But where are Bianca's arms,
her defenseless mouth[?].... There is hardly a thing now in
Slothrop's head but getting to Bianca" (479-80). But she
has disappeared, and although he believes she is only hiding
and that he will find her, he must also listen to
Margherita's story (482-88). Her story takes him as close
as he will come to the truth of the S-Gerat and Imipolex,
but also to the truth about Katje and Blicero and Gottfried.
When she tells of her last days on the Heath, the various
metonymic chains of plot clash, allowing Slothrop to break
through a barrier of dependency. Slothrop doesn't enact his
own talking cure; instead, he experiences a listening cure
as the stories of Margherita finally extinguish his %will to
erection%. But it is too late:
He's lost Bianca. Gone fussing through the ship
doubling back again and again, can't find her any more
than his reason for leaving her this morning.
It matters, but how much? Now that Margherita has
wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter
chasm of a ship,s toilet, of her last days with
Blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the
S-Gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale
ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf. That if he's seeker and
sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. (490)
Although granted this realization, Slothrop is in too far,
and try as he might, he cannot quit the game; he cannot
extricate himself from Their trap.
[31] But that does not mean that he is not changed by his
experience. The loss of Bianca breaks the metonymic chain
of Slothrop's womanizing. When he joins Haftung's dancers--
who comment like a Greek chorus on the apparent sexism in
the text: "'Tits 'n' ass,' mutter the girls, 'tits 'n' ass.
That's all we are around here'" (507)--he does %not% have
one of his trademark, hyperbolic sexual encounters. The
same goes for the girl ("about seventeen," Bianca's age) he
encounters when he becomes the archetypal pig hero,
Plechazunga (571-73), and for his encounter with
Solange/Leni at Putzi's (603, 609-10). As far as Slothrop
is concerned, Bianca marks a closure of the sexual excess
that has been a major pattern of his character.^12^ But
seeing how she has changed Slothrop is only half the story;
we must still look at the one moment in the text that
seemingly represents Bianca's consciousness--a moment in
which she achieves subjectivity and steps beyond her
figuration as fetish.
[32] As Slothrop hesitates on the ladder leading away from
Bianca, the text marks his "Eurydice-obsession," but more
importantly this leads to a meditation (possibly in
Slothrop's consciousness, at least focalized through him) on
representation: "'Why bring her back? Why try? It's only
the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw
for Them.' No. How can he believe that? It's what They
want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between
a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy's
based on %that%...but she must be more than an image, a
product, a promise to pay" (472). The passage raises the
issue of Bianca's representation and our ability to tell the
difference among the various images of her that complicate
our readerly process for assigning her signifiers a
referential signified, what one might be tempted to call
"the real thing." If we read "They" in this passage as the
patriarchy, then the sexual "economy" of objectification and
fetish is uncovered. The cover story of the erotic nymphet
must be turned aside to understand the "differ[a]nce between
a boxtop and its image." The pun here is crude; the
"boxtop" metaphorically represents Bianca's hymen that has
been torn open, not simply to get at what was inside but
also to be transferred into another system of exchange--a
system that claims correspondence between a signifier
(boxtop) and a representation of a signifier ("the one you
draw for Them"). No purchase necessary. Void where
prohibited by law. The law of the patriarchy prohibits the
reading of the void--the "suspension forever at the hinge of
doubt"--because to read the void is to find the text
inscribed on the image, a text that is different from the
one They allow.
[33] Bianca's text is hard to read. As I have been arguing,
the textual set of signifiers that stage her representation
is a trap, one we can now delineate as the production of a
nearly exclusive patriarchal gaze and the phallocentric
addresses to a male narratee. This male narratee, like
Slothrop at first and constituted by the text's limited
focalization through Slothrop, construes "Bianca" as a
fetish and fails to construe her "true ontological being" (a
representation we can only speculate about). One might well
ask if such a construal is possible in postmodern texts or
necessary to postmodern reading; I would say "yes" if one
senses, as I do in reading "Bianca," that the text
represents, however inconclusively, another set of
signifieds. There is a textual moment that, although
problematic in many respects, may let us finally see
"Bianca" (the inverted commas now marking this sign's
%differance% from the phallocentric sign that has dominated
reading so far). As Slothrop turns his back on Bianca and
heads up the ladder, "The last instant their eyes were in
touch is already behind him...."
Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her
mother she knows how horror will come when the
afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has
her worst visions in black and white. Each day she
feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams
often of the same journey: a passage by train, between
two well-known cities, lit by the same nacreous
wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window.
In a Pullman, dictating her story. She feels able at
last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a
way others can share. That may keep it from taking her
past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing
ponderably slow at her mind's flank...when she was
growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own
unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a
presence.... In her ruined towers now the bells gong
back and forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dangle or
slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the
stone. Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old
daylight: late, and cold. Horror in the brightest hour
of afternoon...sails on the sea too small and distant
to matter...water too steel and cold.... (471)
[34] The cross-references to Margherita are overt, and the
repetition of Leni's dream for Ilse is one more piece of
their joint semiotic matrix. But "Bianca"'s dream is less
hopeful and symbolically more complex. Again we confront
the problematic boundary between image ("nacreous wrinkling
the films use") and the real ("rain"), but in the
paragraph's modulating play of light, this cinematic
metaphor forces a double displacement. What does it mean
not only to dream in "black and white" (if we can conflate
"visions" and "dream"), but also to dream in the overt
stylization of German Expressionism? One almost expects her
to dream through the film Emulsion J (387-88). But this is
no dream of being in a movie; instead, it is the dream of
the storyteller who dictates a tale of a "personal horror,
tell[ing] it clearly in a way others can share." In a text
that most consider anything but "clear," we might
rationalize this tale's absence; however, we must see that
"Bianca" now represents the untellable, the feminine text
that patriarchy tries to cover with such mythologies as the
lunchwagon-counter girl Slothrop nostalgically recalls to
place distance between himself and Bianca (471-72).
Although "Bianca"'s dream collapses that distance textually
by setting itself in a "Pullman," in an American context, we
never know if it is enough to keep her from "the edge" and
the "silver-salt dark" of drowning.
[35] A piece of "Bianca"'s dictation does appear to reach
us: "...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms
her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like
a presence...." Set off by the text's ever-present
ellipses, this passage of narrated monologue suggests a
representation of "Bianca" different from the fetishized
image that has deluded our readerly senses to this point.
If this is a fragment of her tale of "personal horror," then
possibly we have a dictation of her initiation to sexuality,
the first violation of her childhood at the moment of
puberty, a rape by someone (by Thanatz? we cannot know for
certain, but we might be able to justify reading differently
his trace of her quoted earlier [670]) who "loom[s] like a
presence." To produce such a reading is to see "Bianca"'s
tale as coming through the body, but in this case, rather
than being the text others write upon, her represented
dreamwork marks a %differant% layer to the textual formation
of her character. From this angle, the "11 or 12" projection
Slothrop estimated for her age could now be seen as a
displaced image from the textual unconscious--an image that
her abuser(s) have inscribed over the real signifier of
"Bianca." Furthermore, by engaging the play of %differance%,
this brief passage stages the problematic of
presence/absence for character formation: if "Bianca" is
already absent, replaced by Bianca, and even Bianca
"vanishes," replaced only by traces formed by the sexual
memories of men (the first male narratees of the text of her
body), the gendering of "presence" and the power of
formulating the Real is placed under question.
Significantly, this placing under question is not only an
extratextual interpretive move of _GR_'s readers, but it is
figured in the text by Slothrop's own scattering and
Thanatz's existential breakdown over Blicero and the
"reality" of Gottfried's fate.
[36] Reading Bianca through the fetishized image of the body
has been the dominant interpretation of her textual
ontology, but the fragment of her dictation can guide us to
reread these textual representations. One example should
suffice to show how such a rereading may be deployed.
Earlier I quoted the oft-cited passage of Slothrop's memory
of total phallicization--"he was [. . .] %inside his own
cock%"; this sort of phallic writing of Slothrop's body
pervades the text and inevitably produces phallocentric
strategies of reading. The penis-eyed view that follows,
complicated by the sexual ideologies (displaced incest,
sexual abuse, pornographic staging) that converge at this
moment, leads the text to one of its most symbolically
significant orgasms: "she starts to come, and so does he,
their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy,
out the eye at tower's summit and into her with a singular
detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be
but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?" (470). The
focalization is through Slothrop, and the arresting slippage
into the discourse system of the rocket stages once again
the play of metaphor and metonymy, but this time with the
inanimate rocket that has served as the center of Slothrop's
quest. Although Bianca "come[s]" too, the representation of
her orgasm is absent--the "void" announced is the absence of
the feminine voice that will counterbalance the "kingly
voice" of annihilation by the most phallic weapon of war yet
conceived.
[37] "Bianca"'s dream takes us not to her orgasm, but to its
aftermath, to "her ruined towers." The "tower" is a
pervasive metaphor and symbol in _GR_, and to pursue it
would take this essay off on another set of tangents and
cross-references. Nevertheless, we must observe in the last
part of "Bianca"'s passage (whether we are now in her
dictation or again experiencing the mediation of the
narrator is impossible to decide) that the symbols of
"tower" and "light" will recur in the third line of the
text's closing hymn: "Till the Light that hath brought the
Towers low / Find the last poor Pret'rite one..." (760).
There are many ways to read these lines, one of which is to
see an apocalyptic foreshadowing of either total
annihilation or final judgment and redemption of the
Preterite--the ellipsis points again ask us to engage the
space of signification and the dynamic process of readerly
desire: which reading do we want it to be? For "Bianca,"
"the brightest hour of afternoon" has already passed, her
textual trace has long vanished.
-----------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
I would like to thank John M. Krafft, Terry Caesar, and
Brian McHale who read earlier versions of this essay and
provided helpful suggestions.
^1^ For a thorough reading of this passage, see
McHale, "You Used to Know," 107-08.
^2^ Pynchon has at least one passage, in which the
narratee "you" is gendered as female, although the passage
itself may refer analeptically to Leni Pokler's childhood
(she grew up in Lubeck [162]) and proleptically to Ilse's
trips with her father Franz to Zwolfkinder (398).
^3^ _Gravity's Rainbow_ contains many meditations on
fetishism; see in particular the nearly textbook description
on 736 (cf. Freud). This description sets up Thanatz's
argument for "Sado-anarchism," a reclaiming from the State
of the resources of "submission and dominance" (737).
Pynchon also explored fetishism in _V._ in the chapter "V.
in Love" (see Berressem for a thorough reading of this
chapter). Of course, Pynchon always places such meditations
on the edge, slipping either into what McHale terms
"stylization" (_Postmodern Fiction_ 21) or into parody, as
Thanatz's intertextual parody (though we might interpret
Thanatz as unconscious of the implications of his parody) of
"Freud" and Marx: "I tell you, if S and M could be
established universally, at the family level, the State
would wither away" (737).
^4^ Although _Gravity's Rainbow_ here and on 364
clearly identifies Margherita as "his Lisaura," Bianca is
also signified in this allusion to the character in Wagner's
_Tannhauser_, an opera which organizes yet another of the
text's semiotic matrices.
^5^ Newman is the only reader I have come across that
comes close to dating _Alpdrucken_ (during the filming of
which Bianca was conceived) as 16 years before the text's
present time (107), and Weisenburger dates Pokler's
recollection of Ilse's conception as "ranging back over
sixteen years, its analepsis beginning in the late twenties,
in Berlin, where the German rocket program began as an
apparently innocent club, the Society for Space Travel"
(194).
^6^ McHoul and Wills read many of the same passages I
examine here, yet their characterological reading that
suggests "it may be Bianca who mugs Slothrop when he boards
the _Anubis_ again later, that is if she hasn't hanged
herself" (31) is problematic to say the least.
^7^ This issue is further complicated by the fact that
a ship's crew during a storm often rig "life lines" about
the deck to keep people from being forced too close to the
side during a "hard roll."
^8^ Kappel suggests this package is the S-Gerat (236)
and Hume and Knight suggest it is a piece of Imipolex G
(304); neither of these suppositions strikes me as
convincing although they play on the symbolic matrix of
Slothrop's possible conditioning to the odor of the plastic.
Nevertheless, both suppositions underscore the readerly
desire for enigmas to be resolved.
^9^ See De Lauretis for a reading of the Alice image
in terms of the sexual politics encoded in film, and by
extension, the power of desire in the male gaze--the primary
determinant of the framed image of women in the cinema.
^10^ At some point I hope to write about the noses in
_Gravity's Rainbow_; one only has to recall Slothrop's
"nasal hardon" (439) to see another thread of
cross-references (my guess is that, maybe under the
influence of Nabokov at Cornell, Pynchon has developed a
deep affinity with Gogol, especially his short story "The
Nose"--a clear forerunner of postmodernism--and his
technique of %skaz% narration). As for "shit" in _Gravity's
Rainbow_ see Caesar and Wolfley.
^11^ Although a definitive feminist reading of
Pynchon's writing is yet to be done, see the following early
formulations of gender questions: Allen 37-51, Jardine
247-52, Kaufman, and Stimpson.
^12^ See my essay, "Starry-Eyed Semiotics," for an
account of how readers are trapped into reading Slothrop as
a personification of sexual excess.
-----------------------------------------------------------
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