David Letzler (CUNY)
For all of the discussion of “uncertainty” and “instability” in Gravity’s Rainbow, nearly all critical views of the novel, both friendly and antagonistic, seem to agree on two points: first, that the novel is devoid of traditionally rounded, three-dimensional characters, demonstrating a characteristically postmodern conception of both the thinness and constructed nature of the human self; and second, that Pynchon’s morality is clearly aligned against “the elect” on behalf of “the preterite,” the latter of whom are defined straightforwardly as the downtrodden Others (the non-white, non-rich, non-empowered) and the former as a global conspiracy of the nefarious, imperialist, capitalist powers-that-be and their morbid will to further a destructive Technology. These commonplaces typically lead to the same claims about the novel’s overall meaning: the first is used by critics to deconstruct any stable human nature, while the second enables them to proselytize a radically progressive political worldview.
These two critical judgments, however, are both fundamentally wrong—that is, they only cohere in the novel’s terms at the cost of eluding many of its most interesting and provocative passages. As such, they have caused many readers of Gravity’s Rainbow to avoid the novel’s most profound moral challenges and questions.
These two critical mischaracterizations fail most profoundly in addressing one character who has been giving surprisingly superficial treatment thus far in readings of the novel: Edward Pointsman. Typically considered an almost comically hideous monster, manipulating the novel’s characters on behalf of The Firm’s goals of endless war so as to prolong the military-industrial complex, critics usually make out Pointsman to be the chief member of the power-hungry, elect Them among the Allied forces, defined solely by a Pavlovian drive for the total mechanization of mankind. This talk will systematically dismantle this notion. First, using Forster’s classic definition of flat and round characters, we will see that, instead of affirming their flatness, many of the novel’s passages are designed to surprise us with its characters’ fullness, none more so than those depicting the consciousness of Pointsman, which, instead of being a banally evil calculating machine, offers many of the most surprising and complex struggles with the war’s nature in the novel, not to mention critiques of scientist worldviews far more withering than those proffered by the novel’s heroes. Second, we will unravel the received notion of the novel’s politics by re-examining its theology. Going back to the psychology and sociology of preterition and election constructed by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, we will see that the usual critical construction of those categories’ membership regarding Gravity’s Rainbow is insufficient to handle not only those reflections by Tyrone Slothrop and Enzian on which they are purportedly based, but also the theology of William Slothrop, in which many see the moral validation of such constructions. By looking again at how the process of election works, we will discover that the crimes that William’s On Preterition wishes we would not commit in the name of Jesus are far different than we have thought—as are, particularly for Edward Pointsman, the mercies we should show in forgiving Judas.