Matthias Mosch (Durham University)
Faustian man has long become the epitome of Western civilization and its drive to transcend boundaries, be they natural or ethical. As Gravity’s Rainbow thrives on this theme, it takes no wonder that the number of literary Faust versions featured in it is legion, reaching from the sixteenth century chapbook to Goethe, Gounod, Byron, and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Far from presenting an arbitrary potpourri, however, Pynchon carefully intersperses his own bitter Parodia Faustiana with fragments of those texts ethically concerned with man’s bargain with the devil. As there have hardly been any endeavours in scholarship to present the Faust myth in Pynchon, a first task is to map common denominators of Gravity’s Rainbow and the tradition of the soul-seller, such as the passion for infinitude (enclosing colonies, zones, metaphysical spaces) and the strife for omniscience and self-determination.
Secondly, I trace the double vertigo of Faust, his two souls as represented by Wernher von Braun and Slothrop Tyrone. Following both men to the Mittelwerke, the Brocken (the “very plexus of German evil”), and finally Berlin, I provide brief outlooks on the respective blueprints behind the two figures: the Orphic/Goethean concept of Faust as a striving poet, changeling, and creator as opposed to the Spenglerian/nationalist concept of will to power, action, technology and conquest. A close examination of the oscillation between these two concepts (Blicero’s turn to love and Tyrone’s immachination) and their culmination in the Zone is then employed as a vector to three central implications in the novel.
On the political level, Pynchon not merely suggests that the consolidation of post-war Germany was predetermined by “völkisch” myth as an undercurrent of history but also points to the possibilities missed in a moment of “maximum freedom”, of reassembling a nation out of the debris of the “European soul”. With this he also suggests a proclivity of myth and “pure, primitive terror”, the inherent vice of ideology in folkloristic form as most apparent in the appropriations of Faust (but also that of Wotan, Siegfried and others) in German nationalist discourse before World War II.
Playfully subverting the Manichaean distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, election and preterition, history and myth, however, Gravity’s Rainbow also argues that there is no innocent mythology that could be dialectically opposed to instrumentalized reason. Pynchon here carefully correlates notions of ars and techne, the productive-destructive unconcealment of truth or what is taken for it. The Benjaminian fragments, however, from which one could build a present, are always already tainted, and, as the disintegration of Tyrone implies, it is sometimes just the right thing to leave fragments as they are (which is not incidentally reflected in Pynchon’s own mythography).
Finally, I argue that the trial of Faust not only reflects the situation of the “national soul” after 1945, that Slothrop’s dismemberment not only is a result of his seduction by the German death drive. The way of the rocket, from V2 to the “pale Virgin”, also implies a significance of Faust in the context of the American nation – be it in form of Henry Adam’s concerns about modernity, the invasion of the moon, or delusions about preterition and predestination.