Dreaming of Zero: Realpolitik and Anarchism in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”
There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret’rite one…
Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road,
All through our crippl’d Zone,
With a face on ev’ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev’ry stone….
Now everybody —
While Thomas Pynchon was working on his novel Gravity’s Rainbow in the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States was experiencing profound social, economic, and political change. The tremors started by the Civil Rights Movement swept across the breadth of the country, the Vietnam War incited massive protests and civil unrest while costing billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, and the revolution in American culture subverted traditions that were seemingly immutable before. Gravity’s Rainbow, first published in 1973, touches upon all of these conflicts in turn. It aligns itself with the antiestablishment, countercultural movement that questioned the very foundation of politics. It is an expression of the American anarchist impulse, and its characters and thematic elements often point toward anarchy as the utopian ideal of human society. It argues that, after exhausting itself on pointless, arbitrary political jockeying and war, society may transcend political structures and reach an antiauthoritarian state based on communalism and cooperation.
But Gravity’s Rainbow does not simply propose anarchy as an alternative. In addition to suggesting that anarchy could present a means of freedom from institutional oppression, the novel also specifically tears down the assumptions about politics that dominate contemporary culture. The political theory developed by Thomas Hobbes and Niccolo Machiavelli created the foundation of realpolitik, or the school of thought that, put simply, emphasizes that countries should pursue national security and power as a means to achieve security above all else.[1] This theory helped solidify the primacy of several political norms, such as a determination to avoid political disorder and the state of nature at all costs. Gravity’s Rainbow, however, challenges these pillars of politics by directly subverting realpolitik. The novel conveys traditional government as a brutal and amoral institution, warped and cruel, hell-bent on preserving the security of the State at all costs.
In spite of his anarchic sentiments, Pynchon certainly is not an idealist. Gravity’s Rainbow addresses the fact that the dismantlement of government would leave behind a dangerous power vacuum — one that could just as easily resurrect the power structures that oppress the populace and lead to violence. In response, the novel presents the dreams of Squalidozzi and the submarine anarchists as something of a utopian vision of the world as it could be, while acknowledging that not any one anarchist commune is likely to triumph in a post-State world. In this consideration of anarchy, Pynchon writes as a contemporary of poststructuralists like Michel Foucault who first conceptualized society as composed of networks of interactions, socializations, and associations, rather than of discrete entities. Although Pynchon does not fit perfectly into the poststructuralist mold, his critique of the realist framework and tentative endorsement of anarchy fit more with the tradition of Foucault and post-anarchists rather than traditional anarchist theorists.
Section I. Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Realpolitik
Gravity’s Rainbow does not fit neatly into a theoretical framework. It is famous in part because it resists the attribution of any one label. Its meandering, nonlinear story seems to propose different, and sometimes contradictory, conclusions at every turn. But it is important to note that the novel still is doing something; its tracking of protagonist Tyrone Slothrop through a war-torn Europe still has weight and consequence. While there is no one way to make sense of all of Pynchon’s mysterious and enigmatic characters and plot, the fact that the novel is unorthodox to the point of chaos and disorder gives readers a foundation from which to build an understanding of Slothrop, the post-war “Zone” that arises in Germany after World War II, and the ever-present V2, the Rocket that leads both to ruin and salvation. The novel’s tumultuous structure is, in fact, the most obvious hint that Pynchon aims to not just critique, but upend convention, both in style and in content. To Pynchon, politics represents one such facet of society that has repeatedly failed the people and led to exploitation. Gravity’s Rainbow does not just criticize contemporary politics in general, but it also takes on the pillars of political tradition that are based on Machiavellianism and Hobbesianism.
Machiavelli
Thomas Pynchon knew about Niccolo Machiavelli and was familiar with his works, especially The Prince. The 16th century Italian statesman and philosopher acts as an antithesis, both direct and indirect, throughout much of Pynchon’s novels. He references the philosopher several times by name in his short story “Under the Rose” and his 1963 debut novel V, both of which critique the Machiavellian conceptions of virtu and fortuna (Rossi 106–107). Gravity’s Rainbow does not call out the philosopher by name, but the political considerations presented by Pynchon in the novel nonetheless clearly target the Machiavellian foundations of modern politics.
Machiavelli’s theory was informed by his experience working in the government of Florence during the early 16th century. As Anthony Grafton wrote in his introduction to The Prince, “Machiavelli’s political life… began and ended in invasion and revolution. No wonder that he saw the political order as so fragile, and insisted that its preservation must take precedence over the scruples of tender, traditionalist minds” (Machiavelli, Prince xx). Throughout The Prince, Machiavelli makes continual invocations of “virtú” to discuss the correct actions of princes. But whereas virtue to a citizen may mean good and moral action, Machiavelli constructs princely virtue as the pursuit of whatever makes the principality more powerful. Hinting at the security dilemmas facing national leaders, a theory later refined by Hobbes, he argues that “virtuous” action as conceived traditionally leads people to be exploited by those who are not constrained by such moral considerations: “The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this or not according to need” (Machiavelli, Prince 50). Machiavelli suggests that the necessities of running a principality thus allow for infringement upon people’s rights as understood in relation to morality. Sometimes, a leader must kill for the good of the state. Moreover, Machiavelli believes that a stable political order is the end goal of politics, and authority must do what it can to prevent society from descending into disorder.
This presents a tension that can become a problem for a prince. People expect their leaders to act good and truthfully, adhering to the norms of morality that common citizens must follow. This presents the leader with a paradox with which he must deal to best rule the state. Machiavelli writes, “A man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done moves towards self-destruction rather than self-preservation” (50). This contradiction between pragmatism and morality becomes a central tenant in both Thomas Hobbes’ theory and the decision-making of countless politicians later, and it forces a leader to sometimes betray his own personal virtues for princely virtú if it means ensuring survival of the state.
The Prince also deals centrally with the necessity of a leader to establish popular legitimacy. Although undoubtedly authoritarian, Machiavelli nonetheless recognizes that a new ruler can have no power unless the people accept his rule. The Prince is filled with examples of leaders who fell to ruin due to mismanagement and inciting the ire of their subjects. For example, he points to the Roman emperor Maximinus, who was deposed soon after acceding to rule because “there was a universal upsurge of indignation against him because of his mean birth, and an upsurge of hatred caused by fear of his ferocity” (66–67). Not much can be done about “mean birth,” but Machiavelli does detail actions that can quell hatred and encourage obedience. For example, a leader must work as hard as possible to neutralize opposition upon acquisition of new territory by catering specifically to its inhabitants. If that does not work, and the territory is “accustomed to freedom,” then the prince can “expect to be destroyed” unless he “wipe[s] them out” to eliminate their “memory of ancient liberty” (18–19). In addition, a prince can deflect dissatisfaction by presenting a façade of virtuousness while nonetheless acting pragmatically. Machiavelli argues that if a prince always adheres to good behavior, such as keeping one’s word, “he will find [such virtuous qualities] harmful; if he only appears to have them they will render him service. He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, kind, guileless, and devout. And indeed he should be so. But his disposition should be such that, if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how” (57). As such, a prince should use strategic deception to make the public think that he is working for moral good, when in fact he is working for the social good.
This also means that if a prince cannot secure the love of his people, he must inspire within them fear of retribution for disloyalty. In Machiavelli’s view (and later Hobbes’), people are:
Ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well, they are yours… Men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared. For love is secured by a bond of gratitude which men, wretched creatures that they are, break when it is to their advantage to do so; but fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective. (54)
A prince should then focus on establishing respect through fear, because that is the only certain way that he can ensure that his people will serve, fight, and die for him. This passage also emphasizes the underlying force pushing forward Machiavelli’s theory of princely virtú: that people are inherently “fickle” and cannot be trusted to act well. Thus, a good prince must “rely on what he controls” (56) to establish loyalty, which, in this case, is the people’s fear of him. This authoritarian strategy becomes important in Gravity’s Rainbow, as the State in the novel attempts to expand its power and wield paranoia as a means of control.
In his book The Machiavellian Moment, J.G.A. Pocock points out that Machiavelli does not address in depth the nature of kings and other long-ruling leaders. As Pocock states, “An absolute monarch… was defined by his relation to a body of law which was part of the complex scheme of his own legitimation; the ‘new prince’ lacked legitimacy altogether and consequently was not what we mean by a king” (159). The Prince deals with innovative leaders: those with newly acquired power who are attempting to consolidate and ensure the security of their state. Machiavelli investigates how a prince should operate to gain power and legitimacy from people who are already accustomed to living under a ruler. To do this, the prince must act ruthlessly, without qualms. He or she must fill the gap left by the deposed ruler. Disorder, after all, is the downfall of states and the great danger to life.
Machiavelli’s discussion in The Prince gives vital context to the way that Pynchon illustrates the creation of the Zone and post-war governance. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the opportunity afforded to rulers in the midst of the German power vacuum after World War II is the same situation that the new princes face in Machiavelli’s work. Further, the rulers use this opportunity to grow their power through Machiavellian means: eliminating the opposition, inciting fear, and doing what they perceive as what must be done rather than what should be done.
Hobbes
Although Pynchon’s works directly incorporate Machiavelli more than Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century political theorist still figures into discussions of politics in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon himself even puns on Hobbes’ most famous line from Leviathan, when he refers to the undoubtedly realist Lyle Bland’s lawyers as “Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short” (Pynchon 601). It is important to analyze Hobbesian political theory because of the ways that it builds upon and enhances Machiavelli’s work, and because of the fact that it establishes assumptions that contemporary politics still rely upon.
One of the largest parts of this received wisdom from Hobbes is a fundamental anxiety toward the state of nature. To Hobbes, the “state of nature,” or human society pre-government, poses a visceral threat to the well-being of all people and an insurmountable obstacle to the pursuit of good life. The assumption he makes is that the state of nature needs something more to tie people together and prevent action on the basest of instincts. Thus, government must arise to fill the void.
Such is the main argument put forth in Leviathan. The monumental work of political philosophy attempts to formulate a theory both for why governments arise and why they are necessary. To do this, Hobbes imagines an anarchic world without authority, where every person is free to operate in whatever way he or she sees fit. In other words, lacking government, people have the liberty to commit acts that infringe upon the personal rights of others. This creates a world that is unforgiving and cruel:
In such a condition [of war], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes 186)
The famous last line of this passage underscores the motivating factor in Hobbes’ treatise: that without some way of controlling the people, quality of life will plummet and render existence “solitary,” “nasty,” and “short.” But the previous parts of the passage also give an important illustration of what Hobbes believes constitutes a good life: culture, trade, construction, arts, and “Society.” In short, all of those human activities that require some sort of communal interaction necessitate a level of cooperation that, in Hobbes’s view, is impossible without governmental regulation.
This argument builds upon another assumption that underlies the entire text. According to Hobbes, people inherently do not act according to “natural law” in the state of nature. People take advantage of the pure liberty of the anarchic order to cause chaos and harm, which leads them to distrust each other and take up arms against each other. Hobbes presents the instinct to secure belongings and protect oneself even in a society with laws as evidence of this pernicious part of nature:
Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests … Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse mans nature in it. The Desires, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin. (Hobbes 187)
Hobbes thus concludes that humans inherently turn to crime and violence to protect themselves, because it is the nature of people to distrust others’ intentions and protect themselves above all else. This includes by taking advantage of someone if it would mean an increase in one’s own personal security. As a result, “During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man” (Hobbes 185).
Hobbes argues that people come together to form governments so that their right to life is protected above all else. They agree to give up some claim to personal autonomy in exchange for greater security provided by the authority. The “Leviathan,” then, ultimately exists to prevent the state of nature from returning, to impose order and structure on society, and to give a legitimate, peaceful path to conflict resolution: “The final Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves… is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby” (223). The Hobbesian state exists as the constructor of certain conceptions of morality and the assurer of limits upon the exertions of one’s will against another. As Noel Malcolm describes it, “moral terms, at [the state of nature] stage, are merely the expressions of personal preferences” (Malcolm 433). The Leviathan checks the excesses of human nature and arises when people realize that, in order to survive, they must sacrifice their personal preferences for the preference of the state. The state of nature is not devoid of morality; natural law still provides an objective set of guidelines for reasoning people to follow. Thus, the Leviathan is not the sole arbiter of morality. However, the complicating factor is that the ultimate goal of humans, according to Hobbes, is self-preservation, and thus people can only rationally follow natural law as long as it does not decrease their own personal security (Malcolm 438). As a result, people — and, it follows, states — must act in the state of nature without regard to morality unless their safety is first secured.
The vital importance that security has in Hobbes’ conception of politics causes the actual structure of the Leviathan to seem shockingly authoritarian to contemporary audiences, but the strength Hobbes vests in the state builds upon the anxiety toward chaos and disorder. The Hobbesian conception of power is a near-perfect analogue to the cruel and evil “They” in Gravity’s Rainbow: “The only way to erect such a Common Power… is to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will… and to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to his Judgment” (Hobbes 227). In the state of nature, every person is an individual actor, completely independent and solely focused on him or herself. Thus people must undertake any possible actions to preserve themselves, even if that means harming another person. In stark contrast to contemporary and postmodern visions of society, Hobbes seems to desire uniformity — the Leviathan must suppress individual impulses and supplant “all their Wills… [with] one Will.” Gravity’s Rainbow critiques Hobbes’ argument that society must move toward connectedness and sacrifice of autonomy to authority as a horrifyingly misguided and destructive theory.
Machiavelli and Hobbes together contributed to a school of political thought that is now referred to as realpolitik: the belief that pragmatism, and not morals, should drive political decision-making. Underlying this belief are the assumptions that people act in their own self interest, and this inevitably brings them into conflict with others; that life without authority is inherently violent due to the security dilemmas that occur; and that the point of a governmental entity should be to seize opportunities to consolidate power and ensure security.
Machiavelli and Hobbes’s theories became particularly relevant during the Cold War as realpolitik came to dominate the political calculus between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was especially true during the Richard Nixon administration (1969–1974), as Henry Kissinger formalized the concept of realpolitik in American foreign policy and his actions are still perceived as manifestations of the doctrine (Kaplan). But the perception that the US treated foreign relations with a heavy-handed Machiavellianism increased dramatically after the onset of the Vietnam War. Public opinion shifted against President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to invade the nation based on what many perceived as flimsy justification. In general, the American public viewed Vietnam as a relatively inconsequential nation in the greater battle against Communism, and sending thousands of American troops there under the pretext of containing Soviet influence seemed a dubious casus belli. Further, the American government’s decision to continue conscripting men for the war effort galvanized the anti-war protests, as many were sent off to Vietnam to fight a war in which they didn’t believe. Governmental obfuscation of civilian deaths caused by American and South Vietnamese forces also encouraged opposition efforts (Barringer). The common thread among all of the reasons for protest, however, was a perception that the United States’ conduct in the Vietnam War breached norms of morality and legality in an attempt to block Soviet expansionism and to solidify American influence. As the Harvard Crimson put it in 1965, discussing the nature of anti-war protestors,
Morality has an important place in politics. It is not, however, easy to say what that place is. Johnson, too, wants the war to end… But Johnson, like De Gaulle, like Churchill, like Machiavelli, proceeds on different assumptions about what peace and morality require. Hopefully the marchers, when they reach the White House, in that spirit of togetherness and certainty that every march inspires, will not be too contemptuous of the man inside. (Lerner)
Michael Lerner here pinpoints the paradox facing American politicians: The American people demand ethics in international relations, but the actual fabric of those relations seems to demand ruthlessness. Although couched nominally in ideological terms — that is, bringing the fight to North Vietnamese Communists — the Vietnam War was nothing more or less than a proxy battle of dueling superpowers, and it has a long list of historical precedents.
So, too, was Kissinger and Nixon’s policy of détente with China an exhibition of realpolitik at work. Disregarding the ideological and moral divide between Maoist China and the United States, the two unfroze relations specifically to give the US more of a foothold in Asia — and to counterbalance better against the Soviet Union (Suri).
These events surely were on the mind of Thomas Pynchon as he worked throughout the 1960s on Gravity’s Rainbow. They, and the other elements of social strain, saturated American society and gave rise to social movements, widespread protests, riots, and assassinations of public figures. Although Pynchon is notoriously solitary and little is known about him, we know that he criticized the Vietnam War on moral grounds and pledged to avoid paying income taxes on the premise that those taxes might go to the war effort (Weisenburger 45).
Even more notably, Pynchon worked at a Boeing factory during the early 1960s when the Kennedy administration was accelerating the arms race with the Soviet Union and emphasizing the ideological conflict with Communism. He wrote technical essays for the aerospace company, a task which gave him the knowledge necessary to include in Gravity’s Rainbow perfect descriptions of the physics and engineering of the V2 rocket. But it also imparted a cynicism toward the American military-industrial complex, as he worked alongside engineers who were creating missiles to be used in the proxy wars and deterrence strategies of the Cold War. Pynchon acquired a sense that, in order to carry out its wars, the government must flatten and produce “numbed moral sensibilities” in its employees (Weisenburger 46). In other words, while Pynchon was writing Gravity’s Rainbow, he had also acquired a deep frustration with a system that valued conformity and complicity over morality and individuality.
Pynchon weaves this disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the state of American and global politics throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. Although Machiavelli is never explicitly referred to in this novel, Pynchon nonetheless clearly attempts to tear down Machiavellianism and, by extension, Hobbesianism. He also proposes an alternative model of politics after attempting to break down the entrenched pillars of realpolitik: that of anarchy, arising out of the ashes of the inevitable apocalypse of power politics.
Section II. Gravity’s Rainbow and the Machiavellian “They”
Nothing occurs in Gravity’s Rainbow without the presence of paranoia. Extreme anxiety, uncertainty, and suspicion plague every character in the book to varying degrees, with Tyrone Slothrop the nexus of paranoid, irrational fear. Pynchon leads us to think that Slothrop has lost his ability to reason and his grasp on reality, likely through psychological trauma during the war. However, the novel never truly delegitimizes Slothrop’s fears. Immense, powerful, pseudolegal, and amoral institutions do exist, after all. The capitalized “They” eternally operates in the periphery, pulling the strings and attempting to exert its will upon the world. The fact that They actually do act like puppeteers, steering the actions of seemingly everyone in the novel, serves to confirm many of Slothrop’s wildest anxieties. For example, the episode with the octopus attacking Katje was seemingly orchestrated by the Allied psychological operations division PISCES and the Special Operations Executive (Pynchon 191), and Slothrop himself was conditioned by those same institutions at a very young age to experience sexual arousal by the launch of a rocket (86). PISCES undertakes revolting, dehumanizing, exploitative, and bizarre experiments at its headquarters called “The White Visitation,” all ostensibly directed at the mission of protecting the Allies and achieving victory by locating, eliminating, and acquiring the technology of the Rocket. Moreover, this shadowy institution is undoubtedly Machiavellian — an exhibition of strength and security prized over virtue, taken to such an extent that its influence cannot be escaped.
Thus, throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, by confirming Slothrop’s paranoia, Pynchon provides a sharp critique of the means by which “They” operate. As the minor but consequential character Father Rapier argues, “Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good” (548). Pynchon suggests that the breadth of institutional activity matters, and that the end result of such a growth is ultimate paralysis, oppression, and annihilation. He puts PISCES and other such organizations at odds with freedom, because of the fact that these organizations adhere to the guidelines set both Hobbes and Machiavelli. This especially parallels the Hobbesian conception of the government as needing to be the only force within a nation. “Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size” follows closely Hobbes assertion that to ensure safety, people must grant the authority power to reduce the individual will in favor of the state’s will (Hobbes 227).
The heart of Pynchon’s criticism comes when Father Rapier moves to consider the role of death in power dynamics. This passage presents a paramount fear of what an elite institution will do to keep control: “I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World… It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever — though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power” (Pynchon 548). Libertarian thought clearly influences this passage, which presents the possibility that the ruling elite have become entrenched — that their power is so absolute as to make it “within the state of Their art to go on forever.” Indeed, in Machiavelli’s reasoning, this pinpoints the driving goal of government: to exist as long as possible, indeed forever, so that it can protect its citizens. To the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, however, this presents a unique horror, wherein death is made a tool to be used by the rulers: “We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests” (548). In The Prince, such utilization of human life composes part of princely virtú. Machiavelli believes not only that leaders often are cruel, but he also argues that sometimes they must be cruel. “Their survival” is inextricably linked to the State’s survival, and the State must survive so that the public can live. This is why Machiavelli proposes that leaders incite terror to encourage respect; otherwise, the “fickle” populace will rise up and pose a threat to state security (Machiavelli 56). Pynchon here presents the opposing viewpoint. To Father Rapier, that motivation to control and promote the greater good — authoritarian utilitarianism, in a sense — destroys the ability to have any sort of agency. The fatalism of Rapier’s statement, “We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to,” adds to the greater argument in the novel that such authoritarianism is born from realpolitik and is antithetical to the good life of the individual.
Gravity’s Rainbow also links war itself to the insidious effect of realpolitik. It is not just the cold, calculating military that is at fault, but also the ignorant and detached elite running the government. In the profile of Pökler, a Nazi rocket engineer who gradually realizes the horror of the German war effort, Pynchon provides a glimpse at a larger critique of power dynamics as a concept. If Father Rapier is used to critique the methods of a Machiavellian prince, then Pökler’s recollection of the construction of the rockets attempts to subvert the prince as an institution at all:
Plutocratic nations to the west, communists to the east. Spaces, models, game-strategies. Not much passion or ideology. Practical men. While the military wallowed in victories not yet won, the rocket engineers had to think non-fanatically, about German reverses, German defeat… But others had the money, others gave the orders — trying to superimpose their lusts and bickerings on something that had its own vitality, on a technologique they’d never understand. (408)
Pynchon’s attack on the pillars of the realist political framework appears again in this scene, as the military and political elites make decisions based either on cold, rational calculations — “Practical men” — or “lusts and bickerings.” Significantly, Pökler feels dissatisfied with both groups. His view of the commanders underscores a contempt for the execution of realpolitik, as it reduces humanity, communities, and war to “spaces, models, game-strategies.” In the minds of the military strategists, the world encompasses exactly two entities: the home country in need of protection, and the others in the form of plutocratic and communist states. To Machiavelli, this would constitute the German leadership exhibiting virtue, as the strategists and engineers take every precaution and plan for every eventuality in their quest for security and power. To Pökler, however, this viewpoint lacks “passion,” as they are “practical men.” In other words, there is something almost inhuman about the way that they detach war from its human, emotional consequences.
His perception of the other side — the political elites — provide just as much of a critique, except in this case Pynchon addresses the underlying assumption of Hobbes and Machiavelli that a leader strives for power for the protection of the state. The political leadership here certainly wants to exert its will, but not for any sort of altruistic push for security. Rather, they attempt to “superimpose their lusts and bickerings.” While Hobbes might be able to reconcile the chance of tyranny with the necessity of an authoritarian state, Pynchon leaves readers with a broken government striving arbitrarily and misguidedly to weaponize. Further, in addition to saying that the pursuit of national security is flawed even if conducted correctly, he also presents the reality that government officials are often too corrupt to be perfectly pragmatic.
Pynchon does not stop simply at criticizing the West and Nazi Germany’s obsession with technological progress and wartime achievement. The Soviet Union is portrayed similarly harshly, although it appears more oligarchical and incompetent than its British and American counterparts. Tchitcherine, the Soviet operative tasked with eliminating Enzian and the Schwarzkommando, represents the absurd excesses of the Soviet bureaucratic machine as it, too, attempts to destroy threats and seize territory. As his thoughts reveal, the motivation behind his mission certainly is not to improve the quality of life for the ordinary citizens:
His orders mention technical intelligence. But his real mission in the Zone is private, obsessive, and not — so his superiors have let him know, in a number of delicate ways — in the people’s interest. Tchitcherine guesses that this, taken literally, may be true enough. But he is not sure about the interests of those who warned him. They could have their own reasons for wanting Enzian liquidated in spite of what they say. (342)
Tchitcherine’s “private, obsessive” orders are to track down and destroy the crew attempting to piece the Rocket back together; this mission goes beyond simple execution and has become an all-consuming motivation in the operative’s life. And the man recognizes that this is “not… in the people’s interest,” instead ostensibly only Tchitcherine’s twisted desires would be satiated by completion of the mission. But here, too, Tchitcherine is consumed by the same paranoia as Slothrop and Pökler. He suspects that the Soviet command “could have their own reasons for wanting Enzian liquidated,” telling him that it is against the greater good seemingly as reverse psychology to make him want to complete the mission even more. Pynchon never delegitimizes paranoia — and Tchitcherine’s is no exception. If the Soviets are exploiting the private obsessions of Tchitcherine to achieve other goals, then that is undeniably Machiavellian — and the Soviets, too, are part of the network of shadowy, nefarious institutions that control everything in the novel.
As Tchitcherine finds out himself, the true character of these institutions and the people involved with them only come out in the aftermath of World War II, which leaves Germany a destroyed and broken shell of a nation. Following the events of history, in Gravity’s Rainbow Germany is divided into “zones” of occupation: the United States, Britain, and France control one half of the country, and the Soviet Union controls the other half. The Zone in the novel represents the recreation of civilization following the cataclysmic events of the war but under the thumb of superpowers attempting to build their own Rocket. The Zone comes into existence in the vacuum left behind by the collapse of the Third Reich, and this vacuum gives rise to the warped and cruel personalities in the novel. Tchitcherine can actually carve out a space, a “State”, to help facilitate his obsessive desire: “The little State he is building in the German vacuum is founded on a compulsive need he has given up trying to understand, a need to annihilate the Schwarzkommando and his mythical half-brother, Enzian” (343). In this, Pynchon does not directly criticize political realism as he does elsewhere; rather, he illustrates this pseudo-state as a product of the Soviet operative’s own twisted fantasies and motives. But as even Tchitcherine cannot escape the influence of “Them,” and in essence is specifically a voluntary assistant for them, this created “State” is, in effect, little more than the expression of the brutality and absurdity of Machiavellian politics on an individual level. It is also an example of the overwhelming urge to create the power structures of oppression even within a vacuum — in Tchitcherine’s case, he finds that making a pseudostate allows him some sort of control and power. But it is just as warped as the others, as it is ideologically linked to the destruction of Enzian.
But much of the Zone also exists in a sort of anarchic daze, reeling from the destruction wrought during the war and yet to have fully rebuilt. Although “They” have begun moving into the Zone to claim it and divide it, early post-war scenes in the novel give an almost sympathetic tone to the area. In the words of critic Steven Weisenburger, the Zone becomes co-opted by “Romantics” who wish for an anarchic paradise (50). Indeed, some descriptions of the Zone illustrate the potential for the growth of individual sovereignty and the dismantlement of the Leviathan:
The Zone is in full summer: souls are found quiescent behind pieces of wall, fast asleep down curled in shell-craters, out screwing under the culverts with gray shirttails hoisted, adrift dreaming in the middles of fields. Dreaming of food, oblivion, alternate histories. The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise. (Pynchon 342)
The survivors of the war live in the Zone with little in the way of concrete reasons to hold onto society or reason, as shown in the descriptions of their lives. They live integrated with the scars of cataclysm, falling asleep in craters, “quiescent behind pieces of wall,” and “screwing under the culverts.” These people also are “adrift dreaming in the middles of fields,” which shows that the structures that before kept them grounded are now gone.
Slothrop’s own hopes reflect this anarchic utopianism, especially when he thinks about the Zone. In his eyes, post-war Germany is the perfect laboratory for trying out authority-less governance — because, for at least a moment, nothing is left by the collapse of the Nazi regime. He believes that America chose the wrong path through history, and yet there may still “be a route back”:
Maybe that anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up. (566)
Perhaps, one day, society can cast aside the structures that lead it into ruin, and tear down the “fences” and “nationality” that make realpolitik even a valid method of action in the first place. But first, the Zone must be “cleared” and a center found from which they can proceed.
Unfortunately for Slothrop, that does not happen in the post-war environment. Instead, the State fills the void. The security state that produces “The White Visitation,” the Rocket, and Tchitcherine’s mandate to exterminate the Schwarzkommando ensures that anarchic utopia cannot arise in this case. Hobbes explains that people naturally come together to escape the state of nature, while Machiavelli argues that princes should invade and occupy to bolster their own security. Both phenomena hold true in the Zone. But just because these events occur does not mean that they should occur, Pynchon counters. In the debris of Nazi Germany, the “Rocket-cartel” emerges (mentioned alongside an in-text figure of a hand with its middle finger extended). It is a “structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it… a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul” (576). The Rocket, the symbol of instantaneous and arbitrary death, unites the superpowers that jockey for position in the post-war world. The Rocket symbolizes the perverted excesses of realpolitik. In this passage, Pynchon presents those excesses in the integration of all of these confrontational foes — “Even to Russia,” he writes (576) — as the inevitable result of the security apparatus. Political vacuums are not filled with utopias; they are occupied by the immense forces driven by realpolitik that began the war in the first place.
But the Zone is nonetheless post-society, at least for a moment. It is simultaneously freeing and horrifying, and people dwell on those things that might either keep them living or free them fully: oblivion, food, alternate histories. But even here Pynchon hints at something coming: The Zone is in silence because sound “gather[s], someplace else, to a great surge of noise” (342). Slothrop recognizes hope within the poststructural Zone for a new order, or rather, a new orderless society, and this hope does not simply disappear with the oppression of the Zone by American, British, and Soviet forces. This hints at the building pressure of true cataclysm: the apocalyptic force toward which society perpetually drifts.
Section III: The Rocket
“The basic problem, he proposes, has always been getting other people to die for you” (Pynchon 715). The realist paradox, Pynchon argues, manifests when an organization actually has to implement its realpolitik. Couched in rhetoric of security above all, of the ultimate value of the nation, such a government must execute on its promise to always protect the nation from threats. As a result, it must wield military might to neutralize its enemies — and therein lies the issue. To secure the nation, a government needs manpower. And leading these men into battle means going to war against the instinct for survival, something that Pynchon proposes has always limited such realist calculations.
As the Father Rapier passages showed, Pynchon is aware of the paradox facing countries in their pursuit of security. Realpolitik prescribes sidelining morality in favor of what is pragmatically the best for neutralizing threats, but this creates the problem of security dilemmas in international politics: in order to prevent another country from taking advantage of a weakness, a politician must improve its own defensive and offensive capabilities in perpetuity, thus creating an arms race and continual escalation. A realist politician can never trust a rival country to not exploit a vulnerability. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon presents the V2 rocket as an expression of the security dilemma facing Germany. Pökler’s consideration of the German rocket construction efforts evokes this, when he remarks that the engineers had to think “non-fanatically, about German reverses, German defeat” (408). Using this and other characterizations of the Rocket, Pynchon draws clear parallels to the convoluted deterrence calculations designed by American military thinkers in their realist approaches to confronting the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The intercontinental ballistic missile in 1960s geopolitics played a similar role as the V2 and the mythical Rocket #00000 in Gravity’s Rainbow — the latter of which is nearly identical to an ICBM in its legendary destructive force and the compulsion among states to acquire it. The weapons are expressions of worst-case scenario calculations; arms that should not have been created, but were thought up after imagining extreme situations.
The opening of the novel hints at the scathing indictment and critique of the Rocket as a product of an institution playing into security dilemmas. In these first lines, Pynchon begins his deconstruction of the concept of those dilemmas. At the center of all of this criticism — and in the novel, at the center of every moment — is the Rocket, the ultimate symbol of realpolitik as the final, desperate gasp of a losing side to wreak havoc upon its enemies:
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now… He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall — soon — it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing. (3)
In these opening pages, Pynchon keeps the Rocket itself hidden, but its presence is clear. The evacuees know it through its screaming, and so the seeming doom flying at this bunker comes in the form of a personified weapon of mass destruction. Whereas weapons might otherwise receive associations of coldness, death, destruction, and detachment, Pynchon places the humanity of this rocket immediately in the foreground. The Rocket becomes not so much a tool but an extension of those who use it. Its scream carries with it desperation, anguish, and anger.
Pynchon returns to this idea at the very end of the novel, when the mysterious Rocket #00000 is finally prepped for launch. Here, Pynchon blatantly humanizes the rocket by literally placing a person inside it. Gottfried, whose own agency and humanity were long since stripped away by the brutality of Captain Blicero — “Lord Death” — underscores Pynchon’s belief that the pursuit of security and triumph leads to the perversion of basic human decency: “The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he knows. It doesn’t frighten him. It was in the room when he fell asleep so long ago, so deep in sweet paralyzed childhood… it was there as he began to dream. Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was always real. Come, wake. All is well” (769). Throughout the novel, Imipolex appears as one of the main results of a society that has descended into excess. Technological progress for the sake of progress has produced a new, mysterious plastic that the rocket engineers use in the development of the V2 and Rocket #00000. In this case, Gottfried is surrounded by the plastic, kept in a cocoon of it within the cavity inside the rocket. Blicero’s use of it seems especially insidious because it lulls Gottfried into a state of calm, even as he hurtles toward death. The symbolism is clear: the drift toward “center” and integration with the forces of progress, as represented by Gottfried’s imprisonment in the rocket, leads to society’s unraveling. This is one of the most profound, disturbing passages in the novel because of the way it combines the antitheses of cruelty and innocence, and rebirth and annihilation into the Rocket hurtling toward its target with Gottfried entombed inside. The womblike nature of the Rocket underscores its dual use: Pynchon presents this Rocket, #00000, as the pinnacle of V2 technology. It is the ultimate symbol of cataclysmic reset, which fulfills Blicero’s twisted desire for death but also brings about a possible resurrection of humanity.
However, this image of the Rocket starkly contrasts with the more conventional view held by the state actors who desire it. For the Nazis who invent the V2, the Rocket represents little but the next step in an unstoppable march forward in protecting the German homeland. As their strategy extends Machiavellian realism, the Nazis assume that the Rocket is imperative because it allows them to balance with the Allies to a certain extent. This is seen during Pökler’s discussion of the coldly rational, logical calculations of the German military leaders who decide how to deploy the V2 (408). In The Prince, Machiavelli focuses on the centrality of countermeasures like this as essential for the survival of weak states: “If a prince has fortified his town well… then an enemy will be very circumspect in attacking him. Men always dislike enterprises where the snags are evident, and it is obviously not easy to assault a town which has been made into a bastion” (36). Although offensive in capability, the Germans position the Rocket as the tool to create such a bastion to make it costlier for the Allies to invade and win the war. And yet, if the intent was to defend, the Rocket nevertheless represents the spiraling security dilemmas that realism sparks. Gravity’s Rainbow illustrates the irony of the weapon being a product of security considerations, because it ultimately leads to consequences like Blicero’s perverted weapon-devotion. As critic Kachig Tölölyan argues in reference to Blicero, who leads the V2 project to culmination with the #00000 Rocket, “It is [this] mystical worship of the perfectibility of the inanimate that is the real enemy” (64). Realpolitik can lead nowhere but this mystical worship, because the paradox of realism is that the only way to truly ensure one’s own safety is to have the ability to completely annihilate one’s enemies.
The people responsible for the creation of the Rocket are not, entirely, unaware of the absurdity of an apocalyptic weapon being created for the purpose of ensuring national security. Just as Pynchon felt discomfort and disillusionment while working at Boeing during one of the high points of the Cold War arms race, so too do some of the Rocket engineers, launch teams, and those responsible for defending against it experience a sort of assault on their identity as a result of their work. But they find ways to cope with this and to reduce the Rocket’s immensity to comprehensible terms. In one instance, they simply break it down into calculations and numbers: “So was the Rocket’s terrible passage reduced, literally, to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control” (Pynchon 242). This manner of thinking is “bourgeois” because of its detachment from the effect of the Rocket — they are able, as a result of their privileged understanding of it, to disassociate themselves from the weapon and distance themselves from facing its destruction. This becomes part of Pynchon’s central critique of realpolitik. These political strategies require the elimination of personal identity because otherwise the people would not be able to stomach it:
If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised — none of them made the connection, at least not while alive: it took death to show it to Roland Feldspath, death with its very good chances for being Too Late, and a host of other souls feeling themselves, even now, Rocketlike, driving out toward the stone-blue lights of the Vacuum under a Control they cannot quite name… (242)
Machiavelli tells us that to ensure state survival, a prince must “not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state” (51). Pynchon argues here that the corollary of Machiavelli’s position is that the State simply finds a way to avoid being blamed altogether by using those vices to eliminate the ability of the people to oppose the state. In this case, the engineers’ lives are warped by their work on the Rocket and their coping mechanism of breaking it down into equations. Only the most final of consequences — death — shows these people that they are being exploited by the “Control” and leading to the “Vacuum”, or anarchy brought about by cataclysm.
At the same time, while the creation and use of the Rocket are products of corrupted, paradoxical realpolitik, Pynchon does not necessarily condemn the actual effects of the Rocket’s launch. In fact, the weapon may represent a sort of cleanse or release of the collective gathering at the “center” that is described throughout the novel. In other words, the use of the Rocket creates something more than the Zone left behind after the end of World War II. The apocalyptic potential of the Rocket incites in characters a masochistic desire; they seem to hope for the release from the collective anxiety and from the spiraling, cyclical institutional suppression that the weapon may bring. Pökler, the Rocket engineer, provides a good example of this feeling:
Something was out to get him, something there, among the paper. The fear of extinction named Pökler knew it was the Rocket, beckoning him in. If he also knew that in something like this extinction he could be free of his loneliness and his failure, still he wasn’t quite convinced… So he hunted, as a servo valve with a noisy input will, across the Zero, between two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation… Pökler would have to find his own way to his zero signal, his true course. (Pynchon 412)
In this passage, Pökler gives voice to the contradictory wishes felt by many of the characters in the novel. He simultaneously hopes for “personal identity and impersonal salvation.” The Rocket represents that salvation: it produces a clean slate and an elimination of Pökler’s feelings of isolation. Moreover, the “zero signal” represents the onset of the ultimate cataclysm, whether that be the Rocket’s explosion (marked by the launch of the Rocket at zero) or personal resurrection. However, Pynchon never makes clear whether the second is possible without the first. The Rocket produces obsessiveness in characters such as Pökler, Tchitcherine, and Slothrop because of the twisted fascination with its ability to reset humanity, that is, to bring it to the “zero.” In the Rocket is the potential to return truly to the state of nature. But whereas Hobbes viewed “nature” as a temporary, dangerous state that people will inevitably organize to get out of, Pynchon suggests that there is potential in the state of nature for “impersonal salvation.” That salvation, Gravity’s Rainbow suggests, possibly comes through the implementation of anarchy.
Section IV. Anarchy as an Alternative
Pynchon argues that at a fundamental level people desire an escape from power dynamics, social constructs, and the perpetual conflicts of national interest. In fact, this same desire binds everyone together. Every individual actor not a willing agent of the State’s machinations in the novel has this same want to varying degrees, and they all recognize the Rocket as the means to achieve it. They all hope to return to something primitive and human without the structures of society around them; they crave something like the state of nature. When Slothrop ends up in Austria, his consideration of the café he frequents conveys the unifying force of the desire for the essential experience of being human:
Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common… perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street… dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse… (266)
Slothrop concludes that these four examples of revolutionary genius, from the political to the literary to the scientific, share a common trait in that they all look upon the public with some degree of envy. The structures of their work — “dialectics, matrices, archetypes” — take them away from the “proletarian blood,” the essence of humanity, and they occasionally feel the need to resurrect that blood. By unifying the four geniuses, Pynchon argues that the motivation to return to a connected humanity is a common trait among everyone, and thus something that everyone strives for. The “body odours and senseless screaming across a table” and the “last hopes,” although messy, nonetheless define the experience of being human. This passage moreover parallels the discussions of the experience of engineers who work on the Rocket, who obfuscate the nature of their creation by reducing it to equations and calculations. It reiterates the argument that finding theoretical explanations for parts of life detach one from life itself.
Here, Pynchon demonstrates again his fundamental opposition to the realist perspective. Hobbes argues that this same state of nature of “body odours and senseless screaming across a table” must be restrained by some sort of power. For Pynchon, though, that power is antithetical not only to satisfaction in life but also to ultimate survival. The restraining of nature brings about the apocalypse by requiring that people turn away from morality and forget about the very human factors of something like the Rocket. Hence, Pynchon personifies the Rocket to not-so-subtly remind his readers that a weapon of mass destruction cannot be abstracted away by equations.
And so the Rocket becomes the hope for a true reset of the world. The vacuum of Germany turns into the Zone, which is merely the perversion of true anarchy by the forces of realpolitik set upon it from the outside. The structures of power are intact even after the war’s end. The Rocket is the inevitable culmination of the paradoxical nature of the power structures. Underlying all of this, though, is also a strain of apocalyptic millenarianism that suggests that the inevitable collapse of the world political order at its own hands must occur to achieve a true reset of society. The characters simultaneously fear and crave this reset the occurs after reaching the Zero point. Slothrop’s experience while deep inside a tunnel at the Dora-Mittelwerk rocket assembly plant gives an exaggerated hint at the post-political world that Pynchon envisions:
For a minute or two nobody in here can see. There is only the hurtling on, through amazing perfect whiteness. Whiteness without heat, and blind inertia: Slothrop feels a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember — never has he been as close as now to the true momentum of his time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture to the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the white moment, the vain and blind tugging at his sleeves it’s important… please… look at us… (316)
Devoid of his sense of sight, Slothrop feels the Zero point come closer. Here, the Zero represents a multitude of different realities: it is the point at which the building centralization of power brings about oblivion, destruction, deconstruction, and anarchy. The world that Pynchon foresees existing after the Rocket breaks down normal conceptions of identity and individuality, which is why the whiteness envelops Slothrop and forces him away from understanding himself to be a discrete entity. All of the distractions — individual, unique things like faces and facts — “fall away for the white moment,” letting Slothrop get a sense of what the Rocket actually does. The Rocket destroys the structures of existence. It only emphasizes this significance that Slothrop’s experience comes while hurtling through the tunnels at a concentration camp dedicated to the production of V2 rockets. Such a morbidly ironic union is, in a sense, a microcosmic version of the endpoint of the political: humanity, harnessed and driven toward extinction, forced to build the tools of even greater destruction. Slothrop “has been skirting” the “terrible center” that is the reality of human life: that to move beyond the horrors and ethical corruption that led to the use of concentration camps to produce weapons of mass destruction, there may need to be a widespread apocalyptic reset.
Critic Graham Benton argues that Pynchon proposes an alternative system to take the place of the institutional if this reset comes to pass — a system that may come, or be resurrected, by way of destruction. Benton suggests that within Gravity’s Rainbow, anarchism presents a return to the past, or a completion of a cycle of history. Benton’s proposal is based primarily on the anarchist submariner that appears in the novel, Francisco Squalidozzi. Having stolen a German U-Boat to flee to Germany, Squalidozzi reminisces on the “national tragedy” of Argentina:
In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. (Pynchon 267–268)
As Squalidozzi remarks later, human society inevitably coalesces to the “center” lacking any strong impulse to change it (Pynchon 268). This center point here represents the increase in bureaucratic power that Father Rapier called the “technical means of control reach[ing] a certain size” where “the chances of freedom are over for good” (548) — in a more dramatic sense, the center is the cataclysmic, apocalyptic nexus of governmental consolidation. Benton thus argues that Squalidozzi’s desired anarchy depends on the destruction wrought by war. A cataclysm must occur in a society for unfettered freedom to return (Benton 157). Benton’s reasoning is solid, and Squalidozzi’s anarchism presents a valid alternative to the PISCES-driven Machiavellianism found saturated throughout the novel. Benton and critic Kachig Tölölyan, who Benton often draws upon, argue, in essence, that “war… inevitably opens up, for a brief historical moment, vistas of a world where there really are no secret networks of power and class, no barriers, no political boundaries and artificial discontinuities” (Tölölyan 60). But this fails to go far enough to sufficiently respond to the problem raised by Father Rapier’s declarations. When the elite use death as a means of control, then nothing short of annihilation will free the people from their oppression — and the destruction of World War II did not go far enough. After the war, the greatest disaster in human history, the “vistas of a world where there really are no secret networks of power and class,” similar to the “vistas of thought” that Slothrop dwells on (Pynchon 566), do not end up coalescing in the chaos left behind by the fall of the Third Reich. Rather, more paranoia, more fear, and more SOE-led control come to inhabit the void. The post-war Zone does not look like an anarchist paradise, but rather a partitioned, authoritarian place where the Rocket-Cartel comes to rule (576).
And yet, in that Zone nonetheless exists some measure of hope and potential. Although Slothrop’s “vistas of thought” come to nothing but unfulfilled desires and the anarchy that he and Squalidozzi daydream of eludes them, even still disparate and diverse groups begin to make their homes and restart. During the time after the war in the novel, before the warped security state can crack down universally across the Zone, these groups come together around shared ideology and goals. And although many — such as a community of brutally violent dogs that spurn every visitor — do not necessarily represent successful anarchic societies, one shows more promise. Graciela Imago Portales, a member of one of these new villages, remarks that her frequent lover and the apparent leader of the village, Belaustegui, has dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the survival of the village — the “anarchist experiment” (Pynchon 624). It is risky — Portales recognizes, “What will the military government think of a community like this in the middle of their garrison state?” — but at the same time, the members are optimistic (624). Benton argues that “it is this experiment that Pynchon holds dear” (Benton 164) and indeed, throughout his descriptions of the new communities that form, Pynchon reveals sympathy for the experimenters. These experiments provide some semblance of hope for the downtrodden and oppressed: “Often at night [Portales will] break through a fine membrane of alcohol and optimism to see really how much she needs the others, how little use, unsupported, she could ever be” (Pynchon 624). Those marginalized by the State need these anarchist experiments to provide them some semblance of a future, a way to function and survive with recognition of one’s own individualism. The communalism here is both dangerous, in that if it collapses, people like Portales will have nothing, but also hopeful, because such bonds lead to a strong community. Overall, Pynchon does not wish to prescribe a set formula for replacing the oppressive State, hence the variety of strange and eclectic groups organizing societies not governed by the authorities. Nor does he wish to say definitively that this is how life should be lived to be successful. The dog community, after all, is subjected to the same scrutiny from PISCES that Slothrop is (625–626). But it is a valid alternative, and one that allows for some semblance of belonging and liberation.
Section V: Anarchism, Post-anarchism, and Pynchon
The anarchy that Pynchon proposes appears unlike much else in political philosophy. It is pessimistic, ushered in only in the void left behind by disaster. It is also based on a shared communalism and not an overriding sense of individualism. But Pynchon still responds to the thinking of his time, and so to fully understand his conception of an authority-less world, it is useful to contextualize Gravity’s Rainbow in relation to the dominant philosophical currents of the mid-20th century.
During the 1960s, while the novel was being written, anarchism came into conflict with poststructuralism. Out of this philosophical tension came post-anarchism, which is, in short, the result of the integration of poststructuralism with radical antiauthoritarianism. It is a rejection of the strict ideologies and the conception of political structures that traditional anarchism relies upon, but also a reaffirmation of the desire to escape from the oppression of authority.
Leading poststructuralist theorist Michel Foucault expressed the underlying tensions between anarchism and poststructuralism best in an interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino in 1977. In a discussion of the traditional perception of power dynamics as being the idea that authority emanates from a singular locus and there is “a fundamental, immutable gulf between those who exercise power and those who undergo it” (121), Foucault argues that power should be thought of more as a diffuse network than a discrete, unilateral relationship:
Sovereign, law and prohibition formed a system of representation of power which was extended during the subsequent era by the theories of right: political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign… What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done. (121)
The idea of the “sovereign”, then, is the fundamental problem of classical political theory, as it restricts the conceptualization of political progress into discussions of authoritative entities, even if the end goal is something like anarchy. To get to the truth of power relations and, even more importantly, how to respond to those relations, theorists must “cut off the King’s head.” In other words, to Foucault and poststructuralists, traditional anarchism relies upon a clear binary in power relations: the people vs. authority. To be an anarchist means to pit oneself directly against the singular point from which power emanates. The traditional idea of a state works well with this theory: anarchists can battle against the obviously powerful that control politics.
Post-anarchism, an offshoot of Foucaultian theory, rejects this binary. To post-anarchists, the traditional anarchists’ structural view of politics is inherently limiting and prevents its widespread acceptance. Moreover, traditional anarchism’s dogma leaves it vulnerable to producing oppression in its own right. Foucault himself described the problem as, “How does one keep from being a fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?” (Deleuze xv). Retaining even the doctrinal acceptance that power structures exist leaves open the possibility of oppression returning, and so humanity must “ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior” (xv). As such, Foucault proposes that one of the essential parts of everyday life is “free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia” (xv). He proposes that theoretical frameworks create that unitary, totalizing paranoia by locking people into certain channels of thought. To escape from authority, then, it is not enough to struggle against it on principle. We must also fight against the urge to base our struggle on a set principle at all, working to adapt and respond to the saturation and diffusion of power in all forms.
Post-anarchism theorist Saul Newman argues that the result of this philosophy is a model of politics that is anti-authoritarian but also radically flexible and inclusive. Whereas the traditional anarchists had to still deal with the inevitable issue of “taking over,” so to speak, from the authority that they overthrow, post-anarchists propose that society after authority is not restricted to such an anarchic plan of action, but rather open to ideals defined during the anarchist resistance. Further, the post-anarchist critique of realpolitik centers on the perversion and corrupting influence of political structures. Newman argues, “National sovereignty blurs into global security while at the same time reifying and fetishizing existing borders, and mobilizing new ones everywhere” (Postanarchism: a Politics of Anti-Politics 319). The extraordinary growth of political authority under the guise of respecting the sovereign has led to the expansion of surveillance, policing, and monitoring while also unifying into a “global security” that is nothing but the highest manifestation of domination.
Pynchon was likely writing Gravity’s Rainbow before post-anarchism became well established as a philosophical tradition, but he surely was aware of the revolution in France in 1968 that led to the development of poststructuralism and post-anarchism. Authority in Gravity’s Rainbow is not entirely diffused, and the State — whether that be the US, British, or Soviet government — very clearly still holds unilateral and oppressive power and wields it through institutions like PISCES. In this way, Pynchon adheres to the premises of traditional anarchism, in that resistance, if there is any in the novel, is directed at the uncertain but nonetheless centralized “They.” Father Rapier’s statement on the “technical means of control” is the best illustration of this (Pynchon 548). The authority is singular, and the implication is that the institutions of authority must be overthrown.
However, Pynchon’s novel also parallels the thinking of Newman and the post-anarchists in that identity is malleable and the idea of domination not fixed. Whereas the State is clearly the authoritative antagonist, the post-State world is chaotic and antithetical to defined identity, as Pökler expresses with the conflict between impersonal salvation and personal identity (Pynchon 412). Characters in Gravity’s Rainbow have extremely limited agency, and, in fact, limited identity — which lends itself to post-structuralism even more. The suggestion made by this combination of factors — that Slothrop is simultaneously underdeveloped and oppressed, for example — is that without the “They,” and without the paranoia, Slothrop would be as post-anarchic theory argues anarchy itself should be: in the words of Newman, “open to a number of different articulations” (Politics of Postanarchism) based upon the nature of the world into which they emerge. The “impersonality” of the ultimate end in the novel suggests the same poststructural theory that the traditional conception of the individual is not sufficient, and that the apocalypse does not just sweep aside political structures, but also identity structures. The “State” as an institution also appears more in line with the interconnected “global security” apparatus that Newman criticizes than the traditional monarchs or dictators that classical anarchists resist.
In addition, the very nature of how Pynchon proposes anarchy would be ushered in is not anarchic in its essence. The characters in Gravity’s Rainbow do not possess particularly revolutionary impulses, and in fact, as critic Joanna Freer points out in “Thomas Pynchon and the Black Panther Party,” even the novel’s one resistance group, the “Counterforce,” is more of a failed resistance than a meaningful opposition force. Further, the group’s failure is linked to its inability to adopt the poststructural mode. The characters in the Counterforce, including Roger Mexico, Milton Gloaming, and Osbie Feel, literally adopt the structures of power which they call a “We-system.” Mexico even points out, “You’re playing Their game, then” (Pynchon 651). As critic Jeff Baker argues, this can be read as a “wry post-mortem of [1960s and 70s] failed resistance efforts… In the Counterforce’s failure to create an effective alternative (and oppositional) We-system, Roger Mexico’s crew must adopt Their “rationalist” methodology and are thus co-opted by the very system they would overthrow” (139). The inability for the Counterforce to mount any meaningful resistance or achieve any meaningful progress effectively undermines the traditional anarchist system. To use the words of Foucault, the characters cannot “ferret out the fascism” innate within them.
Applying the post-anarchic lens to Gravity’s Rainbow is thus useful because it gives a more defined and delineated, albeit somewhat flawed, theory of how anarchism is presented. Acknowledging the poststructural impulse within Pynchon’s work allows for a deeper picture of the failure for any character to achieve meaningful liberation. The characters recognize that the State is constantly expanding its oppression and control. Why, then, can they never cause that system to change? Applying post-anarchist theory as opposed to traditional anarchism shows that this is because of Slothrop, Mexico, and the Counterforce’s inability to break away from the entrenched rationalism of the State — the pragmatism and the binary that result, as it happens, from the unchallenged assumptions of the political theory of Machiavelli and Hobbes. The only hope for achieving those “vistas of thought” about a post-government world, then, lies in the annihilation of those assumptions and structures.
Conclusion
Gravity’s Rainbow is inherently political simply because of the time during which it was written. Composed during the 1960s, the novel reflects many of the same social and political anxieties that erupted in violence and war in that era, and although based on World War II, it thematically reflects the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Pynchon’s employment at Boeing in the early 1960s brought him into contact with the worst excesses of the American military industrial complex: he had to contribute to the nuclear arms race and the arbitrary, seemingly absurd justification for a country to possess enough weapons to destroy the world many times over.
Gravity’s Rainbow, as a result, is linked deeply with the antiestablishment, antiauthoritarian strain of thought that came to dominate the radical left during this time. But Pynchon does more in Gravity’s Rainbow than simply market the anarchist fad of the 60s. Familiar with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and political realism, Pynchon systematically deconstructs the assumptions that realpolitik is based on as exercises in futility and excess. In his view, the realpolitik founded by Machiavelli and Hobbes and extended by President Johnson and Henry Kissinger is inherently flawed, as it incites spirals into escalation that send society hurtling toward cataclysm.
But perhaps the most profound element of Gravity’s Rainbow is that the apocalypse is not necessarily a bad end. Humanity’s anxiety about destruction and regression so strongly influences thought and action in every aspect of life that it seems completely unthinkable that we should do anything else but avoid it at all costs. However, this exactly is the resounding political argument in the novel: that anxiety of the end and of the state of nature is what causes politicians to build V2s or ICBMs and leads to corrupted, power-hungry political machinations. The extension to this argument posits further that as a result of being built on an existential fear, the people are complicit in their own oppression. Pynchon felt disillusioned by his time at Boeing for the same reason that Pökler criticizes the Rocket engineers for abstracting their task to avoid its ramifications. In the novel, the structures of power are so entrenched, and PISCES and other governments orchestrate so completely the details of world events, that characters rarely resist in any significant manner. Rather, they masochistically hope for a global reset, in other words a return to Zero. The Rocket represents the way toward a life without political structure so that Squalidozzi’s past paradise of Argentina can return and Slothrop’s dreams of a “depolarized” Zone can come to pass.
This all means that Gravity’s Rainbow does not present the classically anarchic story of a heroic band of rebels resisting the imposition of power from abroad. Instead, it proposes that the security state is so entrenched, and the structures of domination so pervasive, that the world cannot be free from it without a cataclysmic return to the state of nature. Although power emanates from the State, the State itself has dissolved into an immense network of international corporations and politicians determined to industrialize death and war. The characters in the novel never definitively discover how to resist something so decentralized — but they do recognize the Rocket as a means for achieving a different reality.
Thus, at the end of the novel, readers are left with a fragment of an idea of where to go next, represented literally by a half-sentence. “Now everybody — ” (Pynchon 776) is both a recognition of the doom that hangs over humanity, but also a call to action for everybody to join in on the experience of that doom — so that, after the fall of the security apparatus, the anarchic utopia dreamed up by Squalidozzi and Slothrop may arise.
[1] Realpolitik was coined in the 19th century by German politician Ludwig von Rochau, who argued for the primacy of power in state politics, and that past political theorists had neglected to take into account power dynamics sufficiently (Menzel 22–23). There is a difference between realpolitik, which is a strategy for politicians to follow, and political realism, which is a theoretical framework based on the premise that the fundamental force driving international relations is either the pursuit of power (classical realism, demonstrated by Greek historian Thucydides [Whyte]) or the pursuit of security (neorealism, demonstrated by political scientist Kenneth Waltz). For the purposes of this paper, I use realpolitik to describe political methods, and realism to describe the nature of the political order.
