Tag: Gravity's Rainbow

‘Messianic Time’ in Gravity’s Rainbow

In ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), the philosopher Walter Benjamin offered two conceptions of time: ‘homogenous and empty time’ and ‘Messianic time’. ‘Homogenous and empty time’ is the type of time recorded on clocks and calendars: an even, linear procession of days, months and years continuing endlessly into the future, where every moment counts the same as all the others. The biblical notion of ‘Messianic time’, in contrast, is uneven: it has moments of special, transcendental importance, of divine intrusion into the world – the Creation, the Fall, the Flood. In ‘Messianic time’ it is possible to move backwards, in a sense. The crucifixion of Jesus, for example, reaches back to the sacrifice of Isaac and ‘completes’ that event, revealing its true significance. Crucially, ‘Messianic time’, unlike ‘homogenous and empty time’, has an end point: the End of Days that is signalled, for Jews, by the gathering in of the diaspora and the coming of the Messiah.

The illusion of ‘Messianic Time’

In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon plays with the notion of ‘Messianic time’. At times, he dismisses it, noting that the End of Days never, in fact, arrives. As he writes, the ‘prevalent notion’ that ‘someday, somehow, before the end, [there will be] a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment’ is misguided: ‘I tell you there is no such message, no such home — only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments’. 

On this view, ‘Messianic time’ is simply a comforting illusion conceived to avoid the disturbing conclusion that time really is ‘empty and homogenous’ and will go on and on forever and ever, with or without us. There is no Messiah coming. This fact is felt bleakly by the Jews of the novel, consigned to the concentration camps that are depicted so vividly in the Part Three. In this section, we see the camps as a space consisting only to the dying and the dead, where no-one has been delivered by any saviour. 

The rocket as the anti-Messiah

Pynchon also observes, however, that with the development of new destructive technologies, such the V2 missile (in some respects a precursor of atomic weapons), there is a real possibility that human history might come to an end, not with the coming of the Messiah, but with an equally sudden fall of a bomb. As Benjamin observed, if one believes in ‘Messianic time’, then the future is unknowable, since God could intervene at any moment, meaning that all one can know is that time is inescapably running out  – for the Jews ‘every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter’. Pynchon offers an alternative theory: it is not the Messiah that might come at any moment, instituting peace and justice, but the rocket, bringing death and destruction. Book One sets up this theme, where it is established that the V2 rocket, because it travels faster than sound, arrives, like the Messiah, without any warning signs of its approach: ‘Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out.’ 

In this sense, then, we really do live in a world governed by ‘Messianic time’, since it could all end at any moment, only in a darker manner than that suggested by Scripture. Yet the biblical sense of finality is sinister in its own way, in that the Day of Judgement is a moment when only the righteous will be saved, the rest being cast into hell. Again, Pynchon meditates on this idea in Gravity’s Rainbow, likening the fall of the rocket to a final, damning divine verdict on humanity. At the opening of the novel, which describes a city ruined by the blast of a bomb, the narrator states ‘You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow’. The rocket, in a sense, is the final apocalyptic judgment on mankind, a real doomsday weapon that makes concrete the visions of the end of the world imagined by the ancient Jews and Christians. 

Links in time

‘Messianic time’ posits links between key episodes in the history of the world – the building of Noah’s Ark and the construction of the Church, for example – that reveal God’s providence, a redemptive thread running through time. Pynchon also suggests a series of links between apparently unrelated events in human history in Gravity’s Rainbow. This is done most clearly in a single episode in Book One, which touches on the colonization of Mauritius by Europeans in the seventeenth century, German imperialism in Southwest Africa, and the Nazi occupation of Europe. What links these events is not a story of redemption, but of genocidal violence: the hunting of the dodoes to extinction in Mauritius; the German massacre of the Hereros in Southwest Africa in 1904-8; the holocaust of European Jews  in 1941-5.

History, Pynchon suggests, reveals not the guiding hand of a benevolent God, but the manipulations of an evil, murderous deity, such as Blicero, the ancient German Lord of Death, who is summoned at a London seance in Book One and is incarnated throughout the novel by Captain Weissman, the German military officer who served in Southwest Africa and who is in charge of the V2 rocket programme. Through Blicero we see a horrifying inversion of ‘Messianic time’ revealing a providential destiny of death rather than salvation.  

The hope of redemption

Despite his dismissal and inversion of ‘Messianic time’, Pynchon nonetheless holds out the possibility that some type of redemption may be possible. He does this through his portrayal of the Zone Hereros. The Zone Hereros in many respects mirror the Jews, the originators of the concept of ‘Messianic time’: both are exiled peoples; both suffer under oppressive foreign domination; both are subject to genocidal violence. The Hereros, like the Jews, hope to attain their redemption, wish for the reunification of their people, the reclamation of their land, and for a time of peace and justice. In Gravity’s Rainbow they seek these ends in a fragmented post-war Germany through the construction of the 00001 rocket, the mirror-image of the 00000 rocket designed by Blicero/Weissman for the destruction of the world. 

The construction of the 00001 rocket is explicitly likened to the coming of the Messiah:  ‘the assembly of the 00001 is occurring also in a geographical way, a Diaspora running backwards, seeds of exile flying inward in a modest preview of gravitational collapse, of the Messiah gathering in the fallen sparks’. The Hereros, along the same lines, are likened to Jewish mystics, the ‘Kabbalists’, whose ‘holy Text’ or ‘Torah’ is ‘the Rocket’, the study of which will enable them to reckon with the End of Days. 

At the end of the novel it is observed that ‘Manicheans’ see ‘two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred idio-lalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.’ Here Pynchon makes explicit the contrast of the Herero leader Enzian, who seeks the world’s salvation, a destiny in the heavens, and Blicero, who wishes only for the world’s suicide. In this sense, Pynchon offers hope that there may indeed be peace and redemption and these forces might still prevail over death and destruction. If the 00001 rocket triumphs, ‘Messianic time’ may yet end with the reign of justice.  

The Circle and the Arc – History in Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon is an author obsessively interested in history, not only in the sense of historical events, but also in the sense of history as a process. Two recurring images in his most famous novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) function as metaphors for human history: the circle and the arc. 

The circle

There are numerous symbolic circles in Gravity’s Rainbow: the circular layout of Herero villages; the round badge of the Schwarzkommando; the red circles drawn on the map of London to indicate rocket strikes. These images point to a grander symbol within the novel, the notion that history itself is a circle, where events, like seasons, happen in an eternally recurring pattern. The link between the circle in nature and the circularity of history is made explicit in the book’s depiction of the organic chemist August Kekule’s revelation that benzene resembles a serpent consuming its own tail, an image found in Egyptian, Greek and Norse mythology that signifies the cyclical nature of time. Various historical episodes discussed in Gravity’s Rainbow allude to the notion that the same events happen over and over again: references to the extermination of the dodo by seventeenth-century Dutch colonialists in Part One foreshadow the account of the 1904 German genocide of the Hereros given in Part Three, which itself prefigures the Holocaust, an event that casts a shadow over the entire novel.

History’s cycle, however, is not only a repetition of human evils. Pynchon suggests that two forces, constructive and destructive, force and counterforce, operate in human history and preserve its circular motion. The V2 rocket, the central subject of the novel, is imagined in such a way. At the close of the book it is observed that: ‘Manichaeans … see two Rockets,  good and evil … a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.’ Humanity’s destructive nature, then, is always matched by its genius for creation, giving rise to an eternal cycle. 

The arc

The alternative to the circle is the arc, another recurring symbol of the novel, which describes both the trajectory of a rocket and the shape of a rainbow. The arc as a metaphor for history suggests a single process with a beginning, middle and end. The most famous manifestation of this linear, teleological history is in the sacred history of Christianity, which proceeds through Genesis, Crucifixion and the Day of Judgment. In the novel, the story of the rocket, which is described in consistently religious terms, adheres to the same pattern of creation, sacrifice and apocalypse. Karl Marx’s theory of history follows an identical three stage structure: history begins with the idyll of primitive Communism, followed by various systems of class oppression (slavery, feudalism, capitalism), and terminates with Communism, the end of history which finally resolves the class struggle.

Pynchon draws attention to the parallels between Marxism and Christianity in a passage where the Soviet intelligence officer Tchitcherine and the German chemist Wimpe discuss Communist ideology: 

“The basic problem,” [Wimpe] proposes, “has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique, it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, naturlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it  worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version, yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide.’

As this quotation implies, a teleological conception of history can lend itself to fanaticism. The belief that history has a final destination can give one a disturbing single-mindedness, a sense of the overriding need to to push history forward towards its end, regardless of the human consequences. For the puritan ancestors of Tyrone Slothrop, the novel’s central character, belief in God’s providential plan imparted a moral certainty which justified their violent persecution of heretics. For Bolshevik Marxists, the goal of the classless world of Communism justified Soviet imperialism in Central Asia, which is described at length in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon also points to another, darker vision of the end of history, where events resolve themselves not into a final redemption but into a final death. The character who most evinces this mentality is Weissman, the German military officer who becomes possessed by the need to complete the rocket and comes to adopt the persona of Blicero, the god of death. 

The very creation of the V2 rocket, in fact, with its potential for apocalyptic destruction, creates a possible end point in history, which unifies the entire world in a sense of its own prospective annihilation. Pynchon captures this notion by describing the arc of the rocket as something that Slothrop and Katje, another recurring character, feel somehow within them:

It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice guessed and refused to believe that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward  that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children.

The image of the rainbow invoked here is a reference to the rainbow sent by God in the Book of Genesis after Noah’s flood, which signals God’s covenant that ‘never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life’. As the precursor of the atomic bomb, the V2 rocket stands for a new form of biblical destruction created not by divine agency but by humanity itself. As a result, the rocket gives rise to a new symbolic rainbow, which unifies creation not through knowledge of its common salvation but through an awareness of its shared ruination. The arc of history, as it appears in Gravity’s Rainbow, is thus a terrifying rather than a comforting prospect, holding forth the image of death rather than redemption. 

History without shape

Besides the circle and the arc, Pynchon offers a third reading of history, a reading in which there is no specific pattern, only a scattering of events. Reflecting on this theme, at one point Slothrop muses on the condition of ‘anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.’ The notion that people cannot tolerate a lack of order is articulated by Francesco Squalidozzi, an Argentinian anarchist whom Slothrop meets in Switzerland: 

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. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us.

The metaphor for this disconnected notion of history is the Poisson distribution, a concept taken from mathematics which features in the first part of the novel. While attempting to explain the pattern of the V2 rocket strikes in London, the mathematician Roger Mexico states that it conforms to a Poisson distribution:

Every square is just as likely to get hit again. The hits aren’t  clustering. Mean density is constant. Nothing on the map to the contrary. Only a classical Poisson distribution, quietly neatly sifting among the squares exactly as it should … growing to its predicted shape…. No matter how many have fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.

History, according to this interpretation, has no natural analogies, but is a memoryless process upon which we attempt, in vain, to impose some order where all is connected into a single whole. If we accept that history has no determined course, then there is no point trying to push it in any direction. Various characters in Gravity’s Rainbow adopt this stance, riding the waves of chance as best they can, indulging in drugs, sex, or simply embracing anarchy for its own sake, as Squalidozzi does. Enzian, a Herero who grows up in the wake of his people’s genocide, concludes that no grand narrative arc of human history is comprehensible in light of his people’s reasonless slaughter: ‘he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not believe in any process of selection… There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.’ On such a view, human lives are lived at the mercy of luck, not in accordance with the logic of a providential plan and it is folly to think otherwise. 

Presenting each of these visions of history concurrently in Gravity’s Rainbow allows Pynchon to illustrate that in the twentieth century there was no longer any single narrative of history: cyclical, linear and anarchic conceptions of time co-existed and overlapped. All, in fact, are reproduced in the narrative of the novel, which is simultaneously a linear story from December 1944 to August 1945, a circle which begins and ends with an apocalyptic fall of the rocket, and a chaotic blur of disconnected episodes. 

Pynchon’s meditations on history can be related to his parallel obsession with science. The men of science who feature in Gravity’s Rainbow display a worrying certainty in the correctness of their enterprise, much like the Puritans and the Bolsheviks. Yet for all their mastery of scientific learning and their growing ability to manipulate nature, the belief that the progress of science will result in a new, more orderly world is shown to be resoundingly false. Attempts to impose scientific clarity on a persistently messy reality are parodied repeatedly in the novel, largely through the failed schemes of the Pavlovian psychologist Dr Pointsman. Indeed, the creation of the rocket itself, the ultimate triumph of man’s imposition of his will on nature, and a partial conquest of gravity, is revealed to be a murderous and cultish exercise, inescapably entwined with the genocidal project of Naziism and imbricated with humanity’s irrational nature as much as with the logic of science. In light of these dangerous experiments of rationalization, Pynchon’s sympathies seem to lie with the spontaneity and randomness, if only because those who adopt such an approach to life and history are infinitely less dangerous than those with a teleological certainty of their own righteousness. Believing in the arc of history, he suggests, is what leads to the fall of the bomb.