You are on page 1of 27

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.

com--1

Ksetra and Ksetrajna: The Zone and the Knower of the Zone in Gravitys Rainbow.

Gravity's Rainbow is a ground-breaking instance of literature which accomplishes at least one goal with certitude, namely, a celebration of the Zone. This novel, which has been critically hailed as one of the central texts of (American) post-modernist fiction, deconstructs traditional modes of literary representation and the hopes of teleological closure associated with it. It is, among other things, its explosion of teleology which makes the universe it describes exceed the bounds of Western metaphysics and consequently perplexes attempts at deriving ethical base from which to measure the value of all action (and by action here I mean not simply physical but also emotional, imaginative, and mental action). From a dharmic-ethical point of view, however, one can see that Pynchon's universe in Gravity's Rainbow is traversed by the three Gunas (qualities) of Prakriti (Nature). The novel is a poetic celebration of life, an act of Witnessing to the great Eternal Mystery; this aesthetic presentation is the instance of a yagna (Works or Sacrifice) performed as a raucous and love-filled celebration of Life. Perhaps the most telling sign of this yagna is the fact that Gravity's Rainbow performs within its death-obsessed cosmos the negation of death itself, that is, the negation of teleological Western death. Instead of death as terminal, it celebrates death as the marker of an energy transfer, a crossing-over. Gravity's Rainbow is a yagna that exemplifies the fundamental ontological truth in Hinduism, a truth succinctly expressed in the Bhagvada Gita: that which exists, exists; that which does not exist, does not exist--nasato vidyate bhavo / nabhavo vidyate satah...It is found that there is no coming to be of the nonexistent; It is found that the not non-existent constitutes the real...(II-16, WBG 101). The Zone delineated in Gravity's Rainbow owes its startling nature to the following negations of conventional fiction: there is no central or hero character amongst the novel's vast cast--over three hundred characters circulate within its novelistic zone; there is no central plot or thread which weaves the narrative into a prestidigitable pattern

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--2

and it thus defies habitual consumption; there is, seemingly, no normative ontological base upon which epistemological networks can come to hierarchize themselves to generate definitive truths. The narrator crystallizes the dominant authorial strategy in the following (characteristically parenthetical) remark which also is, of course, an admonition to the paranoiac reader: "those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity" (582). Complementing these and sundry destabilizing strategies is the attention given to Technology, to the technological transformation of lived experience, which makes Gravity's Rainbow a truly a post-modern novel. The modernist categories of an autonomous ego, of an alienated inner self, of a subject of coherent and unified intentionality, and the corresponding textual strategies of metalingual skepticism and epistemological doubt become outdated in the face of the proliferating technologies of (knowledge-)production which put under erasure the fundamental aspects of the constitution of "human" reality.1 In historical terms, the primary operative Zone of the novel is set towards the end of the World War II in Europe, a time in which nothing less than a destruction of Old Europe becomes forcefully evident, along with its simultaneous reconstitution by forces whose controlling agents remain fuzzily defined--signified more often than not by "They," "Them," "the Firm"--but which are propelled by an unabashed drive and commitment towards Technology and Cartelization. The Rocket, in all its phallic, rational, and technological glory, becomes the monumental clue to a global collusion amongst vested parties--megacartels whose constitution makes the category of nationhood obsolete; Tchitcherine, for example, finds himself being addressed by a "very large white finger" which points his attention to "A Rocket-cartel. A structure cutting across every agency human...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

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--3

of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul. IG Raketen" (566). Yet, the novel sets up against the nascent throb of the Raketenstadt a host of non-rational, non-linear knowledges and modes of being, not least amongst which is Mother Earth with her eternal natural cycles of creation and destruction, a vibrant, willful Earth with its quality of Gravity which, "taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody..." (590). Most important, then, for the significance of Gravity's Rainbow, is the fact that it presents a universe in which the binary identities and opposites--such as rational/irrational, technology/nature, North/South, Us/They, masculine/feminine, etc.-are made to collapse towards each other through an implosion in which the interface between them swells to become the effective Zone of all action and meaning. This results in an intimate imbrication between opposites, one which destabilizes all identities based on a system of antinomial reciprocity. In this regard, the ubiquity of Kekul's dream and its repercussions in all facets of the Zone is crucial for coming to terms with the nature and qualities of Pynchon's interface. As architect turned chemist, Kekul's visual mind discovers in a dream the structure that organizes the benzene molecule C6H6. This "dream of 1865" is crucial as it not only revolutionized chemistry but also "made IG possible," that is, the world of polymers and plastics whose scope in the arena of Gravity's Rainbow is vast enough to induce the paranoid remark that Kekul's discovery has led to an edifice so large that it can be contained "not just under the aspect of IG, but of World, assuming that's a distinction you observe, heh, heh" (411). Specifically, Kekul dreams of the Ourobouros serpent, "the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming serpent which surrounds the world" (412). The serpent's obvious Christian association with evil is explored through Pkler's dream about a Lazslo Jamf lecture in which the professor asks, "who sent this serpent to our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence..." (413). Of course, in keeping with the novel's logic of multiple and mutually destabilizing

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--4

ontologies, the Snake is not merely a Christian symbol. As the Ourouboros snake encircling the world, it refers to a Norse cosmology, and invokes also the snake Ananta of Hindu mythology which, equally tail-in-mouth, symbolizes the nature of an infinite universe. In the novel, Kekul's dream is a visitation sent by the bureaucracies of the Other side and ushers in the era of aromatic compounds "so that others might be seduced by its physical beauty, and begin to think of it as a blueprint, a basis for new compounds, new arrangements...so there would be a German dye industry to become the IG..." (412). It is these plastic technologies which threaten to lay waste the rest of the Natural World comprised of animal, vegetal, and mineral life. The fact that the cyclical structure of a Carbon compound should lead to the technologies of plastic fabrication, and help in creating an organization of resources polarized according to the dictates of the Cartel with its logic of System and profitmaking is central to the novel's obsession with the nature of the interface in all its various manifestations. The serpent itself, that is, the nature of the bond itself, becomes the interface between the Cycle and the linear System; it proposes both alternatives in its bivalent form--in its zone it bears the potential or valence both cycle and system. "They" have decided to pursue the linear alternative promised by the Serpent: The Serpent that announces, "the World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit...The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply...No return, no salvation, no Cycle--that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekul, have taken the Serpent to mean. (412-13) This new technology allows for the creation of Imipolex-G, a heterocyclic polymer which is "the first plastic that is actually erectile. Under suitable stimuli, the chains grow crosslinks, which stiffen the molecule...from limp rubbery amorphous to perfect tessellation,

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--5

hardness, brilliant transparency" (699). Imipolex-G is most probably what lies behind or inside Slothrop's inexplicable erections, and his search for the "truth" forms one of the more developed narrative threads in the novel. Imipolex-G is the interface between nature and artifice through its simulation of sexuality. Porn star Greta Erdmann vividly recalls her sexual arousal during her visit/abduction to Blicero's Castle: "they took away my clothes and dressed me in an exotic costume of some black polymer..."This is Imipolex, the material of the future"...The moment it touched them it brought my nipples up swollen and begging to be bitten. I wanted to feel it against my cunt...Drohne had strapped on a gigantic Imipolex penis over his own. I rubbed my face against it, it was so delicious..." (488). Surely a cybernetic era is at hand. Yet, the Zone is infused with the familiar tones of reckless, joyful abandon and celebration. Traveling through the Zone in his "quest," Slothrop finds himself involved in a series of adventures whose authorial renditions approximate buoyant Vaudeville comedy and in which he is time and again stripped of his nominal identity; Slothrop is also Ian Scuffling, Max Schlezpig, Rocketman, and Plechauzunga. Despite his shifting roles, what remains constant is his unerring ability to survive, to find shelter and companionship: the narrator assures us that "he'll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals...Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days" (290-91). These "simple movements" of human relationship are intimately intertwined with the vast and often confusing gamut of militarized deployments rampant in the Zone: Carbon as the Cycle of Nature and, equally, as the Systemic march of Plastics. Gravity's Rainbow is a poetic work which unabashedly celebrates life in all its potential and competing manifestations, life with its grand Eternal Mystery: Pynchon's work seems nothing more than the squirming fragments of a dozen bright ideas until we read it as poetry, as images and meaning rather than as

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--6

narrative investigating personality. Pynchon's characters move through time and event, but the central mystery of their world is outside time and event, and words cannot describe it. Tchitcherine finds the Kirghiz Light, but Pynchon cannot tell us what it is. "They" disintegrate Slothrop, but we never learn how or why....Visible effects, invisible causes; not a single, human-sized plot, but many little ones leading off into the supernatural where words cannot follow them. (Fowler 66) Fowler's evocation of poetry as the expression and celebration of the ever unknowable rightly contradicts an element in Lyotard's famous maxim about post-modernism, "[it] denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable" and "searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to import a stronger sense of the unpresentable" (emphasis mine, 81). Enjoyment is the strongest element of experiencing the unattainable mystery celebrated by Gravity's Rainbow. I would like to pursue the mystery further and read the novel as a yagna, a gesture of sacrifice, to the eternal mystery of life. The Zone is the site of the effacement of the Other. As I suggested above, not only is death conceived of as an energy transfer and a crossing-over but it is also represented as an ontological reality, a part of the "Other side," a side which is an equal participant in the life-processes of the Zone. In negating death in its traditional Western sense, the Zone also negates the metaphysical Other. It performs a destruction of hierarchy--no one ontological version, description, or conception of reality can be said to be the normative one. The Zone is an amalgam of various alternative zones, the site of multiple realities all of which are self-contained and in a state of interaction: "Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center...Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made...each bird has its branch now, and each one is the Zone" (emphasis mine, 519).2 Boundaries are dissolved not merely on the physical and geographical planes but on all planes where their

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--7

entrenchment defined the constitution of "Old Europe"--distinctions based on binaries and dialectical oppositions have lost their poles. As a result, the Other is that which has been erased in the Zone because there is no longer a normative ground from which to other the Other; we have, instead, a universe of the Self that approximates a Hindu cosmology and ontological determination of the self/Self. A minor yet not so minor example is that of the "Hund-Stadt," a village in Mecklenburg that has been taken over by army dogs (614). Though it may be seen as a parody of all Menschstdte, the Hund-Stadt is ontologically speaking a reality in the Zone--it exists inasmuch as any of the variously strange villages of the Zone exist. Killer Dobermans and Shepherds populate this dog-city and constitute a threat to the life of anyone except their erstwhile trainers, who are either dead or lost in the Zone. They form an autonomous state that thrives on the consumption of various resources in the zone. The narrator acknowledges ignorance when it comes to specifics of their social system: "if there are lines of power amongst themselves, loves, loyalties, jealousies, no one knows." The Hund-Stadt has proven impregnable and attracts sociologists who, along with the "bodies of the neighboring villagers...litter all the approaches" to it. From the little information provided, one can see that the dogs are of Kshatriyic (warrior) aspect and that their Prakritic constitution or nature seems to be dominated by the guna of Rajas; that is, they willingly "fling themselves into the battle and attempt to slay, conquer, dominate, enjoy" (EG 49). In the Hindu cosmology, the animal-life form is characteristically blind to its Sattwic potential; indeed, Rajas prevails much more against Tamas, brings with it its developed power of life, desire, emotion, passion, pleasure, suffering, while Sattwa, emerging, but still dependent on the lower action, contributes to these the first light of the conscious mind, the mechanical sense of ego, conscious memory, a certain kind of thought, especially the wonders of instinct and animal intuition. But as yet the Buddhi, the intelligent will, has not developed to the full light of consciousness; therefore, no responsibility can be attributed to the animal for its actions. (209)

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--8

Whether the energy deployment in the Hund-Stadt is purely mechanistic or whether it is the result of conscious reflection remains unclear in the narrator's description. On the one hand, the dogs "may be living entirely in the light of the one man-installed reflex: Kill The Stranger. There may be no way of distinguishing it from the other given quantities of their lives--from hunger or thirst or sex" (614). On the other hand, perhaps their buddhi has developed to an extent considerable enough for them to entertain heretical ruminations: "if there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careful...But in private they point to the image of one human...in whose presence they were tranquil and affectionate..." (614). In the former possibility, the actions of the dogs remain mostly on the Tamasic plane, and "whatever soul is in it...is as much passive in its passion and activity as in its indolence or inaction. The animal like the atom acts according to the mechanism of its Prakriti or Nature" (EG 210); whereas in the latter, the dogs have begun to achieve a sattwic illumination, a conscience of Self, which means that each dog must "know more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his tamasic and rajasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the perfection of his normal humanity" (211). The term humanity is used here for any manifestation of life which has a sattwic awakening. From a Hindu point of view, then, the Hund-Stadt represents one possible manifestation of Prakriti. The Dog-City does not transgress nor transcend the compass of being and becoming. Nothing "new" is manifest here, simply the innate qualities of Prakriti are revealed in an unexpected or unusual form. When Jamf describes the nature of the lion to Pkler, he emphasizes a rajasic single-mindedness as well as a mayasic ignorance in the lion's entrenchment in binarism: "the lion does not know subtleties and half-solutions...He wants the absolute. Life and death. Win and lose. Not truces or arrangements, but the joy, the leap, the roar, the blood" (577). And as with the Hundtstadt and the lion, similarly with the plastic Imipolex G: the fact that it is a new compound, that is, a new arrangement within Prakriti, and that it can simulate a human erection, does not support Berressem's assertion that "the invention of plastics is thus the

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--9

final state in the attempt to control any physical as well as psychic, mental substance: matter and subjectivity...With the help of Imipolex G it becomes possible to create a perfect simulation of the human" (137). Beressem does not elaborate on what he means by the "human" that Imipolex "simulates," unless we are to understand that a good erection is the enough of a criterion for "human." In the Hindu conception of "human," there is a clear distinction between Prakriti with her Gunas and energies and the Conscience as the Witness of all Prakritic action, the human being the sum thereof. In inanimate objects too, such as the plastic Imipolex G, Prakriti is present in its entirety but Tamas reigns supreme, and beings at this level, such as the atom or plastic have not liberated their Witness or conscience-of-Self: There is a will even in the atom, but we see clearly enough that it is not free-will, because it is mechanical and the atom does not possess the will but is possessed by it. Here the buddhi...is actually...jada, a mechanical, even an inconscient principle in which the light of the conscious Soul has not at all struggled to the surface: the atom is not conscious of an intelligent will. Tamas, the inert and ignorant principle [sic], has its grip on it, contains rajas, conceals Sattwa within itself... (EG 209)3 Pynchon's universe presents us with a multifarious assortment of Life in which plant, mineral, animal, and "artificial" forms compete and interact in a Zone that doesn't favor any conventional Western hierarchies. The category of man, of humanity, becomes one of many equally important or valuable in the life-continuum of the Zone. If there are various planes of reality-perception, they, too, are given equal significance. The point is that the privileging of the empirically verifiable reality as the normative one for our existence is negated. It is with these three negations in mind--of death, of the Other, of normative reality--that one can see that Gravity's Rainbow surpasses the limitations of a traditional Western universe, it tears the veil of Maya. In doing so, Gravity's Rainbow is best understood as an instance of a literary and aesthetic yagna that demolishes binaristic, teleological, empirical justifications and celebrates the universe of the self/Self. In this sense, Gravity's Rainbow is highly moral but only in the Dharmic-ethical sense. As a

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--10

yagna, it ultimately celebrates the Dharma that binds all existence and if it teaches us anything, it is the knowledge "to see all beings in the one impersonal self, for so we are liberated from the separative ego-sense, and then through this delivering impersonality to see them in this God, atmani atho mayi, "in the Self and then in Me."" (EG 124). In the context of "knowledge," it is notable that Gravity's Rainbow 's dharmic explorations occur in the "Zone;" the Bhagvada Gita is also situated, as a chapter in the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, in the ksetra or "zone" of the ultimate war. The Gita is one of the core texts in Hindu philosophy which explains the dharmic constitution of and the ethical imperatives in life. In doing so, the Gita like Gravity's Rainbow is an aesthetic yagna--a formal poem which elucidates the parameters of an ontological conception of life, knowing all along that it is merely a gesture in the direction of truth, that the greatest secret lies beyond the compass of its discourse. The Gita is situated in the Zone of life, the Ksetra of Dharma: "Dharmaksetre kuruksetre / samaveta yuyutsavah / mamakah pandavas caiva / kim akurvata samjaya?// When in the Zone of Dharma, in the Zone of Kuru, assembled together, desiring to fight, What did my army and that of the sons of Pandu do, Samjaya?" (I-1, WBG 39).4 The very first words of the Gita, then, situate us in the Zone. The speaker is Dhritarashtra, "the blind Kuru king to whom the Bhagvada Gita is to related by Samjaya, his minister" (WBG 39). Significantly, the Gita, the discourse given by Krishna to Arjuna, is a reportage made by Samjaya, who is not on the scene but has been granted what we can term in today's technological terms a live television broadcast of the War but what is in the dynamics of the Mahabharata one of the many instances of super-natural powers. The war-zone is named not only dharmaksetra but also Kuruksetra after the clan's patronymic Kuru: the war of all wars takes place within the same family, a strategy that emphasizes the oneness of all humanity--there is no Other against whom one wages war, but only multitudinous incarnations of the Supreme Self.

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--11

Krishna's revelation makes true knowledge a function of both knowledge of the Zone and knowledge of the knower of the Zone: not only the knowledge of Prakriti and her Gunas but also knowledge of the Purushottama, the universal Witness or Conscience. Knowledge of either one is an insufficient knowledge; knowledge of the knower of the Zone signals a dharmic-ethical knowledge of the self/Self, a spiritual understanding of the Being of all existence. What is reinforced time and again is the conception of an Other-less universe which is the sum of the Processes + Witness, Nature + Conscience, Prakriti + Purushottama. In direct terms, "the Gita explains the ksetram, zone, by saying that it is this body which is called the zone of the spirit, and in this body there is someone who takes cognizance of the zone, ksetrajnana, the knower of Nature" (EG 398): Krishna tells Arjuna, "know also that I am the knower of the zone, in all zones, Descendant of Bharata; Knowledge of the zone and of the zone-knower; that is considered by me to be true knowledge" (XIII-2, WBG 530).5 Krishna goes on to describe the nature of the zone (see especially XIII-5) and also the ultimate object of all knowledge: "it is the beginless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor non-existent" (XIII-12). What, subsequently, can be said of the nature and quality of the knowledge that is broached by Gravity's Rainbow, both at the level of the zone and at the level of the knower of the zone? As far as knowledge of the zone is concerned, we have already seen above how "Kekul's serpent," as a metaphor for the Plasticity-Circularity of the Carbon ring functions as an interface between opposites, erases binary polarity, and makes a post-enlightenment humanist concept of Selfhood inadequate to understanding the motive force of the novel. Its universe defies a ethical code that depends on binary absolutes, such as good/evil, nature/culture, life/death, Self/Other, feminine/masculine, rational/irrational, and so forth--it is veritably "a great frontierless streaming out there" (549). As the dissipation of absolutes, Gravity's Rainbow becomes a highly impersonal work in which one is hard put to decipher the desire motivating the novel. If it is indeed the case that the novel does not, in the final analysis, abet any one of its narrative threads

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--12

or fictive characters, then it is so because as a yagna the novel transcends the domain of the mutable, the finite, and the personal; it opens up and opens itself up to the impersonal and the infinite, "to that which is pure and high and one and common in all things and beings, the impersonal and infinite in Prakriti, the impersonal and infinite in life, the impersonal and infinite in his own subjectivity" (EG 121). It is for this reason that even as it situates itself at the cusp of one of the most violent and horrifying moments in human history, World War II, the novel transcends the world of transience and suffering-for it relinquishes the ego-sense and the concomitant desires and demands of life conceived of in any finite way; it exemplifies the Hindu credo that "life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite" (121). It performs the real renunciation, that which transcends the bondage of the Gunas of nature, not by describing a universe in which action ceases, but in which ego and desire are slain (122). My argument for an essentially Hindu character to the Zone and the novel as a whole should be misconstrued neither as mystical nor as religious. If there is one point I am emphasizing in my dissertation, it is that the Hindu description of the universe, of being and becoming, of ontology and thereby of epistemology, is incommensurable with any Western-like version in which Death and the Other are given overarching prominence in the determination of ethical being and living (see chapter 1). Critics who are perplexed by Pynchon's imaginative genius, which "creates multiple alternative realities, and several times brings back the dead to comment on the blindness of the living to the true nature of reality" (Hume 213), have tried to resolve the text's inherent "mysticism" according to various Western traditions, such as the Orphic tradition (Bass) or Gnosticism (Eddins). Kathryn Hume, on the other hand, points out connections not only from "spiritualism and theosophy to rilkean transcendence, "electromysticism," the Kirghiz Light, [to] Pan and Walpurgisnacht" but also to Buddhism--"something like the Buddhist "pure light of the void" recurs as a form of the ultimate in the text" (214-15).

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--13

My interpretation pushes the Buddhist connection to its mother Hindu culture in an effort that counters a Western trend in interpretations regarding Slothrop's selfdisintegration in the Zone. I agree with Hume's proposition that his disintegration signals "a thorough renunciation of control and individuality" and "strikes at the very root of Western consciousness" (216); it should be no surprise, then, that its interpretation should appear tinged with negativity from critics who are unable to admit or are simply ignorant about the possibility of the Hindu cosmos of the self/Self. Slothrop's dissolution marks not simply the fact that he ceases to exist nor that he ceases his actions in the life-rhythms of the Zone, but that he ceases to do so in any egoistic manner--as an individual. His disintegration, his becoming "a cross himself, a living crossroads" (625) is a metaphorical marker that signifies that Slothrop's self has harmonized itself with the life-processes of Nature: "he likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain, getting to know the shrikes and capercaillie, badgers and marmots" (623). As a "crossroads" Slothrop becomes the interface between culture and nature, technology and spiritualism, and even, This side and the Other side. James Earl mistakenly asserts that Slothrop's freedom excludes his liberated self from society--"our solitary return to freedom is experienced both by society and ourselves as a dissolution--a loss of the self that is, paradoxically, an act of identification with the world and of all of those who constitute the very society we cannot belong to" (Earl in Hume, 216); in a similar vein, Siegel remarks, "his fate suggests the interrelationship of societal man's fate and his technology, for in order to escape that technology Slothrop must abandon society" (46). Both statements demonstrate an understanding of society solely as society of the System; it is paramount to remember that Slothrop's liberated being or disintegrated self participates not only in conventional systemic society--consider, for example, AWOL Dzabajev's running into "some part of Slothrop...in the heart of downtown Niedershaumdorf" (742)--but participates equally in the social Self of the Cycle.

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--14

There is a cosmological code in Gravity's Rainbow which has been given a significant prominence by Pynchon and which exists in a polar opposition to the Western codes premised on rationality and linearity. I refer to, of course, that belonging to the South-West African Herero tribes which inhabit the Zone as the "schwarzkommandos" led by Enzian on a mission, ostensibly, of tribal suicide upon the location of the "Rocket."6 The Herero universe is pantheistic and admits a cyclical regeneration of lifedeath; of interest, in this regard, is the Herero belief that inhabitants on the "other" side, those who have been chosen for death, have the ability to influence events on this side. In a highly poetic description of a lover's tryst between Captain Blicero and the boy Enzian, the narrator offers us the following insight into Herero metaphysics: "to the boy Ndambi Karunga [the Herero God] is what happens when they couple, that's all: God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including black and white, male and female...and he becomes in his innocence Ndambi Karunga's child" (GR 100).7 The Herero universe maps onto a major aspect of Hinduism, as is evident in the following explanation by Slade: "the pre-literate, pre-colonialized, prerationalized Hereros view the world as a metaphysical whole. Within that world paradox is the law of experience: opposites can be reconciled, stones can be inhabited by souls, men can be individual selves and yet parts of the larger self, members of a cosmic and a human community" (29). Taking the Hereros as emblematic of paradox and cyclicality, Slade sees the Herero/German colonial history as "typical of every encounter between West and non-West" (29). But what both the Herero and the Western vision lack is an accommodation of each other in their world-views, for "where the Herero see cyclical paradoxical nature, westerners see only metaphysical void which they have tried to "rationalize" by displacing nature with institutions, bureaucracies, systems, networks of power" (Slade 30). This seemingly inherent opposition is contained by the interface of Hinduism, a highly literate tradition which has both extensively charted rational and dualistic systems,

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--15

for instance in the Samkhya, Nyaya, and Vaisesika philosophies, and also a conception of paradox, of circular infinity, of Prakriti and Purushottama which collapse all oppositions without losing any of their Gunas.8 There is a proliferation of both the technological and the non-technological life in the Zone created by Pynchon which defies understanding premised on either the Herero-type or the Western-type of cosmologies. The yagnic aspect of the novel is undeniable, its goal can be seen as not "an injunction to subordinate the individual to society and humanity or immolate egoism on the altar of the human collectivity, but to fulfill the individual in God and to [yagna] the ego on the one true altar of the all-embracing Divinity" (EG 128). It is not surprising, then, that Mark Siegel's outline for understanding the novel proposes nothing other than an investigation of both the ksetra and the Ksetrajna: The only thematic perspective which accounts for all the events in Gravity's Rainbow is a three-fold examination of the problem: first, an examination of the possibilities for personal salvation, in the sense of freedom from and transcendence of the individual's painful and disharmonious existence, as exemplified by Slothrop and Tchitcherine; second, an examination of the sociocultural movement toward apocalypse, as seen in the history of the rocket and in the political and economic activity of the novel; and, third, an attempt at divining what lies in the future for both individuals and for society by examining the available patterns of political, economic, technological, cultural, and psychological lines of force..." (46) In the language of the Gita, the first step is knowledge of the Ksetrajna or knower of the Zone, the second step is knowledge of the ksetra or Zone, and the third step is that of true knowledge: knowledge of the ksetra + knowledge of the Ksetrajna. Is the true knowledge that the novel gestures towards one of "transcendence?" In other words, what is the nature of the level of being that has been attained by Slothrop? At one level, we are told that Slothrop's disintegration consists of shedding the "albatross of self" (623). Fowler is correct in pointing out that "the albatross is Pynchon's negative code-term for the Western man's individual ego" (55): ultimately, "Slothrop has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell, stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--16

if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of "positively identified and detained."" (712). The emphasis on positive ID. hearkens to Foucault's discussion of the modern technologies of the Body, which Slothrop finally exceeds. In Foucauldian terms, Slothrop's scattering is an extra-disciplinary phenomenon as it slips through the methods (disciplines) which have, in modern society, made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, being able to impose on it a relation of docility-utility. In this sense, if Slothrop's body is scattered, it is so only because it cannot be made to coalesce together in the form of verifiable documentation and subsequently lacks use-value.9 This type of "transcendence" is one operative prominently in the ksetra or zone--it tells us nothing about "transcendence" for the Ksetrajna, the knower of the zone. "Transcendence" is a complicated term. Its meaning varies depending on the tradition in which it operates. For example, Slade uses the term "transfiguration" to convey what happens to Slothrop: "only Slothrop achieves transfiguration. He may or may not be illuminated by radiance when he sees the rainbow, but he has lost his self in the All of the universe...To be subsumed by the All, without being able to maintain the integrity of the self, is to lose the joy of paradox, according to which the self can be part and whole" (36). Slade's "integrity" is a Western one, which accounts for his use of the term "subsumed" to explain the process of conjoining with the "All." In another context, Olderman critiques Siegel for employing the terms "transcendence" and "transformation" as though they were synonymous, and proposes the clarification that "Pynchon connects the urge to transcend with violating earth cycles and life cycles. In Gravity's Rainbow, wanting to transcend dominates some people's spiritual conceptions almost in proportion to the degree that rigid mechanistic order dominates other people's concepts of rationalism" (505). Whereas Siegel finds Slothrop to be failure, Olderman urges caution lest Pynchon's "radicality" might be misunderstood. In a Hindu reading, Slothrop's "transfiguration," "transcendence," or "transformation" does not lead him beyond the life cycles of the Zone, nor does it exclude him from participation in the Systems of the Zone.

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--17

Instead, it signals Slothrop's conscience of the Self according to which all his actions are judged and from which all his actions emanate. The essential proviso for such yagnic action is that it is very much paradox that is realized in such a state, the paradox-secret of "the beginless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor non-existent." Slothrop's increasing depersonalization is a uni-directional vector in the novel and can be understood as the result of his gradual rise towards a state of being beyond the bondage of the Gunas of Prakriti, that is, towards the state of trigunatita. In such a state, Slothrop continues to be the "enjoyer of the Gunas, as is the Brahman, though not limited by them...unattached, yet all-supporting...the action of the Gunas within him is quite changed; it is lifted above their egoistic character and reactions" (EG 222). he begins to recognize the Self in his self as well as the Self in all other beings, and demonstrates the first two types of yogas, the Karmayoga in which the emphasis is on performing the selfless yagna of Works, and the Jnanayoga, in which there occurs a realization of the Self and of the true nature of the Self and world. It is as a jnanayogi that Slothrop begins to listen to what the trees have to say: Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what's happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down...They know he's there. They probably also know what he's thinking. "I'm sorry," he tells them. (552-53) The one yoga which Slothrop does not attain, for which Pynchon provides no detail whatsoever, is Bhaktiyoga, which is the state of performing all Works in devotion to the Divine, the Lord of Works. The Hindu reading provides a one possible meaning for "the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly--perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly--and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, scattered"

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--18

(738). Whose plan went wrong? Their plan went wrong, They screwed up. If They lost control, then who is he being broken down by instead? He is being broken down, as an "individual," by the dominating trigunatita in his being, by the awakening of the Self, the Purusha within him. Slade's conjecture concurs with the Hindu thrust being made here: "Pynchon makes much of Slothrop's paradoxical behavior in the presence of the Rocket, since it offers --if finally unsuccessfully--a charismatic counter to a rationalized world" (emphasis mine, 33). In Slade's terms, my Hindu interpretation provides a framework in which to understand the contours and constitution of the "charismatic counter." It must be pointed out, however, that my interpretation sees Slothrop's disintegration as nothing less than a success but in no way an escape or a "transcendence." Slothrop's ultimate impersonal self is presaged by his propensity for slipping into different personae, such as British ace reporter Ian Scuffling, Max Schlezpig--the name which belonged to Greta Erdmann's deceased lover, comic-book character Rocketman, and folk pig-hero Plechauzunga. Slothrop does not don the roles of Rocketman and Plechauzunga because of any egotistical motive or forethought, but simply because he participates as a doer of Works in the arena of action in which he finds himself. He becomes Rocketman on the insistence of Sure Bummer, who costumes him, dubs him Rocketman, and sends him off on a comic-hero adventure to recover hidden dope. Slothrop also becomes Plechauzunga, a pagan pig-hero on whose presence the annual festival hinges, for no other motive than the insistence of preterite German-village children. Ironically, it is his for his lack of self-ishness that Slothrop is criticized for his role-switching, especially as this is seen as non-conducive to his "quest" for the Rocket, for the schwartzgert, for the "truth" that is supposed to connect Imipolex G with his inexplicable erections associated with the V-2 and that defines his "individuality." Slothrop's "quest" is not the only incomplete story in Gravity's Rainbow that frustrates closure-minded Western readers; there are also significantly "the failure of Enzian to

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--19

clash with Tchitcherine, the offstage death of General Pudding, the uncertainty of Blicero's fate, the inconclusiveness of Pirate's relationship with Katje, Pkler's unresolved search for his daughter and wife," etc. (Fowler 54). This characteristic of narrative dispersal and open-endedness supports the fact that linearity and teleology are undermined by Pynchon in favor of a Zone of cyclical, unending transformations. Consider the epigraph to the first section of Gravity's Rainbow, which is taken from Werhner Von Braun and which situates us smack in the heart of Hindu cosmology: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death" (1). In such a cosmos of Prakritic energies, it is fitting that stories mingle, criss-cross and connect, and are transformed before their prefigured telos. In such a non-Western cosmos, it is tempting to appreciate and consequently dismiss the nature of "Slothrop's Progress" as comic-strip realism and Vaudeville comedy worthy of Abbot and Costello. But a dismissal on such grounds, however, reflects little or no appreciation of the important non-Western gesture of yagna that permeates Gravity's Rainbow. Slothrop is not the only character to demonstrate impersonality in his actions. Enzian and Tchitcherine demonstrate to varying degrees an impersonality in their actions in the Zone which points to a liberated state of being defying expectations or judgments premised on the finitude of the traditional Western fictive character with a coherent egobound personality. Tchitcherine and Enzian are half-brothers; Tchitcherine senior left behind on his way to a siege of Port Arthur a pregnant Herero woman in South-West Africa, and was never to return, either to Russia or to South-West Africa. Tchitcherine is described as a cybernetic organism more than as a human, "more metal than anything else" (337), and thus marks a compelling interface between technology and nature, Them and self. For example, his obsession to kill Enzian is unknown by him, though he uncovers "evidence" that it has been visited upon him by the outside; Tchitcherine has "a

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--20

compulsive need he has given up trying to understand, a need to annihilate the Schwarzkommado and his mythical half-brother Enzian" (338-39). Fowler points out that Tchitcherine can be said to have three quests, "each murkier than the last: a quest to destroy the "mythical" black brother; a quest to find a new "birth" inside the magic womb of the Kirghiz Light; a quest for the Rocket" (63). Of course, none of these quests are resolved as the Kirghiz Light is experienced beyond that which can be communicated and soon thereafter forgotten; and worse yet, for the closure-obsessed reader, the much anticipated confrontation between the brothers is a non-event as Tchitcherine is bewitched and way-laid by Geli Tripping's witchcraft while Enzian and his troops march by. Tchitcherine's mission in Kirghiz, Kazakhstan holds an interesting commentary for (post-)colonial discourse. It is not unexpected that the description of the Kirghiz Light invokes Allah in a predominantly Islamic region being colonized by Russian bureaucracies: "And a man cannot be the same, / After seeing the Kirghiz Light. // For I tell you that I have seen It / In a place older than darkness, / Where even Allah cannot reach" (358). This is the Aqyn's song, an old wandering Kazakh singer, and Tchitcherine's encounter with the Kirghiz Light proves to be even more mysterious if not anti-climactic to our expectations. The experience becomes yet another instance in which Pynchon celebrates that which cannot be presented, the unpresentable which is also the eternal mystery. Pynchon's oeuvre is a celebration of life in its infinite forms and becomings, a yagna to the great divine Self that inhabits all, and if he is equally direct in bringing us the divine and the scatological, god and shit, it is the "price of attempting to articulate the inarticulable, of attempting to make present to us what our language will not let us see, of attempting to disorient us so much that we will risk what each moment, unpenetrated, hides from us" (Levine 135). And so it is with the Kirghiz Light, for Tchitcherine, and so it shall be with the Rocket.

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--21

A flashback to the early Stalin years finds Tchitcherine stationed out in "Seven Rivers Country" busy with a mission of instilling the "the NTA (New Turkic Alphabet)" to the young and old Kirghiz whose organic language seems too supple for the "stiff Latin symbols:" "he had come to give the tribesmen out here, this far out, an alphabet: it was purely speech, gesture, touch among them, not even an Arabic script to replace" (338). Tchitcherine's mission is synecdochal of the processes of Imperial colonization, and the Kirghiz experience with the Russian powers reflects the Herero experience with the Germans: in the 1916 Kazakh rising, "thousands of restless natives bit the dust. Their names, their numbers, lost forever. Colors of skin, ways of dressing became reasonable causes to jail, or beat and kill;" similarly, the Herero rising of 1904 resulted a program of extermination led by the "butcher" General Von Trotha, at the end of which "sixty percent of the Herero people had been exterminated. The rest were being used like animals. Enzian grew up into a white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden death, one-way departures were the ordinary things of every day" (323). These historical segments reflect no ambiguity nor any uncertainty as to the anti-natural conquests of Imperial forces against the non-Christian, non-white sectors of the world. These diversions into the history of Christian-based imperial colonization are marked by a surprisingly acerbic and judicial narratorial voice, and at one level they serve as a counter to the dominant versions of the "secular history" which is "the faithless construction of defenses that, as they justify by explanation the power of the empowered, participate in the plasticizing of life and death" (Levine 126). The narrator is unequivocal in associating Christianity with the ills not only perpetrated on the colonies, but more importantly with the hypocrisy rampant in a rationalistic, humanist Christian society: yes, it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe that it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets...Oh no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--22

loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts...No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets... (all ellipses in original, 317) This truly remarkable passage certainly shows no kindness towards European Christianity. It performs and demonstrates various post-colonial strategies, such as the reinstatement and revalorization of the marginalized people and its discourses against the hegemonic Western Metropolis; it unmasks the desire of the Western man to relegate the colonial world to the status of mythical being and existence--as a ruse to aid in his own guilty catharses; it exposes the hypocrisy in "the structures of attitude and reference" that generally informs imperial discourses whose goal is to simultaneously endorse the moral superiority of the imperial power and the inferior status of the colonized.10 In Edward Said's terms, it can be said that Gravity's Rainbow performs nothing less than the explosion of subjugated knowledges across the rationalist, teleological field of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It is crucial to keep in mind, however, that despite the pointed attack against Christian hypocrisy and the related histories of colonization, Gravity's Rainbow does not perform any straightforward binary flip-flop that ends up simply valorizing the hitherto suppressed, colonized, or marginalized. This is, of course, central to the novel's strategic interface which, while it decomposes values based on polar fixations and binary values, constantly celebrates the unknowable which fuels all energies in its interfacial Zone. The words assessing Slothrop's erections at the consequent impact sites of the incoming rockets, a fact which causes much consternation to the Pavlovian Pointsman, also signal the nature of the novel itself: "this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of the

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--23

opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness" (emphasis mine, 50). In Hinduism, yagna entails a form of surrender of the self to the Self. The interface collapses opposites while it sheds light on that which will always escape its grasp. Thus, Tchitcherine's effort to alphabetize the Kirghiz language, for example, is accompanied by the knowledge that "the great silences of Seven Rivers have not yet been alphabetized, and perhaps never will be...They are silences the NTA cannot fill, cannot liquidate, immense and frightening as the elements in this bear's corner--scaled to a larger Earth, a planet wilder and more distant from the sun..." (340-41). In keeping with the overall effect of the celebration of life-energies and manifestations in the interfacial zone, the very presence of the Hereros in the Zone is tinged with a humorous irreality which makes it impossible for the reader to read a univocally dogmatic judgment on colonization. A ploy by the allied forces to send Germans on a wild-goose chase after a non-existent commando force, named the Schwarzkommado, materializes into real-life in the Zone when the presence of the Hereros becomes known. Gehard Von Gll a.k.a. der Springer, who directed and produced the fake footage of the schwarzkommandos, with the invaluable thespian help of the "autochromatic" Gavin Trefoil, has been ecstatic "since discovering that Schwarzkommado are really in the Zone, leading real, paracinematic lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwarzkommando footage" been ecstatic, thinking it his "mission...to sow in the Zone seeds of reality" (388). Another humorous instance which lightens the Herero "mission of tribal suicide" is the inclusion of a Herero-theme game in the Zwlfkinder Park: "the patch of African desert where every two hours exactly the treacherous natives attac[k] an encampment of General von Trotha's brave men in blue...a great patriotic favorite with children of all ages..." (422). This is not to deny the somber message regarding the potential annihilation of an entire people and manner of life at the hands of the relentless march of masculine technologies. Enzian and the Zone-Hereros' quest for the rocket is a search for

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--24

completing the extermination started by von Trotha, but on their own terms instead of on the terms of Christianity, the narrator tells us "it was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian made none at all" (318). The rocket becomes the Holy text waiting to be discovered, and the Hereros, rocket-technicians all, hope that its revelation will provide a substitute for their own text which has proven inadequate to account for their colonial extermination. At the same time, the Hereros are indulging themselves in vain posturing, being "in love with the glamour of a whole people's suicide--the pose, the stoicism, the bravery" (318). Enzian, being one of the more self-reflective ksetrajnas in the Zone realizes, despite being taught by Weissman that "the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature" (324), that the rocket technologies are always at the mercy of the quirks of nature: "one reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be--how at the mercy of small things...dust that gets in a timer...a film of grease you can't even see, oil from a touch of human fingers..." (362). In a moment which finds him leading a convoy of motorcycles through an industrial ruin, Enzian's ruminations about the true nature of the Rocket for which the Hereros are willing to sacrifice themselves lead him to one of the crucial realizations in the novel: "there floods on Enzian what seems to be an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap...is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order" (520). The bombing becomes part of the process of completion for the construction of this facility, "part of a plan both sides--"sides?"--had always agreed on" (520). Enzian realizes that this factory is the "real Text" whereas the Rocket was a redherring chosen for its symmetries and its seductive "cuteness." Finally, Enzian comes to the terrific paranoid conclusion that: this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--25

technology...by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war...The real crises were crises of allocation and priority [among] different Technologies... [Capitalize] the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible--but it puts you with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are--"" (521) In the light of this revelation, drug-induced as it may well be, it comes as no surprise that the Hereros end up not completing their project of racial suicide, but instead become Zone inhabitants, and "the last we see of the Hereros, the Empty Ones have been neutralized, the tribal death-wish has been suspended, the abortions have stopped" (Fowler 69). This provides a fitting dharmic closure to the Herero story, for the primary ethical injunction is the holding together (dhr means to hold) and sustaining all life-forms. In this context, it is remarkable that there are almost no staged-deaths in the novel. Slothrop comes closest to experiencing the fact of death when he probes in the dark and makes contact with Bianca's naked, hanging corpse. This moment is one amongst the thousands of equally-weighted moments celebrating the multitudinous manifestations of life in Gravity's Rainbow, all of which are provided without the comforting background from which we can issue conventional (i.e.., Western) moral judgments. Finally, Gravity's Rainbow makes for productive reading when read according to the Hindu model of a yagna that celebrates life rather than when read according to the traditional Western model which enshrines "estrangement" in act of writing and reading literature. As a yagna, the novel is a sustained literary performance that celebrates a universe of the self/Self and its potentially infinite manifestations. The novel is par excellence a post-modernist engagement as it provides an arena which destroys the commonplace Western categories of the unified, cohesive self, of intentionality, of the modernist individual who suffers alienation, by mobilizing the transformative potentials of twentieth-century technologies. It is also, again par excellence, a post-colonial text

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--26

which destabilizes the hegemonic centrality of Western discourses by making the ontology which supports them one of many competing ontologies in the Zone. It has been my argument throughout that the novel is best appreciated through the lens of an Hindu ontology, whose description of the universe corresponds with the energy networks circulating within the novel, but also provides a framework which demystifies the mystery of the text, if only by reinvesting it as the Eternal Mystery that must be the cause for enjoyment and celebration. The Hindu framework also supports the impersonal nature of Gravity's Rainbow as a dharmic-ethical yagna dedicated to the spirit of the Purushottama, the lord of all Works, the eternal Self of all Life. Gravity's Rainbow is a text that is marked by uncertainties, gaps and absences. It does not cater to any mechanistic description of events, subverting cause-and-effect. It presents a universe in which all forms of life, from man to mineral, from natural to technological, have the potential for self-realization. It is a celebration of language itself with its range of discourses, from scientific to poetic to hymnic. It is a celebration of technologies, not least amongst which are the technologies of perception, such as cinematography. It is a multi-dimensional interface, constantly reminding the reader that life itself is an interface with a limitless number of potential polarities whose values are arbitrary and reversible. It performs a destruction of hierarchies, equalizing them by exposing to us the prejudices with which we construct our versions of the truth. But at the base of all these operations and more, Gravity's Rainbow celebrates a Hindu vision of the universe in which Death and the Other cease to hold mastery over our conception of being and becoming.
1See

Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Post-modernism and Brian McHale's Postmodernism for excellent discussions of the theoretical differences between modernism and postmodernism evinced in literary writing. See especially Hutcheon's discussion of "historiographic metafiction" and McHale's explanation of the epistemological versus the ontological dominants characterizing, respectively, modernist and postmodernist fiction.

Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.com--27

2The

term "red-shift" refers to the currently accepted scientific theory for the creation of the universe, the Big-Bang theory. Weisenburger explains that the theory describes how light waves from stars in rapid motion away from the point of observation "shift" to infrared color spectra (193). This is proof of expanding universe since all stars observed from earth show the infrared shift, therefore, all stars are moving away from the earth. We must keep in mind that this scientific story of the universe is merely one among others in Gravity's Rainbow, it is not in any way privileged. 3For a listing of the various manifestations of the Supreme Self in Prakriti, see chapter X of the Bhagvada Gita. Krishna emphasizes the following: "Whatever manifested being exists, glorious and vigorous, indeed, understand that in every case he originates from a fraction of my splendor" (X-41, WBG 451). Also, see x29: "Ananta I am, of snakes..." (WBG 439), which resonates, as pointed out earlier, with Kekul's Ourobouros snake. 4The traditional translation for ksetra is "field;" however, I believe that zone approximates the meaning better--regardless of the fact that this makes it more congruous to my discussion of Pynchon's zone. 5Here, Ramanuja's explanation is helpful: "Sages who possess exact knowledge of the body call it experiencing-atman's zone of experience. A person who knows this body and, because of this very knowledge, must be different from his body which is the object of his knowledge, is called a ksetrajnana (knower of the zone) by these sages" (in WBG 529). 6Joseph Slade finds the Hereros' inclusion in the novel as signifying the very creative kernel of Pynchon's opus: "The inception of Gravity's Rainbow probably occurred on the day that Pynchon, while searching for information on Malta for V., stumbled across a New York Public Library "pamphlet volume" containing reports on both the Maltese and the Bondelawarts of South-West Africa. After that fortuitous accident, Pynchon wrote to Thomas F. Hirsch in 1968, he could not forget the Hereros" (29). 7For a useful explanation of Ndjambi Karunga, see Weisenburger 101-02. The mythological traits attributed to the Herero creator resonate with the Hindu conception of the nature of the Purushottama: "the god is also bisexual...while he is thus "the god of life," he is also "the master of death"... 8For an excellent introduction to these and various other schools of thought in Hinduism, see T.M.P. Mahadevan's Outlines of Hinduism (1956). 9See Foucault's discussion in Discipline and Punish, especially the section entitled "Making the individual." 10For a discussion of the "structures of attitude and reference" see Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993). See also, in a related context, Sara Suleri's Rhetoric of English India for an excellent discussion of the imperial strategies of various ways in which colonial certitude was under constant destabilization by the "native" Indian symbolic sublime.

You might also like