Stefan Mattessich

Literature Board
University of California, Santa Cruz
hamglik@sirius.com

 

 

Remedios Varo, “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” 1961. Reprinted by permission.¹

 

Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines....
--Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (11)

 

Near the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas recalls a trip to Mexico City with the recently deceased real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, and in particular an art exhibition she saw there by the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo. The text, in a moment of ekphrastic digression, describes one painting in detail:

 

[I]n the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. (20-1)

 

This room in Varo’s tower assumes for Oedipa the fatal and enigmatic attraction of a destiny from which there is no escape, a point of departure and arrival that exposes the illusion of movement between a here and a there, between life “among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret” (20), California, and the imagined or imaginative freedom of Mexico. Time as both a causal sequence and a signifying chain suffers its catastrophic involution, turns in on itself, immobilizes or suspends the presumption of an animate nature, a substantial self and an autonomous desire. The experience precipitates in Oedipa an immediate paranoia:

 

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried.... She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. (21)

 

If Oedipa’s tower is “only incidental,” however, it is also omnipresent–that is, she finds it everywhere. It is a human condition, the human condition as incidental, as nonessential subordination, remainder, residue or “W.A.S.T.E,” that spectral communication system which Oedipa comes to encounter as a kind of destiny in the novel. Pynchon’s metaphors here signify that displacement or paratactic placement beside or to one side of one’s self that characterizes the feeling of subjection to a fundamentally irrational externality. Oedipa is an incident person, a projection, a kind of hologram whose point of origin, that which “keeps her where she is,” suggests a terrifying complicity between “anonymous” gravitational force and “malignant” social power, between ineluctable physical law and fantasmatic structures actively vitiating (to borrow a Marxian locution) the social field in which self-recognition (as a subject, as a citizen) is possible.² Oedipa’s imprisonment in the tower, at least on one level of implication, cannot be understood apart from this reified estrangement from a labor that quite literally comes to figure the alien object of paranoid investment, and which the paranoid subject can only reconsummate in a continual fabrication of that external world which “keeps her” in her place. To be “incidental” is therefore to experience alienation in the form of a fantasm installed at the center of being, a fantasm that destabilizes any clear sense of the human or the real. The novel specifies this experience a little later on in the figure of Metzger, who relates to Oedipa his dual career as an actor-lawyer in the following terms:

 

"But our beauty lies," explained Metzger, "in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I'm a former actor who became a lawyer. They've done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can't fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly." (33)

 

With this permutative logic, Pynchon weaves a profound textual likeness of life in a differential world of signs, images, filmic doubles, digitized desires, a world effectively transformed into a simulacrum, suspended or orbitalized in the etherous medium of an endless replicability and without any footing in a secured ground. If Oedipa is one of the women in Varo’s tower “embroidering the mantle of the earth,” her peculiar capacity or labor power is limited by this spectrality, transformed into an empty repetition not capable of transcending its own determination from without and so condemned to wallow in a postmodern America generated as if by “magic.” Of course it is not actually generated by magic but, as the text implies, by Oedipa herself in her tower, and the virtuality that Oedipa represents rests upon a simultaneous abstraction from and reduction to material forms of existence that are no less real for the unreality in which they are lived. This is why Oedipa is essentially a machine, a kind of information-processing computer that organizes or links together the elements of the textual world through which “she” seeks answers to the mystery of the Tristero and the underground postal system W.A.S.T.E, much in the same way that Maxwell’s Demon “sorts” molecules and “connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow” (106) for another character in the novel, John Nefastis. In or around Oedipa, that is, the terrifying conspiracy of physis and techne manifests itself, deploys its secret as secret, as the blank and impervious surface of an impossible matter, a matter that does not mean even as it conditions the possibility for signification itself. Submission to gravity, to entropy, to a repetition “automatic as the body itself” (120), to a sign that is pure or unmotivated, constitutes the “destiny” that Oedipa sees figured in Varo’s tower, a destiny so total in its extension that no escape is possible, indeed the desire for escape only apotheosizes the law it seeks to transgress by perfecting the illusion of freedom that supports it.

 

In their seminal and enigmatic work, Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between “technical machines” that are defined extrinsically in terms of their functional use-value or in proportion to how well they work, and “desiring machines” that work only by “continually breaking down” (31). This latter type of machine denotes a structure or system founded upon the internalization of its own difference, an intrinsic boundary or an invaginated contour that makes it no more like a technical machine than it is unlike one. A desiring machine can only oppose its own determination, and this is why it always malfunctions, this is why its fundamental reflex is masochistic, this is why its proper mode is catastrophic or singular, always tending toward its own disappearance. Pynchon’s preoccupation in The Crying of Lot 49 with the process of entropy closely parallels this malfunctioning modality of desiring machines, and suggests a fundamental structural principle of the novel. Oedipa’s attempt at escape through her search for the Tristero (a figure, finally, for the possibility of freedom) enacts a kind of cancer in the body of meaning itself; her “quest” multiplies possible senses of the Tristero and erodes any single truth it might contain. But the “endless, convoluted incest” (14) of repetitious waste generated by the novel cannot be read as a simple neutralization of desire. If this were the case, then The Crying of Lot 49 would only be a technical machine to which the reader/worker is subjected, and not a broken machine that works by metabolizing itself, by becoming a residual supplement within an underground economy of WASTE. The interpretive stakes could not be higher here: one can only read the novel as enacting at the level of expression what it constructs at the level of content by modifying the relation between desire and the machine, by acknowledging an investment of desire in the machine so extreme as to displace the distinction between them (and the category of the human which this distinction supports).

 

This much needs to be said against any “liberal” interpretation of the novel which would confer upon Oedipa the attribute of freedom or spontaneity, the election of a subjectivity which needs only to overcome the accident of its dehumanization in a late capitalist society: “she” never ceases being that machine, never escapes the quotation marks that underscore “her” intrinsic virtuality, “her” constructed and supplemental nature, “her” status not as character but as caricature. The solidity and force of the paranoid moment in Pynchon’s novel is such that it never yields to reason, to community, or to political effectivity. Quite categorically, I would say, no alternative to social repression as it is analyzed in The Crying of Lot 49 can be thought outside that moment of paranoid apprehension. In a sense the novel itself is woven inside Varo’s tower, a proposition which suggests in turn that Varo’s tower stands in metonymically for the entire text, its description of the painting taking on a function of ekphrasis with respect to its own artistic production. If this is so, and if it is not enough simply to assert a thoroughgoing pessimism (or full-blown paranoia) which the novel does no more than sustain, then the stake of freedom (personal or political) that it raises will be found as well in that ekphrasis, encrypted in the painting which figures that peculiar destiny of making a world or constructing the ground upon which a world can be formed, weaving as well a “mantle” in the sense of a covering, an enveloping skin, that cortical interface between inside and outside that is the place of form or the limit where forms appear, where the “coral-like” genesis of structure occurs.³

 

Toward the Tower

 

“Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle” forms the central panel of an autobiographical triptych, and though Pynchon mentions this fact he never expands the allusion or explicitly elaborates on the contextualization it suggests.⁴ The triptych lies dormant in the text not so much in a mode of figurative connotation as of simple displaced absence, buried there in a kind of ghostly obliquity to its signifying systems. It functions as a supplement without necessity to the text, as the negative space of a reference that needs no other support than itself, but which nonetheless conjures a double dimension, an unconscious of that unconscious formed by the act of reference and accessible only through an intertextual (and cross-generic) digression from the novel proper. What one finds in this double unconscious, in this “other” dimension of reference, is a set of parallel themes centered on the possibility of escape. The first panel, entitled “Toward the Tower,”

 

Remedios Varo, “Toward the Tower,”
1961. Reprinted by permission.

 

introduces the “frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, [and] spun-gold hair” of Pynchon’s description emerging from a building of narrow gables set against an umber-colored sky (the same as that identified by Pynchon in the second panel as a “void”). The visual effect of the gables suggests a honeycomb, a fragment of latticework, or more generally a process of algorithmic or polymeric duplication that recurs again in the faces of the young girls, who appear not as individuals but as replicas of each other, a group of identically dressed figures with identically spellbound expressions. Varo’s interest in the triptych is clearly with an automaton-like sameness: the “replicant” girls leave a “replicant” building in a movement toward the tower and the compulsion it represents continually to remake their own oppression. But since the gables also strongly suggest a plurality of towers as the girls’ point of origin, this movement is qualified by an implication of tautology, of a certain motion in place further indicated by the fact that all the girls are riding bicycles, and so evoke in the very act of “cycling” a static immobility.

 

This condition of arrested or static motion seems universal in the first two panels and clearly expresses the girls’ lack of freedom, their subordination to sinister overseers (the man carrying a bag full of crows, the woman in a nun’s habit, the man in the tower holding an open book over an hourglass-shaped container from which the filaments of thread used by the girls to embroider the earth’s mantle are taken), and their palpable alienation in the work they perform. Conjoined with the visual motif of repetition, then, is a focus on forced labor, on an activity of production or creation subsumed under a requirement of regimentation and panoptic management, of an almost bureaucratic routine extending even into the bodies and minds of the producers. But if the story Varo tells here is about the artist constrained by a uniform and mechanical production, what she means by artistic (or productive) freedom cannot be understood in terms of a simple opposition to that constraint.

 

The theme of escape is introduced in the first panel by a small detail: one of the girls does not look straight ahead as the others do, but glances to her left out of the painting and back at the viewer in a scarcely perceptible deviation from an almost catatonic norm. This deviation is significant for its very slightness, the fact that it manifests itself in a mode of diminution or subtle variation, not as a constituted difference from the rote repetitiousness of work, but as a difference in repetition or repetition with a difference that becomes the essentially tautological movement of an emancipatory desire. In this light, Varo’s triptych cannot be interpreted solely as a representation of an unfree dissimulation or doubleness characteristic of that political economy of the sign that obtains in modern societies, but rather as inherently dissimulatory and double, inherently catatonic, invested in its own (machinic) repetitiousness as the ground for any escape it might make possible.

 

To put this another way, escape for Varo will be art as production and as thing produced, as the making of the triptych and as the triptych itself; it will be this glance out of the world of the painting that makes the painting itself worldly or material, only its materiality will consist in elements of simulation or fantasy, in virtual or “as-if” effects that are never “vitiated” even when they become double in their self-conscious apprehension as the necessary conditions for achieving artistic freedom. The triptych dramatizes art as escape, then, only by raising a further question about the nature of fantasy and the simulacral, or only by disrupting the semiotic claim to signify a “real” world which can be felt in meaning itself, in the attribution of truth to a particular event, situation or identity (even when that identity is as an “artist”). It is this complicity between signification and the real, between truth and self-identity or self-presence, that the triptych disrupts in its surreal emphasis upon the girls as replicated or several. If this disruption indeed lets its effects be felt in the paintings, then it leads to a quite different reading of that multiplicity: not only does it reflect their alienated relation to the means of production, but it also expresses an almost schizophrenic subjectivity lived in the ambiguous shifting between “she” and “they.” The girls are all the same girl, that is, they exist only in terms of each other. They constitute holograms repeating the whole in each part, making each part or fragment a totality as such, a complete part or complete incompletion enclosing a process and a result, a processive result, a product that changes or that indexes in itself a motion predicated upon the immobilizing passage within its own object-nature or objectification. The triptych, then, profoundly treats the artist-producer’s relation to a reified and alienated socius not from a place of non-perspectival privilege, but from within the socius’s own deepest tendencies, and this inclusiveness informs a production bearing on the world itself, producing not just particular things, external differences or even simulacra seen as self-contained within a horizon of realistic expectation, but the real as a simulacrum or as the exposure of its own boundary, its own fundamental constructedness.

 

For this perhaps “convoluted” reading to be persuasive, then, the possibility of escape held out by Varo will have to pass through the world made by the artist-producer or within the woven mantle which serves both as the world’s ground (in its function as an interior layer of the earth) and as its peripheral limit (in its function as a covering or skin). The central panel of the triptych rejoins the thematic of minimal variation or

 

Detail from
“Embroidering Earth’s
Mantle.”

 

difference in repetition by once again skewing the eyes of the girl farthest to the left of the tower. Her expression, more cunning than her predecessor’s, here registers a consciousness of her overseer and the impassive suppression of guilt. What has she done? In what Varo herself, commenting on the triptych, describes as the girl’s “trick,”⁵ one fold of the mantle flowing out from the slit window just underneath her station discloses two tiny upside-down figures within the enlacing branches of bare trees, “woven” literally and figuratively together in an attitude of embrace. These two eminently textual and textural lovers become the central figures of the third panel, entitled appropriately enough “The Escape,” which shows them standing in a vehicle of indeterminate type (it resembles in inverted form the umbrella-like rudder controlled by the woman, but also suggests in its hairy texture some kind of vegetal or animal matter) as it conveys them upwards toward mountain peaks and a clearing sky of yellow light.⁶This line of

 

Remedios Varo, “The Escape,”
1961. Reprinted by permission.

 

flight drawn through the three paintings does not go by way of a simple transcendence any more than it indicates a “real” freedom from a simulacral labor, from repetition or from fantasy. It delineates what Deleuze would call an “abstract line” generated at the point where the tension between form and matter, figure and ground, surface and depth, center and periphery collapses and gives way to a generalized non-distinction, to a formal, figural or structural difference that is internal to itself and so not determinable in an empirical sense.⁷ For the girl who makes her escape, for the artist who makes her escape, and for the triptych that constitutes their collective escape, this internal difference undermines the self-identity of escape, opens it/her/them to an otherness or to a world from which no escape is possible except through this opening, this singular experience in being, in art, in structure, in meaning, of a fundamental alterity and displacement rendering what is “real” virtual in its essence.⁸

 

To account for Varo’s triptych in its molecular details (its repetitions, its multiplicities, its automata, its production of the real or of the ground of the real, its peculiar escape) requires a different understanding of what constitutes being, such that it no longer conditions a simple opposition between a living present and a simulacral or spectral logic.⁹ It requires that one do without this opposition and grasp the singularity of the “real” in its impossible possibility, as a form of expression that does not signify or presuppose the Saussurean structure of the sign.¹⁰ Instead of counterposing to a “transcendent” signifier (whose relation to its signifieds can only be one of dominance) an empirical or imaginary content, Varo’s triptych suggests what Deleuze and Guattari call a “collective assemblage of enunciation” subsuming within its form variables or “flows” of a semiotic, material and social kind no one of which is privileged over the other and no one of which is intelligible in isolation. The “subject” in general becomes this collective assemblage producing a world (in speech, in acts, in art, in writing) that does not differ from that production (i.e., of the world in which “you” appear), or rather from a production of production itself which appears only in a “free” indirect discourse without agency or authorship.¹¹ The “outside,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, “has no image, no signification, no subjectivity” (A Thousand Plateaus 23), only this machinic co-implication or lived displacement in discourse, only this mode of radical becoming which is “imperceptible” precisely in its perceptibility, disappearing in the act of its appearance. This catastrophic ontology (or this catastrophe for ontology) serves as a clear subtext for Varo’s triptych insofar as it relates the making of a world to a virtual contour or intensive trait, and insofar as it implies in its multiplicities an inclusive relation to the world which one becomes. “Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde),” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract” (A Thousand Plateaus 280). To make a world is therefore to make the world become, to make it the movement of a free difference or a nun that is always other than itself, but that also is this otherness in its positivity, apart from a negative economy of lack or of the “transcendent” signifier (distributing its effects of meaning from on high, by virtue of its detachment from the signifying chain).

 

To posit movement in this way, however, also implies a certain immobilization or stasis which Varo’s triptych could be said to thematize in the vehicular nature of the escape it constructs. It implies a formal movement akin to what Deleuze and Guattari call nomadism. “The nomad,” they write, “is…he who does not move,” or rather, “the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving…. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a ‘stationary’ process, station as process–these traits…are eminently those of the nomad” (A Thousand Plateaus 381). Such an arrested movement also expresses a discursive time: the time of a writing that is flush with the real, a writing that materially writes, a writing that writes the real in a book as an “assemblage with the outside” rather than as a representation or “image of the world.”¹² The dynamics of Varo’s triptych–tautological or stationary movement, the girl at her station weaving (writing) a mantle or a flow that is the earth–raise as a central issue the relation between art and the world, in particular as it is focalized in the book held up by the man in the tower. This book, it can be inferred, functions as a kind of instructional manual or plan for the process of embroidering the earth’s mantle, and the man appears in this light not simply as a manager or foreman but as a priest interpreting the book by whose representations the world will be formed. The condition of oppression from which the girl desires to escape is coded in terms of a specific model of discourse, a mimesis of the book or labor according to bookish rules which the paintings attempt to disrupt. That this disruption assumes a “nomadic” form, and that its stake is nothing less than a production of the real, indicates not a freedom from the world of the book but the latter’s transformation, its rewriting in terms that include the outside as an internal difference or in its textual/textural singularity.

 

At stake, in other words, is not a real or living present opposable to representation any more than it is a representation opposed to the present, but an art or a book in whose temporal dimension a “becoming everybody/everything” is played out.¹³ As a result, the first index of any escape afforded by the book as an assemblage will be its indistinguishability from its condition of servitude, its relative success in passing through the world without distinction, repeating but not simply reproducing the separateness of the individual in his or her essence, in an identity which can only experience itself against an existential ground which is not different from it.¹⁴ The nature of escape for Varo (and for Pynchon, as I will shortly argue) hinges upon this desubjectification of art, of the book. It manifests itself not in a detachment from a simulacral labor, or from a “postmodern” human condition, but in a complicity that registers an experience of non-distinction or nomadic spatiality, an in-different freedom in difference itself, an almost masochistic incorporation or encryption of the world that constitutes a refusing desire in the face of social repression.

 

Oedipa’s Night Journey: Repetition, Language and Desire

 

This kind of theoretical insight informs a quite different reading of The Crying of Lot 49 than that which starts from a condition of alienation which Oedipa attempts to overcome (even if she does not succeed and even if it is only the reader who experiences “escape” in the form of a catharsis). The novel must first be situated within this logic of the assemblage, of an internal difference, of the displaced opposition between the living present and the simulacral, of a discursive time disclosing in its dimension the abstract lines or intensive traits of a drama about making worlds or about the production of the real. Only in this light can the investments of the novel in its own convolutions, impenetrable enigmas and simulacral effects be seen for the peculiar desire and freedom they evoke. The point, the moral resonance, of Oedipa’s story consists not in a particular content, not in moments of recognition that lay bare (or fail to lay bare) the simulacra that separate her from a genuine relation to her world, but in its parodies of that recognition, its fabulating ironies which always impede communication or ambiguate meanings, its continual reflux back toward its own textuality in a movement itself expressive of the only “human” condition that can be shared in the novel.

 

This, then, is the central premise I would like to substantiate for The Crying of Lot 49: that the basis for any escape from Oedipa’s tower, for any freedom from the malignancy of social power in a postmodern America, or for any redemption of public space or political agency implied in the novel, is precisely the latter’s refusal to mean, its self-objectification or textual reflexivity as a book that attempts to write the postmodern world in a non-opposable language. Such a refusal governs the ambivalent tension which quite literally holds Pynchon’s words in place, a tension with which one reads statements like this one by Dr. Hilarius, the renegade psychoanalyst turned psycho whom Oedipa had hoped would “talk [her] out of [the] fantasy” of the Tristero. His advice:

 

"Cherish it!... What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be." (138)

 

Dr. Hilarius can hardly be a less reliable voice in the novel than he is at this point (barricaded in his house, shooting at bystanders, hinting at his sinister role as a psychiatric intern in Nazi death camps), but at the same time his admonition cannot simply be dismissed as yet another symptom of alienation and escapism. The novel acknowledges the power of his contention that fantasy is necessary for being by encasing it in a fantasm of its own, and by deliberately modulating its tone into a farcical register. The value Dr. Hilarius places on fantasy becomes for Oedipa another clue that, far from simplifying her situation or clarifying its mystery, only compounds the problem, knots her deeper into the mystery, and further exacerbates the paralysis which she feels slowly overtaking her (“trapped,” as the text will put it, “at the centre of some intricate crystal” [92]). This means that fantasy works to retard signification in a double sense: as a symptom but also as a breakdown of the symptom, as Pynchon’s diagnosis of postmodern America and as the refusal of diagnosis itself, or of the objectivity claimed by the diagnostician. The subtext of Dr. Hilarius’s insanity is thus this erosion of truth-claims made by the master (analyst or doctor, author or critic) presumed to know, and at the level of expression no less than at the level of content. This is why the text so emphatically highlights its own absurdity: for not only does it represent the absurdity of its culture, it also enacts that absurdity from within. The novel is Dr. Hilarius in this passage, reacting in the modes of violent scandal recapitulated by a tabloid and TV-dominated society (the form would be: “man suddenly goes crazy, arms himself with guns, massacres innocent people, film at 11”) to the alienation that society provokes.

 

In other words, the novel, in reacting to its own alienation, also compounds it in the same fantasmatic or virtual gesture by which it cogently indicates its escape. The function of paranoia in the novel (Hilarius’s, Oedipa’s, or Pynchon’s) is to ground this double valence in an immanent relation to the world it describes. The text renders its own paranoia schizophrenic, encases it in an inclusive structure of multiple determination and centrifugal effects. This plural dynamic of becoming the world (or, like Mucho Maas on LSD, “a whole roomful of people”) entails not that the schizoid text oppose its own totalizing paranoid moment, but that it take on the external or exclusive difference that denies its own inclusiveness, that it therefore deny itself, submit itself to the “rising” ground of a figure that can only be masochistic and singular, that can only be groundless, turning in an abyssal space of unmotivated signs or paraleptic meanings. This figure is exemplified in The Crying of Lot 49 by the Tristero, or even more concretely by the post horn, insofar as it flashes its signs in a displaced and elliptical phenomenality. What it signifies is a world experienced in a state of displacement that Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow will call “preterition,” a “passed over” or dynamically repressed modality of being predicated on an unconscious that belongs to consciousness or that knows no difference between them. This modality exemplifies what Deleuze calls a “second power of consciousness” raised in the act of a repetition which implies “not a second time but the infinite which belongs to a single time, the eternity which belongs to an instant, the unconscious which belongs to consciousness, the ‘nth’ power” (Difference and Repetition 8).¹⁵ The preterite tense is “bygone,” archaic, a reference to a dead past, but it is what Oedipa becomes when she “pursu[es] strange words in Jacobean texts” (104), for instance, or when she yields to an aestheticizing hermeneutic desire in her search for the Tristero. She brings the dead to life, as it were, to a “life-death” that is inherently simulacral or textual, a textual mode of living. Deleuze’s work on a repetition of singular or unrepeatable things turns the concept in on itself, makes it intensive, sediments the moment of repetition with “levels” at which the “whole” of time is repeated not successively but “at once” (Difference and Repetition 83) or simultaneously. The “unconscious” is not “below” but “lifted” into the surface, “belonging to consciousness” in the same way that time “inheres” in the moment of repetition (the model for this present moment is a diachronic cone tapering into a synchronic virtual point). The post horn scrawled on latrine walls, doodled on Yoyodyne stationery, inset on rings, printed on stamps, recycled in dreams, graffiteed in a San Francisco bus or tattooed on a sailor’s hand expresses a structure of clandestine communication which is nonetheless omnipresent, everywhere inscribed in the “malignant, deliberate replication” (124) of post horn symbols that dissimulate an underground that may or may not exist, that indeed may be itself dissembling or apocryphal. The post horn is then dissimulation as such, appearance as a weave of ambiguous signs which does not stand over and against the real, but in which the real appears or becomes legible as a text.

 

There is nothing outside the text in The Crying of Lot 49, and no place in it from which to guarantee an immunity from its mediations or its fantasms. But at the same time that the real is textual, the textual is also real, it “signifies” a condition that every character in the novel shares. They are all triste, all “wretched” and “depraved” (the etymology is given in these terms on page 102), all expressed in the system of simulacra known as the Tristero, so that what Oedipa (and the novel she structures) seeks is finally her (its) own implication in the underground that may not exist, in the world that she (it) projects and that claims her (it) precisely in its uncertainty. The object of this textual desire focalized in Oedipa is Oedipa herself (the novel itself) in her (its) otherness or non-self-identity; it is therefore strangely anoedipal in nature, grasped in its approach to a limit where meanings and bodies break down, where words and things lose the stability of their difference and begin to flow together.¹⁶ Pynchon quite literally writes this flow in the long hallucinogenic episode of Oedipa’s night journey through San Francisco, which in the following excerpt becomes a musical “score.”

 

At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it... came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but the tourists to see. (117-8)

 

The city described here belongs to Oedipa, it is “hers,” her city, the city ofOedipa, and the consequent sense of “safe-passage” she feels at large in it conditions its transformation into a vast organism, a living thing “made up” of “words and images,” a text-body that is strangely abstract, without affect or impersonal, breathing and pumping blood yet chimerical, a virtual city woven out of repetitious symbols as empty and unreal as Oedipa herself (or the novel itself). The text goes on:

 

Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of [post horn] symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo--any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. (118)

 

Oedipa’s fugue-like passage within the text-city or within the text-body of herself as city begins with a lack of “touch,” of the skin’s or the hand’s abstraction from the sensuous capacities that indicate an animate nature. The city and Oedipa in it become an inanimate “repetition of symbols” that is not “traumatic,” that is posed not as the extinction of desire but as the ground for a pleasure that is indifferent yet “lovely beyond dreams.” In this way Pynchon describes the allure of an interpretive labor that, as an end in itself, is also immaculate, a pulchritudo vaga that seals Oedipa in an almost psychotic hermeticism. If Oedipa “means” an ability to remember or recognize, then that very ability finds itself assumed into the peculiar lightness of her world, transformed into “toy streets” she sees from the detachment of a “high balcony,” or with the conditioned appetite of animals in a zoo. Oedipa’s desire is caught in “roller coaster” cycles of a culture geared to incite and satisfy a “death-wish” in its subjects, to direct desire toward objects that empty its “consummation” of any substance. To “submit” to the destiny of a remembering that nonetheless cannot remember, or that is infinitely attenuated, implies a movement as or more ineluctable than gravity, an orbitalized desire that immobilizes not only Oedipa but the novel with its own repetition of symbols and its own fascination with the Tristero.

 

So there is no escape from that repetition, and indeed for Oedipa and for The Crying of Lot 49 it will have “to be enough.” What follows from this is that one must understand the nature and function of repetition more clearly. What the post horns repeat, what Oedipa repeats, what the text repeats, is the empty form desire takes in contemporary culture. But as this repetition approaches the relative limit of a death-wish that must always reconstitute itself (to want again), Pynchon’s text discloses what could be called an absolute or asignifying limit at which grammatic and semantic structure loses its edge or begins to blur. A zero degree can be felt in the language in the same way that the executrix Oedipa, upon first encountering Inverarity’s complex legacy, notices a “sense of buffering, insulation,… an absence of intensity, as if watching a movie just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist had refused to fix” (20). The Crying of Lot 49 is also just perceptibly out of focus, slightly approximate in its diction, a feature which can be glimpsed in the above-quoted passage’s occasionally lapsed article or ambiguously deployed pronoun. Language begins to erode its own sense or substantive content as it plays out its submission to the “voluptuous field” of its repetitions, and in the process the text becomes a travesty of its own truth-claims, the warp and woof of potentially empty meanings or of an impenetrably parodic “matter” that always obtains or never changes insofar as it is the static condition for change itself, a textual hyle that bears its determination inside itself, or that appears in an in-differentiated form.

 

Like Oedipa, then, the novel presents a curious detachment and levity (implied even in her name) that complicates the desire it dramatizes in the Oedipal search for a signifier that is not “transcendent” so much as triste, depraved, low, looked for in undergrounds or in depths that are flat, brought to the surface of a transparent consciousness “meant to remember” the secrets with which it is coextensive. This immanent reading of the object (i.e., language itself, iterative, abstract but isomorphic with the real) taken by desire in the novel suggests even as an imperative that one read escape or freedom from Oedipa’s tower not in contradiction with an alienated socius, but as that socius encased within a form of expression that (re)doubles its alienation, citing or incorporating its orbitalized effects until they metabolize, become residual or excremental signs in an economy of WASTE. Language (or writing) is strung through the body in the process of becoming the alternative or “shadow” system that Oedipa witnesses only in an exacerbated degradation on the streets of San Francisco:

 

So it went. Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a facially-deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason, dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuouso stomach to accept also lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccoes and waxes in a hopeless attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too late; and even another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city's still-lighted windows, searching for who knew what specific image. (123)

 

In this series of encounters, Oedipa looks and listens for her own belonging to the system of WASTE it implies–not its reality or real support for which she cannot find adequate assurances (but which is really there behind the appearances), but the perverse or denatured “interregnum” that it constitutes for time itself, the discontinuous space or gap in structure that renders it paratactic, displaced in its place, double, spectral or self-parodic. Oedipa takes her place within this series precisely by displacing herself, by loving the repetition of symbols, by desiring texts, and by failing to find any unmediated connection in a common ground or shared public space. What she seeks is not this common ground but the secret of disconnection that nonetheless communicates, the broken machine that links only by unlinking, that posits as the basis for community a reversal of communal values or the “assimilation” of an outside that is absolute and originary. In this light, the welder who “cherishes” his ugliness, the child who “misses” a “death before birth,” the Negro woman “dedicated” to “rituals of miscarriage,” the night-watchman swallowing commodities, and the two voyeurs looking for their “specific images” together indicate a desire not simply trapped in passive cycles of consumption, but actively seeking to undo the structure of repression in which it is caught, indeed from which it is not different. Laid over the “death-wish” implicit in each “species of withdrawal” (123) Pynchon enumerates in Oedipa’s Walpurgisnacht is another theory of the death drive, another kind of repetition compulsion than that which presumes a material model of return to inanimate states.¹⁷ Repetition in the above passage abrogates the natural and human functions of sociality, reproduction and digestion; it marks in the text-body a refusal or breakdown of its own organic constitution. But it accomplishes this refusal not through a process of externalization so much as by incorporating, like the night-watchman, the products of a world that reduces desire to its most material (and empty) form. Desire for the inanimate (or as the inanimate) in Pynchon’s novel (and in all his work) has to be seen in this double light to contract two death instincts, two repetitions, two limits, for only in this doubleness can the desire of the text appear in its excessive expenditures, in its masochistic transgressions of its own realism and truth.

 

Oedipa’s and the novel’s desire is double: it repeats itself, it repeats itself repeating, it repeats repetition. This nomadic movement in place designates the central ekphrastic dynamic of the text, the precise way it feels itself into the world of forever deferred revelation it describes. Freedom from Oedipa’s tower occurs only through this movement, never against it, never in reaction to it, for to do so would be to destroy the implicate and broken structure of the novel which is its critique of contemporary America. Repetition for its own sake, repetition as an end in itself, repetition at the surface of the text in all its slightness, all its insubstantiality, but also all its brutality, expresses a force at the heart of desire that seeks an end to desire itself (understood as captured within a logic of consumption), a neutral or displaceable energy that verges on a digitized automaticity. This is one way to read the “great digital computer” through which Oedipa walks at the novel’s end, sorting Oedipa’s world into ones and zeros:

 

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeros and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.... Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. (181-2)

 

Oedipa’s conundrum presumes here a digitization at the level of expression, so that the indecision she suffers between “transcendent meanings” and “just America” does not entail a choice between the world as computer or the world as human or public space. The binary choice she faces, in other words, is not between paranoia and something else, since paranoia already figures the ground or frame for choice itself, for any formulation of agency one might attach to her example. The machinic nature of the human precedes any determination of its spontaneity and freedom, and this is why Oedipa’s desire for escape cannot be thought outside or in reaction to her encasement in a machine of generalized communication. On the contrary, this encasement must be seen as the condition for that desire and in two senses: as the cause of her alienation and as the medium for her escape, as the stimulus for an escape from the nexus of power relations that constitutes social repression and an escape in that nexus, within the structures of power from which she is not different. The possibility of freedom held out by the novel hinges on the precise function of this preposition in,or rather on the co-implicate or coincident structure exemplified by the novel itself where it achieves its peculiar effect of orbitalized meanings.

 

The Crying of Lot 49 does not choose one or the other of the possibilities confronted by Oedipa at the “crying of lot 49”; it chooses the impasse as such, it presents the tautological circle of that double bind as the vehicle for its escape and the condition for any coherent activity of dissent. This elliptical and repetitious textual ambivalence signals a desire that includes the world and that refuses its own exemption or election in it, a preterite desire that takes the world as its object in all its “promise, productivity, betrayal.” By weaving or inscribing in its very texture the empty form of a “wasteful” signification, the novel discloses the incorporating, encrypting link between desire and a masochism that governs the underground or unconscious of the Tristero. This masochistic desire in turn links Oedipa to her world and makes her one of those outsiders who communicate via W.A.S.T.E. The impingement of non-meaning in the text therefore assumes a new insistence or urgency in the allegiance it suggests to an experience which is residual, left over, or paratactically displaced, an experience in which experience itself becomes indeterminate or unlocatable.

 

To grasp the linkages, the empathic connections, the asymptotic convergences, the calculus of simultaneity that can be observed in Pynchon’s novel is then to center analysis on its disjunctive nature, to underscore the lack of “touch” upon which it everywhere insists as the condition for any “coming together.” It is also to resist recuperative readings that define desire (Oedipa’s and the text’s) as a search for meaning, for identity, or for the recovery of a dispossessed communal space. Oedipa is not a “heroine” in this sense, not the locus of a potential agency capable of wresting her culture from its postmodern catastrophe.¹⁸ Or rather, she is this heroine in a parody, and one can only emphasize the heroic aspect of her character in the context of its parodic quotation, for otherwise one misses the very political point about the nature of dispossessed communities and the bonds (bindings, Bindungen) on which they are based. If The Crying of Lot 49 can be said to contribute in its emphasis upon escape to the theorization of political freedom or of a genuinely public space in America today, it does so by giving us a glimpse of what a rhizomatic “experience” might look like. I do not imply by this that Pynchon has embedded in his text some “real” content which the reader might salvage and claim as its political message, but neither do I mean to occlude the “real” behind the signifier, or confer upon language the monolithic character of a metalanguage. Pynchon’s novel is an attempt to write the displacement of the difference between the real and the simulacral, and as such to imagine the world that follows from that displacement both in its vitiating effects and in its desiring modes. The politics of the novel consists in its formal displacement of that difference, for only with it does the “community” of “people” who “communicate” through WASTE come into being.

 

Notes

 

1. Each of the four Remedios Varo images in this article is reproduced by permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS). These images are protected by copyright law. The following are prohibited by law: (1) Any theatrical, televised, or public display or performance, including transmission of any Image over a network, excepting a local area network; (2) The preparation of any derivative work, including the whole or in part, of any Images without the permission of ARS.

 

2. Vitiation describes for Marx the inverse relation under capitalism between the worker and his labor power (expressed both in the product and in the activity of production). “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force” (134). To the alienation of the thing is added the alienation of the worker from himself or from his “species life” conceived as his implicate relation to the “inorganic” world. Ideally, “[t]he object of labor is… the objectification of man’s species life; for he no longer reproduces himself merely intellectually, as in consciousness, but actively and in a real sense, and he sees his own reflection in a world which he has constructed” (140). Work within a capitalist order, however, “vitiates” this self-reflection in the constructed world by taking away the worker’s species life, his real objectivity as a species-being, his produced and producing relation to an inorganic body, to his “belonging” within an inclusive and interdependent nature.

 

3. The problem of coral reef formation confronted by biologists up to Charles Darwin centered on the fact that corals, in Darwin’s terms, “require for their growth a solid foundation within a few fathoms of the surface” of the sea (Coral Reefs 128). Since the likelihood of geologic foundations as uniformly present at or near the ocean’s surface as the global distribution of reefs would indicate is scant, Darwin proposed a correlation between reef growth and a rising sea level, arguing that coral grows at a limited depth, dies as the sea rises, and so provides its own foundation. This coral-like production of the foundation at the surface is suggestive for the kind of structure I am interested in here, which supposes a non-distinction between ground and figure, inside and outside, as its basis. Deleuze refers this figure internal to its own ground to the concept of “difference in itself,” a difference grasped not as a displacement in space (i.e., external or extensive in nature), but intensively and inclusively, opening the figure up to an intensive field of variable and differential relations which serves as an abyssal ground isomorphic to its own limit (Difference and Repetition 21-2). Deleuze and Guattari’s work on acentered or rhizomatic systems not defined “by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and bi-univocal relations between the positions” (A Thousand Plateaus 21), rests upon the concept of an intensive field that renders a system simultaneous with each of its parts, multi-levelled or multi-dimensional, and expressed in the singular movement of an absolute or “free” difference.

 

4. See Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys (20-3), for an account of the triptych in relation to Varo’s life as an artist.

 

5. This is quoted in the book Remedios Varo by Octavio Paz; cited in Kaplan (21).

 

6. This vehicle is one of many fascinating machines that recur in Varo’s work, and that conspicuously offer a means of conveyance which leaves its passengers in a state of suspension (they are often standing or sitting as they move, float or hover through a painting), and sometimes they even include towers or (usually circular) domiciles in their construction.

 

7. I am attempting here an economic formulation of Kant’s paradox of internal sense, inflected through Deleuze’s reading of difference in itself. For him, difference as such can be understood as a form differentiated from a ground that does not in turn differentiate itself from the form, with the result that the ground “rises” to the surface and “dissolves” the form’s empirical and symbolic content, rendering it empty. Difference is no longer grasped “between” two things in a classificatory manner, but in the “autonomous existence” of the rising ground that comprehends its own limit (Difference and Repetition 21-2). With this displacement, forms (whether of matters, substances, subjects or objects, of meanings in the broadest sense) assume a certain concrete abstraction or intensive nature apprehensible only as that internal difference which articulates into the structure of being an originary otherness or alterity. An “abstract line” (referred to by Deleuze in conjunction with a brief discussion of Odilon Redon, whose work intersects Varo’s in thematic as well as technical ways) would be the contour of this singular form or of the intensive trait which it becomes once it is no longer opposable to other forms. The object so defined, whether it be of thought, of desire, or of labor–the materiality of things in themselves–assumes a virtual or subtle being which Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize in terms of differential forces, intensive fields and bodies without organs.

 

8. Varo evokes this singular experience or “abstract line” through techniques, first innovated by Surrealist artists like Max Ernst and Varo’s friend Oscar Dominguez, of decalcomania, which entails blowing and blotting paint on the canvas in such a way that color intensifies and contours assume an ambiguous definition (Kaplan 122). This effect is prominent in the texture of yellow, foliage-like fog on which the lovers rise in “The Escape.”

 

9. Derrida writes in Specters of Marx that a political being or political event (his example is the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989) cannot be understood today “as long as one relies on the simple (ideal, mechanical, or dialectical) opposition of the real presence of the real present or the living present to its ghostly simulacrum, the opposition of the effective or actual to the non-effective, inactual, which is also to say, as long as one relies on a general temporality or an historical temporality made of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves…” (70). For Derrida in this text, ontology can no longer be thought in adequately historicized terms as referring to determined contents, but must be grasped in a self-reflexive temporal and discursive dimension that he links to ghosts, specters, the work of mourning, etc.

 

10. Deleuze and Guattari’s polemic against the signifier’s “arbitrary” and biunivocal relation to its signifieds rests upon their contention that the (Saussurean) sign cements an idealist system of representation. They identify two “dimensions” in the work of Saussure: “one horizontal, where the signified is reduced to the value of coexisting minimal terms into which the signifier decomposes; the other vertical, where the signifier is elevated to the concept corresponding to the acoustic image–that is, to the voice, taken in its maximum extension, which recomposes the signifier” (emphasis mine) (Anti-Oedipus 207). In the grid formed by the two axes of value and concept, “the signifier appears twice, once in the chain of elements in relation to which the signified is always a signifier for another signifier, and a second time in the detached object on which the whole chain depends, and that spreads over the chain the effects of signification.” This “detached object” gaurantees the meanings it organizes in virtue of its absence from the signifying chain, and so introduces a second order sign, a “sign of the sign” that can be grasped only in terms of an idealist or metalinguistic domination. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari speak of the signifier as “transcendent,” a usage I am following here.

 

11. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then become clear that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so. It is for this reason that indirect discourse, especially ‘free’ indirect discourse, is of exemplary value; there are no clear, distinctive contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individuated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation, but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their shifting distributions within discourse. Indirect discourse is not explained by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single voice…” (A Thousand Plateaus 80). This formulation of an enunciative “assemblage” resonates in The Crying of Lot 49 with Mucho Maas’s LSD-inspired “spectrum” (or immanent plane of movement) on which being becomes a matter of multiplicities (or “whole roomfuls of people” [143]). More formally, it works itself out in the novel’s intertextual excesses, exemplified by Oedipa’s reading excursions through “The Courier’s Tragedy,” the text’s propensity for breaking out into parodic song, or its punning word-play around, for instance, names like “Oedipa Maas,” “Dr. Hilarius,” “Mike Fallopian,” “Pierce Inverarity,” etc.

 

12. The difference between the book and the assemblage-as-book is analagous to that more celebrated difference between arborescent and rhizomatic systems. For Deleuze and Guattari, “The first type of book is the root-book: the tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, as signifying and subjective organic interiority….” (5). The “fascicular root” proceeds, by contrast, to “abort” the “principal root” and graft onto it an “indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots” that grow rhizomorphically, and support a “modern” text that is asignifying, asubjective, and anorganic (5).

 

13. For Deleuze and Guattari, this process entails a “transparency” in the world that makes being a matter of passing or impersonation. “Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible” (280).

 

14. This is a restatement in other terms of the Deleuzian paradox of a rising ground. A subject experiences the uniqueness of its “essence” only in terms of an existence that is that essence, or only in the empty form of an indifferent existence which invades the autonomy of the “I” and articulates it through time. This point is made forcefully by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Experience of Freedom. Man’s egocentrism, Nancy maintains, entails a “concentration in itself” of being and a setting apart of the subject’s essence in what Hegel calls “a hatred of existence” (14). This unfreedom or “evil,” however, is the “first discernible positivity”of freedom and can only be understood in a co-implicate or “masochistic” relation that renders the “experience” of freedom singular or imperceptible, not a constituted difference, attribute or mode but an internal difference calling forth a particular kind of deconstructive apprehension. Experience for Nancy, indeed, needs to be defined in its “nomadic” singularity or imperceptibility, not in extension but intensively and according to a differential logic (145).

 

15. Pynchon uses the word preterition in its Puritan sense to refer to the “damned” as opposed to the elect members of a community (204 and passim). Like the “wretched” of the Tristero, the preterite characters of Gravity’s Rainbow are living repression at an elliptical surface, strangely flush with the real from which they are displaced. Preterition for Pynchon is analogous, I think, to repetition for Deleuze, since both concepts bear on the past, on history as contemporaneous with the present in a discursive temporal dimension.

 

16. Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition of a reflux of libido upon the self in narcissism which suggests for Freud the formation of a “desexualized, neutral and displaceable energy” (112). Deleuze isolates in this energy a function of emptying subjectivity, of hollowing out the space of the self, of rendering its body virtual. What this energy precipitates in its immateriality is what Deleuze and Guattari call the “pure continuity that any one sort of matter ideally possesses” (Anti-Oedipus 36) or the “unformed, unorganized, nonstratified or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities” (A Thousand Plateaus 43). The underlying idea here is similar to an infinite substance in Spinoza’s sense, matter as intensive rather than extensive, differential rather than substantial. My own use of this idea emphasizes the relation of this “empty” desire to language and textuality, echoing a Derridean formulation of a heterological drive or “force” of “disappropriation” (The Postcard 352) that cannot be defined (as self-identical or present to itself) and that therefore manifests itself in an always interpretive textual mode. See Derrida’s analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in “To Speculate–on ‘Freud'” in The Postcard.

 

17. Deleuze’s reading of Freud in Difference and Repetition and Masochism focuses on the nature of the death instinct. For Deleuze, “Death does not appear in the objective model of an indifferent matter to which the living would ‘return’; it is present in the living in the form of a subjective and differential experience endowed with its prototype. It is not a material state; on the contrary, having renounced all matter, it corresponds to a pure form: the empty form of time” (Difference and Repetition 113). This death instinct is also linked by Deleuze to the desexualized energy discussed in footnote 15.

 

18. See Peter Euben’s analysis of The Crying of Lot 49 in The Tragedy of Political Theory for an example of the recuperative reading I have in mind. Euben compares Oedipa’s story to Oedipus’s “search for meaning and identity” (284) and claims for her a power of mediation between opposites (male and female, difference and sameness, low and high cultures, “exile” and “incest”) which signify the two limit-cases between which a political identity and community can be founded. She functions as a kind of Hermes-like messenger and so as a figure for analogy itself, for the linking or structural principle of an alternative social and political system symbolized by the Tristero. But for Oedipa to be the “founding mother who can save America” (303), for her to be the linchpin of an alternative social, political, sexual and psychological structure not undone by the simulacra of contemporary society, she must be “real,” just as the Tristero and the WASTEful system it signifies must be a “genuine society of communicants in which real information is exchanged and real diversity sustained” (303). That is, the kind of alternative system Euben has in mind cannot tolerate the ambivalence that nonetheless marks the novel throughout and expresses its economy of waste (which is precisely suspended between the real and the unreal, between fact and fiction, between presence and spectrality). As a result, the only way he can locate political agency in the text is by negating the very implicated structure I have been attempting to analyze here–and therefore cancelling, in the name of a political freedom, the very possibility of freedom held out by the novel.

Works Cited

 

• Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volume 1. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
• Darwin, Charles. The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
• Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• —. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Postcard. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. The Specters of Marx. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Euben, Peter. The Tragedy of Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
• Kaplan, Janet. Unexpected Journeys: the Art and Life of Remedios Varo. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988.
• Marx, Karl. “Alienated Labor.” The Portable Marx. Ed. E. Kamenka. New York: Penguin, 1983.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Experience of Freedom. Trans. Bridget McDonald. Stanford UP: Stanford, 1993.
• Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Perennial Fiction, 1966.
• —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.