Bernard Duyfhuizen

Univ. of Wisconsin–Eau Claire
<pnotesbd@uwec>

 

No matter how much we work on Gravity’s Rainbow, our most important interpretive discovery will be that it resists analysis–that is, being broken down into distinct units of meaning. To talk about Bianca is to talk about Ilse and Gottfried; to try to describe the Zone is to enumerate all the images of other times and places that are repeated there. Pynchon’s novel is a dazzling argument for shared or collective being–or, more precisely, for the originally replicative nature of being.
 

–Leo Bersani

 

Leo Bersani is right about Gravity’s Rainbow‘s resistance to analysis, yet if we pursue the “dazzling argument” in the particular case of Bianca, we find not only more than Bersani acknowledges but also elements for a strategy for reading Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern text. This strategy rests on the formal element of the “reader-trap”: stylistic and thematic techniques that on the one hand court the conventional readerly desire to construct an ordered world within the fictional space of the text, but that on closer examination reveal the fundamental uncertainty of postmodern textuality. Rather than reducing a reader-trap to a “distinct unit of meaning,” readers must adopt for GR a postmodern strategy of reading in which the reader avoids privileging any specific piece of data because the text, in its implied poststructuralist theory of reading, thematically attacks the tyranny of reductive systems for knowing the world. The reader must engage the play of differance encoded in GR‘s textual signs to avoid falling into traps of premature narrative closure.

 

What makes Bianca a reader-trap? First, she is part of a matrix of intersecting stories that could be labeled the “Tales of the Shadow-Children,” a matrix which produces the stories that readers construct about Bianca, Ilse Pokler, Gottfried, and by analogy Tyrone Slothrop. She becomes simultaneously a represented character(complete with genealogical relations) and a trace of textuality (an arrangement of semiological relations that is never totally fixed). This double nature of her character is figured the first time we hear of her when Slothrop, under the alias of Max Schlepzig (Bianca’s putative father), reenacts with Margherita Erdmann the moment of Bianca’s conception during the rape scene at the end of the movie Alpdrucken (393-97). As a shadow- or movie-child, Bianca maps onto these other children; thus what we know about one (both from referential and semiological epistemologies) depends on what we know about the others. Bianca’s mother, for instance, sees “Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure…clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero” (484). As readers, if we want to avoid the trap of correspondences, we must mark the intersections and the double exposures, even though the effect produced is often an increased undecidability.

 

Second, Bianca is coded as one of Pynchon’s examples of the dehumanizing effects of perverse fetishism:

 

Of all her putative fathers--Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrucken Night, on the other--Bianca is closest [. . .] to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, [. . .] you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker... She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.¹
 
(472; bracketed ellipses added)

 

As is often the case in GR, the passage closes off by shifting to a second-person address that may be directed at Slothrop, who has just left her after their sexual encounter, but also seems to address–through images of sexual imperialism and a reference to Pokler that could not yet be part of Slothrop’s consciousness–the text’s male narratees and ultimately its male reader/voyeurs. I will defer until the final section of this essay the significant questions of gender and reading presented by this passage and others like it.² Indeed, this issue may itself be one of the most problematic aspects of Pynchon’s writing. The question–Who are the narratees of this text?–cannot be left unanswered.

 

Lastly, Bianca is a reader-trap because of her relationship with Slothrop. If GR has, besides the V-2 rocket, a “central” protagonist around whom readers try to construct systems of meaning by following his picaresque adventures, Slothrop is it. Bianca is one of his many sexual experiences, one that is doubly coded by its analogy to Gottfried’s launch in rocket 00000 and her alignment with the “lost girls”–the Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won’t interpret (567)–who haunt his journey through the Zone. Bianca must be read, therefore, within yet another play of representational and semiological doubling–a mapping onto that is both the same-and-different from shadow-child mapping–as she maps onto Darlene, Katje Borgesius, Geli Tripping, and even her own mother, Margherita. The text underwrites this process of mapping when Bianca is viewed as “silver” (484), the same color as Darlene’s star on Slothrop’s map (19) and as her mother’s “silver and passive [screen] image” (576), or with Greta’s (Margherita’s) mapping onto or merging into “Gretel” and finally “Katje” within Blicero’s sado-masochistic fantasy (482-86), which maps in turn onto Slothrop’s relations with both women. Bianca holds a special place within this metonymic play of sameness and difference, because her loss produces the most profound change in Slothrop’s behavior–he is finally freed of the will to erection that has dominated his psychological life ever since his childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf. Paradoxically, however, at the moment he might have a chance to formulate his own identity, Bianca’s loss prefigures Slothrop’s ultimate dissolution–indeed, after his encounter with Bianca, “Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter” (509). His experience with Bianca and his subsequent loss of her bring him, as we will see, face-to-face with his unconscious fears of his own death and bring the reader to confront the deconstruction of the semiotic codes that form Slothrop’s and Bianca’s textual representations.

 

Bianca appears on the stage of the narrative in two consecutive episodes of GR (3.14-15). We meet her aboard the Anubis as seen through Slothrop’s eyes:

 

He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes...help, help. Why do these things have to keep coming down on him? He can see the obit now in Time magazine--Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.(463)

 

The text’s focalization through Slothrop codes Bianca as a fetish, a “Lolita” if you will, and we later learn these heels are “spiked” (466), and the silk stockings are connected to “a tiny black corset” with “Satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework” (469). As the narrator comments later–in a passage metonymically structured to connect Bianca, Margherita, Blicero, the S-Gerat (a rocket part Slothrop has been seeking), Laszlo Jamf, Imipolex (the plastic from which the S-Gerat was made), and the Casino Hermann Goering (where Slothrop lost Katje)–“Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn’t” (490).

 

Yet from a different perspective, Bianca’s fetishized outfit is a repetition of her mother’s outfit during her first encounter with Slothrop, when they reenact Bianca’s conception on the torture-chamber set of the film Alpdrucken:

 

All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps as points of osculation, mathematical kisses...singularities! (396)

 

But the transition to the mathematical context leads this meditation on fetishism to an unsettling metaphor: “Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation? [. . .] And what’s waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of Greta’s stockings here?” (396-97).³ What’s waiting first is “his latest reminder of Katje”–whose sexuality is figured in the text as both metaphor and metonymy of the rocket: “Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life,” Katje told Slothrop (209)–but more significantly, it is Bianca who waits to teach Slothrop and the reader something about the trajectory of annihilation.

 

Slothrop’s vulnerability “to pretty little girls” is foregrounded early in GR when he comforts a little girl rescued from a V-2 hit, comfort she returns by smiling “very faintly, and he knew that’s what he’d been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they’d found her down in the middle of” (24). The moment of kindness, so crucially redemptive in Pynchon’s fiction, figures as Slothrop’s primal response, and while in London, before his paranoia has gone out of control, Slothrop can care directly. Once he reaches the Zone, however, his ability to connect becomes problematic as in the opening of part 3 when, by burning human/doll’s hair, he conjures out of the shadows a dancing child he maps onto Katje: “he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms” (283). Both these children prefigure Bianca, but the empirical reality of the first has been replaced by the hallucination of the second, a slippage between fantasy and reality that dogs Slothrop through the rest of the text and especially in his encounter with Bianca. Neither is the reader immune to this slippage which s/he may seek to repress by evoking the trap of an overtly mimetic strategy of reading.

 

However, before Bianca takes center stage, Slothrop wanders off to listen to some gossip about Margherita, told by the woman whose handy cleaver almost dumped him into the river. But what he hears sounds like the voice of the text’s narrator offering a simple binary solution to the problems of narrativity and signification in the text:

 

"Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That's the key, that's the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, they do not work." "That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time." (464)

 

If the “silly bitch” can be seen dialogically as a reflexive figuration of the narrator, then this “voice” may be, for a brief and estranged moment, Pynchon dialogically and reflexively commenting on his own text. We soon discover that the voice belongs to Miklos Thanatz who serves as a figure of narrative intersection: Margherita’s husband, Bianca’s stepfather, and–though we don’t know it yet– witness to the firing of rocket 00000. Indeed, Thanatz begins to tell Slothrop precisely what he and the reader have been desiring to hear, the magical names of Gottfried and Blicero, but….

 

“About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child” (465). Margherita forces Bianca to perform a Shirley Temple imitation, and when she refuses to perform again, Bianca is publicly punished with a steel-rulered-bare-bottomed spanking–which triggers one of GR‘s set pieces: the everything’s connected orgy on board the Anubis. Bianca’s representation of “Shirley Temple,” in contradistinction to that “Shirley Temple smile” that warmed Slothrop’s heart in London, is a grotesque infantilization that ironically seeks to erase the war years and their horror, yet its perverse eroticism (accentuated by cultural contexts of sexual vulnerability that come through Slothrop’s point of view) precisely makes manifest the war/perversion dynamic explored in various other scenes that test the edge of a reader’s erotic tolerance. Clearly Bianca’s exploitation as a sexual object is a same-but-different version of Katje’s exploitation by Blicero or Pointsman, or Bianca’s mothers by von Goll for the film Alpdrucken.

 

The public humiliation of Bianca is one of GR‘s many moments of theatre. Indeed, Slothrop wonders whether “somebody [is] fooling with the lights” as Bianca “grunts” through her Shirley Temple routine (466). The lights are, in fact, being fooled with: Slothrop’s perceptual creation of Bianca as an overtly fetishized Shirley Temple is the emblem in the text of errant reading. Slothrop’s specular projection of Bianca as infantile nymphet is a mise en abyme for the reader-trap the text is about to spring, a trap that this piece of theatre–focalized so thoroughly through the gaze of a male spectator–helps to mask.

 

Throughout GR Pynchon demarcates the public and the private stages. On the public stage the character performs for others, even when the character is unaware of an audience (Slothrop under surveillance, for instance). The public performance usually originates from some form of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation. Since many of these performances align with what prevailing cultural formations would define as deviant sexuality, we can discern an analogy with “pornography,” but only at the level of story (although occasionally Pynchon has been accused of pornography at the level of discourse) and with a clear recognition of how conditioned Western patriarchal culture is to the semiotics of pornographic representation. Although “Pavlovian conditioning” may explain part of the dynamics of response to the pornographic, unwholesome pornography in GR is not necessarily in the sexual act itself or in its textual representation; it is, instead, in the systems of power and control that motivate the act–the ubiquitous “They” who operate just outside of view. This public stage is contrasted with the private moment, the free exchange of comforts–but this too is a conflicted stage, as the conventional entrapped reading between the private moment of Slothrop and Bianca makes clear.

 

When Slothrop wakes up the next day (and in the next episode), Bianca is with him, offering herself as a manifest wish-fulfillment to his lust. This private “performance” for Slothrop nearly closes the “distance” between himself and Bianca, who now replaces her mother in a liaison that is not free from metaphoric and metonymic overtones of incest (Slothrop, impersonating Max Schlepzig, has already reenacted Bianca’s conception). But Bianca’s gift of sexual intercourse is also a plea for help. She suggests they “hide,” “get away,” quit the game which for Slothrop has ceased to be fun. For him, this act of kindness activates his socialized guilt–to be offered “love” is more than the Zone will allow. So Slothrop “creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites” (470). In leaving Bianca he makes a mistake that he will not realize until after he hears “Ensign Morituri’s Story” (474-79), but by then it is too late.

 

Importantly, before he leaves Bianca, Slothrop’s consciousness is the nearly exclusive narrative filter for this tryst in which something “oh, kind of funny happens [. . .]. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it’s going on–but later on, it will occur to him that he was–this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock” (469-70). Of course the mediated narrative discourse that shifts Slothrop’s “later” thoughts into the present of this scene estranges the text and marks it as more hallucination than representation. Yet this startling image has trapped more than one reader into a perspectival blindness. Because Bianca’s character is primarily focalized through Slothrop, she functions at that edge of textual consciousness between fetishized objectification and hallucination. Bianca may “exist” (470) for Slothrop at this moment, but she, more quickly than Slothrop himself, soon slips into the textual unconscious, only to be recalled by dream and hallucination.

 

If we grant that we cannot know Bianca because of the narrative filters of fetish and hallucination, can we even be sure–in a perfectly pynchonian paradox–of the certainty of our fantasy? It turns out we cannot because the text set this reader-trap long ago, and it is only by reading the cross mapping of her textual representation that we can see how the reader might misperceive Bianca and why many critics have misread her. More significantly, uncovering this reader-trap also uncovers the questions of gender and reading in GR.

 

* * * * *

 

When Bianca first appears, Slothrop calculates her age–an amazing feat in itself, given her get-up at the time–as “11 or 12.” Many readers hardly question this incongruous perception because the fetishistic plot, its theatrical representation, and its semiotic codes overdetermine the narrative at that moment. Moreover, the narrative concretizes our perception of a “preadolescent Bianca” by its descriptive references to her: “the little girl,” “a slender child,” “little Bianca [. . .] tosses her little head [. . .], her face,round with baby-fat,” and her “baby breasts working out the top of her garment” (469-70). Bianca is not the only female character who is perceived by Slothrop and other men in child-like terms. From the very first references to Slothrop’s map–“perhaps the girls are not even real” (19; emphasis added)–to his meeting again with Darlene (115), to his first sight of Katje (186), to his first awareness of Geli Tripping (289), to Trudi and Magda (365), to Stefania Procalowska and others aboard the Anubis (460, 466-68), and eventually to Solange/Leni Pokler (603) Slothrop encounters females as girls. Even Margherita, who is clearly older than Slothrop, is introduced as “his child and his helpless Lisaura” (393).⁴ In the semiosis of reading, these “girls” engage in a play of mapping that lays bare the repetition compulsion of the narrative as it underwrites the sexual politics of the Zone which finally come to a crisis in Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca, and it underwrites the sexual politics of reading.

 

What does this infantilization signify? Could it be a collective fear of coming-to-age during the war and the later post-war systems of arrangement? One reading, a rather romantic one, might have it that to be young is still to hold a piece of innocence, but examined more closely, even this hopeful image rings hollow. If we accept Bianca’s age as Slothrop gives it, an incongruity emerges: Bianca’s erotic and sexual maturity (she, like many of Slothrop’s lovers, is more active than he is) dislocates these child-like representations. On the one hand, these images may be exaggerations projected from Slothrop’s fetishizing focalization; on the other hand, Bianca symbolizes the “child of the War,” the darling of those permitted to view Goebbel’s private film collection (461). She is one of Pynchon’s most poignant emblems of the human destruction caused by war. However, if we dislocate our reading and consider Bianca through cross-mapping with Ilse,her shadow sister, we discover that she was most likely born in 1929 and is much closer to 16 or 17 than she is to “11 or 12.”⁵

 

If uncovering her likely age resituates our reading in one direction, freeing us from the trap set by Slothrop’s peculiar point of view, Bianca’s disappearance from the fictional universe after her liaison with Slothrop is equally vexed; indeed, McHoul and Wills state that “The fate of Bianca highlights the problem with reading Gravity’s Rainbow…. One will never know just what does happen to her” (31).⁶ Bianca has told Slothrop she knows how to hide (470), but her next “appearance” is brief and problematic:

 

Slothrop will think he sees her, think he has found Bianca again--dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the Anubis starts a hard roll to port, and even at this stage of things--even in his distance--he will lunge after her without thinking much, slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side. (491; emphasis added)

 

What actually happens here is hard to say–Slothrop does end up over the side, but does Bianca? Slothrop only “think[s]” he sees her–she is becoming insubstantial already–and her vanishing is a symbolic erasure. But is it she who “vanishes under chalky lifelines” or Slothrop who “slip[s] . . . under” while she “vanishes”?⁷ As McHoul and Wills note, it “hinges on how one reads the syntax” (31).

 

All life lines in GR are subject to erasure, but traces are left in the mind–especially Slothrop’s– and in the text. The traces are sometimes known only by their absence; for instance, 170 pages after this scene, in a passage that challenges how readers produce meaning in GR, we read: “You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis” (663). Bianca is missing from this passage if one wants a textual construction (a statement from the here dramatically foregrounded narrator) that will affirm that Bianca did indeed go over the side during the storm; at the same time this passage suggests a natural causality–“the same storm”–for Slothrop going overboard, putting into question but not necessarily overturning the likely possibility that someone had “flipped” him over the side. However, in the deconstructionist logic of the reader-trap, Bianca’s absence from this textual representation cannot definitely tell us whether she remained on the Anubis either.

 

Bianca’s traces always test our readerly desire for causality. After Frau Gnahb rescues Slothrop from his trip overboard, he falls asleep and “Bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him. ‘You’re really in that Europe now,’ she grins, hugging him. ‘Oh my goo’ness,’ Slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like Shirley Temple’s, out of his control. It sure is embarrassing. He wakes to sunlight” (492-93). Momentarily we breathe a sigh of relief “thinking” that she has made it, but her speech pattern is identifiably Slothrop’s and he has adopted her Shirley Temple voice. Something’s not right, and when “he wakes,” he is alone, and we see this trace of Bianca as a dream. Later that morning, when Slothrop meets von Goll, he “fills von Goll in on Margherita, trying not to get personal. But some of his anxiety over Bianca must be coming through. Von Goll shakes his arm, a kindly uncle. ‘There now. I wouldn’t worry. Bianca’s a clever child, and her mother is hardly a destroying goddess'” (494). Meant to “comfort” Slothrop, von Goll’s characterizations allow Slothrop to repress his anxiety for the moment, but as we will see, the return of the repressed is not far away. Given the text’s compulsion to repeat within a same-but-different logic of mapping, the reader aligns this Bianca/Slothrop escape fantasy with the Ilse/Pokler escape fantasy (420-21). In that startling scene at Zwolfkinder, the narration does not signal its shift into a fantasy mode, and some critics have been trapped and have taken literally the scene of “amazing incest” that precedes the escape fantasy–a reading that would seriously undermine Pokler’s eventual moral position in the text.

 

The most disturbing trace of Bianca re-enters the narrative when Slothrop returns to the Anubis to pickup a “package” for von Goll (530-32).⁸ As he returns to the site of his tryst with Bianca, Slothrop descends into the private hell of his own consciousness. Motivated by a return of his repressed “Eurydice-obsession” (472), Slothrop seemingly discovers the dead Bianca’s body, but like Orpheus he cannot bring his Eurydice back from the dead. But does he discover her? Nearly the entire scene takes place in total darkness (the specular image is unrepresentable), but the psychic reminders force Slothrop to confront his betrayal of Bianca and his fears of her death, and his possible implication in that death. Through a gauntlet that metonymically repeats Brigadier Puddings ritual approach to the Mistress of the Night (Katje)–“the pointed toe of a dancing pump,” the “ladder,” “stiff taffeta,” “slippery satin,” “hooks and eyes [. . .] lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger.”

 

He rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead. Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea. He turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. No matter which way he tries to move now...cold nipples...the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume and shit and the smell of brine...and the smell of...of... (531)

 

“When the lights come back on” (532) (recall Slothrop’s earlier concern that someone was “fooling” with the lights), we receive no confirmation that the text represented whatever actual events Slothrop experienced–indeed, I would argue he only experiences this nightmare psychologically. The confusion of sensory images conflates two deaths for Bianca: death by drowning and death by hanging. But the text never deploys the signifier “Bianca” in this scene; instead, the text offers a set of metonymies that may or may not signify the “presence” of Bianca’s body. “When the lights come back on,” Slothrop does not directly see her; he sees only the “brown paper bundle” he was sent to retrieve, its enigmatic contents a mise en abyme for his experience and an emblem for the best way to read this scene. The scene closes with a last challenge to specular acts of reading: “But it’s what’s dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight…and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?” (532). As with the two ellipses that mark the close of the longer passage just quoted, the ellipsis points here mark the site of absence, the dead-white page showing through the text and yet another site of repetition if we recall the opening of Bianca and Slothrop’s tryst: “In the corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red” (468). But can the text and its reading, linear like a ladder “back up and out,” be “really as empty” as it looks? The reader can let this scene either remain enigmatic or decide the undecidable–to paraphrase Tchitcherine much later in the text: “[It] could be anything. I don’t care. But [it’s] only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter” (702). Bianca last “existed” for Slothrop at the moment of decision when he climbed the ladder to leave her (470-71) and at the moment on deck when he “lunge[s]” to save her (491) only to lose her–does she exist elsewhere?

 

Many readers read mimetically the scene of Slothrop’s return to the engine-room of the Anubis, stating that he does in fact discover Bianca’s body; some are even convinced that Margherita has murdered her daughter. Yet reading in this way misses the psychological dynamic the text builds around Slothrop’s anxiety over the intersection of sexuality and death that haunts his experience. It misses the text’s implicit questioning of Western culture’s perverse fetishization of the child. It is no stray detail that Slothrop dreams of a conversation with the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland when Bianca comes to him–as Henkle observes, “we all know about Lewis Carroll’s supposedly illicit feelings toward little girls; we all understand what Shirley Temple’s fetching little dance steps aroused” (282).⁹ Moreover, a mimetic reading misses the postmodern narrative function of Bianca’s decharacterization to the level of a cipher and trap for readers who want teleologically to complete her story by a represented death scene.

 

After Slothrop’s return to the Anubis, Bianca’s trace enters the narrative only four more times. The first trace appears when the text lists some of the wishes Slothrop, now headed for Cuxhaven, makes upon evening stars. The seventh wish is “Let Bianca be all right [. . .]” (553). Either Slothrop has no certainty of Bianca’s fate or he is repressing what he knows; the case is complicated by the coupling of the Bianca wish with “[. . .] a-and–Let me be able to take a shit soon.” The text seems to be laying a trap for the Freudian reader–the ass-bites of their first encounter (469) and the smell of “perfume and shit” that Slothrop calls up in the engine room (531)–who may want to argue that Bianca’s memory has become cathected with Slothrop’s anal fixation. Can any reader ever forget Slothrop’s hallucinatory journey down the toilet in 1.10? That drug-induced nightmare, which occurred because of Pointsman’s involvement, connects back to Slothrop’s childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf (when he should have been moving through the anal stage of his psychosexual development, Jamf may have been displacing the smell of Slothrop’s own feces with the smell of Imipolex–if indeed that was the stimulus used).¹⁰ I suggest this set of connections may be a trap because reading GR through Freud calls for paradigms of totalization that the text will inevitably undercut even though structures of wish-fulfillment and dreamwork proliferate in the narrative. Interestingly, however, the Bianca wish is preceded by a significant Slothrop wish, although it is at the same time a bad pun on the shit-wish: “Let that discharge be waiting for me in Cuxhaven.” This wish (ultimately to return home to his mother?) will not come true in its literal form, but the quest for it leads Slothrop almost into Pointsman’s plot for his castration and to his last dream of Bianca.

 

The second trace of Bianca occurs when Slothrop meets Franz Pokler:

 

Well, but not before [Pokler] has told something of his Ilse and her summer returns, enough for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca's dead flesh.... Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann's silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as Pokler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm--how could they not be the same child? She's still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room...still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams. (576-77)

 

This time Slothrop’s memory contravenes his wish only 23 pages earlier as he is “taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca’s dead flesh.” This passage appears to confirm Bianca’s death. However, while we come upon this cross-mapping alert to the alignment of Ilse and Bianca, for Slothrop this is a new coincidence that, because of Pokler’s significance to the S-Gerat plot, instantly feeds his paranoid paradigm of reading: “how could they not be the same child?” Moreover, “She” (Bianca/Ilse) will now, if not already, “work among your [Slothrop/Pokler/the reader’s] saddest dreams.”

 

The third trace is in the cross-mapping dreams of Slothrop and Solange/Leni Pokler: “Back at Putzi’s,” after Slothrop has unwittingly escaped castration but not received his wished-for discharge,

 

Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwolfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees. And "Solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni's early dream of her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy.... (609-10)

 

This is one of the text’s most positive images–Leni’s early dream (156) seems to be moving from the story to the discourse as the dialogic narrative erases the distinction between the character and a narrator who appears to extend to the reader the small comfort of knowing Ilse will be all right. Ironically, Leni will never know within the space of the text what the narrator says (nor will Franz know it), but the small chances for mercy are crucial to holding back the bleakness that is otherwise so pervasive in this fictional universe. If Ilse makes it, does Bianca? It depends on how much plot producing power we grant to textual cross-mapping and dreaming in our readerly formation. As we will see with Thanatz’s ordeal riding “the freights,” this hopeful image of “a few small chances of mercy” might vanish. We’ll never know for certain either way; our reading decisions on such points may say more about our readerly desires than about what the text says.

 

Slothrop’s dream clearly maps onto Pokler’s experience with Ilse at Zwolfkinder in 3.11, but its shift into the unknown room (significantly not where “Once something [the Imipolex conditioning?] was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless” [285]) seems to be a shift to a life-affirming set of natural images–trees and singing birds. Slothrop’s greater attention to nature and its restorative powers has been building since the time of his wishes on evening stars (“Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally” [552]), and it will become his distinctive emblem in the fourth part of GR. Lastly, Bianca maps onto Leni’s dream because, in a passage I will examine in the next section, she too has a dream that shares the central image of the “passage by train” (471), but the narrator here has no discourse of comfort and we know Bianca has been “used.” Her traces are problematic because they cannot be disentangled from Slothrop’s psychic processes of coping with his experience of betraying her confidence and not providing her a small chance for mercy. Thus the experience takes different shapes in his mind, which is then mediated for the reader by the narrative discourse that arranges sets of textual associations and intersections that establish paradoxes at best. The last traces of Bianca, however, do not come to us through Slothrop’s consciousness–Thanatz, Bianca’s step-father, provides the last traces, and although these cannot confirm her life or death, they deepen her character and extend the textual network of her narrative function as shadow-child.

 

Thanatz first recalls Bianca while he “rides the freights” with other DP’s and longs to molest “a little girl”–he fantasizes the event using Bianca as a reference: “pull down the slender pretty pubescent’s oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throat back Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it” (669-70). The passage recalls Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca (469-70), though it may represent only Thanatz’s desire to molest and not a memory. Thanatz then recalls his experiences with Blicero on the Heath and the firing of rocket 00000 (the story he tried to tell Slothrop), but this leads him to make a connection Margherita had also made: “He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now he’s forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn’t know which child he lost first, or even [. . .] if they aren’t two names, different names, for the same child [. . .] that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca, are the same” (671-72). As his confusion grows he conjures up one last (and the text’s last) specular image of Bianca, returned to the fetishistic coding of a masculine gaze: “a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for…will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love–” (672). The shift to the second person problematizes this last image; is it addressed to Thanatz or to the reader?

 

What do we gain by discovering Bianca’s age, questioning her textual appearance and disappearance, and reading her last traces–her “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”? First we see that characters in GR are semiotic systems as much as they are represented entities produced by characterological reading. Moreover, they are constructs produced by other characters; Bianca is always a hallucination, a movie-child of others’ fantasies and fetishes. Second, individual plots are the result of characters mapping onto one another to form a semiotic matrix of representation. Third, we must reread Slothrop’s relationship to Bianca and to the other women in the text. And lastly, the concept of the reader-trap allows us to read the differance at play in GR and to see conventional strategies of reading deconstructing as patterns of stable meaning dissolve amid fragmented and conflicting traces. The reader-trap reveals Pynchon’s text as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, proclaiming its aesthetic and narrative richness in the uncertainty generated by its complexity, but the question of gender and reading, of GR, still remains.

 

* * * * *

 

If we grant that GR encodes a narrative transaction between mimetic representation and fantasy, then we must also ask whose fantasies are these? and, Do these fantasies evoke different reading responses? As the example of Bianca shows, Slothrop’s (and in the end Thanatz’s) fantasies and hallucinations overdetermine her representation until she loses personality and becomes a fetish, a figure of cultural formation: the child as erotic object. Although recognizing and avoiding the reader-trap allows a reader distance to read beyond the fetish, to attempt to read character as a system of signs that mean only in relation to other signs, we must ask how this strategy of rationalizing textualization engages the reader’s sensibility, and specifically how it interacts with the reader’s gender formation.¹¹

 

If the reader-trap of Bianca’s representation in GR, as I have argued, is to read her as a fetish–a representation similar to those associated with her mother and with Katje–then we must also recognize the predominantly masculine gender perspective in the text. Cast in the role of male voyeur (figured in the text by Ensign Morituri), the reader is presented with the dilemma of becoming complicit or resistant. The textualization that limits Bianca to only the role of fetish underwrites a sexual politics that operates at different levels in our acts of reading. There is no denying that Bianca gets “used” in and by the text, but in the power struggle between fetishistic and resistant reading, a struggle the reader-trap helps to stage, we can discover a dialogic strategy of reading GR.

 

Although reading GR teleologically can lead to misreadings, it is hard to ignore the power of plot as a means of organizing textual material. Thus one way of reading Bianca is to see her as a projection of Slothrop’s needs–innocence and fetish all mixed up. His abandonment of her after their encounter (just as he has abandoned all the other women before) is in a metonymic sequence that underwrites the dysfunctional nature of his sexuality caused by his childhood conditioning. He stays longest with Margherita because she represents a mother who both satisfies his Oedipus complex and satisfies his need– through a logic of transference–to punish his real mother for the conditioning she allowed his father (“pernicious pop”) to submit him to. The subtext of incest in his encounter with Bianca overloads his psyche to the point that he recalls the event as a moment of becoming totally phallic and being fully incorporated into the object of desire. Their mutual orgasm symbolically represents a rebirth for Slothrop though he realizes this (if at all consciously) too late to save Bianca.

 

Slothrop must first hear Ensign Morituri’s story (474-79), which tells him of Margherita’s pre-war alter ego of Shekhinah–a destroying Angel who psychotically murdered Jewish boys–an alter ego Morituri believes Slothrop has resurrected when he was brought on board the Anubis. Slothrop’s immediate response is to worry about Bianca: “‘what about Bianca, then? Is she going to be safe with that Greta, do you think?’…. But where are Bianca’s arms, her defenseless mouth[?]…. There is hardly a thing now in Slothrop’s head but getting to Bianca” (479-80). But she has disappeared, and although he believes she is only hiding and that he will find her, he must also listen to Margherita’s story (482-88). Her story takes him as close as he will come to the truth of the S-Gerat and Imipolex, but also to the truth about Katje and Blicero and Gottfried. When she tells of her last days on the Heath, the various metonymic chains of plot clash, allowing Slothrop to break through a barrier of dependency. Slothrop doesn’t enact his own talking cure; instead, he experiences a listening cure as the stories of Margherita finally extinguish his will to erection. But it is too late:

 

He's lost Bianca. Gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morning. It matters, but how much? Now that Margherita has wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship,s toilet, of her last days with Blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the S-Gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf. That if he's seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. (490)

 

Although granted this realization, Slothrop is in too far, and try as he might, he cannot quit the game; he cannot extricate himself from Their trap.

 

But that does not mean that he is not changed by his experience. The loss of Bianca breaks the metonymic chain of Slothrop’s womanizing. When he joins Haftung’s dancers– who comment like a Greek chorus on the apparent sexism in the text: “‘Tits ‘n’ ass,’ mutter the girls, ‘tits ‘n’ ass. That’s all we are around here'” (507)–he does not have one of his trademark, hyperbolic sexual encounters. The same goes for the girl (“about seventeen,” Bianca’s age) he encounters when he becomes the archetypal pig hero, Plechazunga (571-73), and for his encounter with Solange/Leni at Putzi’s (603, 609-10). As far as Slothrop is concerned, Bianca marks a closure of the sexual excess that has been a major pattern of his character.¹² But seeing how she has changed Slothrop is only half the story; we must still look at the one moment in the text that seemingly represents Bianca’s consciousness–a moment in which she achieves subjectivity and steps beyond her figuration as fetish.

 

As Slothrop hesitates on the ladder leading away from Bianca, the text marks his “Eurydice-obsession,” but more importantly this leads to a meditation (possibly in Slothrop’s consciousness, at least focalized through him) on representation: “‘Why bring her back? Why try? It’s only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for Them.’ No. How can he believe that? It’s what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy’s based on that…but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay” (472). The passage raises the issue of Bianca’s representation and our ability to tell the difference among the various images of her that complicate our readerly process for assigning her signifiers a referential signified, what one might be tempted to call “the real thing.” If we read “They” in this passage as the patriarchy, then the sexual “economy” of objectification and fetish is uncovered. The cover story of the erotic nymphet must be turned aside to understand the “differ[a]nce between a boxtop and its image.” The pun here is crude; the “boxtop” metaphorically represents Bianca’s hymen that has been torn open, not simply to get at what was inside but also to be transferred into another system of exchange–a system that claims correspondence between a signifier (boxtop) and a representation of a signifier (“the one you draw for Them”). No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. The law of the patriarchy prohibits the reading of the void–the “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”–because to read the void is to find the text inscribed on the image, a text that is different from the one They allow.

 

Bianca’s text is hard to read. As I have been arguing, the textual set of signifiers that stage her representation is a trap, one we can now delineate as the production of a nearly exclusive patriarchal gaze and the phallocentric addresses to a male narratee. This male narratee, like Slothrop at first and constituted by the text’s limited focalization through Slothrop, construes “Bianca” as a fetish and fails to construe her “true ontological being” (a representation we can only speculate about). One might well ask if such a construal is possible in postmodern texts or necessary to postmodern reading; I would say “yes” if one senses, as I do in reading “Bianca,” that the text represents, however inconclusively, another set of signifieds. There is a textual moment that, although problematic in many respects, may let us finally see “Bianca” (the inverted commas now marking this sign’s differance from the phallocentric sign that has dominated reading so far). As Slothrop turns his back on Bianca and heads up the ladder, “The last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him….”

 

Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by the same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a Pullman, dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind's flank...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence.... In her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone. Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold. Horror in the brightest hour of afternoon...sails on the sea too small and distant to matter...water too steel and cold.... (471)

 

 

The cross-references to Margherita are overt, and the repetition of Leni’s dream for Ilse is one more piece of their joint semiotic matrix. But “Bianca”‘s dream is less hopeful and symbolically more complex. Again we confront the problematic boundary between image (“nacreous wrinkling the films use”) and the real (“rain”), but in the paragraph’s modulating play of light, this cinematic metaphor forces a double displacement. What does it mean not only to dream in “black and white” (if we can conflate “visions” and “dream”), but also to dream in the overt stylization of German Expressionism? One almost expects her to dream through the film Emulsion J (387-88). But this is no dream of being in a movie; instead, it is the dream of the storyteller who dictates a tale of a “personal horror, tell[ing] it clearly in a way others can share.” In a text that most consider anything but “clear,” we might rationalize this tale’s absence; however, we must see that “Bianca” now represents the untellable, the feminine text that patriarchy tries to cover with such mythologies as the lunchwagon-counter girl Slothrop nostalgically recalls to place distance between himself and Bianca (471-72). Although “Bianca”‘s dream collapses that distance textually by setting itself in a “Pullman,” in an American context, we never know if it is enough to keep her from “the edge” and the “silver-salt dark” of drowning.

 

A piece of “Bianca”‘s dictation does appear to reach us: “…when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence….” Set off by the text’s ever-present ellipses, this passage of narrated monologue suggests a representation of “Bianca” different from the fetishized image that has deluded our readerly senses to this point. If this is a fragment of her tale of “personal horror,” then possibly we have a dictation of her initiation to sexuality, the first violation of her childhood at the moment of puberty, a rape by someone (by Thanatz? we cannot know for certain, but we might be able to justify reading differently his trace of her quoted earlier [670]) who “loom[s] like a presence.” To produce such a reading is to see “Bianca”‘s tale as coming through the body, but in this case, rather than being the text others write upon, her represented dreamwork marks a differant layer to the textual formation of her character. From this angle, the “11 or 12” projection Slothrop estimated for her age could now be seen as a displaced image from the textual unconscious–an image that her abuser(s) have inscribed over the real signifier of “Bianca.” Furthermore, by engaging the play of differance, this brief passage stages the problematic of presence/absence for character formation: if “Bianca” is already absent, replaced by Bianca, and even Bianca “vanishes,” replaced only by traces formed by the sexual memories of men (the first male narratees of the text of her body), the gendering of “presence” and the power of formulating the Real is placed under question. Significantly, this placing under question is not only an extratextual interpretive move of GR‘s readers, but it is figured in the text by Slothrop’s own scattering and Thanatz’s existential breakdown over Blicero and the “reality” of Gottfried’s fate.

 

Reading Bianca through the fetishized image of the body has been the dominant interpretation of her textual ontology, but the fragment of her dictation can guide us to reread these textual representations. One example should suffice to show how such a rereading may be deployed. Earlier I quoted the oft-cited passage of Slothrop’s memory of total phallicization–“he was [. . .] inside his own cock“; this sort of phallic writing of Slothrop’s body pervades the text and inevitably produces phallocentric strategies of reading. The penis-eyed view that follows, complicated by the sexual ideologies (displaced incest, sexual abuse, pornographic staging) that converge at this moment, leads the text to one of its most symbolically significant orgasms: “she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower’s summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?” (470). The focalization is through Slothrop, and the arresting slippage into the discourse system of the rocket stages once again the play of metaphor and metonymy, but this time with the inanimate rocket that has served as the center of Slothrop’s quest. Although Bianca “come[s]” too, the representation of her orgasm is absent–the “void” announced is the absence of the feminine voice that will counterbalance the “kingly voice” of annihilation by the most phallic weapon of war yet conceived.

 

“Bianca”‘s dream takes us not to her orgasm, but to its aftermath, to “her ruined towers.” The “tower” is a pervasive metaphor and symbol in GR, and to pursue it would take this essay off on another set of tangents and cross-references. Nevertheless, we must observe in the last part of “Bianca”‘s passage (whether we are now in her dictation or again experiencing the mediation of the narrator is impossible to decide) that the symbols of “tower” and “light” will recur in the third line of the text’s closing hymn: “Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low / Find the last poor Pret’rite one…” (760). There are many ways to read these lines, one of which is to see an apocalyptic foreshadowing of either total annihilation or final judgment and redemption of the Preterite–the ellipsis points again ask us to engage the space of signification and the dynamic process of readerly desire: which reading do we want it to be? For “Bianca,” “the brightest hour of afternoon” has already passed, her textual trace has long vanished.

 

Notes

 

I would like to thank John M. Krafft, Terry Caesar, and Brian McHale who read earlier versions of this essay and provided helpful suggestions.

 

1. For a thorough reading of this passage, see McHale, “You Used to Know,” 107-08.

 

2. Pynchon has at least one passage, in which the narratee “you” is gendered as female, although the passage itself may refer analeptically to Leni Pokler’s childhood (she grew up in Lubeck [162]) and proleptically to Ilse’s trips with her father Franz to Zwolfkinder (398).

 

3. Gravity’s Rainbow contains many meditations on fetishism; see in particular the nearly textbook description on 736 (cf. Freud). This description sets up Thanatz’s argument for “Sado-anarchism,” a reclaiming from the State of the resources of “submission and dominance” (737). Pynchon also explored fetishism in V. in the chapter “V. in Love” (see Berressem for a thorough reading of this chapter). Of course, Pynchon always places such meditations on the edge, slipping either into what McHale terms “stylization” Postmodern Fiction 21) or into parody, as Thanatz’s intertextual parody (though we might interpret Thanatz as unconscious of the implications of his parody) of “Freud” and Marx: “I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away” (737).

 

4. Although Gravity’s Rainbow here and on 364 clearly identifies Margherita as “his Lisaura,” Bianca is also signified in this allusion to the character in Wagner’s Tannhauser, an opera which organizes yet another of the text’s semiotic matrices.

 

5. Newman is the only reader I have come across that comes close to dating Alpdrucken (during the filming of which Bianca was conceived) as 16 years before the text’s present time (107), and Weisenburger dates Pokler’s recollection of Ilse’s conception as “ranging back over sixteen years, its analepsis beginning in the late twenties, in Berlin, where the German rocket program began as an apparently innocent club, the Society for Space Travel” (194).

 

6. McHoul and Wills read many of the same passages I examine here, yet their characterological reading that suggests “it may be Bianca who mugs Slothrop when he boards the Anubis again later, that is if she hasn’t hanged herself” (31) is problematic to say the least.

 

7. This issue is further complicated by the fact that a ship’s crew during a storm often rig “life lines” about the deck to keep people from being forced too close to the side during a “hard roll.”

 

8. Kappel suggests this package is the S-Gerat (236) and Hume and Knight suggest it is a piece of Imipolex G (304); neither of these suppositions strikes me as convincing although they play on the symbolic matrix of Slothrop’s possible conditioning to the odor of the plastic. Nevertheless, both suppositions underscore the readerly desire for enigmas to be resolved.

 

9. See De Lauretis for a reading of the Alice image in terms of the sexual politics encoded in film, and by extension, the power of desire in the male gaze–the primary determinant of the framed image of women in the cinema.

 

10. At some point I hope to write about the noses in Gravity’s Rainbow; one only has to recall Slothrop’s “nasal hardon” (439) to see another thread of cross-references (my guess is that, maybe under the influence of Nabokov at Cornell, Pynchon has developed a deep affinity with Gogol, especially his short story “The Nose”–a clear forerunner of postmodernism–and his technique of skaz narration). As for “shit” in Gravity’s Rainbow see Caesar and Wolfley.

 

11. Although a definitive feminist reading of Pynchon’s writing is yet to be done, see the following early formulations of gender questions: Allen 37-51, Jardine 247-52, Kaufman, and Stimpson.

 

12. See my essay, “Starry-Eyed Semiotics,” for an account of how readers are trapped into reading Slothrop as a personification of sexual excess.

Works Cited

 

• Allen, Mary. The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.
• Berressem, Hanjo. “V. in Love: From the ‘Other Scene’ to the ‘New Scene.'” Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986): 5-28.
• Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations 25 (1989): 99-118.
• Caesar, Terry. “‘Trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up’: Mindless Pleasures in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 14 (1984): 39-48.
• Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
• De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
• Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “Starry-Eyed Semiotics: Learning to Read Slothrop’s Map and Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 6 (1981): 5-33.
• Freud, Sigmund. Fetishism. 1927. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 21.
• Henkle, Roger. “The Morning and the Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Clerc 273-90.
• Hume, Katherine, and Thomas J. Knight. “Orpheus and the Orphic Voice in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 299-315.
• Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
• Kappel, Lawrence. “Psychic Geography in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): 225-51.
• Kaufman, Marjorie. “Brunnhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Levine and Leverenz 197-227.
• Levine, George, and David Leverenz, ed. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
• McHale, Brian. “‘You Used to Know What these Words Mean’: Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow.” Language and Style 18.1 (1985): 93-118.
• —. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
• McHoul, Alec, and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.
• Newman, Robert D. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986.
• Pearce, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
• —. V. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.
• Stimpson, Catharine R. “Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon’s Early Fiction.” Levine and Leverenz 31-47.
• Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1988.
• Wolfley, Lawrence. “Repression’s Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon’s Big Novel.” Pearce 99-123.