July 6, 2004 draft
I want to open my talk by juxtaposing two texts and drawing out some threads between them:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Wollnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
This you will recognize as a passage near the end of the first section of The
Waste Land, a poem by an American expatriate who found in London an archetype
of the City as modernist Inferno, its crowd a modern dead end, its
persona a joyless flâneur (designated as Tiresias in the third section).
To be in this crowd is to be in the opposite of the Green World, in an anti-pastoral,
condemned to pointless work with paper (perhaps much like that which Eliot had
to deal with in post-WWI Lloyd’s Bank).
The second text is from Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow,
which follows most of the Vietnam War, similar to World War I in a few respects:
It inspired disillusionment with heroic action and distrust in any sense of
social order and meaning. (The excerpt is longer, and in prose.) For Pynchon
as for Eliot, the city is both literal location and symbolic reference.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children then it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered through bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . .
They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into—they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . . and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard . . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. (3; ellipses are Pynchon’s)
This evocation of The Waste Land, 50 years after, is even more bleak, if that is possible. The context of a diminished Christianity no longer gives us even its dead sound on the stroke of nine, but instead an architectural reference to fragile Crystal Palaces (destroyed by fire a few years before the Blitz); rather than walking across London Bridge, human figures are transported into an underground whose true purposes (beyond isolation and helplessness) are concealed. Not much in the opening is specific to London, but the atmosphere is highly referential, with evacuation, total blackout, steam engines and coal smells, the movement through old wood smells and tarry ropes into an underground much like those used during the Blitz. Even the railways move underground, into more dirty and brown and industrialized sections of the city, stopping “under the final arch.” World War II-era propaganda films stress pulling together to defy Hitler, but it is entirely plausible, a generation later, to entertain (via a willing suspension of disbelief) the narrator’s conjecture of paranoia.
Underfoot crunches the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened, lied to its children. Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, “You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow. . . .” (4)
Gravity’s Rainbow’s opening, then, presents several of
the novel’s dominant themes: division into elect and preterite (i.e.,
the elite favored by those in power, against the rest of us); paranoia as a
condition of continuing existence; and technological development, embodied in
the city as symbol, as a dead-end.
At the end of this opening sequence, Pynchon segués from what we discover
retrospectively to have been a dream by a minor character, Pirate Prentice.
Prentice has a flâneur-like talent for “having other people’s
fantasies” (without much enjoyment, however), and we may consider the
opening passage as our fantasy at the novel's beginning. Pynchon, like Eliot,
renders the city as both specific to London and general. Where Eliot drops in
cultural references, Pynchon draws from physical traces of the city (coal-smoke,
rust, iron) as well as a more specific knowledge of chemistry and physics (naphtha,
Absolute Zero)—still allusions, but not yet attached to literary or cultural
texts (those will come later).
Eliot’s city is where Pynchon and several other post-WWII writers begin.
Pynchon’s first short stories appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
a period when Anglo-American literary criticism and practices were suffused
by Eliot; they are steeped in Eliotic allusions and references to armchair anthropology
(a tendency the mature Pynchon comically dismisses in his introduction to these
stories in Slow Learner). The tone is at times as gloomy as Eliot’s,
though Pynchon’s version is mixed with humor and the pursuit of energetic
mindless pleasures. Beginning with his first novel, V. (1963), the
trappings of modernism are put to postmodernist uses, and that theme is what
I would like to trace in looking at London in Gravity’s Rainbow.
Gravity’s Rainbow begins with an evocation of the city as emblematic
of a diminished present, set in the locale of the past. The opening scene modulates
into morning set in a flophouse near the Chelsea Embankment; its owner is the
dreamer Pirate Prentice. His Special Operations work makes him a little better
informed than most about the V-2 rockets which have been striking London for
nearly four months (it is approaching Christmas 1944). As Prentice goes onto
the roof to his greenhouse where he grows bananas (yes, bananas), he sees to
the east a vapor trail which catches the sun’s light across the channel.
The novel’s Banana Breakfast typifies Pynchon’s mixture of historical
and fantastic detail: the opening pages register the difficulty in wartime of
getting fresh eggs, much less bananas, and packs in details of films, radio
programs, transportation and other specifics gleaned from Baedeker, newspapers,
and other sources. These are interspersed with fantasy: a giant adenoid has
swallowed up much of the city, along with London businessmen and bureaucrats;
the war effort enlists psychics and cranks, and produces a propaganda film about
black rocket troops which materialize somehow in the war zone. These events,
like the portrayal of the city itself, combine verifiable history with magical
realism, rationality with paranoia.
Such mixtures persist throughout the novel. "In the Zone," its third
section, combines carefully researched detail about the V2’s construction
and (anti)paranoid reinterpretations:
it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated” (303).
As the novel says a little before, “What you thought was a balanced mind is little help” (297).
Richard Lehan’s The City in Literature points out connections between isolation, paranoia such as that expressed throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, and Freud’s concept of the uncanny.
But the flâneur is discontented because the city offers more experience than he can assimilate. He always feels that he is missing out even in the process of experiencing: his state of mind is restless dissatisfaction, aimless desire, . . . When this sense of potentiality becomes frightening, it threatens stability and leads to the kind of neurasthenia we find in Eliot's writing; when the threat becomes personal, it leads to the paranoia that informs Pynchon's novels. And paranoia takes us to the doorstep of the uncanny . . . "something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light" (74).
Pynchon’s version of the uncanny, then, is rooted in modernist attitudes
toward the city, as it traces connections between the development of war technology
and postmodernist disconnection, rootlessness, and fears of external control.
Later in his working day, Prentice misses meeting, at the site of a rocket strike,
Slothrop, the novel’s protagonist and the object of considerable interest
because of a map he keeps on his office wall. Slothrop is the focal point of
the novel’s most significant use of the fantastic: his map features colored
stars and dates which indicate locations and dates of his meetings with women.
The slides that Teddy Bloat’s been taking of Slothrop’s map have been projected onto Roger’s, and the two images, girl-stars and rocket-strike circles, demonstrated to coincide.
Helpfully, Slothrop has dated most of his stars. A star always comes before its corresponding rocket strike. The strike can come as quickly as two days, or as slowly as ten. The mean lag is about 4 1/2 days (85-86).
This creates something of an uncanny puzzle for Pointsman, the novel’s
Pavlovian psychologist and control freak (as his name suggests--a pointsman
being the person who controls railway switches, sending trains to Happyville
or Pain City). For Pointsman it threatens the entire scientific structure of
cause-and-effect, as disruptive as the passing of (mostly Christian) religious
belief is for Eliot and his characters.
Gravity’s Rainbow legitimates reading its historical detail simultaneously
as realistic detail and symbol, in part by its linkage to Puritan habits of
thought through Slothrop, its New England protagonist. “Slothrop’s
Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can
find himself inside a parable” (25). Slothrop’s desktop is a mass
of period references whose diegetic function is to show that Pynchon’s
done his pop culture homework (Zippo lighters, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat
Lozenges, George Formby, Kreml hair tonic, News of the World). Many of the evocations
of London are specific places used primarily to anchor the book in historical
event and geographical location—as will be the case later in Pynchon’s
account of the rocket’s development and testing, connections between technological
development and international corporations such as ICI, Royal Dutch Shell, and
IG Farben, German colonial enterprises in Sud-West Afrika, and so on.
A few specific locations, perhaps gotten up from Baedeker: 1) Pirate Prentice
keeps a “maisonette” not far from the Chelsea Embankment, which
according to Weisenburger has Bohemian roots going back to Oscar Wilde. 2) Slothrop's
workplace is at the Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany—ACHTUNG--near
Grosvenor Square. 3) Slothrop uses the Bond Street Underground station, north
and east, in “a gray stone town house, neither large nor historic enough
to figure in any guidebook” just off “the official war-routes and
corridors” where “a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting
death and some of them even know it” (17). 4)Slothrop is subsequently
sent TDY (military slang for temporary duty) for testing at a fictional East
End hospital, St. Veronica’s of the True Image for Colonic and Respiratory
Diseases. The architecture is described in thematically significant terms as
a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals—but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God’s actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year (46).
(Such a reading of architecture recalls John Ruskin’s account
of the implications of architecture for the individual workman in “The
Stones of Venice,” but read for its postmodern evocation of doubt about
meaning or God’s existence.)
5) Near the hospital, one of the book’s comic masterpieces juxtaposes
Slothrop’s uncomplicated Hershey-bar expectations against prewar English
candies and medicinal teas, at the place of residence of one of Slothrop’s
girls met again by chance in the East End.
Apart from Slothrop, other characters provide occasion for place references.
6) Two lovers, the emblematically named Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake, carry
on in the evacuated area south of London under the barrage balloons, “in
a defiance they can never measure unless they’re caught . . . They are
in love. Fuck the war” (41-42). 7) They meet cinematically in Tunbridge
Wells and, along with Roger’s superior, Pavlovian psychologist Edward
Pointsman, 8) pursue a stray dog for experiments in a V-bomb ruin. 9) There
is a seance somewhere named "Snoxalls," perhaps in the East End. Several
other brief references occur, e.g., to Shell Mex House. These are aspects of
Pynchon's use of the literal city in diegetic terms, to signify that his reinterpretation
of history is grounded in fact.
Eliot’s and Pynchon’s use of the city as symbol differ significantly. For Eliot, London is the modern European city, marking a discontinuity between past tradition and present “secular hell” (Lehan 132).
His work . . . partakes of the archaeology of history, the superimposition of one layer of time upon another—a technique that presupposed a cyclical process of time and that accommodated his use of myth, Bergson's idea of durée, a sense of simultaneity, and a belief in history as repeated process (134)
Pynchon draws on Eliot’s bifurcation, but instead of locating it in valued
cultural past / soulless present, the poles are vital but obscured green world,
capable of breaking out in surprising and energetic fashion, and bureaucracy
/ technology / control.
Most of this opposition between city and green world comes by way of traditional
associations, as might be seen in this passage:
It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more than dark strength—it is an imperial presence the lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts smeared with years’ pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease-black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall buses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars, everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing, hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black through an instant—perhaps the true turn of the sunset—that is wine to you, wine and comfort.
This is the time of the first V2 rocket strike, as the culmination of industrial
technology; the passage takes us to Slothrop’s erection in connection
with the rocket.
London becomes less relevant after the novel's first book, when the scene shifts
to occupied Germany, among other locations. The most significant use of London,
then, is as the starting point for the literal and symbolic use of the city
as the most significant of human technological creations, set against the natural
world in a postmodern pastoral which is employed for both literary and rhetorical
purposes.
Baedeker, Karl. London and Its Environs: A Handbook for Travellers.
20th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1951.
Irving, David. The Mare’s Nest. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources
and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens: Univ. of Georgia, 1988.