[Continued from DUYFHU-1 991, "A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt": The Reader-Trap of Bianca in _Gravity's Rainbow_, by Bernard Duyfhuizen. Copyright (c) 1991 by Bernard Duyfhuizen, all rights reserved; published in _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.1 (September, 1991), available from PMC-LIST@NCSUVM or PMC-LIST@NCSUVM.CC.NCSU.EDU] * * * * * 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^ [28] 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_. [29] 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. [30] 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. [31] 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. [32] 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. [33] 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) [34] 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. [35] 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. [36] 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. [37] "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.