The Character of Preterition: An Apology for Pointsman

David Letzler “The Character of Preterition”Of Pynchon and Vice

The Character of Preterition: An Apology for Pointsman

Readers of Gravity’s Rainbow generally don’t like Dr. Edward

Pointsman. According to critics, his scientific principles

exhibit “an obsessed Pavlovian […] bent for determinism and

control” (Clerc 13), while the man himself is “inept,”

“repulsive” (Lynd 7, 9), or simply “evil” (Earl 231). In this

way, he interestingly illustrates a paradox surrounding Gravity’s

Rainbow: despite its oft-purported openness and indeterminacy, it

has managed to provoke among admirers and detractors alike

several nearly unanimous conclusions. In fact, these responses

to Pointsman in addition to their common judgment upon him,

demonstrate two larger consensus perspectives. The first is that

Gravity’s Rainbow does not depict fully-realized, “rounded”

characters, instead peopling itself with “flat,” “sketchy,”

“cartoonish” or “grotesque” personages (cf. Moore 64, McHugh 2).

The second is that the novel espouses a paranoid, near-Manichean

worldview that pits an evil conspiracy of “Them,” a multinational

conglomerate of “elect” white, imperialist warmongers, against

“Us,” a downtrodden and powerless “preterite” (cf. Mackey 27-28,

McClure 40). For admirers, these characteristics constitute a

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radical critique of traditional fiction and/or contemporary

society, as in Brian McHale’s claim that they demonstrate the

postmodern “absorption of character by text” (105) or Kathryn

Hume’s belief that the “magnitude of Them” and the “paranoid and

multiple nature of reality” cause Pynchon to shift his focus from

novelistic “character” to “humanity” (252); for detractors, they

exhibit a politically irresponsible puerility that undercuts any

possible seriousness, as in Scott Sanders’ early worry that “a

nation of paranoiacs would be a totalitarian’s dream” (158) or

James Wood’s more recent claim that in Pynchon “everyone is

ultimately protected from real menace because no one really

exists” (150).

In this paper, however, I will argue that the novel’s

characters are not as “flat” or “thin” as typically described,

and furthermore that the usual political and philosophic response

to the book based in this evaluation minimizes its most

interesting questions. In both cases, I think these views’

inadequacy is most pronounced in dealing with Pointsman; inasmuch

as I will argue that, to understand Gravity’s Rainbow’s fullest

profundity, Pointsman must be taken more seriously – and more

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sympathetically – than a mere cartoonish monster, this essay will

constitute an apology for Pointsman.

Flat and Round Characters

As Hume notes, the majority of writers on Gravity’s Rainbow

remark upon the book’s “thinness of character”: despite Pynchon’s

“opulent Joycean world,” he “denies us the filigrain complexity

of Joyce’s psychological portraits” because the characters appear

“flat” (242). The use of the term “flat” to describe fictional

characters derives, of course, from E. M. Forster.1 In Aspects of

the Novel, he defined “flat” characters – whom he notes have long

been an important part of the novel’s repertoire (67-69) – as

those whose entire function “can be expressed in one sentence”

(68), while his test for a rounded character is “whether it is

capable of surprising in a convincing way” (78); that is, a

rounded character can defy whatever one-sentence formula we

assign. Though Forster’s view of character has generally been

dismissed as irrelevant to postmodern texts, on the grounds that

it is too naively invested in mimesis and representation (cf.

Fokkema 20-25), the division has more utility than might at first

be apparent. Certainly, many of Gravity’s Rainbow’s four hundred

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characters are well-described as “flat,” since we can give most a

word or phrase describing them almost totally: e.g., Seaman

Bodine opposes the establishment, Major Marvy wallows in the

vulgar cowboy fantasies of the red-blooded American GI, Brigadier

Pudding fears the changing world, etc. This is not particularly

unusual, historically speaking: as Forster notes, novelists whose

prose has “immense vitality” often rely on casts of almost

entirely flat characters (71-72), as do authors whose books

contain large amounts of comedy (73).

Nevertheless, not all of Gravity’s Rainbow’s characters are

flat. For instance, consider the Nazi scientist Franz Pökler,

who initially seems an exemplary flat character, since despite

his obvious intelligence and basic decency, he never questions

the use of his work, nor attempts to flee with his family to

another country, nor rebels against his commanders when they are

sent to a camp (GR 403-424): as the narrator, in Forsterian

summing-up, says, “Pökler chose silence” (GR 416), to the point

where he not only cannot identify whether the girl his overseers

send to visit him annually is his daughter but is unsure whether

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he even ought to be ashamed by his emergent sexual desires for

her (GR 427). In one scene, that daughter asks to enter his bed:

He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud

and terrible blow. That took care of his anger.

Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged

her up on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands

already at the buttons of his trousers, her white

frock already pulled above her waist. She had been

wearing nothing at all underneath, nothing all day ...

how I’ve wanted you, she whispered as paternal plow found

its way into filial furrow...and after hours of

amazing incest they dressed in silence... (GR 427)

The passage continues for a while longer, giving us time to

assimilate whatever shock this event provokes. There is probably

not much: we’ve already seen the success that government and

entertainment institutions have had in conditioning sexual desire

in their subjects (e.g., GR 72-74, 403-404) and have been

prepared for pedophilia and incest by earlier scenes of deviant

sexual behavior (e.g., GR 95-106, 402-403). Pökler’s final

submission to this manipulation would fit his formula perfectly.

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Except that it’s not what actually happens. After

describing their post-coital activities, the narrator revises the

scene: “No. What Pökler did was choose to believe she wanted

comfort that night, wanted not to be alone. Despite Their game,

Their palpable evil, though he had no more reason to trust ‘Ilse’

than he trusted Them, by an act not of faith, not of courage, but

of conservation, he chose to believe that” (GR 428). Though it

would’ve been entirely plausible for the scene to have occurred

as originally described – most readers, I suspect, believe it

upon first reading – Pynchon instead utilizes the reserve of

integrity he has laid out within Pökler to follow another

plausible path. Pynchon’s trick shows us how much we had been

willing to grant to Pökler’s submissiveness – to his flatness –

then up-ends it, generating the type of surprise that, for

Forster, defines a rounded character. The choice has its limits,

of course, but there are two distinct possibilities, with

meaningfully different consequences, and Pökler chooses between

them. Similarly, though the options of the novel’s other

characters are also limited by circumstance, many act and think

in surprising ways: for example, Pirate Prentice decides to seek

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out the lost Tyrone Slothrop with the Counter-Force even though

he discovers it’s been co-opted (GR 546-558); Geli Tripping,

despite knowing that her beloved Tchichterine could be anywhere

in the Zone and in the arms of any of hundreds of women,

successfully locates and seduces him (GR 732-739, 748-749); and

Oberst Enzian, despite the purported preterition of his near-

extinct Hereros, decides to resist Josef Ombindi’s calls for mass

suicide (GR 739; more on this later).

As we noted earlier, most critics treat Pointsman as a flat

character, essentially taking his stated wish to find a “true

mechanical explanation” for human behavior at face value (GR

90). This argument proceeds as follows: 1) Pointsman, through

his work at the White Visitation, is allied with the nefarious

Them and seeks to accumulate and utilize power on Their behalf,

much like the Nazi Weissmann (Patrick McHugh, for instance,

claims that Pointsman “out-fascists the fascists” (4)); 2)

Pointsman’s scientific philosophy, defined by his search for the

“true mechanical explanation” and his allegiance to “ones and

zeros” (as opposed to Mexico’s on the “space between”) is a

direct result of this drive for systematic power and control (cf.

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Cooper 120-121); 3) Pointsman’s schemes regarding Slothrop and

the novel’s other characters are motivated by 1) and 2). Many

critics continue by following Charles Cleric in claiming that

Pointsman “dialectically opposes the beliefs of statistician

Roger Mexico” (13), the latter characterized as more open to

indeterminacy, thus flattening two characters at once.

Certainly, the novel does contain several critiques of a

mechanistic worldview, as in this account of a rocket attack:

… half of St. Veronica’s hospital in the morning

smashed roofless as the old Ick Regis Abbey, powdered

as the snow, and poor Spectro picked off, lighted

cubbyhole and dark ward subsumed in the blast and he

never hearing the approach, the sound too late, after

the blast, the rocket’s ghost calling to ghosts it

newly made. Then silence. Another “event” […], a

rounded-headed pin to be stuck in his map, a square

graduating from two up to three hits, helping fill out

the threes prediction, which lately’s been lagging

behind…

A pin? Not even that, a pinhole in paper that someday

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will be taken down, when the rockets have stopped their

falling, or when the young statistician chooses to end

his count, paper to be hauled away by the charwomen,

torn up, and burned … […] alone, shaking his head no…

inside me, in my memory…more than an “event” … our

common mortality … these tragic days … (GR 141)

Treating a lethal rocket explosion as a mere statistical “event,”

a data point whose only purpose is to validate a scientific

model, exhibits the kind of inhuman, rationalist callousness

critics associate with Pointsman; the surrounding metaphysical

and apocalyptic speculation aligns better with the sensibility

most critics endorse and associate with Mexico (cf. Cooper 121).

Except, again, that’s not what’s happening. In fact, this is

Pointsman’s critique of the mathematical coldness of Mexico’s

statistical outlook. Despite his reputation as a soulless

bureaucrat, Pointsman has the sensitivity to imagine this

intricate, intimate vision, one which – were it formed by another

character, perhaps by Pirate or Katje or Slothrop – would likely

provoke more critical sympathy. That the type of prosaic

richness featured in this passage is not infrequent in

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Poinstman’s appearances during the novel’s first two parts – such

as his reveries outside the bus station (GR 50-52) and at

Christmastime (GR 170-171, 176-177) – should give us reason to

reconsider our reading of Pointsman.

Pointsman as Character

As the above passage suggests, Pointsman is less defined by

logic than by paradox. After all, despite his commitment to the

“true mechanical explanation,” he often appears to believe in

significant human agency, which might best be illustrated via his

surname. As many have noted, the word “pointsman” historically

referred to the railroad switch-puller who controlled which of

several intersecting sets of tracks a passing train would take.

This figure had great symbolic import to nineteenth-century

thinkers like physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who saw in it a

metaphor for the human mind’s power to direct larger forces.

According to one recent writer, “The lesson of the pointsman [to

Maxwell] was that consciousness matters, and that the physical

world cannot be properly explained without considering how our

role as conscious, willful beings might impact it” (Stanley 491)—

that is, the pointsman figures how humanity may control mechanism

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instead of being determined by it. This concept of the pointsman

may oppose the notion of a “true mechanical explanation,” but it

is consistent with Pointsman’s attitudes elsewhere in the novel,

as in the passage in which he reflects on the British military

bureaucracy:

By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he

has gained a great bit of Wisdom: if there is a life

force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so

analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It

all comes down, as it must, to the desires of

individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless

their empty little heads. But survival depends on

having strong enough desires—on knowing the System

better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s

work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any

extrahuman anxieties […] (GR 231)

Though Pointsman does acknowledge the tremendous power of larger

political structures here, he also asserts that they are not all-

determining and may be influenced through concentrated effort and

skill—and interestingly, rather than seeing himself as part of

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this hierarchical power, he views himself as one who must

constantly work both with and against it.

Pointsman attempts to negotiate this dialectic through his

interest in Pavlov’s theory of the “ultraparadoxical stage.”

This phenomenon, which Pointsman investigates in dogs and

eventually attempts to explore in Slothrop, examines those points

where the polar “idea of opposites” appears to break down,

allowing response to occur before stimulus (GR 49). This enigma

does not seem commensurate to the mechanistic view usually

ascribed to Pointsman; in fact, it seems more in tune with

Mexico’s critically-celebrated suggestion that “cause-and-effect

may have been taken as far as it will go” (GR 91), though it

might also suggest greater determinism than the “true mechanical

explanation,” since if response occurs before stimulus, there

cannot even be a pretense of agency within the stimulated

individual. The idea’s implications are problematic and

equivocal, and the doctor puzzles inconclusively over them: on

the one hand, he is excited by the implication of “[s]omething

that’s been there all along, something we could be looking at but

no one is” (GR 50); on the other, he wonders if it’s not all

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“yang-yin rubbish” (GR 90). In short, though Pointsman at times

may seek control via the “true mechanical explanation,” he is

neither confident it exists, nor sure of its nature, nor decided

upon whether it would be beneficial to pursue.

Especially in light of these complications, we should see

how Pointsman’s activity at the White Visitation is more complex

than a mere propping-up of the nascent military-industrial

complex. Despite the frequent paralleling of Pointsman and

Weissmann as power-mad directors of morally-parallel research

institutions, Pointsman’s task at the novel’s start is not mass

destruction but the defense of Britain against Nazi rockets, an

unimpeachably moral task. Nor does he only regard this job as a

pretense for consolidating power: as we’ve seen in the hospital

bombing scene, he has vivid fears of mortality—and not merely his

own, as best shown during his Christmas mourning for his deceased

colleagues, whose deaths by progressively sophisticated Nazi

technology (“auto, bomb, gun, V-1, and now V-2”) are described

earlier (GR 141):

Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro are

stars on the doctor’s holiday tree. Shining down on

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this holiest of nights. Each is a cold announcement of

dead ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee

south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end. But

Kevin Spectro is brightest, and most distant of all.

And the crowds they swarm in Knightsbridge, and the

wireless carols drone, and the Underground is a mob

scene, but Pointsman’s all alone. But he’s got his

Xmas present, fa la la, he won’t have to settle for any

Spam-tin dog this year mates, he’s got his own miracle

and human child […] (GR 170)

Pointsman’s attention is not centered on his control of the

Slothrop experiment; on the contrary, it is an afterthought, cold

comfort when considered next to his inability to stop the Nazis

from killing Spectro and the others.

This feeling of ineffectuality helps demonstrate,

incidentally, why Pointsman’s interest in “ones and zeros” rather

than the “space between” is more than a mechanical assertion of

certitude and hierarchy: other approaches, like Mexico’s use of

the Poisson distribution, may impress with their mathematical

sophistication (GR 56), but they are all but useless in aiding

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British defense. A Poisson distribution merely calculates the

probabilities of a certain number of rockets falling into a given

area over a period of time; as those probabilities are

necessarily uniform across every square on Mexico’s map, and as

they do not even become more precise with additional information

about successive rocket hits (GR 57), they provide almost no help

to British intelligence in preparing for the attacks.2 The

mechanistic formula that Pointsman wishes the Poisson

distribution were would be of much greater humanitarian benefit

than Mexico’s actual calculations. As Pointsman asks Mexico:

“What will you do with the sieve you’ve laid over London? How

will you use the things that grow in your network of death?” (GR

57-58). Put another way, in Vineland, Frenesi contemplates “the

one and zero of life and death” (VL 72); with her, we should

understand that life and death generally are matters of one and

zero, not the probabilistic space between,3 and it seems unjust

to censure Pointsman for understanding that.

In short, it is not the dominating drive for the “true

mechanical explanation” that causes Pointsman to engage in

manipulative enterprises like the Slothrop experiment; rather, it

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is the failure to realize such an explanation – at least one

capable of effectively defending against the rockets – that leads

him in that direction. With straightforward logic unable to

solve the problem and his consciousness terrified into

submission, Pointsman takes recourse in the mysteries of the

ultraparadoxical, attempting to discover whether he can “solve

the mystery of why the rockets are falling as they do” (GR 92)

by exploring the “physiological basis for what seems very odd

behavior” (GR 91). Ironically, it is this aspect of his

philosophy, the one most in tune with critical rejection of

standard cause-and-effect, that leads to the activities they most

censure. Not only does the experiment’s content – Slothrop’s V-

2-anticipating erections – reverse causality, but Pointsman’s

method in undertaking the experiment does, as well. What is his

dismissal of the requirement to “justify” an experiment before

rather than after its execution (GR 49) but an ultraparadoxical

challenge to the usual order? What is his rationalization to

Pudding that “the Americans have already been at him! don’t you

see? It’s not as if we’re corrupting a virgin or something—”

(GR 85) but a preposterous ex post facto inversion? It is

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Pointsman’s lack of commitment to cause-and-effect, rather than

his confidence in it, which corrupts him.

This jumbling of Pointsman’s priorities causes another

paradox at the war’s end: instead of being relieved by the

cessation of falling rockets, he is undone by it. We might best

see this during the scene in which he schemes to separate Roger

and Jessica during their post-VE-Day vacation. At one point,

Pointsman is caught by his colleagues saying some odd things

about an “unpleasant hallucination”:

What the somewhat disconnected Mr. Pointsman has been

hearing all this time is a voice, strangely familiar, a

voice that he once imagined a face in a well-known

photograph from the War to have:

“Here is what you have to do. You need Mexico now,

more than ever. Your winter anxieties about the End of

History seem now all well comforted to rest, part of

your biography now like any old bad dream. But like

Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent

hands. Mexico’s girlfriend is a threat to your whole

enterprise. [...] I’d jump at it, if I were you.”

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Pointsman is about to retort something like, “But

you’re not me,” only he sees how the others all seem to

be goggling at him. “Oh, ha, ha, ha,” he sez instead.

“Talking to myself here. Little—sort of—eccentricity,

heh, heh.”

“Yang and Yin,” whispers the Voice, “Yang and Yin…”

(GR 281-282).

This is not a mechanical thought process, nor one characterized

by control or a drive to hierarchy. It appears to be a dialogue

between two separate personae, one a rational, manipulative

scientist and the other a somewhat frightened, confused, and

ineffectual bureaucrat, two aspects of Pointsman that have been

shorn apart by the war’s paradoxes. We should note, though, that

Pointsman identifies with the second personality, seeing the

first as a hallucinated alien (“you’re not me”)—yet to save face

in front of the others, he’s forced to claim identity with the

former (“talking to myself”). From this point on, that figure

dominates his appearances in the novel, peppered with power-

hungry schemes and Nayland Smith fantasies (cf. GR 644). We

won’t try to psychoanalyze precisely what has happened here, but

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the general result is that Pointsman has gotten lost in the

“yang-yin rubbish” of the ultraparadoxical stage, and what had

been a means – his authority at the White Visitation and

involvement in The War – has become an end he preserves for its

own sake. James Earl claims that there is irony in Pointsman’s

“inability to be his own pointsman, though he tries to be

everybody else’s” (GR 233), which is true enough—but if one sees

his goals as at least as worthy as grotesque, and his available

options as more fraught than clear-cut, the irony is tragic

rather than satiric.

We will discuss the larger implications of Pointsman’s

characterization later, but before proceeding, let’s briefly

examine one more Pointsman scene. Though most of Gravity’s Rainbow

verse passages are comic, near-doggerel songs, there are two

prominent exceptions of serious poetry, of which Pointsman is

responsible for one:

Thus, reaching for some flower on my table,

I know the cool mosaic of my room

Begin its slow, inhibitory dissolve

Around the bloom, the stimulus, the need

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That brighter burns, as brightness, quickly sucked

From objects all around, now concentrates

(Yet less than blinding), focuses to flame.

Whilst there yet, in the room’s hypnotic evening,

The others lurk—the books, the instruments,

The old man’s clothes, an old gorodki stuick,

Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits,

Or memories I kept of where they were,

Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame:

The reach toward the frail and waiting flower...

And so, one of them—pen, or empty glass—

Is knocked from where it was, perhaps to roll

Beyond the blank frontiers of memory...

Yet this, be clear, is no “senile distraction,”

But concentrating, such as younger men

Can easily and laughing dodge, their world

Presenting too much more than one mean loss—

And out here, eighty-three, the cortex slack,

Excitatory processes eased to cinders

By Inhibition’s tweaking, callused fingers,

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Each time my room begins its blur I feel

I’ve looked in on some city’s practice blackout

(Such as must come, should Germany keep on

That road of madness). Each light, winking out...

Except at least for one bright, stubborn bloom

The Wardens cannot quench. Or not this time. (GR 229-

230)

This stunning poem by Pointsman, glossing a comment by Pavolv

regarding the elderly, could sustain an entire paper’s worth of

commentary, but for now we should observe three things: first,

for a man supposedly representing a Them that hates all

Otherness, Pointsman here poignantly adopts a persona somewhat

different from himself; second, Pointsman’s speaker, instead of

empathizing with the forces of The War, fights against them;

third, that speaker’s awareness dissolves under the weight of the

surrounding night, causing him to hide in a dark space so that he

can concentrate. In addition to seeing how these reflect upon

Pointsman himself, we ought to recognize, too, that they provide

an apt description of Tyrone Slothrop.

Pointsman as Preterite

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This convergence between Pointsman and Slothrop may be

surprising, since politically and philosophically, the novel is

usually taken to pit the evil Them (including Pointsman) against

a persecuted Us (including Slothrop), often identifying the

former with The War, Technology, and other abstract, all-powerful

agents (cf. GR 224-225, 529-530, 657-658, and 710-711, for just

a few examples). We should recall, though, that references to

Them almost always occur in characters’ inner monologues, and

many of those characters recant these thoughts upon reflection

(cf. GR 441, 530). There are actual conspiracies in the novel –

notably the one against Slothrop – but as Pointsman’s case

illustrates, the notion that They constitute a homogenous,

omnipotent power structure is belied by its supposed members’

feelings of alienation, impotence, and rebellion. Perhaps

Pointsman’s underling Webley Silvernail demonstrates this best

when he sadly admits to his beloved lab rats that he’s powerless

to free them and that the “elite few, who are the loudest to

theorize on freedom [are] the least free of all” (GR 233).

Regardless, the divide between Us and Them is often mapped

upon the Calvinist distinction between the elect and preterite,

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and just as Pynchon is typically seen as championing the

oppressed Us against the wealthy and powerful Them, he is taken

to support the preterite against the elect; John McClure, for

instance, writes that Pynchon “endorses an array of preterite

spiritualities” (49). However, a number of moments in the novel

work against this notion, even when we examine its most obvious

example, the Hereros, who are dubbed a “preterite clan”

practically from their first appearance (GR 102) and who adopt

as a slogan (in the wake of their omission from Mondaugen’s

genocide) “mba-kyere,” or “I am passed over” (GR 368),

practically the dictionary definition of “preterition.” For

instance, what do we make of this reflection by Schwarzkommando

leader Oberst Enzian: “Who will believe that in his heart he

wants to belong to them out there, the vast Humility sleepless,

dying, in pain tonight across the Zone? The preterite he loves,

knowing he’s always to be a stranger...” (GR 746). Why is

Enzian, the leader of the Zone’s Hereros, a man who has been

literally fucked by the powerful for much of his life, feel like

a stranger to the preterite?

We may understand why by examining the logic behind

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correlating wealth and election, as theorized in Max Weber’s The

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. According to Weber, the great

Calvinist anxiety is individual uncertainty over whether or not

one is elected (110): Calvin claimed that one could feel election

internally, but also distrusted purely inward modes of

spirituality, insisting that any of the truly elect would be so

filled with the spirit of God that he would act industriously to

spread His glory (113-114). As Weber notes, Calvinists’

subsequent devotion to productivity is an effort at “getting rid

of the fear of damnation” by demonstrating to themselves that they

are elected (115). The association of election and wealth is

therefore not a point of doctrine: it is a psychological device

designed to cope with the doctrine. However, since one’s life is

either saved or not – a one or zero with no in-between – and

since we cannot really know whom God has elected, any earthly

method of determining election can only be a subjective,

existential model for creating meaning. This implies that anyone

could choose his own model by which election is signified—and by

extension define anyone who does not conform to it as preterite.

The blue-blooded “elect” believe that election is signified by

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material success, but others invert this worldview and read

suffering as a sign of election: for example, while being “passed

over” is taken by the Hereros as a sign of their preterition, in

Judaism being “passed over” by the Angel of Death designated the

oppressed Jews’ elected status over their Egyptian masters.

Since, in this manner, one may read one’s suffering as a

sign of election, though, why do the Hereros designate themselves

as preterite? Perhaps they do so because, like Ivan Karamazov

and Huck Finn before them, they believe that if election requires

a populace’s suffering and damnation, they want no part of it.

Huck, however, was never a rigorous enough philosopher to see the

consequences of this decision; Ivan, who was, is driven mad by

it. If the destiny of preterition is unredeemable death, we might

understand why Josef Ombindi wants Enzian to lead the

Schwarzkommando to mass suicide, so as to get things over with

(GR 324-325). Enzian cannot quarrel with Ombindi’s conclusion,

but he also cannot accept it: his alienation from the preterite

reflects his rejection of willful preterition and his decision,

instead, to create some model of election for his own followers.

Though we do not know how exactly he plans to do so, his

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possession of the 00001 (GR 749), whose last digit contrasts

affirmatively to the 00000’s total negation – if only in a small

way – suggests some hope.

Whether Enzian’s Hereros will have any success, of course,

is entirely ambiguous. Election, after all, can only be

validated by transcendence, which is nearly impossible to observe

from an earthly perspective. This difficulty is best negotiated

via a Christ-figure, who may simultaneously sustain a carnal

embodiment and a transcendent meaning. Slothrop’s ancestor

William perceived this well, though he added an interesting twist

when writing about the preterite in his tract On Preterition:

William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,”

without whom there’d be no elect. You can bet the

Elect in Boston were pissed off about that [...].

William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas

Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in Creation

has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus

be an exception? Could we feel for him anything but

horror in the face of the unnatural, the

extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if

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what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to

love Judas too. (GR 565)

In response, his descendant Tyrone wonders, “Suppose the

Slothropian heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper?

Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more

mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?” (GR 565-566). Despite the

critical approval Slothrop’s doctrine has received (cf. Mackey

18, Muste 171), it does not seem that many have grasped or taken

seriously its moral philosophy, because nearly every response

simply aligns this philosophy with Pynchon’s supposed support for

Us over Them. Though at first the passage aligns with this

division – “the Elect in Boston” seem to be ancestors of Them,

and the “second Sheep” of Us – it actually undoes that

distinction entirely via the inclusion of Christ. Jesus – the

pacifist pauper who preached that the meek would inherit the

earth and that the persecuted would gain the kingdom of Heaven –

is the last person who could prefigure the Boston blue-bloods and

military-industrial complex. By invoking Jesus, William

Slothrop’s elect/preterite formulation renders itself incapable

of simply contrasting the haves and have-nots.

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Instead, it shows how any model of election requires an

opposing preterite: that is, in any method of justifying our

lives – in selecting a Christ who both exemplifies and transforms

them – we also must define everything that opposes it as bad and

associate it with an emblematic Judas, even if this Judas has

done nothing worse than select a different model of election.

What Slothropian mercy suggests, then, is not simply benevolence

for the downtrodden. Rather, it extends its compassion from

those we view as being among Us toward any whom we must hate for

the sake of our worldview. Once we abandon the idea that

preterition and election are simply about money and power, it

should become apparent that there isn’t one consistent Christ

figure (and by extension, one model of election) throughout the

novel. Certainly, in some parts of the novel, Christ is

associated with various forms of “European adventuring” (GR 111);

in particular, Enzian notes that upon first seeing Weissmann that

he “knew, in the instant, [he] must be Jesus Christ” (GR 330).4

But there is a more significant, if more implicit, Christ figure,

one perhaps first articulated in the quote from Pointsman’s

Christmas reverie cited above: Tyrone Slothrop. After all, it is

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he who is sent out into the world to suffer, he who is betrayed

by those closest to him, he who is destroyed by the Zone, and he

who inspires a movement of followers for whom his sacrifice is a

motivating symbol: when the Counter-Force Spokesman notes years

later that “Some called [Slothrop] a ‘pretext.’ Other felt he

was a genuine, point-for-point microcosm” (GR 753), it is hard

not to hear the echoes of contemporary Christian debates over how

to interpret the import and effect of Christ’s sacrifice. Far

from being purely preterite, Slothrop is the path to

transcendence for characters like Pirate, who is nearly lost

before setting off with the Counter-Force to save him (GR 546-

558, 631-633).

If Slothrop is Christ, who is his betrayer? Who is his

purported ally, who gives him up to destruction in exchange for

money and power? His Judas – the man whom William Slothrop would

have us forgive – is Edward Pointsman. Pointsman does not hang

himself in penance, but he is politically exiled, “officially in

disgrace” (GR 625-626) after his failure. Perhaps worst of all,

he is damned by Mexico to be perpetually chased by the Counter-

Force to “the last room […] and you’ll have to live in it the

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rest of your scum, prostituted life” (GR 649). This is his

eternal punishment for trying to find The Truth and instead

succumbing to The War: he must be the preterite that the Counter-

Force (and literary critics) may loathe in search of meaning.

Forgiving Pointsman

At the novel’s conclusion, as the rocket closes upon us,

William Slothrop makes a final appearance, giving us a hymn to

sing just before destruction.

There is a Hand to turn the time,

Though thy glass today be run,

Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low

Find the last poor pret’rite one...

Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road

All through our crippl’d Zone,

With a face on ev’ry mountainside,

And a Soul in ev’ry stone.... (GR 776)

William Vesterman’s classic essay on Pynchon’s poetry grants that

this passage is more serious than the typically bawdy, comic

verse of the rest of the novel, but claims that it has a similar

ironic effect, since its “style creates pseudo-confusions rather

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than enhancements in meaning”; specifically, the meter becomes

irregular and unfocused in the later lines, and that these lines

cause troubling ambiguities, such as whether “poor pret’rite one”

might refer to a single powerless preterite or an enlightened

massing of the lower classes (110-111). To the first claim, we

should recall that the Protestant hymn has always relied on

melisma to balance its irregular verse, and that the tune of “A

Might Fortress is Our God” might be laid upon this lyric without

much trouble. To the second, we should note that the two

meanings suggested by Vesterman are not as incommensurable as he

thinks: “Pret’rite one” offers the suggestion that preterition is

what, fundamentally, unites us, in that we are all, at some

level, singular and unsure of any meaning we may or may not have.

(In William Empson’s terms, this is a type IV ambiguity, not a

type VII.) If we need further encouragement to combine the

universal reading with the solitary one, we should note that the

only two words following this hymn are “Now everybody—”

And why shouldn’t they be? After all, no theory of election

will save anyone from the rocket. The Zone, as Geli notes, is

without “subdivisions” or “frontiers” (GR 298), because the

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trauma of the war has jumbled the old orders. For all the

attractive freedom of this, we rediscover in it how artificial is

our sense of election, how certain is our mortality. From a

Christian worldview, William Slothrop claimed we should forgive

Judas because without him Christ’s sacrifice would have no

meaning. From a humanist standpoint, we might make the same

judgment by concluding that any meaning requires the rejection of

its opposite, and that mercy means that we should empathize with

even those who promulgate that opposite, for we share with them

both mortality and a will to transcend it. This does not mean

that their model must be equally valid to ours – certainly, what

Pointsman becomes is monstrous – but it does mean that the human

condition is fraught with anxiety, violence, and terror, and that

if it causes some people to do horrible things, those mistakes

are not because they are fundamentally inhuman and different from

us, but human and the same. In light of the endless pillorying

of Pointsman, I am not sure that many critics of Gravity’s Rainbow

have appreciated this. Suppose we were to allow this position to

consolidate and prosper—might there be less critical bile spewed

in the name of political grandstanding, and more mercy in the

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name of forgiving Edward Pointsman?

Notes

1 For an earlier examination of Gravity’s Rainbow’s characters in

Forster’s terms, see the chapter “Characterization and Personal

Salvation” in Mark Richard Siegel’s Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in

Gravity’s Rainbow. Unlike my essay, however, Siegel’s chapter

looks at Forster’s discussion of “realistic” characters, as

opposed to flat/round ones; though we end up reaching some

different conclusions about the novel, I do assent to his

conclusion that “Slothrop and a half dozen other characters in

Gravity’s Rainbow seem to be quite capable of moving any sympathetic

reader” (72). Thomas Moore also discusses Gravity’s Rainbow and

Forster in his The Style of Connectedness (64), though only very

briefly. (The relative age of both these citations suggests, I

think, how much the “flatness” of the novel’s characters has been

taken for granted over the past twenty years or so.)

2 At best, it might aid emergency resource management (e.g., if

they determine that there’s only an infinitesimal chance of any

square receiving five or more hits over a given period, they can

arrange they rescue teams so that they only need to cope with

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four or fewer), but this kind of information might be as easily

intuited from the raw data.

3 Unless, I suppose, one becomes a Thanatoid—though I’m not sure

how attainable an option that is for most of us. (Thanks to

Zofia Kolbuszewska for raising this point.)

4 Thanks to Douglas Lannark for reminding me of this passage.

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Works Cited

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Ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1984. 3-30.

Print

Cooper, Peter. Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary

World. U of California P: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983.

Print.

Earl, James W. “Freedom and Knowledge in the Zone.” Approaches to

Gravity’s Rainbow. Ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State,

1984. 229-250. Print.

Fokkema, Aleid. Postmodern Characters: A Study of Characterization in British and

American Postmodern Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. Postmodern

Studies 4. Print.

Forster, Edward Morgan. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. New York:

Harcourt, 1957. Print.

Hume, Kathryn. “Repetition and the Construction of Character in

Gravity’s Rainbow.” Critique 33.4 (Summer 1992): 243-254. Print.

Lynd, Margaret. “Science, Narrative, and Agency in Gravity’s

Rainbow.” Critique 46.1 (Fall 2004): 63-80. Print.

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Mackey, Louis. “Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition.” SubStance

10.30 (1981): 16-30. Print.

McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and

Morrison. Athens, GA: Georgia, 2007. Print.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987.

Print.

McHugh, Patrick. “Cultural Politics, Postmodernism, and White

Guys: Affect in "Gravity's Rainbow.” College Literature 28.2

(Spring 2001): 1-28. Print.

Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas

Pynchon. Columbia, MO: U Missouri P, 1987. Print.

Muste, John M. “The Mandala in Gravity’s Rainbow.” boundary 2 9.2

(Winter 1981): 163-180. Print.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin,

2006. Print.

---. Vineland. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1990. Print.

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Leverenz. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1976. 139-160.

Print.

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Siegel, Mark Richard. Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1978. Print.

Stanley, Matthew. “The Pointsman: Maxwell’s Demon, Victorian Free

Will, and the Boundaries of Science.” Journal of the History of

Ideas, (July 2008): 467-491. Print.

Vesterman, William. “Pynchon’s Poetry.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on

Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz.

Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1976. 101-112. Print.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1904. Trans.

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Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and

Giroux, 2008. Print.

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The Character of Preterition: An Apology for Pointsman

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