MOLLY HITE“Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive”: Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity’s RainbowThe title quotation, “fun actually was becoming quite subversive,” is not from Gravity’s Rainbow, although I would argue that Thomas Pynchon’s great novel takes it for granted. The observation is part of Abbie Hoffman’s testimony during the 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven, young men from various antiwar and revolutionary groups who were accused of disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention. In statements carefully scripted to be cued by his attorney, Leonard Weinglass, often with unintentionally hilarious interruptions by prosecutor Richard Schultz and judge Julius Hoffman, Abbie observed, “fun was very important . . . it was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and morals that were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a rat race.” Furthermore, he added, the rat race, the nine-to-?ve, ?ve-day-a-week workload at the center of the lives of most middle-class Americans even during the economic boom of the late 1960s, “didn’t make any sense because in a few years . . . machines would do all the work anyway” (Hoffman). Hoffman’s point, familiar at the time to sociologists and cultural theorists as well as members of the counterculture, was that the work ethic had lost its economic rationale.1 It persisted1. Famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 study The Af?uent Society popularized the concept of a limit to in see especially 255–67. David Riesman’s Abundance for What? was an ensuing and widely read popularization of sociological and economic approaches. French sociologist Joffre Dumazedier laid out the possibilities for a leisure society in his 1967 study Toward a Society of Leisure (33–46) andContemporary Literature 51, 4 ; E-ISSN /10 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System678?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Ebecause it served the disciplinary aims of social control, not because it was necessary for anyone’s survival or even relative prosperity. Developments in technology, especially, had drastically reduced the need for human labor and could be expected to reduce this need more drastically in the near future. The 1968 Yippie manifesto from which Hoffman quoted near the end of his testimony called for “[a] society which works towards and actively promotes the concept of full unemployment, a society in which people are free from the drudgery of work, adoption of the concept ‘Let the machines do it.’” In our current situation, the 1968 call for full unemployment seems ironically prophetic, while Hoffman’s announcement that “there was a whole system of values that people were taught to postpone their pleasure, to put all their money in the bank, to buy life insurance, a whole bunch of things that didn’t make any sense to our generation at all” foreshadows all the aging baby boomers (and other U.S. citizens as well) in unprecedented personal debt, without savings, many without retirement bene?ts or health care. This fall from the ideal of a benign technology enabling a benignly truncated but still nurturant welfare state is one of the reasons new readers are increasingly puzzled by the themes and even the narrative tones of Gravity’s Rainbow. Through most of its apocalyptic chronicle of the trajectory of the V–2 Rocket—for Pynchon, the leading edge of Western technological development—the novel still sustains an alternative vision of technology as redemption, notably in its account of Rocket-Manichaeans, “who see two Rockets, good and evil . . . Enzian and Blicero[:] a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide” (727). So the notion of fun as subversive is connected to a particular vision of a society served by laboring machines. It also has a larger and more comprehensive theoretical elaboration in radical political, social, and psychological writings of the 1950s andarrived at some “tentative conclusions” (233–49). Psychologist Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture draws on both Norman O. Brown and, more centrally, Herbert Marcuse (84–123) and offers an excellent introduction to the utopianism of Paul Goodman (178–204).H I T E?6791960s. In particular, it draws on Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 cultural synthesis Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, republished in 1966 with an important “political preface” and by that time one of the core texts of the New Left. Although generations of Pynchon critics have ?ltered the novel through philosophers and social and political thinkers—from Machiavelli to Nietzsche to Max Weber to Norman O. Brown to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—and especially through important ? movements in academic theory since the mid-1970s, surprisingly little work considers seriously the social, economic, and political writing that was new and widely discussed in the 1950s and 1960s, the period of Pynchon’s life in which he conceived and wrote Gravity’s Rainbow.2 This is only to point out that the Derridean, Foucauldian, Lacanian, and Deleuzian readings to date have stopped short of the particular way in which Gravity’s Rainbow theorizes fun as subversive. The idea that fun could subvert an oppressive capitalist structure is central to this novel of excess, of proliferating riffs, of a mind-boggling superabundance of historical evidence for conspiracy and cooptation, of nauseated, giggly embrace of “the horror,” whether the horror is racism, genocide, global annihilation, or the “[m]an . . . inside our brains,” whose “corporate emblem is a white albatross[;] each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit” (Gravity’s Rainbow 712–13). In this notion of a kind of play that both abets and undermines “structures favoring death,” we see the recognition of complicity essential to postmodern political theories, along with an apocalyptic conception of a global conspiracy and its utopian alternatives—totalizing tendencies that Marianne DeKoven’s study Utopia Limited has taught us to see as part of a last great ?owering of syncretic high modernism. The epic reach2. Notable exceptions include Schaub, Attewell, and Wol?ey. Wol?ey’s important 1977 article argued for the in?uence of Norman O. Brown’s revisionist psychoanalytic treatises on Gravity’s Rainbow. Because Brown emphasized the individual and normative standards of sexual behavior, however, the essay could not accommodate the radical politics and polymorphous sexual exuberance of Pynchon’s novel. Indeed, Brown was in?uenced by Marcuse but developed Marcuse’s ideas entirely in relation to the individual psyche, thus arriving at a more mainstream version of Marcuse’s revolutionary theory.680?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Eof Gravity’s Rainbow, both in space and in time, is intimately related to the priority it places on play—on “mindless pleasures,” to cite Pynchon’s original title. This immense ambition, in essence to propose a revisionary master narrative of the whole of Western civilization, is part of what has become anachronistic about Gravity’s Rainbow, so that to new readers its strategies often seem self-indulgent, redundant, and even imperialist in their appropriation of third-world narratives for the purpose of constructing a large-scale history of oppression and repression.3 Eros and Armageddon There can be little question that Pynchon knew Eros and Civilization and that it directly in?uenced his 1973 epic. Gravity’s Rainbow picks up speci?c motifs from Marcuse’s study. It presents a nontraditional characterization of Orpheus as a ?gure connected not only with music and memory but also with play, desire, “perverse” sexuality, receptivity, and nonproductivity. It lays out an origin and theory of what Marcuse calls “sublime administration” and Pynchon simply calls “Them.” It bases part of its argument on the same geometrical ?gures that Gravity’s Rainbow associates with the Rocket—the ascending arc, a mapping of literal ?ight and metaphorical progress, and its counter?gure, the circle. Both Marcuse and Pynchon elaborate these ?gures as a commentary on transcendence, as the central value of Western culture and a negative value. Most of all, Marcuse’s argument supplies a context for Pynchon’s great novel, indicating how the postwar period both resembles and is an effect of the period from the 1930s through World War II. Marcuse claimed that the society in which Pynchon wrote Gravity’s Rainbow was a privileged historical moment, when surplus production seemed likely to allow citizens to work shorter hours. At this point, when a “leisure soci3. In a famous article of 1976, Edward Mendelson characterized these qualities as “encyclopedic” and thus totalizing. As I argued in 1983, totalization and its claims of control are thematized as well as undermined in Gravity’s Rainbow. Luc Hermann and Petrus van Ewijk further argue against totalization and control in Gravity’s Rainbow, invoking Martin Buber’s 1923 essay “I and Thou.”H I T E?681ety” became for the ?rst time economically feasible, Marcuse proposed that af?uent societies might conceivably “regress,” reversing their monomaniacal demand for increased productivity and consequent “progress” toward increasing armaments and nuclear “overkill.” Going backward, returning, or reversing direction all became in this argument positive values, ways of claiming a mode of life that would not be dedicated to the endless increase of productivity and the domination of nature and other cultures. Marcuse wrote in his 1966 preface, “Historical backwardness may again become the historical chance of turning the wheel of progress to another direction” (xvii). Many prominent sociologists and economists theorized that in the af?uent society, as Abbie Hoffman had predicted, there would be less need for repressive structures of work, time, and competition. In the zone of possibility anticipated for the postwar West, Marcuse could well have declared with Gravity’s Rainbow’s Argentine anarchist Squalidozzi, “[O]ur hope is limitless. . . . So is our danger” (265). Squalidozzi explains that hope lies in a geographical area where “this War—this incredible War—just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that’s prevailed in Germany for a thousand years” (265). The postwar “Zone” is a brilliant spatial representation of a temporal condition no longer compartmentalized and regulated by the demands of productivity. For Squalidozzi, this Zone recalls an apparently archaic object of desire, an ur-Argentina, “that ?rst unscribbled serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky . . .” (264; ellipses in orig.). The new and in many respects unprecedented Zone signals possibility, and thus futurity, but takes the form of nostalgia for a mythic past—a golden age or prelapsarian Eden always described in terms of oneness, an absence of oppositions, distinctions, or binaries. Students of psychoanalysis will hear in this nostalgia a regret for the dissolution of the preoedipal bond between mother and child. According to Freud and Jacques Lacan, as well as Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Julia Kristeva, the infant’s primordial perception is of being the universe, constituting a seamless unity with the mother and, through her, the world. But this primitive certainty exists to be betrayed by desires that cannot always, or682?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Ecannot immediately, be ful?lled. Because the infant is not satiated on every occasion of want, she or he must eventually come to terms with a break between self and mother, self and other, ?nally self and world—a break that violates an impression of originary wholeness but allows conceptualization and language to arise as means of bridging the gap. Psychoanalysis thus takes on a whole Western metaphysical and theological longing to eradicate the distinction between subject and object and assimilates it to a story about individual psychic development. Freud was well aware of how his narrative about the origins of the individual dealt with desires that motivated Western disciplines, from mysticism and gnosticism to the dialectical historicism of Hegel and Marx. In some of the essays generally called metapsychological—notably Totem and Taboo, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Civilization and Its Discontents— he drew from his theories of individual development a more speculative account of how present-day civilizations came into being and operate. As a political philosopher, Marcuse was most directly concerned with these essays. Both Freud’s metapsychological essays and Eros and Civilization construct a narrative of Western history as ever-increasing repression. Freud postulated that human beings have learned to deny or defer more and more of their instinctive desires for pleasure (called variously Eros, the life instinct, or the pleasure principle) as societies have become more sophisticated and work has required more skill, training, and single-mindedness. In Civilization and Its Discontents he suggested that repression has so thwarted or attenuated the pleasure principle that advanced civilizations are in danger from a second group of instinctive impulses striving for death (Thanatos, or the death drive). Directed outward, as aggression and destruction, these instincts clash with the “binding” or uniting power of the pleasure principle. Freud observed about the interwar period, “[m]en have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no dif?culty exterminating one another to the last man” (Civilization 112). Gravity’s Rainbow dramatizes this situation of genocide gone global at its conclusion, where the last Rocket hangs an in?nitesimal distance over theH I T E?683heads of “us, old fans, who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?)” (760). Pynchon’s narrator seems cozily assured that “we” recognize the disaster and our collusion in it. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse accepts much of Freud’s melancholy story, emphasizing even further the intrinsic tendency of a civilization based on increasing repression to “progress” toward its own destruction. His project begins with bringing historical particularity to a story that Freud presented as universal. Freud calls the individual in these metapsychological works “man”; the social structure under consideration is “civilization”; the repression of Eros, or the pleasure principle, is required by an ultimate principle of necessity that he called the “reality principle.” Marcuse, however, argues that civilization in general need not take the particular form that Western civilization has taken. Indeed, there are many cultures in the third world that have developed in strikingly different ways: the key example in Gravity’s Rainbow is Herero culture in what is now Namibia. Most important, Western civilization relies on what Marcuse calls the performance principle, an impetus to detach from and dominate the natural order. The performance principle has its origin in the need for survival but cannot stop when survival is assured. The increased control of nature, entailing exploitation and technological transformation, becomes the de?nition of progress, to which human happiness is subordinated. The performance principle denies people’s desire for “mindless pleasures”—sexual, playful, and nonproductive (or nonreproductive)—in order to promote labor that becomes ever more alienated from its products and purposes. As the society evolves to the point where it can satisfy basic human needs, the demand for more, and more complicated, goods and thus technologies of production entails more work, more alienation, and more repression. In Marcuse’s analysis, the industrial society that can provide for everyone (but of course does not) and that continues to raise its standards of productivity requires a “Surplus-Repression” from its members (35). The restrictions on pleasure—deferring or simply denying the grati?cation of many desires, which Freud saw as necessary for people to organize socially and survive in a world of material necessity—grow more encompassing and684?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Emore arbitrary. As the performance principle accelerates and exacerbates its own processes in the drive toward more power, functional knowledge, and transformation of the natural world, it serves increasingly aggressive and ultimately destructive ends. The organization of Western societies under patriarchal capitalism, the monogamous family, and the work ethic is for Marcuse always de?ned by the requirement of transcendence—that is, of exceeding the present moment and thrusting into the future in order to dominate and control further. And for Marcuse the most poignant symbol of such transcendence is the ascending curve, a visual representation of endless progress (Eros 118, 124).4 This ascending curve is of course the title ?gure of Gravity’s Rainbow. The V–2 Rocket rises under human guidance and in response to a humanly de?ned demand to mount above natural processes, but ultimately it is “betrayed to Gravity” and descends uncontrolled and unguided. It is the major image in Gravity’s Rainbow of the tendency of the performance principle to fall into service of the death drive. Another embodiment of this principle is Enzian’s vision of a vampirish transnational economy that exceeds human controls and goes on to create and feed off human power struggles:[T]his War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated by needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, ‘Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,’ but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more.. . .(Gravity’s Rainbow 521; ellipses and brackets in orig.)Enzian’s “paranoid” revelation concurs with Marcuse’s observation that the human endeavor leading to advanced technolo4. Marcuse seems to derive his negative understanding of transcendence from the af?rmative sense described by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre theorizes world as instrumentality, and instrumentality as the essential mode of understanding: the for-itself, or pour-soi (human consciousness), is an “upsurge” (think of Pynchon’s Rocket) “which has to be its will-be within the perspectives of a certain ‘was’ which it is ?eeing” (276).H I T E?685gies has given these technologies a momentum that endows them with something akin to motivation (One-Dimensional Man). Technological development now has its own “wants” and “needs.” Although national and corporate leaders claim to be in control, they seem determined to go as far as they can in developing annihilating weapons, destroying resources necessary to sustain human life, and constraining the possibility that anyone can think differently—including ahead.5 As Freud spells out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the goal of the death drive is to return life to the state of the inorganic: life represents only “detours on the path to death” (79). Marcuse adds that in postindustrial civilization under the productivity principle, this move toward the inorganic is economic and social, and its reach is global. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon dramatizes both observations by emphasizing how the productions of advanced industrial society attempt to transcend life by imitating it. His two main examples are key developments leading to World War II and the cold war era: chemical synthesis, espec and the rise of intricate international corporate structures. (As legal entities, corporations, of course, are inorganic persons.) In a brilliant moment early in the story, he has the ghost of assassinated industrialist and Weimar foreign minister Walther Rathenau explain to a seance of Nazi and ? German corporate elite that their ostensible “growing, organic Kartell” disguises a “real movement . . . from death to deathtrans?gured. . . . just as the buried coal”—the matter that is transformed by chemical polymerization—“grows denser, and overlaid with more strata—epoch upon epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death, the impersonator” (166– 67). In Gravity’s Rainbow, societies driven by the performance principle create ersatz life. They permute and combine molecules to form polymers, culminating in the “erectile” plastic Imipolex G (699), which has provocative connections to Tyrone Slothrop and his own apparently death-dealing erections. These societies5. In a recent article, speculative ?ction writer Neal Stephenson spells out precisely how the priorities embedded in rocket science seem to have determined the direction and impasse of technological developments.686?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Edesign, test, and use a supersonic Rocket that seems to draw charisma from the generations of leaders and scientists who dreamed of its potential for both literal and ?gurative transcendence. And they transcend visible human leadership by making the real power progressively less locatable. The logical extension of ungraspable boards of directors, vanishing CEOs, and heads of state in undisclosed locations is the shadowy superauthority called Them, controllers whose intentions are wholly self-interested, wholly unknowable, and ?nally inhuman. The Father You Will Never Quite Manage to Kill When rules and prohibitions inhere in an omnipresent, authoritarian They-system rather than in visible human subjects, they seem ubiquitous. In Marcuse’s argument, dominance becomes more and more nearly complete as it becomes the function of a bureaucratic administration, because at this point, “the concentration of economic power seems to turn into anonymity: everyone, even at the very top, appears to be powerless before the movements and laws of the apparatus itself” (Eros 98). When there is no longer a human embodiment of power, power seems to be everywhere. There appears to be no outside to the institutions that de?ne and satisfy the needs of individuals. Words like “freedom” become simply a description of living inside the system, even when the subject is simultaneously aware that, as Pynchon’s narrator puts it, “Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide” (412). As in the “Newspeak” and “doublethink” of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (to which Pynchon wrote a politically astute foreword in 2003), slavery is freedom. Marcuse remarks of his own mid-century society, “Rebellion now appears as the crime against the whole of human society and therefore beyond reward and beyond redemption” (Eros 92). In this twentieth-century context, the oedipal father—whom the son envies, wants to kill, and ?nally internalizes—is a relic of an inef?cient past. In Marcuse’s terms, biological fathers constitute “a rather inappropriate target of aggression” because the father’s “authority as transmitter of wealth, skills, experiences isH I T E?687 he has less to offer, and therefore less to prohibit” (97). For Freud, the founding act of civilization occurred when the primal pack of “sons” banded together and killed their despotic pack “father”—thus achieving grati?cation, guilt, and organization in one fell swoop. The grati?cation was ?eeting and almost instantly regulated, as guilt brought the dead father into the psyche as the principle that would repress further desires for body-centered happiness and play, which might de?ect members of a clan, community, or state from performing (unpleasurable) work. Thus guilt established more control of nature and more stability. In Marcuse’s formulation, murderous fathers and the sexy mothers who are their corollary are replaced by the “sublime . . . administration” (91–92). The narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow mourns this attenuated oedipal sexuality in an elegiac passage that is tonally both passionate and striated with con?icting affects—suffused with nostalgia while simultaneously parodying and otherwise undermining that nostalgia:The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail . . . So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terri?ed of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life de?ned for them by men whose only talent is for death.(747; ellipsis in orig.)6The role of the father is taken by “the Man” who “has a branch of?ce in each of our brains” (712–13). At various points in vari6. Using Eros and Civilization, Nadine Attewell theorizes nostalgia as a complex phenomenon in Gravity’s Rainbow, often not “an anodyne, sop, or paci?er” but rather “critical to Marcuse’s project of liberation” (26).688?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Eous historical moments, this introjected power is reprojected outward, taking such forms in Gravity’s Rainbow as the Puritan God, the charismatic dictator, or that most personal avatar of Them, the noble sadist. These charismatic father ?gures derive much of their glamour from nostalgia—participation in the mythic and Romantic ideal of the ur-father who was so great that he grati?ed all his desires. This primal father is not only dangerous but irrationally desirable. As re?ected in the overdetermined ?gure of the SS of?cer Blicero, he is obsessed, anguished, and murderous, killing his adored lover and child in the name of transcendence, which repudiates nature and endorses the death drive: “I want to break out—to leave this cycle of infection and death” (724). Blicero is yearned-after as well as yearning. Memory of him is a powerful erotic bond between Enzian and Katje, and his last appearance on the Luneberg Heath is inextricably wound up with the mystery of Slothrop’s identity and fate, the glittering central enigma of the whole novel. According to his Tarot, Blicero vanishes into the newest and most successful manifestation of Them, apparently crossing the Atlantic like Wernher von Braun to occupy a place “among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors” (749). But he also speaks textual and Marcusan truths: for instance, about the progress of death—that is, the death drive—from Europe to America, and about the possibilities of America as a means of returning. These iterated recognitions complicate his culpability with tragic knowledge (722). And his apparent sacri?ce of Gottfried is a central atavism, prerational and counteranalytic, which at the same time repeats the characteristic anti-oedipal gesture of Gravity’s Rainbow, the murder annihilating the future: father killing son.7 Blicero embodies the complexity of “the Oedipal situation in the Zone.” He is a ?gure of the archaic father who wields murderous power. At the same time, however, he is the technocrat whose personality will be entirely subsumed by what Marcuse7. Pynchon insinuates that this central inversion of the oedipal story underlies JudeoChristian values, appearing not only in the story of Abraham and Isaac but most heretically in the story of the cruci?xion of Jesus.H I T E?689calls the “sublime administration” of postwar society—that is, by Them. He is most attractive as the Rilkean hero climbing toward his Lament, the sensuously imaginative decadent, and the character who acts most directly on desire—a proponent of the pleasure principle who makes Eros inseparable from the death drive. As Gravity’s Rainbow moves toward its end, we see him moving to gratify his most fervent desire, to murder the young man who is his lover and metaphoric child. Indeed, when, near the end of the novel, his friend Thanatz (think Thanatos) recalls his last memories of Blicero, the third-person narrator slides into direct address with the subtle effect of universalizing a conventionally outrageous desire by implying the reader’s collusion:Haven’t you wanted to murder a child you loved, joyfully kill something so helpless and innocent? As he looks up at you, at the last possible minute, trusting you, and smiles, purses his lips to make a kiss just as the blow falls across his skull . . . isn’t that best of all? The cry that breaks in your chest then, the sudden, solid arrival of loss, loss forever, the irreversible end of love, of hope . . . no denying what you ?nally are. . . .(671; emphasis and ellipses in orig.)8Blicero seems to personify the death drive. More ambiguously, however, his character insinuates that as a force of desire, such manifestations of the death drive may be enemies of Them. This is to say that the murderous fathers and the sacri?ced children are in some respects on the same side, against the impersonal power structure whose abstraction is represented, in one narratorial ?ourish, this way: “They drink together, shoot very very synthetic drugs into skin or blood, run incredible electronic waveforms into Their skulls, directly into the brainstem, and backhand each other, playfully, with openmouth laugh—you know, don’t you is in those ageless eyes” (697). Marcuse’s analysis indicates why the cannibal Titans represent such a regressive refuge from their rationalist, technologized children: the latter are insanely, if uncontrollably, effective in destroying human futu8. McHale discusses such passages of direct address in Constructing Postmodernism 87– 114. See also Hite 133–46. Stefan Mattessich comes very close to a Marcusan reading of this passage without bringing in Marcuse (189–94).690?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Erity. In one of the great elegiac passages of the book, which has been a node of tonal discomfort in Pynchon criticism for some years, the narrator identi?es the mythic reign of the Titans with an essential realm of nature and voices apparently unironic nostalgia for both versions of a golden age:This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant ?ow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputre?ed to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong.(720)9In presenting “the World just before men,” the narrator still inserts some ?ip—or Pynchonesque—vernacular phrases into a higher-toned meditation—“some spoiler,” “It was something we had to work on.” But the overall rhetoric comes close to Romantic sublimity. The narrator goes on to present a utopian alternative that is blatantly essentialist in its presuppositions. Human beings, who heretofore have acted as corrupt Olympian offspring, tricking and murdering their primeval progenitors and destroying their heritage, can change sides, “going over”:A few keep going over to the Titans every day, in their striving subcreation (how can ?esh tumble and ?ow so, and never be any less beautiful?), into the rests of the folksong Death (empty stone rooms), out, and through, and down under the net, down down to the uprising.9. Pynchon’s use of the Titans is consonant with his treatment of the Totem and Taboo scenario generally, in that it does not stress their role as son-killers before they were wiped out by these same sons, in patricidal league. Pre-Olympian gods are often associated, through somewhat dubious but literarily in?uential modernist anthropological theories, with matriarchal cultures and antirational mystery religions. Marcuse stresses the antimaternal work done by the oedipus complex and suggests that a preoedipal mode of being, with its unrepressed desire for the mother, might include a castration wish.H I T E?691Striving subcreation? Down, down to the uprising? The alliterative exaltation and orthodox paradox (the way down is the way up) are so rhapsodic that old Pynchon hands have looked desperately for parody. And the passage risks that twentieth-century taboo, sentimentality, when it presents the parenthetical celebration “(how can ?esh tumble and ?ow so, and never be any less beautiful?).” I am inclined to take the sublimity here at face value. The Titans, fathers in their aspect of the primordial, are fully if sometimes horri?cally embodied. They are mythic but also quasi human, reminders of an abandoned human possibility that might be reclaimed. They are “violently pitched alive in constant ?ow” (the phrase enacts their tumultuous continuity) rather than separate and objectifying. Because their mode of being is alien to the habits of abstraction, functional domination, and transcendence that characterize consciousness under the productivity principle, they might be said to embody the “mindless pleasures” the novel celebrates. As Marcuse suggests, “mind,” like “civilization,” tends to be de?ned within rigid societal parameters. There is more than one operation of mind, just as there is more than one kind of society (Eros 143–46). Essential Perversions What can alternative modes of consciousness know? The sixties answer is, of course, alternative, utopian modes of being. But the visionary, in the sixties or other times, never simply claims to be able to form hypotheses about possible alternatives. To imagine otherwise, in the strong Romantic sense of “imagine,” is to grasp the truth—the realer real not available to senses conditioned and deadened by ideology and habit. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous de?nition of the primary imagination, it is “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the ?nite mind of the eternal act of creation in the in?nite i am” (167). This primary imagination, which both creates and discerns an underlying authentic reality, has an af?nity with what Freud termed primary narcissism, the state in preoedipal infantile development before the formation of the ego, in which692?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Ethe child experiences the whole of its reality as coextensive with itself (Laplanche and Pontalis 337–38; Marcuse, Eros 167, 227). Marcuse embraces this strong Romantic sense of “imagination.” With Freud, he tends to use it as synonymous with “phantasy,” the activity of dreams and those daytime dreamers, artists.10 And with Freud, he de?nes it as a psychic activity that bypasses the reality principle and its customary agent, the ego (142–44).11 For Marcuse, phantasy is the agent of regression. He calls it “a thought process with its own laws and truth values” and claims it was once an essential component of a unitary psyche, in which the ego was guided as much by the pleasure principle as the reality principle (141). The turn to the productivity principle intensi?ed the split in the psyche, leaving the ego governed only by the demand for more productivity and, in consequence, further repression. For Marcuse, this psychic splitting is a sort of Fall, an origin for the experienced loss of pleasure and wholeness. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the many associations of the Fall with post-Enlightenment Western rationality make the same connection. Because the productivity principle requires the subjectobject distinction, dividing in order to dominate, it is the agent of division, fragmentation, and ultimately destruction. As Blicero observes, “Modern Analysis”—in the double sense of separation and rationality—was “Europe’s Original Sin,” leading to the “Subsequent Sin” of wholesale domination (722).10. The spelling phantasy, used in the original James Strachey English translations of Freud’s work, is intended to dissociate this activity from the more colloquial and trivializing senses of fantasy. Marcuse acknowledges his af?nities with Henri Bergson’s dualism. Phantasy resembles Bergson’s intuition, the mode of apprehension whose object is duree, or existence perceived nonfunctionally—that is, not for use. In this respect, existence ? is continuous although in?nitely varied, unsevered by the subject-object distinction or any other distinction. Marcuse differs from Bergson, however, in maintaining that nonutilitarian mental processes of this sort are politically powerful as a basis for critiquing society under the productivity principle. 11. Marcuse regards enforcing the reality principle as only one function of the ego and regards the ego under the productivity principle as fatally truncated. In other respects, he often blends the functions of the Freud so does Pynchon. Marcuse also tends to regard much of what Freud called sublimation as simple repression, although when he deals with phantasy he makes many activities that Freud would regard as sublimations (art, disinterested intellectual endeavor) into direct manifestations of the pleasure principle and thus the id.H I T E?693In Marcuse’s account, the second mode of knowing—imagination or phantasy—was historically left free to operate entirely outside the reality principle, but “at the price of becoming powerless, inconsequential, unrealistic” (141). Artistic production and speculative thought in general (for instance, philosophy) became, like dreams, marginal to the real business of society. Because phantasy remains the psychic function producing art and all genuinely creative endeavor, it clearly is available to consciousness, at least to a degree, and thus available to the ego. For Marcuse, this means ?rst and foremost that it can be used, and not just to fantasize (wistfully). For him, primary narcissism has “another existential relation to reality” (168). Phantasy has “a truth value of its own,” and this truth value “corresponds to an experience of its own—namely, the surmounting of the antagonistic human reality” (143). Unlike the use of mind under the reality principle and its successor the productivity principle, phantasy is a mode of psychic functioning in which the subject does not set herself or himself apart from, above, and against objects—other people, nature, the world. While Marcuse maintains that a certain degree of separation and mastery are required for survival, he privileges phantasy as “a fundamental, independent mental process” that works primarily to connect, and to acknowledge the fact of universal connection that is the ground of preoedipal experience. Thomas Schaub has made the crucial link between Barry Commoner’s First Principle of Ecology (?rst published in 1971), “Everything is Connected to Everything Else,” and the famous passage from Gravity’s Rainbow, “everything is connected, everything in the Creation . . .” (Gravity’s Rainbow 703). Marcuse links perception of this connection to the power that refuses to separate apprehension and creation, self and other, subject and object, humanity and nature. In Eros and Civilization, the originary, preoedipal state belongs not only to the infant but to the infant species. It is also a mode of knowing, which experiences self and others as purely present and continuous. It thus does not objectify, cut out for use and mastery, or, consequently, need to re-present or symbolize in the dominant language, which is the language of domination.694?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R EHow does one gain access to alternative modes of consciousness? The answer is almost a sixties mantra: drugs and sex. Eros and Civilization does not explicitly appeal to mind-altering drugs as adjuncts to phantasy, although many of its readers were happy to infer a recommendation. By contrast, drugs in Gravity’s Rainbow are often associated with revelation. For example, the passage about the realization that “everything is connected, everything in the Creation” is part of a description of hallucinations produced by the drug Oneirine. And the brains “crazed by antisocial and mindless pleasures” who are unable to distinguish between the sides during the Nuremberg trials (“sides?”—as the chemically speeding Enzian asks, when he thinks with sudden clarity about the war [520]) are engaged in endless parties involving drugs as well as orgiastic sexual escapades.12 In Gravity’s Rainbow, “perversions” like Brigadier General Pudding’s coprophagia (and the treatment of excrement generally), along with sadism and masochism, resemble drugs in that they frequently ?gure as routes to the revelation of essential reality. Such revelations include an explicit acknowledgment of death as the central fact of human existence, which no rationalizations, no state or corporate mythologies can make meaningful other than in purely personal terms (701–2). More generally, all nonreproductive or “perverse” sexual activities serve in Marcuse’s account as important means of regression and thus acts of political rebellion, because they make pleasure an end in itself, not ancillary to breeding children in order to maintain the world of work and war. Quoting Freud on the “promesse de bonheur” of non-“norm[ative]” sexual desire, Marcuse suggests that for this reason, “perverse” sex is more fun, an edict endorsed by many countercultural sixties activists (49–50). But further, “perverse” sex is, or can be, revelatory or demystifying, because it returns12. The more accessible value structure of the 1991 novel Vineland establishes that Pynchon is inclined to regard drugs as positive, not only as recreation but as ways to penetrate the cultural ideology that, in his ?ctional universes, obscures and distorts reality. When near the end of Vineland local “guerilla elements” launch skyrockets to change the skywritten Reaganite slogan “Drug-Free America” to “Drugs Free America,” these “elements” appropriate the Rocket, the technology of mass destruction central to Gravity’s Rainbow, for the cause of liberation (222).H I T E?695experience to the physical body, for Marcuse a ground of essential, unmediated preoedipal experience, once the encrustations of the performance principle’s version of civilization have been scraped away. Of the “perversions,” he speci?cally names homosexuality, sadism and masochism, and coprophilia—all present in Gravity’s Rainbow—but not pedophilia. Pedophilia ?ts Marcuse’s argument rather neatly, however. The child herself, or himself—the characters Bianca, Ilse, Geli, Ludwig, and Gottfried all are treated as children—embodies regression, a “way back,” in the novel’s terms, to the preoedipal paradise. And the sexual child, who is not simply exploited but takes pleasure in sexual activity, is a contradiction in terms in a culture with narrow, historically shifting, functionalist de?nitions of what people are supposed to desire and feel. Marcuse regards “perverse” sexual behavior as an expression of phantasy, an idea unsettlingly enacted in the sadomasochistic Hansel and Gretel game played by Blicero, Katje, and Gottfried.13 As the narratorial voice ?ltered through Blicero’s point of view explains, the stylized bondage, tortures, transsexuality, and homoeroticism of this game appropriate and displace “what outside none of them can bear—the War, the absolute rule of chance, their own pitiable contingency here, in its midst . . .” (Gravity’s Rainbow 96; ellipsis in orig.). Sadism and masochism are for all the players a kind of safety, a world of meaningful, controllable pain. Eros and Civilization explicitly endorses this interpretation, another indication that the cruelty of Blicero is deeply ambivalent in the value structure of Gravity’s Rainbow. In some respects, this cruelty is a revolt against the denatured fathers of the Theysystem, rather than a reinforcement of Their oppression. Sadism and masochism testify to the fundamental inseparability of Eros and the death drive. In postindustrial society, the productivity principle diverts both instincts from the realization of immediate pleasure to technological progress, oppression, and conquest in the external world (Eros 52). To return the human being’s innate destructiveness to the realm of bodily enjoyment thus under13. Unlike Gilles Deleuze, Marcuse understands masochism and sadism to be components of a single “perversion” (Eros 51).696?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Emines the dominant power structure—an authorization of the evocatively named Thanatz’s “Sado-anarchistic,” quasi-Marxist come-on to Ludwig: “I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away” (Gravity’s Rainbow 737). Even more directly, the ubiquitous pornography in the novel disrupts what Marcuse terms the “work-world of civilization” (161). When the Yippies applied for a permit to demonstrate against the 1968 Democratic Convention, they wrapped the application in a Playboy centerfold before presenting it to the deputy mayor of Chicago, in an attempt to provoke a bodily response that might change the mode of the interaction (Hoffman). As this example may suggest, pornographic stimuli threaten to override not only rules about the place of sex in polite society but also conventional political resistance to taking pleasure in others’ exploitation or in being exploited (although the feminist recognition of pornography as exploitation was almost certainly absent from most male Yippies’ consciousness in 1968). In Marcuse’s terms, Eros over?ows the boundaries set for it by the productivity principle and threatens to divert the desire to dominate or submit from the work world back to the sexual body.14 Pynchon’s pornography in Gravity’s Rainbow effects similar disruptions.15 Marcuse aligns nonnormative sexual desires and behaviors with the mythic ?gures of Narcissus and Orpheus, associating both with primary narcissism and nonreproductive erotic play. Both are countermyths to Prometheus, the “culture-hero of toil, productivity, and progress through repression,” and Pandora, who illustrates that in the world of the productivity principle, “the female principle, sexuality and pleasure, appear as curse—14. Another interpretation, of course, would be that culturally conditioned habits of domination and submission penetrate even (or especially) into the apparently intimate and personal realm of sexual desire. For an excellent discussion of this Foucauldian interpretation, see Melley 94–99. It seems to me important for understanding Gravity’s Rainbow that both the thesis that the instincts escape cultural control and the thesis that nothing escapes cultural control be entertained throughout. 15. For the most thorough reading of pornography in Gravity’s Rainbow, see Berube ? ? 239–55.H I T E?697disruptive, destructive” (161). In contrast, Narcissus and Orpheus experience a world in which sexual difference is blurred and nature is not treated functionally. Adopting a striking phrase from Paul Valery’s Cantate du Narcisse, Marcuse describes this ? world’s “diminution of the traces of original sin” (164).16 It is unfallen because it was never for human use. Narcissus and Orpheus “liberate” the “repressed and petri?ed forms of man and nature” by being continuous with this world and taking pleasure in the immediate present. Both are linked to a possibility within Freud’s concept of primary narcissism, in which selflove can be transformed into nonrepressive, sublimated relations with the world—relations such as creativity, celebration, play, and pure research motivated only by fascination with things in themselves (Eros 169–70). Claiming to repair the Hegelian split between the An-Sich and the Fur-Sich, or in Jean-Paul Sartre’s ¨ adaptation of the terminology, the en-soi and the pour-soi, Marcuse’s premise of dualistic modes of consciousness that survive intact from primary narcissism allows him to argue that human aspiration can achieve what Sartre de?ned as an impossible project, the reconciliation of subject and object in a single mode of being traditionally attributed by desirous projection only to God. Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness that human beings want to be “the In-itself which escapes contingency by being in its own foundation the Ens causa sui, which religions call God” (784). In Eros and Civilization, human beings can be God . . . or at least Orpheus. Whereas Narcissus was the presiding spirit of The Crying of Lot 49, Orpheus is the mythic ?gure whose presence pervades Gravity’s Rainbow.17 Tyrone Slothrop of course ?gures as a type of Orpheus throughout the novel, in his journey into the subtoilet underworld, his ?awed “Eurydice-obsession” with Bianca, his ability to play musical instruments and charm people and animals, his association with Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus,” and his16. Marcuse quotes the original French: “diminution des traces du peche originel.” ? ? 17. The Minnesinger Tannhauser (the Minnesinger is the twelfth-to-fourteenth-century ¨ Germanic equivalent of the troubadour) is in many respects his Northern European counterpart, repentant and repressed in the end. Hume’s study deals with the Orpheus myth but does not use any works by Marcuse.698?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Eapparent disintegration toward the end of the novel—the last example paralleling the important fertility myth that has Orpheus torn to pieces by Thracian women and washed up on many shores to grow “into consistent personae of their own” as the gift of song (Gravity’s Rainbow 63–71, 472, 622–23, 742). The treatment of Orpheus and Orphism in Eros and Civilization suggests that there are some respects in which Slothrop represents the world of phantasy and the pleasure principle. Because Marcuse saw individual regression as a retreat from genital specialization back to the libidinalization of the whole organism, Slothrop’s sexual diffusion becomes part of the Orphic tendency toward polymorphous perversity. Slothrop is initially presented as a hyperbolic signi?er of the phallic order, the bearer of an apparently death-driven “Penis He Thought Was His Own” (Gravity’s Rainbow 216). But he escapes surveillance and control and turns for comfort and sustenance to a diverse group of alternative communities, where his sexuality spreads into different parts of his body. Two humorous pornographic scenes, the ?rst when with Bianca he ?nds himself “inside his own cock” (470) and the second when Trude licks his nose into an erection (439–40), seem to belong to this potentially positive regression. “Do you want to put this part in?” So far, my synopsis of Eros and Civilization has been tilted vertiginously in the direction of optimism. I have wanted to make clear that in this in?uential study Marcuse laid out a possibility for escape from the trajectory of rise and fall that drives postindustrial Western societies toward annihilation, and that Pynchon encoded this possibility in his great novel. I need now to note how slight this chance for reprieve is in both their treatments. Both describe an insidious element of collusion that has historically sabotaged revolutionary movements at the moment when they seemed ready to challenge the logic of domination itself. With reference to this “element of self-defeat,” Marcuse maintains, “every revolution has also been a betrayed revolution” (90). Every revolution has always been a betrayed revolution: the motto could be posted over the ruin of high-sixties political activ-H I T E?699ism, with its major players dead or drawn into the cultural and political mainstream of the productivity principle. The motto applies in the novel to their forties counterpart the Counterforce, whom the narrator describes as being “as schizoid, as doubleminded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s the hard fact” (712). The rest of us? The narrator gets cozy:The Man has a branch of?ce in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that.(712–13)“The Man,” a sixties epithet for the power structure, here has a “corporate rep”(-resentative) not in the superego, where classical Freudian theory would locate it, but in the ego, the individual conscious self that takes shape when the intense desires of the id come into con?ict with reality. Pynchon’s narrator seems to take Marcuse’s theory a step further, making individuation and personal identity concomitant with in?ltration by the productivity principle’s commitment to hierarchy—with its belief in the fundamental distinction between them and us, elect and preterite. The implications are damning. Betrayal is built into the structure of “your own individual life in time” (697). In failing somehow to achieve the regression implied in going over to the Titans, human subjects remain doomed to complicity: “They will use us. We will help legitimize Them, though They don’t need it really, it’s another dividend for Them, nice but not critical” (713). The “we” and “us” resonate not only as applying to readers but also as authorial. After all, if the statement is true, the writing of resistance is also fatally compromised. Gravity’s Rainbow itself is fatally compromised. In Gravity’s Rainbow, implied speakers and addressees frequently seep out from their grammatical and generic containers, implying more than anyone can pin down. Perhaps the most astonishing moment occurs when a reading of Slothrop’s Tarot mutates to a parenthetical comment on the mediocrity of “his700?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R Echroniclers too, yes yes”—a comment hard to keep within the domain of ?ctional reality, as Slothrop’s only chronicler at that point has been this narrator. The narrative then moves into a Wall Street Journal interview with “a spokesman for the Counterforce” who functionalizes Slothrop as a “pretext” or a “microcosm.” After a series of embellishments on the theme of “heretic-chasing” (738), a ?rst-person commentator intervenes in brackets:[Yes. A cute way of putting it. I am betraying them all . . . the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus.](739)The bracketed monologue continues for the better part of a page, narrating a long chase in the (London?) Underground of “some of them” (heretics? or a later referent, the Typhoid Marys who carry “[y]our virus”?), which is called “[m]y ?rst action, my initiation.” The chase culminates:[ . . . Two of them got away. But we took the rest. Between two stationmarks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my ?rst blood. Do you want to put this part in?](739)Tonally, this speech conveys a jolt into self-loathing followed by an atmospheric urgency apparently unalloyed by irony. But who is speaking? The unnamed spokesman who knows “what your editors want, exactly what they want” may be working with The Wall Street Journal or at the Viking Press with Faith Sale, the legendary editor of Gravity’s Rainbow and Pynchon’s good friend (739). The “years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971” seem to be the years in which Gravity’s Rainbow was written. And “tasted my ?rst blood” is at once insistently embodied (“down into the slick juicery to be taken in by all the cells”) and so ?gurative that it might almost be a code. I can never read that passage without wondering what else Pynchon was doing during that time. Of course this moment is strategic, not the product of some inadvertent self-disclosure that made it through the Viking editorial process unnoticed. It is a highly experimental moment ofH I T E?701provocative crossing back and forth over boundaries of text and reader, text and author, other and self. Moreover, this apparent admission is also a supreme moment of fun in this novel—fun as travestying conventions of ?ctionality and self-revelation. Is Pynchon suddenly embedded in his text, or safely distanced like the God of creation, paring his ?ngernails? It is impossible to tell. The moment seems a supremely meta-meta?ctional instance of the ontological undecidability that Brian McHale uses as a primary formal feature identifying postmodernist narrative strategies (Postmodernist Fiction 3–25; Hite 127–28). Like many other parts of Gravity’s Rainbow, this strange passage shows how extreme violations of narrative conventions can shatter the reading effect, calling attention to the constructed nature of the ?ctional universe and the reader’s detachment from and elevation above it. Like his Frankfurt school colleague and mentor Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse maintains that only highly experimental art can oppose society under the productivity principle: “Art survives only where it cancels itself, where it saves its substance by denying its traditional form and thereby denying reconciliation” (Eros 145). I see an extraordinary form of this denial of complicity with dominant cultural codes precisely in this apparent admission of complicity. At this point, Gravity’s Rainbow betrays readers in perhaps the most unsettling way, by betraying the dif?cult, brilliant, and erudite author’s own overt display of mastery.Cornell UniversityWORKS CITEDAttewell, Nadine. “‘Bouncy Little Tunes’: Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and Narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Contemporary Literature 45.1 (2004): 22–48. Berube, Michael. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Poli? ? tics of the Canon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographica Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Ed. George Watson. London: Dent, 1965. DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs. New York: Zone, 1991.702?C O N T E M P O R A R YL I T E R A T U R EDumazedier, Joffre. Toward a Society of Leisure. Trans. Stewart E. McClure. New York: Free, 1967. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1922. Trans. C. J. M. Hubback. New York: Norton, 1990. ———. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. ———. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. 1918. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1950. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Af?uent Society. 1958. New York: Houghton, 1976. Hermann, Luc, and Petrus van Ewijk. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia Revisited: The Illusion of a Totalizing System in Gravity’s Rainbow.” English Studies 90.2 (2009): 167–79. Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Ohio State UP, 1983. Hoffman, Abbie. “Testimony of Abbie Hoffman in the Chicago Seven Trial.” Famous Trials, by Douglas O. Lindner. Web. 6 Feb. 2011. Hume, Kathryn. Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Laplanche, J., and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. 1955. Boston: Beacon, 1966. ———. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Mattessich, Stefan. Lines of Flight: Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little, –95. Pynchon, Thomas. Foreword. Nineteen Eighty-Four. By George Orwell. New York: Penguin, 2003. iii–xxvi. ———. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1974. ———. Vineland. Boston: Little, 1990. Riesman, David. Abundance for What? and Other Essays. 1964. New Brunswick, NJ, 1994. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Re?ections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. 1956. New York: Washington Square, 1984. Schaub, Thomas. “The Environmental Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Ecological Context.” Pynchon Notes 42–43 (1998): 59–72. Stephenson, Neal. “Space Stasis.” Slate. Web. 2 Feb. 2011.
更多搜索：
What is a Literature Review paper_英语学习_外语学习_教育专区。What is a Literature Review paper? It synthesizes the key theories and results of a field...how to write a literature term paper_英语学习_外语学习_教育专区。如何写论文 Literature Term Paper Writing a literature term paper requires hard work and ... MLA Literature Paper_英语考试_外语学习_教育专区。英文文学学习课程MLA Literature Paper, with Secondary Sources Jack 1 Jack Xu Professor Walsh English Period...America literature (paper B)_英语考试_外语学习_教育专区 暂无评价|0人阅读|0次下载|举报文档 America literature (paper B)_英语考试_外语学习_教育专区。...But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper? The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, ...the development of paper-making industry [能力层次:记忆、理解];[难易度:较易] 6. Who has been called the “Father of American Literature”? A. Walt...Emerson 3. Sister Carrie written by ______ is considered as one of the representative naturalistic novel in the American literature. a. Sinclair Lewis ...Part I Text A Lead-in Do you think the following forms of writing can be counted as literature? □ news report □ novel □ research paper □ diary...Firstly papermaking as the carrier of the literature and history it built a bridge between modern and historical. We use this technology to record and ... Test paper for Selected Readings in American Literature 隐藏&& TEST PAPER FOR SELECTED READINGS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Multiple Choices: Fill in the blanks...
All rights reserved Powered by
koorio.com
copyright ©right 。文档资料库内容来自网络，如有侵犯请联系***。