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of Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the oppressively rectilinear is countered only by the post-
apocalyptic: “the straight-ruled boulevards” of Berlin, “built to be marched along are
now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding,
like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort” (GR 379). Prairie and Ché’s movements,
conversely, are neither organic nor purely utilitarian. They are, rather, signifiers of a
search for means of resistance, for encountering materiality differently, and for
expressing a human agency that is not exclusively in the service of systems of control. In
this way, the devastation and death of Gravity’s Rainbow’s spatial economy is countered
in this novel by a human material embodiment that rejects its implication in such an
economy and finds ways through the waste-piles that defy the spatial encoding of the
hegemony of death.
The desire for a different kind of encounter, and for access to different forms of
agential assembly, is foregrounded in Pynchon’s depiction of the joyriding exploits of
Prairie and Ché’s parents’ generation, who “go out and play motorhead valley roulette in
the tule fogs […] The idea was to enter the pale wall at a speed meaningfully over the
limit, to bet that the white passage held no other vehicles, no curves, no construction,
only smooth, level empty roadway to an indefinite distance—a motorhead variation on a
surfer’s dream” (37). Although the road is not a switchback in this case, the game for the
driver is to use his or her zigzag orientation, that knowledge of the switchback, to
disengage from control ecologies in which the teleology of the straight shot (the
predictable passage through “birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction,
death” [Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 21]) rules. It is a means of resisting the grid
systems overlaying Vineland County, and of engaging the materiality of one’s own body
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in defiance of those systems in which Pynchon situates “the worship of mechanism,
power, and—ultimately—death” (Eddins, Gnostic Pynchon 5). Thus while playing
motorhead valley roulette may seem to court death, an alternative may be to view these
troublemaking human actors engaging in a struggle to resist this worship, to resist the
straight shot from birth to death by integrating into an assemblage of the aleatory, an
“external reality with surprises and events” (Latour 79) in which the fog and the highway
become an escape both from excesses and, significantly, losses of control. To embrace
the swerve is to find a middle ground between these, where one is neither a pawn of the
system nor a victim of fickle fate, but rather the author of a small space, somewhere in
between.
6
Switchback
As though to suggest that a zigzag or switchback orientation can counter even the
hegemony of death, Pynchon peoples Vineland with some of his most troublesome
human actors: the “Thanatoid personality.” This community, living in the interior beyond
Vineland County’s coast, exists in a state “like death, only different” (170). Indeed it is
not clear whether they are living or dead, only that they resist Western teleo-ontology’s
straight story of human life, settling instead into “constant turnover, not living but
persisting” (173). The Thanatoids are victims “of karmic imbalances […] that frustrated
their daily expeditions on into the interior of Death” (173), and yet these “transient souls”
(173) seem, in Vineland, neither particularly unhappy (despite all the sleeplessness, bad
food, and “complexities in the credit situation” [218]), nor particularly desperate to move
6
An interesting point of cross-reference here is Katje Borgesius, cringing away from the control of E.W.A.
Pointsman under the Wheel of Fortune in Gravity’s Rainbow, “getting ready now to bolt down the beach
and into the relative calm of the switchback railway. Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control” (181).
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on. Although the Thanatoids are described as feeling “little else beyond their needs for
revenge” (171) for past wrongs, they seem rarely to achieve this sought-after closure,
remaining instead “entangled in other, often impossibly complicated, tales of
dispossession and betrayal” (172). These tales, rather than reaching a conclusion, become
increasingly tangled: “facts only grown more complicated, many original wrongs
forgotten or defectively remembered, no resolution of even a trivial problem anywhere in
sight” (219).
These tales are representative of the switchback narrative strategy that I propose
Pynchon maps in the landscapes of Vineland. Rather than doing its telling from start to
finish, the switchback narrative loops back on itself, insisting on a recursive motion over
the spatio-temporal plane, so that every movement forward becomes simultaneously a
look back on a past that remains materially encoded in the present, an act of reorientation
demanding that the traveler become accustomed to seeing the relationship between time
and space as what Pynchon calls in Gravity’s Rainbow “a progressive knotting into” (GR
3), rather than a smooth unfurling of clear narrative passage. Such a narrative strategy
also represents a practice laden with risk—“perilous” as Pynchon describes switchbacks
(223)—in that it is uncertain in terms of opportunities for resolution. However, despite its
loops and risks and densities, the switchback is nonetheless a technology of movement,
its authorship functioning over vertical and horizontal planes. It is a modification to
Benny Profane’s Kerouacian yo-yoing in V., which, as David Seed notes, never moves
anywhere. “Pynchon is careful to point out that [Profane’s] dress is exactly the same at
the end of the novel as at the beginning, thereby suggesting that he has not changed at
all” (74). As difficult as the search for resolution may be in Vineland, the reward of the
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