Trespassing limits

Oklahoma City University Law Review
Volume 24, Number 3 (1999)
reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review

TRESPASSING LIMITS: PYNCHON'S IRONY AND THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE

FRANCISCO COLLADO-RODRIGUEZA*

The Law of the Excluded Middle, that currently proclaims that a statement can only be true or false, is to a large extent responsible for the categorical way western people conceive of reality. This Article traces the Aristotelian origin of the Law and then proceeds to analyze the different strategies Thomas Pynchon deployed from his short-story Entropy to his latest novel Mason & Dixon, in order to comment on the implications of this Law. The Author's ideological aim is understood here as an attempt both to erode his readers' confidence in the validity of the Artistotelian Law and to replace it by a new and more comprehensive paradigm.

"It goes back," he might have begun, "to the second Day of Creation, when 'G-d made the Firmament, and divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the Waters which were above the Firmament,'--thus the first Boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division."¹

Thomas Pynchon was still a young man when the beat generation tried to shatter some of the traditional pillars on which American society stood at the beginning of the postmodernist period. A metaphorical drifter always

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on the road, his fictive protagonists from V. to his latest work Mason & Dixon have always kept on moving, as apparent proof of their creator's disbelief in the Aristotelian rigidity of substance and in its powerful consequence, the Law of the Excluded Middle. For some a prophet of the New Age, his fiction thoroughly represents a sustained critical subversion of categorical binary thinking and, more specifically, of the traditional interpretation Western culture has given to the rigid Aristotelian Law. However, his novels are also a warning against human narrativizing excesses, and, as I shall also argue below, they offer ironic comments on an idealized mythic reconciliation of opposites.
In itself, the human reiterative belief in either/or structures or binary oppositions is not primordially Aristotelian. In effect, twentieth-century anthropological interpretations on the creation of the world that go from James Frazer's influential and modernist study The Golden Bough² to more up- dated perspectives, defended, among others, by Norman Cohn,³insistently point out the recurrent primitive belief in a primordial battle between the principles of Order and Chaos, a first struggle that constitutes probably the earliest interpretation of the way in which the existing universe originated. This primitive belief is already marked by one of the most powerful drives of categorical thinking: its apparent necessity to discriminate reality in pairs of opposites, a semiotic drive frequently contested by poststructuralist criticism,⁴ but that still has, in the Law of the Excluded Middle, one of the most effective instruments to oppose more contemporary assumptions about the randomness and indeterminacy of life. The belief in this primordial struggle between Order and Chaos frequently represented the possibility to divide the world between the rightful servers of Order and the evil servants of its antagonist, thus producing an ideological schism that was going to condition, not just the cultural discrimination between man and woman or between master and slave, but the very existence of Western metaphysics.
Classical Greek philosophy had already incorporated the notion of a divided universe in the Pythagorean belief that the perceived world was

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illusory, truth being mathematical in form, a binary notion that was later validated by Plato with his influential belief in idealism.⁵ In radical contrast with the realm of phenomena, Plato's transcendental world of Ideas strongly resembles the result of the old battle between Order and Chaos: the first principle happily takes residence in the heavenly realm, whereas Chaos still tries to enslave humans in this world. The importance of dual Platonic idealism should not be underestimated: paradoxically Rene Descartes, one of the most important artificers of the Age of Reason, formulated, from his famous dictum cogito ergo sum, the rational continuity of dualistic idealism by incorporating the Platonic Ideas into the realm of the human mind.⁶ Under Descartes' influence, the project of bourgeois modernity reduced the philosophical schism to the differences existing between a ruling and rational "I" and an external world or "other," an alien entity whose behavior had to be understood and finally fixed by the paradoxical promulgation of the "natural" laws.
If we go back to classical Greek philosophy, we find in Aristotle's works not the pragmatic attack on Platonic binary idealism that some traditional treatises still proclaim, but a maintained insistence on duality. Aristotle cannot get rid of a belief in the notion of an Unmoved Mover or First Cause, as this concept informs his paradoxical understanding of matter as "immaterial" potentia capable of actual existence by passing into form. This concept is, as Robert Nadeau affirms, "not unlike Plato's [binary notion that the immaterial form or idea is reflected in its material image."⁷ In this manner, the transcendental and its correlative material image again become a dangerous reification of a type of dual thinking that is insistently furthered in Aristotle's discussion of categories. The Greek philosopher frequently commented on categorical thinking although it is in Metaphysics⁸ and in his treatise Categories⁹ where the critical foundations of the dangerous Law of the Excluded Middle become firmly established. Book seven of Metaphysics starts with a study of "substance" as that which "is thought to belong most obviously to bodies" (part two), a principle that

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strongly informs his understanding of Being in combination with "form" (the essence of each thing and its primary substance) and with "matter" (or "substance without essence"). The rule of these principles is supplemented by a definite number of categories but, interestingly enough, the treatise Aristotle dedicates to the explanation of the latter starts with a linguistic analysis. Part two of Categories begins with a sentence that already signals the philosopher's relish in his own law: "Forms of speech are either simple or composite." The Greek gives as examples of the former "man" or "runs," and of the latter expressions such as "the man runs." Part four already enumerates the existent categories, expressions that are in no way composite and whose combination will produce positive or negative statements: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, affection, and action. Substance is soon defined in Part five as "that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject," and its importance in the formulation of the Law soon becomes clear when the philosopher relates it to the category of quality and affirms that "while remaining numerically one and the same," substance is the only principle "capable of admitting contrary qualities." Things other than substance, then, do not possess this mark, which leads Aristotle to proclaim: "one and the same color cannot be white and black. Nor can the same one action be good and bad: this law holds good with everything that is not substance." Furthermore, later on in the same part of Categories, the philosopher reminds the reader that even substance cannot admit contrary qualities at one and the same moment: the rigidity of this norm will be extremely influential both in Eurocentric metaphysics and in the classical understanding of the physical world.¹⁰ In one way or another the categorical

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Law confirmed the overwhelming rule of dualism and supported the human insistence on finding and imposing limits and boundaries on reality. From the medieval Scholastics to Hegelian dualism, the belief was enhanced in certain historical periods, and more particularly in the project of the Enlightenment whose effects, that started to take root by the end of the seventeenth century, have extended till the second half of the twentieth century, when the new physics and postmodern culture began to demolish their discriminatory implications.
Nowadays many cultural critics and philosophers of science coincide in pointing out that the twentieth century has brought about a new interpretive paradigm.¹¹ Relativity theory and quantum mechanics (and more specifically the Copenhagen interpretation and Werner Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy) represented the first attempts of the century to warn humans that reality could no longer be explained by the mere recourse to "common sense," Newtonian physics, and sensorial data. Einstein's ideas were soon used by a number of modernist writers, from T.S. Eliot to William Faulkner, who saw in relativity theory an important scientific correlate of their own epistemological relativism. However, quantum mechanics was not so easy to assimilate by the artificers of the new modernist culture. In effect, readers would have to wait till the post-war period to find sustained literary attempts that try to reproduce the important implications brought about by the study of sub-atomic particles. In a sense, it can be argued that quantum mechanics entails such a tremendous shift from classical Greek and Newtonian notions that many people are not yet ready to accept it. The study of sub-atomic particles and the behavior of the electron thoroughly undermined the common beliefs in substance and matter: the "wave function" came to replace the human belief in the existence of compact bodies, and Niels Bohr had to formulate his famous Principle of Complementarity to avoid scientific doubts after the formulation of Heisenberg's principle.¹²

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When the validity of traditional scientific notions such as "substance" and "matter" is put at stake, one might think a similar fate awaits Aristotelian categorical thinking and its ruling Law, since they rely heavily on the existence of these two principles. However, not many years ago critics were still supporting the idea that quantum mechanics is valid only for the microscopic world of sub-atomic particles and the wave function does not really affect macroatomic reality.¹³ It seems clear that people are not ready to get rid of traditional common-sensical views about the character of a stable reality, but Pynchon's readers know better: randomness, indeterminacy, fractal cartography, unstable selves, and early cultural announcements of the coming of chaos into common-sensical Aristotelian reality are all constantly repeated motifs in his fiction. In the scientific realm, the basic ideas of chaos theory were already present in the work of Henri Poincare, a nineteenth-century French mathematician, but it is only in recent years, as Davies and Gribbin point out, "especially with the advent of fast electronic computers with which to carry out the appropriate calculations, that the full significance of chaos theory has been appreciated."¹⁴ And, we could add, Pynchon was probably the earliest United States novelist to systematically incorporate and metaphorize in his work the implications of both quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and in a moment in which the latter was not yet the "scientific religion" it has become nowadays.
The belief has easily spread among non-scientific critics and cultural interpreters that chaos theory is the scientific correlate, on the macroatomic level, of quantum mechanics: the fluctuation, indeterminacy, random behavior, and instability of irregular systems perfectly (or, at least, discursively)correspond to the schizophrenic manifestations of the electron. Either/or notions and categorical thinking are strongly contested by believers in chaos theory, a clear ideological consequence¹⁵ that could also allow us to establish connecting cultural links with Derridean deconstruction--where binary oppositions are also highly contested¹⁶--

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and obviously with the typical features of the postmodern condition, which strongly resemble the values analyzed in chaotic systems.
The effects of categorical thinking are quite obvious in language, to such an extent that there are many critical voices from Lacanian to Derridean criticism that support the idea that, as it stands now, language cannot escape binary structures--that is to say, the rule of the Aristotelian categorical Law. The literary motif of the "reconciliation of opposites," also promulgated by many artists and thinkers in the course of the last twenty-five centuries, has escaped any discursive formulation so far: legal language, for instance, cannot get rid of its traditional dichotomies, guilty/not-guilty or true/false, simply because there seems to be no other discursive alternative in sight.
It is precisely within this cultural and discursive "entrapment" that Thomas Pynchon chooses, almost from the beginning of his literary life, to ironically play with the notion of our linguistic incapability to escape the Law of the Excluded Middle. And in order to do so, he goes back to investigate some scientific ideas apparently related to the primordial pair of Order and Chaos, a dichotomy that, as mentioned above, seems to be at the very roots of human interpretation. However, as I also argue below, the inexhaustible author does not simply advocate an option that would integrate opposites: final integration, he also warns us, may end up in a notion remarkably similar to a Freudian state of thanatic entropy.¹⁷ According to the beginning of the mythological Book of Genesis, the Word (Logos) created the world:¹⁸ the use of language by the human being represented his or her recognition of the multiplicity of life; the opposite value, speechless silence, would take us to the previous prelapsarian stage where the human being cannot recognize her or his self yet. Pynchon also plays extensively with these notions of duality and mythic or entropic fusion, and with the ambiguous implications science and culture have had in different moments for both interpretive options. Of course, the ultimate paradox is that by textually presenting both alternatives the novelist involves his readers in another instance of binarism where the Aristotelian Law rules again.

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The importance of this duality in Pynchon's fiction is already crystal-clear in his celebrated short story Entropy (1960),¹⁹ where the plot is ironically set in two different contrasting places: Callisto's perfectly ordered apartment, and his neighbor Meatball Mulligan's messy and disordered house where a party has been going on for forty hours. Interestingly, Pynchon already uses his extensive knowledge of physics in this short narrative to suggest that the persistent Aristotelian Law that entraps humans in categorical thinking has now to deal with the opposing effects of another law. This law establishes that in a closed system the amount of energy available for work is always decreasing: the Law of Entropy puts a physical end to the happy Newtonian-categorical belief in a clockwise Universe where limits and boundaries are clearly fixed and obey neat universal laws. Chaos, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics suggests, is finally going to overcome Order. Or such is the fear felt by the systematic Callisto: influenced by Henry Adams's thoughts about the dissemination of energy in the universe,²⁰ he has turned his apartment into what he believes to be an insulated and "ordered" closed system. Callisto already represents one of Pynchon's favorite figures: the human being obsessed with imposing order in life, a discursive believer in the primordial duality of order and chaos and, therefore, a discriminative thinking self fond of imposing dualistic boundaries on reality. Callisto's plight is all too clear: disorder must be kept outside, energy cannot leak from his apartment: "Hermetically sealed, [his apartment was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city's chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any civil disorder."²¹ Furthermore, in Entropy, the author already incorporates the notion that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is ultimately only responsible for the condition of death, an obvious human preoccupation that

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Callisto consciously metaphorizes in his attempt to avoid any further loss of energy from a little bird that is dying in his hands: the protagonist fears that the transmission of his own heat into the bird will not be enough to keep it alive, in this way corroborating the validity of the terrifying Law. To make things worse for Callisto, the outside temperature has lately been keeping at a steady thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, that is to say, very close to zero degrees Celsius, the symbolic figure that represents the void or the entropic heat-death of the universe. Meanwhile, Mulligan's party goes on with a disorderly number of events and conversations about some of the most fashionable topics of the moment, such as the application of the concept of entropy to information theory,²² with the noise playing the role of disorder. As Pynchon's readers know, this notion constitutes one of the favorite motifs of the author to such a point he even translates its effects to his own fiction. In effect, many readers could claim that often Pynchon's books are difficult if not impossible to understand in a precise way because there is such an excess of information that it translates as informational noise.²³ But this is not the case yet with Entropy; on the contrary, at the end of the story, the writer decides to ironically trespass the categorical limits imposed by Callisto: "The noise in Meatball's apartment had reached a sustained, ungodly crescendo."²⁴ This condition of sustained departure from the "godly" order, eventually forces the apparent representative of chaos to think in Aristotelian categorical terms:

The way he figured, there were only about two ways he could cope: (a) lock himself in the closet and maybe eventually they would all go away, or (b) try to calm everybody down, one by one. (a) was certainly the most attractive alternative. But then he started thinking about that closet. It was dark and stuffy and he would be alone. He did not feature being alone. And then this crew off the good ship Lollipop or whatever it was might take it upon themselves to kick down the closet door, for a lark ....
So he decided to try and keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos ....²⁵

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His choice finally being (b), Mulligan stands up paradoxically as the first one who has finally allowed for the interplay of the primordial opposites. Order has balanced the previous rule of chaos when rational thinking has entered the mind of this random protagonist. Self-obsessed Callisto, however, is not ready to accept the necessary role of chaos: he stands petrified, thinking that the death of the bird means the end of the transference of energy and that it has to be his girlfriend, Aubade, who offers herself as victim to the final rule of entropy. She smashes one of the window panes to allow the fateful thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit to enter the up- till-then closed system, foreseeing the moment of equilibrium in which Callisto's and her own life will "resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion."²⁶ This is a moment that, obviously, will never come for them despite the end of the tale: Aubade has been contaminated by Callisto's old Adamsian notions about a heat-death that contemporary scientists locate, if at all, several billion years from now. The actual symbolic result of Aubade's breaking of the panel is different: disorder enters the insulated apartment, thus breaking again the boundaries imposed by the categorical mind of the obsessed protagonist. The roles have been changed in each apartment and nothing seems to come out of it, although the final image of Callisto and Aubade physically waiting for the coming of deadly Entropy can already be understood as a Pynchonian warning of the dangers of the human mind: an obsessive belief may bring about actual death.
It is within similar scientific and metaphorical coordinates that Pynchon's posterior fiction systematically erases our Western confidence in clear, categorical limits: his first novel, V. (1963), again presents two main characters that, we may believe at the beginning of the book, seem to correspond to the contrasting principles of structured classical order (Stencil) and the rule of chaos (Profane). However, the story, whose main aim is the quest for the lady V., finally dissolves in a never-ending chain of signifiers that always escapes an ultimate categorical meaning.
The title of Pynchon's first novel already suggests the pictorial image of a bifurcation point, a concept very popular among believers in chaos theory²⁷ and that incorporates in itself the notion of a common link from

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which two elements gradually separate. But the author goes further in his scientific implications and, in the page that precedes the beginning of the story, draws a symbolic fractalic "v," thus anticipating the fact that below his apparent narrative chaos lies hidden a systematic pattern as symbolic announcement of our human insistence on drawing patterns to interpret reality.
      V. also marks the beginning of a series of Pynchonian textual devices that will subsequently appear in his later narratives and that will effectually bring about the metaphorization of the unstable condition of both the postmodernist self and the world.²⁸ The issue of a characteristically unstable self and world is basic for our interpretation of Pynchon's oeuvre as a systematic attack on Aristotelian categorical thinking because the classical myth of stability strongly relies on the concept of "substance," a principle that, as we saw above, is also basic for the manifestation of the Law of the Excluded Middle: without a belief in the existence of compact substance, stability vanishes as a principle and contrary qualities cannot be affirmed of any "being" at different moments.
     I pointed out earlier the important discovery of the integrative behavior of the electron as being both wave and particle, and the quantum physicists' attack on the classical notion of substance. Surprisingly for his time, what Pynchon initiated in Entropy with two protagonists apparently so dissimilar but who eventually confuse their roles, already becomes one of his most subversive technical devices in V.: the two different human manifestations of the "electron," Profane and Stencil, correspond to two sides of the same coin, and integration replaces dualism. The scientific metaphor is otherwise supported by two other effective devices that help stress the blurring of categorical limits: the use of the Doppelganger or double, and the crossing of narrative levels.²⁹
     The three techniques gradually develop into reiterative Pynchonian motifs in his later fiction and certainly deserve further consideration. As happened in Entropy, the figure of Henry Adams is also parodied³⁰ in V.,

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now in the character of Stencil, a researcher into that flux of energy that passes from Christianity into electricity, the notion that the historian predicated in The Dynamo and the Virgin.³¹ The son of a Foreign Office agent who died in Malta "under unknown circumstances" in 1919,³² Herbert Stencil's intellectual quest becomes clear when he finds a mysterious paragraph in his father's private journals:

Under "Florence, April, 1899" is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: "There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report."³³

In this way Stencil becomes the rational researcher for a meaning, the constructor and reconstructor of mental patterns that take him to track the signifier V. and its escaping meanings to different parts of Western civilization and to recreate or dream different historical moments. Pynchon's story is also a splendid homage to modernist thinking with a multiplicity of references to Eliot's obsessive motifs or to Wittgenstein's distrust of language as a tool to know reality. Not surprisingly, Stencil's quest and his dreamy reevaluations of the first decades of the twentieth century (he was born in 1901, "the century's child") frequently lead the reader to encounter multiple references to the modernist motif of physical, religious, and cultural decadence. Trapped by the high-modernist obsession of projecting the self into reality and creating some order in it by means of discourse, Stencil would perfectly represent the antithesis of the other protagonist, ironically named Profane since once the last--modernist--attempt to reinstall a mythic understanding of life fails,³⁴culture "must" turn into the profane, the other half of the dichotomy. If Stencil is basically a modernist quester that continuously projects his interpretations and mental patterns on reality, Profane is the literary result of the post-war

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period: he is abundantly described and even describes himself as a yo-yoing schlemiel haunted by the belief that the inanimate is taking over and quickly replacing the animate. As happened to Callisto, he is also scared of entropic death, an idea that surprisingly offers a first link with Stencil's understanding of reality: in his quest for the meaning of V., the latter suggests that the lady V. (Veronica Manganese) has gradually become a cyborg, with a progressive incorporation of inanimate elements into her body.
Readers, as happened to some critics of Pynchon's novel, may have fallen into Pynchon's ironic trap of categorical dualism, thinking that Stencil and Profane are truly opposite characters, when there is not such a thing. Their mutual obsession with the realm of the inanimate motivates an actual "stencilization" of Profane who even dreams of "an all-electronic woman. Maybe her name would be Violet."³⁵ Even the external narrator of the apparent dual story becomes "stencilized"--or shall we say "profanized"?--when it comments: "All things gathered to farewell."³⁶ This integrative spell is also suggested in the use of the Doppelganger, a reflective double that Pynchon highlights with his insistence on the role of mirror reflections that discover (as the embedded narrator Fausto Maijstral believes) our self in the other. Of course, the notion is not simply Lacanian or Borgesian, as the mirror has traditionally been a source of literary symbolism, but here I interpret it as further proof of the Pynchonian irony of binary thinking. In V., the use of doubles is not yet as extensive as it will be in Gravity's Rainbow and in Mason & Dixon, but it is already apparent in the case of Flip and Flop and, obviously, in the character of Stencil who (as happened to Callisto) is, in his quest and in his third-person self-address, a "stencil" or discursive reflection of Henry Adams and his theories.
Ultimately V. represents a failed modernist quest for meaning because the enunciative power of the novel's external narrator and of the other, embedded narrators (Stencil, Mondaugen, Flopp, Eigenvalue, Maijstral, and others), is systematically subverted by the author in his attempt to trespass categorical limits. Metalepsis abounds in the novel, but possibly the end of chapter eight and the beginning of chapter nine constitute the best example of the writer's attempt to dissolve the limits separating traditional narrative levels. The end of chapter eight marks the beginning of a new embedded

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story whose doubtful gnoseological basis is, in this case, clearly indicated by the narrator:

A week or so later, in one of the secluded side rooms of the Rusty Spoon, Mondaugen yarned, over an abominable imitation of Munich beer, about youthful days in South-West Africa.
Stencil listened attentively. The tale proper and the questioning after took no more than thirty minutes. Yet the next Wednesday afternoon at Eigenvalue's office, when Stencil retold it, the yarn had undergone considerable change: had become, as Eigenvalue put it, Stencilized.³⁷

What follows (chapter nine) is the "stencilized" version of Mondaugen's story whose credibility is once more at stake when, metaleptically, the resultant Mondaugen-Stencil-narrator has a dream about Flopp's account of his own early period in the German Army. In other words, within Stencil's impersonation of Mondaugen, the latter impersonates Flopp and goes from 1922 almost twenty years back in time.³⁸ The reader is subjected to a double journey backwards: from the first narrative about Stencil's activities in 1956, to 1922 in which the events apparently told by Mondaugen (his possible encounter with V.) happened, and, from this apparent "dream"³⁹ to the period of 1904-07 when Flopp, a young soldier under the orders of General Lothar von Trotha, whose troops historically massacred the Hereros and Hottentots, rebels against German rule. As it frequently happens in Stencil's quest, once again a historical

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event appears mixed in a complex web of references and narrative instances, and any possibility of coming to terms with the real and historically true is gradually and persistently eroded. Mondaugen's story is also one of Pynchon's clear tributes to high modernism: this character tells Stencil about events which took place in 1922 (the "magic year" of modernism), and we are told that ironically Mondaugen lived in a tower in the middle of the African wilderness while trying to isolate himself from the decadent atmosphere that surrounded Flopp and the other Germans.⁴⁰ Parodic irony overflows at the end of the chapter: Mondaugen is awakened by Weissmann, the future Nazi officer in Gravity's Rainbow, who says he has finally deciphered the code Mondaugen was looking for, the message being nothing but "DIEWELTISTALLESWASDERFALLIST" ("the world is all that the case is"), the first proposition of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in book form and with an English translation in the year 1922. The intertextual reference to this famous essay, which argued for the impossibility of actual knowledge by means of language, is finally echoed in the last words of the chapter, when Mondaugen trots away in the company of a Bondel who begins to sing, but "[the song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn't understand it."⁴¹ Only some pages later, and back in 1956 again, Charisma will sing a joyful song, in English this time, about love and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, repeating its first proposition despite the fact that he has nothing in common with Mondaugen. At this moment, the reason for this "coincidence" may be glimpsed by the reader: perhaps the whole collection of stories within the main story of V. is nothing but a number of "impersonations and dreams" devised by a playful external narrator, and this figure is not ashamed of subtly producing a web of repetitions and coincidences which operate to dissolve narrative (ultimately ontological) borders.
The dissolution of borders between different characters and narrative levels (i.e., main story, embedded stories, and text) is a technique which operates throughout the novel. This technique also tends to confuse readers of Pynchon's fiction, and it certainly deserves a more detailed analysis. But this device has become quite reiterative in the writer's later works, as we will see later on, and so I will simply add now one more metaleptical incidence in V. I have already mentioned the fact that both Mondaugen and Charisma can evoke Wittgenstein's work and that the roles of the external

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narrator and of other embedded narrators, mostly Stencil, are sometimes very dubious and interfere with one another, and I would like to conclude the analysis of this novel by referring to another one of those examples in which the narrator mixes with or fuses into other characters. This is the case of McClintic, whose favorite motto is revealed by the narrator in a paragraph written in that other common technique among modernist writers, free indirect discourse. McClintic focalizes, and the narrator narrates:

--there came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense.⁴²

The motto, which became very famous among Pynchon's readers, is soon repeated by another "character", if we can call "SHROUD" a character, when this dummy wishes Profane farewell once the protagonist has been dismissed from his job as watchman for Anthroresearch Associates.⁴³ The effect, once again, warns us against categorical thinking: where are the limits between thoughts and experiences, and where are the limits between the narrator and its characters? If anything, what suffers is the stability of the narrative voice and that of the characters it tells us about. The concept of an independent, stable self that views the world in categorical terms is dissolving, and Pynchon's later novels will offer even more radical devices to bring about its total textual disappearance.
The author's 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, represents a shorter but very effective attempt to create in his readers a total distrust of textual representation. At this moment, Pynchon has already become a well-known and absent writer: earthly vanity has lost track of his figure and he rewards his readers with a highly complex little book where the excess of information might well bring about an ultimate diffusion of meaning. Entropy (both informative and thermodynamic) is one of the writer's favorite metaphors but, within the context of literary history, the novel is much more. Like other postmodernist novels written in the 1960s, this one is characterized by its symbolic excess. Oedipa Maas's adventure is not simply a parody of the California detective novel, as reviewers would soon

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contend, but a more extensive parody of Modernism and of its favorite motif of the quest of the hero. The modernist quest, at the beginning of the twentieth century, is in itself an expression of the humanist necessity to come to terms with a Universe where God has disappeared only to be replaced by gnoseological relativity.
In the first decades of this century, the need for certainty exploded in a proliferation of references to a cyclical or mythical understanding of life that crystallized in Jungian psychoanalysis. Carl Jung wrote extensively about his belief in the necessity of a process of psychic integration. In the process, the individual had to undertake a perilous mental path, denominated "integration of the personality," and where the key notion consisted in the patient's assimilation of a number of mental archetypes that had their external correlates in a multiplicity of popular and religious stories and plastic symbology.⁴⁴His theories became so popular that, by the end of the 1940s, American anthropologist Joseph Campbell devised a Jungian interpretation of the meaning of life Campbell denominated "the quest of the hero," a monomythical figure that, perfectly responding to the modernist necessity to find a meaning in life, has to follow a path of trials before facing an ultimate, liberating answer.⁴⁵
Parodically, Oedipa is the modernist quester who still doubts about the actuality of life outside her own self: Modernism brought about a revision of Cartesian dualism in favor of the so-called "inner gaze," the capacity of the private self to find and come to terms with an external reality, despite the apparent impossibility of objective knowledge. But this gnoseological myth is dispelled in Pynchon's parodic use of the modernist motif. Oedipa actually undergoes clear Campbellian stages. She enters an unknown zone that represents the unconscious (San Narciso), receives some "supernatural help" to clarify her quest (Metzer), and is ready to defy the dark forces of evil (Trystero). She even plays the role of the modernist intellectual when, facing an authentic picture by Remedios Varo, she imagines herself as a captive maiden in the solipsistic tower of her mind.⁴⁶ And it is within this context of Cartesian and modernist binary conflict where the novelist chooses to play, in an excessive way, with the Law of the Excluded Middle.

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Pynchon's parodic heroine ends up trapped in her own categorical thinking and the story starts to be filled with an ever increasing number of either/or choices that mirror her basic question, "[does the Trystero really exist or is it simply the product of her paranoia?" The bifurcative option is elaborated by the narrator himself: "Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasized by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenetrated with the dead man's estate."⁴⁷
Oedipa's quest soon becomes the reader's private quest for knowledge, a situation the author handles with mastery by producing a Borgesian regression ad infinitum. His outstanding knowledge of physics leads Pynchon to establish a celebrated and often-quoted relationship between entropy in thermodynamics and entropy in information flow. When Oedipa visits Nefastis, questing for the meaning of Trystero, and is offered the possibility to operate his Maxwell's Demon device,⁴⁸ a double metaphor becomes activated. On the one hand, as a "sensitive" Oedipa stands outside the system--that is to say, outside the box in which the Demon would apparently carry out its discriminative and categorical either/or function of sorting out the hot molecules from the cold ones. However, her role becomes not simply that of a believer in the Aristotelian Law because a successful result in the Demon's discriminative activity would represent an eternal source of heat, resulting in the ultimate abolition of death.⁴⁹ On the other hand, when Oedipa fails to activate the Demon, a series of suggestions enter in conflict with the Aristotelian Law: the either/or pattern--the sorting out of molecules--cannot be effected on the physical level because Oedipa never "manifests" to the Demon from outside its system, in the same way as the narrator never manifests itself to Oedipa by providing her with an answer from its external system (the level of the narrating). The regression ad infinitum continues when we understand, as readers, we cannot provide an answer to Oedipa's either/or quest, and outside the textual level we can neither escape the tyranny of the categorical Law.

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Eventually, the always-regressive game proves to be the old game of Western apocalyptic religion⁵⁰ because it metaphorizes the ancient human hope of waiting for the transcendental revelation of extraordinary beings that will provide us with the ultimate answer to eternal life. This wish has traditionally encapsulated human imagination in the power of Order, here represented by the hot molecules that would produce eternal energy. In this second novel, Pynchon furthers his ironic argument with a multiplicity of references to Christian Revelation that go from the title of the book (with the number forty-nine that precedes the fifty or revelatory Pentecost) to its very end, when Oedipa "settled back, to await the crying of lot 49." The novel ends in a symbolic repetition of its very title, with an auctioneer who resembles "the priesthood of some remote culture"⁵¹; perhaps he is the Beast, the fallen angel that precedes the Apocalypse or final revelation of the truth. But the reader will never know because the story stops there in an uncertain, postmodernist open ending. There is no other way to escape the Aristotelian law that excludes middles,⁵² and, with no transcendental manifestation, we will not know whether it is system or paranoia, true or false, either/or. Categorical language is finally subverted by the suggestion of a symbolic "crying" followed by the blank space on the final page, by the silence that precludes the defeat of the Word or Derridean Logos.
Life, death, entropy, physics, infinite regression, or different narrative levels whose limits become blurred are all elements that Pynchon already masters in the encyclopedic Gravity's Rainbow (1973).⁵³ As the author's most celebrated and difficult work, this book represents a brilliant and sustained criticism of an ample variety of discriminative binary oppositions that include life/death, man/woman, inside/outside, white/black, master/slave, and, underpinning its many pages, the reiterative motif of the primordial battle between Order and Chaos with the rigidity of mathematical law being opposed by the random impacts of the German rockets. This bulky novel represents the radicalization of Pynchonian metafictional practices and his ultimate attempt to celebrate (but also to

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warn us of) the coming of the new paradigm. The author parodies both notions of classical physics and the Modernist cult of mythic structures.
     Gravity's Rainbow can be easily summarized as a literary field where the old humanist interpretation of life is finally defeated by new postmodernist values. In the novel, the Law of Cause and Effect is drastically contested by the inanimate protagonist of the story, the real but also symbolic V2, whose blast arrives before its sound. In this way, the rocket actualizes in a macro reality what scientists had already proved in the realm of the atom. But Pynchon's suggestions go even further when he stresses the unstable condition of the human being by textually dissolving the animate protagonist of the book, Lieutenant Slothrop.⁵⁴ Many more motifs and technical devices coincide in pointing out the book as a sustained symbol of the contemporary struggle between the old and the new paradigm. To list all of them would probably require more than a hundred pages, something that obviously surpasses the scope of this article. However, it is not an exaggeration to say that the full text constitutes an almost endless play of either/or choices and that categorization is again one of the main targets of Pynchonian irony. In effect, by perceiving the novel as a literary ground where the old and the new enter in conflict, readers already become trapped in the categorical way of thinking that leads towards the Aristotelian Law.
     As mentioned above, Pynchon's third novel radicalizes techniques that he had already used in his previous works and that tend to dislocate the traditional insistence on clear limits and categories. A brief summary combining the plot with the use of technical devices may suffice to discover the persistence of old Pynchonian motifs. Divided in four parts, the main story is set in an imprecise period of time that covers the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the post-war period, although many temporal jumps interfere with the reader's traditional attempt to impose a chronological order on the story. The use of embedded narratives reappears in this novel in order to enhance this gradual dissolution of textual chronology.
     The plot is structured as a modernist quest for knowledge. In this occasion, a certain Lieutenant Slothrop is ordered to trace the position of the Nazis' ultimate weapon: the V2 modified prototype renamed as 00000. Characteristic of the monomythical quest is the fact the protagonist will have to enter what anthropologist Joseph Campbell denominated a "zone

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of magnified power,"⁵⁵ according to Carl Jung a symbol for the human unconscious. Slothrop actually has to enter the Zone, a strange ground apparently located in Germany but actually a textual example of ontological instability, with many different interspersed stories. Here the reader meets characters who change their names or that double each other, and even the limits of textual reality are always under scrutiny: the reader is watching a movie, contemplating a dream, reading a comic magazine, and getting lost in a multilayered reality where the frontiers between the different narrative genres and ontological levels are continuously blurred. Once more, characters are divided in different, opposite types (such as the cases of the post-quantum statistics expert Roger Mexico and the traditionally behaviorist Pointsman) or they become ironic couples whose ontological status is also unclear (the Komical Kamikazes Takeshi and Ichizo). Spies, counterspies, false identities, reflecting characters are all elements that frequently appear to radicalize the notion that limits are not clear any longer, that stories have no beginning and no end, and that the protagonist's quest for knowledge is bound to fail. Similarly anguished by an excess of information, the reader is also bound to fail in his search for coherence once categorical limits stop being clear.
Surrounded by the decadent Eliotean symbols of the Rock and the Twilight, Slothrop also tries to find a meaning in his life strangely connected to the rocket. As happened in V., here the protagonist is also involved in the passage from the animate to the inanimate. In his Education, Henry Adams had predicted the shift of energy from electricity to radium, and this is precisely the stage now investigated by Pynchon. Slothrop is in himself a modified human prototype, a mixture of male Lady V. and wandering Profane, physically affected by the ultimate human creation, Imipolex G, a carbon "plastic that is actually erectile,"⁵⁶ and the perfect case for the new phallic rocket, the prototype of the five zeros Weissmann, as representative of the white death, commands to be fired with the suicidal Gottfried riding it.⁵⁷ The act of firing the rocket is in itself multisymbolic: the reader may understand that it represents, among other things, the inescapable link between love and death, the dangers of technology, or the metaleptic bomb that will kill the reader/spectator at the end of the novel, a further suggestion of the psychic effects of the Bomb in the atomic era.

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Mondaugen, a German mythic-obsessed character that already appeared in V., is also partly responsible for one more interpretation of the role of the bomb. As the narrator ironically affirms, Mondaugen's electro- mysticism takes this character to believe that humans "live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero."⁵⁸ The zero as symbol of the fusion of opposites becomes one more aspect in the Jungian quest for integration that characterizes Nazi deeds. Even the Hereros, black shadows of their German white masters, try to reproduce the Aryan mandala, the ultimate rocket explosion that will bring about the end of the cycle, of the Wagnerian Twilight of the Gods, and the beginning of the new era.⁵⁹ Manichean or mythic, Aristotelian or Blakean--Pynchon's narrator ironizes--will have their own interpretation of the ultimate weapon.

So, yes yes this is a scholasticism here, Rocket state-cosmology [... But the rocket has to be many things, it must answer to a number of different shapes in the dreams of those who touch it--in combat, in tunnel, on paper-- it must survive heresies shining, unconfoundable ... and heretics there will be: Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the Rocket-throne ... Kabbalists who study the Rocket as a Torah, letter by letter [... Manichaeans who see two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World's suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.⁶⁰

There are abundant elements in the book that suggest that the Nazis are representatives of a mythic modernist understanding of life, but again limits are not clear and Wagnerian myths are frequently mirrored in Herero African culture or in the trespassing psychic powers of characters like Pirate Prentice. However, Pynchon reintroduces in this novel his obsessive notion of entropy to inform his readers that the mythic integration of opposites does not seem to have cultural meaning any longer. The endless

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struggle between Order and Chaos that mythically resolves in a new cycle is now threatened by a new technology that, as anticipated by the Lady V., is taking over all life forms. Plastic, Imipolex G, represents the end of the last Cycle; "the six carbon atoms of benzene are in fact curled around into a closed ring"⁶¹ and they mean the very end of the life chain, waste, the ultimate Pynchonian paranoia.

The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning" is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the world can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.⁶²

The threat of the end of the mythic cycle is in itself also a modernist motif,⁶³ but the modernists believed they were living in a decadent period and still showed some hope in a new cyclical beginning. On the contrary, Gravity's Rainbow reinforces Pynchon's warning about the excesses of post- industrial capitalism, an ideology that inherits the categorical project of Modernity and sees in the limitless production of goods the "ultimate aim of life," an ambiguous phrase that can be easily interpreted here as final apocalypse. Is there any hope left? The quest for the lost paradise will take us to the pages of Vineland,⁶⁴ the third escaping "v" that, this time, comes informed by new postmodernist theories of the simulacrum.
Published on the verge of the new decade of the 1990s, Pynchon's fourth novel was neither a critical nor a public success. Perhaps the old

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drifter had been too clear in his political views, perhaps his attack on American politics was, this time, too overt and many people discovered that he was not simply a formal experimentalist. At first sight, the new novel seems to be too Manichaean, with Ronald Reagan and the FBI as the "baddies" in a social context in which drug consumers and ex-hippies seem to be the "goodies." What was the author complaining about? The answer to this question was being written since his early short stories: it is not just the System or They. With Vineland the novelist is still criticizing the unfulfilled American Dream, the voyage from Europe to New England, from there to California, always looking west for a political refuge against human madness. Vineland, the good, legendary place discovered by the Vikings, is nothing but a dream, a country of plenitude where the grapes of God have again become the grapes of wrath. Steinbeck's social warning is reinscribed fifty years later by the postmodernist Pynchon in a novel that starts with the end of Zoyd Wheeler's dream, and that comes to an apparent closed ending with Prairie waking up from another dream. In Zoyd's case, blue jays are stomping around in his house's roof; in Prairie's, she sees her dog with his face full of blue-jay feathers. What has happened to the birds? Is the end the beginning? Is Pynchon back to the old mythic structure of the full circle or is he predicting the end of dreams?
"Dream" is a basic key-word to approach Pynchon's texts because it offers a link to an alternative reality: it is a second ontological level whose limits with daylight reality are systematically blurred. Stencil "impersonated" and dreamed in V., Oedipa ended up thinking that she might be projecting her own reality, and Gravity's Rainbow started with the celebrated scream in Pirate Prentice's dream. Sensorial reality has always been escaping from Pynchon's descriptions of his fictional universe, and his fourth novel is no exception in his attempt to subvert the notion of a clear-cut substantial reality that can be evaluated in categorical terms. Vineland is a quest with protagonists always on the move, but it is a quest that recaptures a notion that the reader already found in the writer's first novel. The aim is the reencounter with a mother, and Stencil's obsession with the lady V. is now transmuted into Prairie's attempt to locate her ex-hippie mother Frenesi Gates. At the time of publication of the book, personal computers were already a commodity. People like William Gibson or Bruce Sterling had already revised postmodernist writing (including Pynchon's fiction)⁶⁵ and created cyberpunk, and Jean Baudrillard had become a well-

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known cultural critic with his theory of the simulacra.⁶⁶ It is no wonder then that Prairie's quest takes the form of the simulacrum, with a continuous use of parodic Derridean traces that appear as old documents, pictures, film footage that the young protagonist will try to use to find her mother.⁶⁷ The girl's knowledge of Frenesi is always limited to her images, to written or pictorial references, till their final reencounter. But, according to the ironic narrator, there is a moment of convergence between the two female characters, a link that seems to confirm their belief in a new interpretation of the world affected by categorical thinking. Being an old FBI informer, Frenesi tries to cash one of the checks she still receives from the federal agency, and at that moment she imagines what human life is:

We are digits in God's computer, ... [and the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.⁶⁸

The Aristotelian law is reenacted in this metaphorical interpretation of life as a big computer where "electronic patterns of ones and zeros are like patterns of human lives and deaths." Outside the systematic computer stands God the categorical controller. The Borgesian metaphor is later repeated by the narrator when it is following Prairie in her quest that this time takes her to a computer library where she sees, "in storage, quiescent ones and zeros scattered among millions of others, the two women [Frenesi and DL, [...] in some definable space [....]"⁶⁹ The notion that computerized technology also constitutes a categorical threat will have to be dispelled by Pynchon once more by means of a number of devices that again go from the use of ironic and contrastive doubling to the continual trespassing of narrative levels and the addition, this time, of an ironic new race of people who live in-between two worlds, the Thanatoids.
If "waste" is a motif that has so far characterized the findings of some of Pynchon's protagonists (Profane, Oedipa, Slothrop), in Vineland the

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author offers the readers his interpretation of the American waste land in dualistic terms. In his own Waste Land, Eliot chose to present interpretations that came from both Eastern and Western cultures. Here Pynchon ironizes with the new powers that, coming from both parts of the planet, seem to exert a tight control of United States life: references to Wayvone's western Mafia are counterbalanced with signs of the Yakuza in a moment in which Northamerican paranoia has already become suspicious of the tremendous economic power the Japanese were acquiring in the U.S. by the end of the 1980s. But, in an excessive way, many more ironic dualities invade the book's pages: Man is opposed by a new type of fighting woman, who can be a treacherous exuberant spy, as Frenesi, or a deadly cyberpunk ninjette as DL. When it comes to the repressive federal system, they also come from two sides: on the one hand Federal Attorney Brock Vond, with a Rambo mood and the prototypical characteristics of the evil powerful person who feels himself above the law. On the other hand, crazy agent Hector Zuniga, a contemporary Zorro who has become a television addict who wants to impersonate actor Ricardo Montalban (to impersonate an impersonator!). Nor will the reader miss one of the most pervasive dualities in Pynchon's stories:

"OK [Prairie says--my mom made movies for that Revolution you guys tried to have, she was on the run, warrants out on her, FBI put her pictures in the post office, Zoyd was her cover for a while, and then they had me ... and we were a family until the feds found out where she was and she had to disappear--go underground." There was a small defiant tremor in her voice. Underground. Right. That's the story DL should have known they'd tell the kid. Underground.⁷⁰

The old frontier between above and below reappears in Pynchon's story to disappear immediately after. Frenesi's revolutionary background is only fictitious; she did not have to go underground on account of her political beliefs. The reason was totally different: she had to go underground because she was forced to join the FBI as an informer, finally committing an act of treason against her own friends. Was she immoral or only a victim? However, if the frontiers that categorically divide day-light "above" from underground "below" and good from evil dissolve in Frenesi's confusing

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moral labyrinth, there are others (also old ones in Pynchon's fiction) to take its place. The either/or principle also traps ninjette DL in the old modernist dilemma which consumed Oedipa's brain:

Sometimes, waiting in her room, she'd wonder if this was all supposed to be some penance, to sit, caught inside the image of one she'd loved, been betrayed by, just sit.... Was it a koan she was meant to consider in depth, or was she finally lost in a great edge-to-edge delusion, having only read about Frenesi Gates once in some dentist's waiting room or standing in line at the checkout, whereupon something had just snapped and she'd gone on to make up the whole thing?⁷¹

To escape the law that traps us in a dualistic understanding of life Pynchon resorts to his favored technique of confusing ontological boundaries. As I have already pointed out, the suggestion that everything could be nothing but a dream offers the reader a new uncertain possibility of an apparent happy ending, but Prairie's quest for knowledge is in itself an adventure where ontological limits are never clear. She has to interpret documents, photos, and footage to sort out clues in a way that resembles Oedipa's search for the Tristero or Stencil's quest for V. We are trapped again in human subjectivity and in its projections of an invented reality. Outside the human brain the situation has become, by the end of the 1980s in the US, a bit more problematic. As Baudrillard suggested, the mass media have already effected one more displacement from reality. Newspapers, photos, television, or film (the "traces" Prairie has to resort to in her search) have combined in order to impose on us an extra barrier to ever reach the real. The United States is infested by television sets that are never switched off, a notion Pynchon also used in The Crying of Lot 49, and that he radicalizes with the creation of his Thanatoids. The new Eliotean living-dead or "Straw Men" who share with Zuniga a fatal drive towards the TV set: no wonder "the Tube" is a term written in capital letters all through the novel. DL helps the reader know a bit more about these peculiar individuals who live in-between the limits of life and death:

"What's a Thanatoid. OK, it's actually short for 'Thanatoid personality.' 'Thanatoid' means 'like death, only different."'
"Do you understand this?" Takeshi asked DL.

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"Near as I can tell, they all live together, in Thanatoid apartment buildings, or Thanatoid houses in Thanatoid villages. Housing's modular and pretty underfurnished, they don't own many stereos, paintings, carpets, furniture, knickknacks, crockery, flatware, none o' that, 'cause why bother, that about right, OB?"⁷²

Pynchon's ironic narrator is kind enough to extend this definition in his own words by adding that while "waiting for the data necessary to pursue their needs and aims among the still-living Thanatoids spent at least part of every waking hour with an eye on the Tube."⁷³ Entropy as technological addiction has been installed in the Pynchonian pages, replacing the old hippies' use of cannabis. Eventually only the coming together of the Traverses and Beckers, representatives of the different waves of left-wing thinking in twentieth-century America, will bring some life to a nearby Thanatoid village whose inhabitants "actually slept the night before" and were therefore able to wake up. After coming back to life, the Thanatoids abandon their indeterminate ontological position but a new logical transgression awaits the ultimate evil character Brock Vond. He is made to disappear in an Amerindian country of death, where the frontiers between the factual and the fantastic become blurred again.⁷⁴ What is the reader to

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expect in the last page of the book? Reality or dream? If the latter, is there any hope left for the US?
If there is any hope left, it certainly stands far away from pernicious categorical thinking, and, to insist on this notion, Pynchon decides in 1997 to publish his own views on one of the most powerful categorical frontiers that was to bring the young American country to the Civil War, a conflict fought over a boundary that separated two different ways of understanding life: the Mason & Dixon line, the ultimate symbol of a middle ground categorically excluded from human interpretation.
Pynchon's interest in the task of the two surveyors can be traced back to at least two references that the author includes in V.⁷⁵ This new novel incorporates into his personal world an element that was still missing in the writer's previous fiction: the historical analysis of the US at almost the moment of its birth as a nation. So far the novelist had commented on many historical events mostly related to colonialism and to the political role of his country in the twentieth century. In this sense, we may interpret V., Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland as brilliant examples of what Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon has denominated as "historiographic metafiction,"⁷⁶ but it is in Mason & Dixon where Pynchon, by going so far back into the past, establishes clearer links with the recent historiographic novel in Europe. As happened with his third novel, the new book is in itself bulky and encyclopedic but it is also easier to understand. The reader will find again a number of typical Pynchonian motifs translated into the atmosphere of the eighteenth century; the funny ironic narrator, the use of names for characters who are the apparent ancestors of twentieth-century Pynchonian personages (Bodine, Cherricoke), and the frequent dualities the author has systematically employed for more than thirty years: visible/invisible,

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conspiracy/freedom, above/below, factual/fantastic, etc. Similarly he deploys strategies to make the reader doubt the validity of categorical thinking; the use of doubles, the blurring of narrative frontiers, the instability of life and the self. In effect, the line (/) that separates the two elements that form a binary structure falls down in the very title of the book, whose linking and harmonious "&" already announces the writer's insistent attack on the Aristotelian categorical law. But here there is a real line to cope with, the historical Mason & Dixon line that was to symbolize the radical division of the U.S. into North and South. On top of everything else, the two historical protagonists also have to live in a period characterized by the trespassing of a cultural border: the Enlightenment--the rule of categorical Newtonian mechanicism--is giving way to the Gothic and the Romantic, mathematics is ceding grounds to the rule of fantasy and the imagination. The protagonists' plight is, however, a serious one because, paradoxically, they are the servants of order, whose task is to map the earth and to glorify categorical neatness, even if their own characters are already trapped in a romantic ethos that stresses the importance of the Gothic or declares the evil of slavery.
Romanticism was in itself a temporary departure from the bourgeois values of mechanicism. However, in order to subvert the values of the Enlightenment, the ironic writer resorts to a radical effect of decontextualization. He presents a story, set in the eighteenth century, from a clear postmodernist perspective where life is described as a text or a map and where poststructuralist critics will have no problem to recognize the imprints of some of the most important contemporary thinkers, ranging from Foucault to Derrida or Lacan.⁷⁷ As happened in his previous fiction, Pynchon stresses the values of different theories and cultural beliefs that highlight the rule of complementarity, indeterminacy, or chaotic transgression, comically presenting figures like the Feng-Shui master who is able to transform himself into his hated opposite, the Spanish Jesuit Padre Zarpazo.⁷⁸ Captain Zhang becomes Zarpazo, but, when it happens, the reader has been trapped again in the ironic game of the "Z." This game also stands for the entropic Zero, which qualifies the Jesuit as an eighteenth-century double of Nazi Weissmann: "Zarpazo as well--his vows include one sworn to Zero Degrees, Zero Minutes, Zero Seconds, or perfect North.

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He is the Lord of the Zero."⁷⁹ Like his double from Gravity's Rainbow, Zarpazo also offers a mythic, integrative interpretation of life when speaking to his students, an interpretation that ends up in the entropic void that has informed Pynchon's fiction up to date:

"Perhaps there is no Disjunction," he has nonetheless continu'd,--"and men, after all, want Rome, want Her, desire Her, as both Empire and Church. Perhaps they seek a way back,-- to the single Realm, as it was before Protestants, and Protestant Dissent, and the mindless breeding of Sect upon Sect. A Portrayal, in the earthly Day-light, of the Soul's Nostalgia for the undifferentiated Condition before Light and Dark,--Earth and Sky, Man and Woman,--a return to that Holy Silence which the Word broke, and the Multiplexity of matter has ever since kept hidden, before all but a few resolute Explorers."⁸⁰

In the Jesuit's words,⁸¹ Pynchonian readers have to face the ultimate notion of integration that humans have called nirvana, or mystic experience, an apparent overcoming of categorical frontiers. People like Zarpazo or Weissmann use this integration for their own private benefits, paradoxically enslaving people into the categorical authority of religious or political systems. And again Pynchon suggests a counterfight by means of a number of doubles and narrative jumps that present a confusing alternative to the clear limits imposed by the clearing of the Visto. This new playful game of the letter "v" is actually saturated with characters who impersonate somebody else or who reflect each other, shattering to pieces any bourgeois notion of a stable self. Even the fantastic Automaton Duck has its double, or, as mentioned above, Zhang is able to change into his own enemy. The writer also plays with different narrative levels where the motif of the double inexhaustibly reappears: the typical Pynchonian narrator introduces the figure of a second-level and terribly unreliable narrator, the Revd Wicks Cherrycoke, a parodic (mirroring) Sheherezade who can stay with his relatives as long as he charms the children with daily narratives. Two of Cherrycoke's nephews are Pitt and Pliny, the Twins who can easily

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interchange their roles. Within the main story that Cherrycoke narrates Molly & Dolly, the protagonists' ironic female reflections, stand out. Even in one of those embedded stories that frequently appear in the text we find the reflecting Chinese astronomers Hsi and Ho. These mise-en-abymic icons are reinforced by parallel stories presented on different narrative levels whose boundaries are eventually trespassed, such as happens on chapters fifty-three and fifty-four with the "nun's" parodic "narrative of captivity." This results in an agglomeration of facts, characters, and motifs that radically suppress the validity of clear boundaries.
The ultimate paradox comes when we gradually discover that the two protagonists, servants of Order and of its enlightened limits, show in their own characters the same chaotic instability and doubling behavior that Pynchon continuously suggests in the rest of the book. From the first polite letters they cross at the beginning of the story or the appreciation of beer of the one against the fondness the other feels for wine, the Anglican Charles Mason and the Quaker Jeremiah Dixon move in an uncertain and frequently alternate path of friendship and rivalry.⁸² This emotional path is frequently crossed by more references to doubles and doubling, and it ends up at the climactic moment in which they have to decide whether to trespass the other, more ancient Indian line of the Warrior Path. The narrator has informed the reader of Mason's previous wish to cross it and of Dixon's reluctance to do so. However, only one page later we are informed that the Surveyors "at some point exchange Positions, with Dixon now for pushing on, razzle-dazzling their way among the Indians at least as far as Ohio."⁸³
As Cherrycoke later comments, the two protagonists put an end to their partnership when the Visto has been concluded (they also have an argument over the drawing of the actual map of the Line). However, this does not represent the textual end of the adventures that have taken them to both hemispheres: characteristic of postmodernism is the authorial possibility to present alternative endings to the ones proposed in historical documents, and that is precisely what Pynchon decides to do in chapter seventy-three. This chapter is an "invented" episode in which the narrator imagines Mason and Dixon together again to draw now a line across the Atlantic Ocean: "'A thoughtful enough Arrangement of Anchors and Buoys, Lenses and Lanthorns, forming a perfect Line across the Ocean, all

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the way from the Delaware Bay to the Spanish Extremadura'[...."⁸⁴ The joke is a big one and more so when one considers that Extremadura itself was named so because originally this word meant the "limits of the river Duero," that is to say, the early medieval frontier between Christians (in the North of the river) and Muslims (in the South), a mark that later kept continuously moving for several hundred years of war. Everything is Representation, readers are reminded in the last part of the book, mythically named "The Last Transit," so that we can have again the end in the beginning of that other Transit of Venus that signaled the start of the two rambling heroes' adventures.
Since, as poststructuralist criticism has demonstrated, thinking in terms of binary oppositions frequently implies the subordination of the second element to the first (of Chaos to Order), to reverse the order of the pairing would simply reduplicate the initial system. Subtle and ironic, Pynchon chooses to continuously undermine such oppositions by stressing the ambiguity of our surrounding universe, neither mythic integration nor categorical either/or: both options only respond to our necessity to narrativize, to map a reality whose meaning always escapes us despite the fact that language, our tool to communicate, cannot easily escape from the all-pervasive Law of the Excluded Middle.

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ENDNOTES

* Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. The Author wishes to acknowledge that the research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education (DGICYT, PS94 - 0057 and PB97 - 1022).

1. THOMAS PYNCHON, MASON & DIXON 360-61 (1997) (quoting The Purveyor of Delusion).

2. See generally JAMES FRAZER, THE GOLDEN BOUGH: A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION (1915).

3. See NORMAN COHN, COSMOS, CHAOS AND THE WORLD TO COME: THE ANCIENT ROOTS OF APOCALYPTIC FAITH (1993).

4. The obvious case that comes to mind is that of Jacques Derrida. See JACQUES DERRIDA, L'ECRITURE ET LA DIFFERENCE (1967). See also JACQUES DERRIDA, DE LA GRAMMATOLOGIE (1967).

5. See JULIAN MARIAS, HISTORIA DE LA FILOSOFIA 9-40 (1974).

6. See id. at 203-22.

7. ROBERT NADEAU, READINGS FROM THE NEW BOOK ON NATURE: PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS IN THE MODERN NOVEL 25 (1981).

8. ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, in THE BASIC WORKS OF ARISTOTLE (Richard McKeon ed., 1941).

9. ARISTOTLE, Categories, in THE BASIC WORKS OF ARISTOTLE (Richard McKeon ed., 1941).

10. As already pointed out, Aristotle's style was in itself indicative of the importance the Greek sage conferred to either/or structures. His insistence on the important role played by opposites in life is also indicated by the fact that once he has discussed the different categories, he dedicates part ten of his treatise to the explanation of the different senses in which he uses the term "opposite." Out of the four meanings he gives to the word, it is the second one (things said to be opposed as contraries to one another) which again proclaims the law:

Pairs of opposites which are contraries are not in any way interdependent, but are contrary the one to the other. The good is not spoken of as the good of the bad, but as the contrary of the bad, nor is white spoken of as the white of the black, but as the contrary of the black. These two types of opposition are therefore distinct. Those contraries which are such that the subjects in which they are naturally present, or of which they are predicated, must necessarily contain either the one or the other of them, have no intermediate ....

ARISTOTLE, supra note 8, Pt. 10.

11. See PAUL DAVIES & JOHN GRIBBIN, THE MATTER MYTH: BEYOND CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY (1992), ILYA PRIGOGINE AND ISABELLE STENGERS, ORDER OUT OF CHAOS: MAN'S NEW DIALOGUE WITH NATURE (1984); and PAUL SCOTT DERRICK, THINKING FOR A CHANGE: 'GRAVITY'S RAINBOW' AND SYMPTOMS OF THE PARADIGM SHIFT IN OCCIDENTAL CULTURE (1994).

12. See NADEAU, supra note 7.

13. See J. FISHER SOLOMON, DISCOURSE AND REFERENCE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE 74-105 (1988).

14. DAVIES & GRIBBIN, supra note 11, at 27.

15. See CHAOS AND ORDER: COMPLEX DYNAMICS IN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE (N. Katherine Hayles ed., 1991).

16. See COHN, supra note 3.

17. See ROSEMARY JACKSON, FANTASY: THE LITERATURE OF SUBVERSION Chs. 61- 91 (1981).

18. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Genesis 1:3 (emphasis added).

19. Thomas Pynchon, Entropy, in SLOW LEARNER 77-94 (1985).

20. See HENRY ADAMS, THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS (1931). In effect, Callisto himself refers to Adams's essay The Dynamo and the Virgin (Chapter XXV of his autobiography, THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS) but, in a more extensive way, the historian showed his deepest concern about the cultural effects of the Law of Entropy in Chapters XXXIII and XXXIV of the EDUCATION. He came to believe that, in human evolution, there was first human reproductive energy as represented by women; second, faith, culminating in Christianity, whose energy--that he perceives in the cult to the Virgin--then passed on to mechanical power; from there energy moved into electricity--the dynamo--and finally into a fifth stage represented by radium. Pynchonian readers will easily recognize the novelist's ironic attempt to metaphorize Adams's theories in this and in his subsequent books.

21. PYNCHON, supra note 19, at 83-84.

22. See id. at 86-87.

23. See FRANK D. MCCONNELL, FOUR POSTWAR AMERICAN NOVELISTS 159-97 (1977).

24. PYNCHON, supra note 19, at 93.

25. Id. at 96-98.

26. Id. at 98.

27. See Thomas P. Weissert, Representation and Bifurcation: Borges's Garden of Chaos Dynamics, in Hayles, supra note 15, at 223-43. That also marked the fiction written by Jorge Luis Borges, already recognized as an important predecessor of American postmodernist fiction.

28. On this concept, see POSTMODERNISM AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION (Edmund J. Smyth ed., 1991).

29. A device that, in narratological terms, Gerard Genette denominates "metalepsis." See GERARD GENNETTE, NARRATIVE DISCOURSE 234-37 (Cornell Univ. Press 1980) (1972).

30. I use the concept of parody here in the sense given it by LINDA HUTCHEON in A THEORY OF PARODY: THE TEACHINGS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART FORMS 37 (1985). The Canadian critic argues that "parody is repetition, but repetition that includes difference ... it is imitation with critical ironic distance, whose irony can cut both ways. Ironic versions of 'trans- contextualization' and inversion are its major formal operatives, and the range of pragmatic ethos is from scornful ridicule to reverential homage." Id.

31. See supra note 20.

32. THOMAS PYNCHON, V. 52 (1963).

33. Id. at 53.

34. On the sustained modernist attempt to build an ultimate mythic interpretation of reality, see MARC MANGANARO, MYTH, RHETORIC, AND THE VOICE OF AUTHORITY: A CRITIQUE OF FRAZER, ELIOT, FRYE & CAMPBELL (1992).

35. PYNCHON, supra note 32, at 385.

36. Id. at 379 (emphasis added).

37. Id. at 228.

38. See id. at 261-65.

39.

As he passed the imprint on the coverlet of the scurvified body which had lately occupied it, Weissmann gave it (so Mondaugen [hidden under the bed fancied) a coy, sidewise smile. Then he vanished. Not too long after that Mondaugen's retinae withdrew, for a time, from light. Or it is presumed they did; either that or Under-the Bed is even stranger country than neurasthenic children have dreamt it to be. One [already meaning the sanguinary Flopp could as well have been a stone mason. It dawned on you slowly, but the conclusion was irresistible: you were in no sense killing. The voluptuous feeling of safety, the delicious lassitude you went into the [Hereros' extermination with was sooner or later replaced by a very curious ... operational sympathy.

Id. at 261.

40. See id. at 277.

41. Id. at 279.

42. Id. at 366 (emphasis added).

43. Id. at 369.

44. CARL JUNG, COLLECTED WORKS (2d ed. 1971). Although Jung defended his peculiar psychoanalytic therapy in many different articles and books, a good selection of his most influential theories can be found in volume 9, part I.

45. JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES (2d ed. 1968).

46. THOMAS PYNCHON, THE CRYING OF LOT 49, 21 (1966).

47. Id. at 109.

48. See id. at 105-06.

49. For a clarification of the concept of entropy as the "arrow of time" and causality of the degeneration of live forms see PAUL DAVIES, THE COSMIC BLUEPRINT (1987).

50. See COHN, supra note 3, for an extensive explanation of the anthropological shift from the belief in a primordial duality chaos/order in the monologic apocalyptic faith that crystallized in Judaism and Christianity.

51. PYNCHON, supra note 46, at 127.

52. See id. at 125. Excluded middles "were bad shit, to be avoided." Oedipa--or is it the narrator?--concludes by the end of her inverted quest. The last pages of the book are also saturated with references to dissipative structures and chaos theory.

53. THOMAS PYNCHON, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW (1973).

54. Id. at 624, 738.

55. CAMPBELL, supra note 45, at 77.

56. PYNCHON, supra note 53, at 699.

57. Also a reiterative motif along the book. See id. at 431, 465.

58. Id. at 404.

59. See id. at 99-100.

60. Id. at 726-27 (Since Thomas Pynchon is known for his use of the ellipse, the ellipses inserted by the Author are in brackets [....).

61. Id. at 413.

62. Id. at 412.

63. See Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, Blurring Frontiers: Myth and Narratology in the Analysis of The Waste Land, 1994 ATLANTIS XVI, 39-70.

64. THOMAS PYNCHON, VINELAND (1990).

65. See BRIAN MCHALE, CONSTRUCTING POSTMODERNISM 225-67 (1992).

66. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, in SELECTED WRITINGS 166-84 (Mark Poster ed., 1988).

67. See Carmen Perez-Llantada, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland: Undermining Signifying Practices, 1992 ATLANTIS XIV, 169-81.

68. See supra note 64, at 91. However, the metaphor is not a new one in Pynchon's fiction since he has already introduced it. See PYNCHON, supra note 46, at 125.

69. PYNCHON, supra note 64, at 115.

70. Id. at 101.

71. Id. at 141 (emphasis added).

72. Id. at 170.

73. Id.

74.

    As he drove, Vato told an old Yurok story about a man from Turip, about five miles up the Klamath from the sea, who lost the young woman he loved and pursued her into the country of death. When he found the boat of Illasa, the one who ferried the dead across the last river, he pulled it out of the water and smashed out the bottom with a stone. And for ten years no one in the world died, because there was no boats to take them across ... Across the river Brock could see lights, layer after layer, crookedly ascending, thickly crowded dwellings, heaped one on the other. In the smoking torch- and firelight he saw people dancing.
    ... "What is it?" he asked. "Please."
    ....
    "They'll take out your bones," Vato explained. "The bones have to stay on this side. The rest of you goes over. You look a lot different, and you move funny for a while, but they say you'll adjust. Give these third-worlders a chance, you know, they can be a lotta fun."
    "So long, Brock," said Blood.

Id. at 379-80.

75. PYNCHON, supra note 32, at 419, 492.

76. LINDA HUTCHEON, A POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM 5 (1988). With this expression she qualifies

those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages: The French Lieutenant's Woman, Midnight's Children, Ragtime, Legs, G., Famous Last Words .... [I]ts theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.

Id.

77. See PYNCHON, supra note 1, at 482, 487, 497, 540.

78. See id. at 548-49.

79. Id. at 544.

80. Id. at 522-23.

81. That had been comically anticipated in the "cyclical" figure of the Torpedo "El Peligroso," a fish that even ends up being the living compass of the expedition due to its tendency to point North. Id. at 432-35.

82. Id. Examples of mutual likes and dislikes abound. See id. at 61, 98, 179-80, 253, 314-15, 361, among many others.

83. Id. at 679.

84. Id. at 712.

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