Cultural politics, postmodernism, and white guys: Affect in Gravity's Rainbow

You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him. (Barthelme 1975, 179)

Published in 1973 and steeped in the politics of altered states and alternative consciousness, Gravity's Rainbow foregrounds the political question central to debates in the 60s between the counterculture and the New Left: Does alternative cultural practice lead to change in social history? Can culture transform patriarchy? Capitalism? Western civilization? In the years since its publication, Gravity's Rainbow has become canonized in the academy as a classic postmodern novel because its disrupted narrative conventions, its indeterminate epistemology, and its countercultural politics anticipate, indeed, influence later theories of postmodernism. However, Gravity's Rainbow does not live by cultural politics alone. More ambitiously, it focuses on the emotions of cultural politics. Both a comedy of radicalized consciousness and a tragedy of that radicalized consciousness's inability to change an unjust political and economic system, it engages the joy and the terror of cultural resistance to social injustice. In contrast to prevailing conceptions of postmodernism, Gravity's Rainbow articulates a complex, historically resonant, and surprisingly intense affect.

More specifically, Gravity's Rainbow articulates the affect particular to white male postmodernism. The white male characters of the novel occupy a uniquely conflicted position within the cultural politics of resistance. In one way, these white guys are victims like everyone else of the forces of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. Yet unlike everyone else, of course, the forces of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism grant privilege to white guys. Moreover, the patriarchal ritual of succession happens precisely through (oedipal) resistance. Thus the question of cultural politics for white guys in the novel, especially the naive young Ivy Leaguer Tyrone Slothrop, is how to resist without this resistance itself becoming a form of complicity and perpetuation. Again, Gravity's Rainbow clarifies this by now familiar postmodern conflict, but more remarkably clarifies the emotional experience of this conflict. The white male characters of the counterculture, especially Slothrop, move between the pleasures of a hippie-style resistance to "The Man" and the paranoia that such "resistance" is yet another manifestation of the power of "The Man." In terms of later debates on postmodernism, Gravity's Rainbow's white male characters help clarify the emotional experience of liberation and its limits proper to postmodern critiques of representation.

Gravity's Rainbow's innovative narrative form re-creates this emotional experience for its readers. It explores cultural politics within a multi-layered, discontinuous collection of narratives that are often boisterous, preposterous, and slapstick. The novel always retains concrete historical reality as its referent, but it presents history in grotesque characterizations and cartoonish allegorical plots punctuated by disruptive digressions and an often-playful mocking narrative voice. Thus the terrors of history, specifically of the Cold War, get displaced by the pleasures of the narrative. The political implication is that culture can transform history, indeed that pleasure can transform history, which echoes credos from the 60s and from postmodernism. Yet Gravity's Rainbow also signals in Marxist fashion the material limits to this cultural politics. Thematically, it marks the complicity of the cultural resistance of its characters, again specifically its white male characters, with the forces of capitalism and patriarchy. Structurally, it reminds its readers of the concrete historical and political limits to such cultural pleasures as reading.

Gravity's Rainbow is in large part organized around the question of countercultural politics.Virtually all the zany plots and subplots involve the issue of how cultural practice shapes material reality. From fairy tales to pornographic films, from drug-induced hallucinations to the experience of other people's fantasies, from the lessons of games and toys to the magical spell of the words "fuck you," the novel explores forms of language, discourse, and culturally determined significance. The issue is power.Which ones can shape material reality? Which ones cannot? What are the social consequences of this play of power? And how can that play be changed in order to save the world from apocalypse? During the 60s, listening to different music, wearing different clothes, or doing drugs not only defied cultural norms, but heralded an altogether new order of being. Flowers or free love would stop the missiles by changing the consciousness of the missile makers. With affiliations to Heideggerian ontology and connections to the cultural politics of postmodernism, 60s radicalism sought social change not through political activism alone but also through cultural revolution. Thus the novel's incessant forays "beyond the zero" into the more intangible and spiritual dimensions of cultural practice serve to emphasize its concerns with cultural politics.