Thomas Pynchon introduces Tyrone Slothrop’s sodium amytal-induced vision at PISCES with meditations on the syntax and tone of the phrase, “You never did the Kenosha Kid.”  The narrator offers myriad options for the phrase’s construction, each of which alters the field of plausible meanings that a reader may assign to the sentence.  On the one hand, this linguistic play opens a space of possibility that encourages—indeed,  demands—an affirmation of textual possibilities through recognition of the ways in which words are imbued with meaning in various, sometimes competing ways.  On the other hand, this proliferation of ambiguities also invites confusion, an overload of interpretive faculties that can overwhelm the interpreter, leading either to an inability to locate meaning in the face of semantic instability or to a pervasive sense that pattern is omnipresent but impenetrable.  In the absence of “the possibility of something that could actually… light the path home” by dismantling “the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are,” Pynchon’s characters remain mired in “too much shit.”[1]  GR thus offers semantic variability and the dismantling of “false” boundaries as a potentially liberating ideal.  Nevertheless, Slothrop’s foray into the chaos that blurs these boundaries produces fear and panic, for finding the “path home” requires a radical re-conceptualization of selfhood.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Slothrop’s dream is the racialized terms in which his anxiety manifests itself.  While still under the influence of sodium amytal at PISCES, Slothrop imagines himself slithering down a toilet at the Roseland Ballroom in order to escape Malcolm X and a “dark gang of awful Negroes”[2] who are attempting to sodomize him.  However, while he avoids anal penetration at the hands of Malcolm X and his cohorts, Slothrop’s trip down the pipes forces him to face the byproducts of anal expulsion that fill the sewage lines.  Slothrop thus deflects the site of danger from his own “virgin asshole”[3] to the filth produced by the assholes of others—including his Harvard acquaintances and his African-American pursuers.  The racial images that pervade his dream indicate that Slothrop associates the proliferation of shit with the encroachment of social spaces he hopes to maintain as distinct.  However, the more Slothrop endeavors to avoid his drug-induced phantasms, the more he finds himself engulfed in excremental space.  He immerses himself in the realm of filth, and must contend with “toilet paper in his hair and a fuzzy thick dingleberry lodged up inside his right nostril.”[4]  His plunge generates both fears and desires:  the prospect of homosexual activity with the “awful Negroes” repulses and entices him, as we learn when the narrator muses that Slothrop’s vision in the sewage pipes may have arisen out of a latent wish “to be sodomized, unimaginably, by a gigantic black ape.”[5]  Furthermore, Pynchon portrays the blackness, disorder, and vulnerability that Slothrop discovers in the toilet as a potential site of refuge from the even more threatening triad of “Strength, Stability, and Whiteness”[6] that stands for the rocket cartel and its seemingly ubiquitous cohorts, who have initiated Slothrop’s psychological evaluation.  Shit opens a space of narrative chaos in GR that both overwhelms and beckons to Slothrop,[7]  who initially battles the excrementally-infused Other of his vision, and later locates in the chaotic world of blackness tentative possibilities for hope.

By the end of the novel, Slothrop has fragmented to the point where he can no longer be described as a “character” in the traditional sense of the term; Pynchon in effect obviates the possibility of viewing Slothrop as a unitary, free-acting subject.  Yet many writers have applied critical frameworks to GR that view Slothrop’s fragmentation as a binarized conflict between subject and object.  Such scholars often read Slothrop’s encounters with shit as large-scale enactments of the “return of the repressed” or interpret his ultimate dissolution in the novel as a symbolic death.  However, their analyses tend to perpetuate a differentiation of ego and id and of self and Other, and thereby to foster an ontological stability that Pynchon persistently avoids.  The project of this paper is threefold:  first, I will examine the terms in which Pynchon represents Slothrop’s radical fragmentation and the categories of identity that come into play in the process.  Second, I will discuss some of the ways in which both Pynchon scholars and other contemporary theorists speak to—or fail to speak to—the postmodern formulation of identity that Pynchon imagines in Slothrop.  Finally, I will explore the phenomenon of resistance to Slothrop, the discomfort that he engenders in readers who struggle with his frustratingly ambiguous fate in Pynchon’s text.  Such discomfort crops up repeatedly as a theme both in Pynchon’s novel and in the critical commentary it has generated, and, I will suggest, helps to place ourselves as readers into a particular historico-critical context: a context in which the act of literary interpretation helps reaffirm the notion of the constituent subject by maintaining our cohesiveness and competence in the face of texts that we find destabilizing.

For Slothrop, resistance begins in the can, where he desperately attempts to maintain his status as a coherent subject by imposing a certain semantic order on the shit that surrounds him.  He locates “order” in the boundaries of racial classification, finding “he can identify certain traces of shit as belonging to this or that Harvard fellow of his acquaintances.  Some of it too must be Negro shit, but that all looks alike.”[8]  In this scheme, “white” feces exhibits the signatures, so to speak, of its producers; Slothrop even claims to identify the shit of two particular friends, “Gobbler” Biddle and Dumpster Villard.  These names suggest excessiveness in consumption and recall the fact that Slothrop himself has vomited copious quantities of partially-digested food into the ballroom toilet, including “beer, hamburgers, homefries, after-dinner mints, a Clark bar, a pound of salted peanuts, and the cherry from some Radcliffe girl’s old-fashioned.”[9]  Nonetheless, while this binge and purge of overabundant Boys’ Club fare implies a metaphorical reaction against the confines of the Harvard socialite milieu, Slothrop finds a consoling familiarity in perusing the “white shit” of his acquaintances.  Conversely, he dismisses “Negro shit” as indistinct:  “that all looks alike.” “White shit” thus conforms roughly to the preservation of identity and the delineation of intelligible social spheres, while “black shit” threatens the white with its amorphous, collectively racialized nature.  However, the tone of the passage is comic:  Pynchon clearly presents his character’s process of classification as an absurd parody of racial stereotyping, and problematizes Slothrop’s attempt to latch onto familiar forms of identification in the pandemonium that ensues when the toilet is flushed. 

Indeed, the great flush swirls together the toilet’s contents in a disorienting rush, bringing Pynchon’s protagonist face-to-face with rampant chaos.  Slothrop has “no visual references” that would shed light on where the “murky shitstorm” has carried him.[10]  Nevertheless, he makes a last-ditch effort to maintain the order he has imposed by describing his confrontation as racialized combat:

… already the cylinder of waste has wiped him out, dark as cold beef gelatin along his upper backbone, the paper snapping up, wrapping across his lips, his nostrils, everything gone and shit-stinking now as he has to keep batting micro-turds out of his eyelashes, it’s worse than being torpedoed by Japs![11]

Slothrop insists upon attributing the launch of the weapons of filth—including the grenade-like “cylinder of waste”—to the malevolent racial Other.  His fears manifest themselves in his portrayal of Malcolm X and the “dark gang of awful Negroes,” in his reference to “Japs,” and in his identification of the “fuzzy thick dingleberry” that becomes lodged in his nose:  “it is a Negro dingleberry, he can tell—stubborn as a wintertime booger he probes for it.  His fingernails draw blood.”[12]  Slothrop resists the looming disorder of excremental space by attempting to arm himself against the shit that invades his mucous membranes, covering his lips, nose, and eyes.  Malcolm X, the “Unthinkable Nihilist”[13] who sells condoms to the Harvard boys at the ballroom, certainly won’t give Slothrop a prophylactic to preserve his status as a coherent subject.  On the contrary, Slothrop’s attempt to jettison the scatological and racial Other renders him less stable, as he wounds himself by plucking the “Negro dingleberry” from his nose.  His body and the stubborn turd fragment have attached themselves to each other with a bond that illustrates the mutual dependence of self and Other, in which the expulsion of the Other catalyzes a splitting of the self.

Psychoanalytic theorists have viewed the Roseland Ballroom episode as a confrontation with the repressed in various forms.  Lawrence Wolfley, one of the most influential of these theorists, reads Pynchon’s text in relation to Norman O. Brown’s two major works, Life Against Death and Love’s Body.  Brown posits, via Freud, that repression produces the neurosis that pervades human history and culture.  Wolfley claims that Brown’s theories help to illuminate Pynchon’s struggle in GR to establish a dialectic between Eros and Thanatos, and thereby to “circumvent repression and make the unconscious conscious.”[14]  Another critic, Kathryn Hume, views Pynchon’s narrative as an exposure of the underbelly of culture, as a “trip to the repressed side of Western mentality.”[15]  Other scholars have followed suit, offering complex and often apt analyses of themes in GR.[16]  However, at a basic level, psychoanalytic theories view the status of the subject and object as distinct.  The emphasis on repression constructs GR as a battle between the ego and the id, as a drama in which the unconscious surfaces repeatedly but ultimately does not trouble the categories of conscious and unconscious in which repression operates.  Critics like Wolfley thus frame Pynchon’s ambiguous expressions of hope for humanity as unsustained moments of optimism, as affirmations of the Dionysian ego,[17] without acknowledging the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of locating in Slothrop anything like a recognizably sustainable “ego.”  Similarly, critics like Hume correctly identify the theme of marginalization in the Roseland Ballroom scene, but fail to examine the ways in which Slothrop’s subsequent metamorphosis calls into question the very idea that “centers” and “margins” are stable, or even consistently detectable, in Pynchon’s novel.

Julia Kristeva’s theories of abjection provide a more nuanced psychoanalytic framework by moving beyond the “dialectic of negativity” that secures the distinction between subject and object in Freudian theory.[18]  For Kristeva, abjection is a “revolt of being,” a “vortex of summons and repulsion” that “challenges the theory of the unconscious.”[19]  It does so by rejecting as “inoperative” Freud’s theories of repression and denial, and thus by questioning the sanctity of both conscious/unconscious and subject/object differentiation.  Marc Redfield, in an article that reads Pynchon’s work in part through a Kristevan lens, succinctly describes the mechanism of abjection and its implications for the formation of subjects and objects as follows:

... in an end-of-the-line scenario, a subject, threatened by near-indistinguishable differences, empowers itself, or at least holds on to the possibility of its own coherence, by invoking a difference that appears minimal but ontologically sound; sometimes, in addition, the subject turns out of its attenuated condition by scapegoating a maternal figure... not yet an 'ego,' the infant must 'abject' what is not yet an 'object'—the mother—to gain the possibility of acquiring language and acceding to subjectivity; it does this by 'identifying' with the gap, the vide, between itself and the mother, which also functions, for Kristeva, as the gap between signifier and signified that makes language possible.[20]

Abjection is an attempt to achieve subjectivity by jettisoning a pseudo-object and thus invoking a contrast between self and Other:  by abjecting the Other, a subject “holds on to the possibility of its own coherence.”  Contact with substances like shit poses a threat to that coherence because “excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without:  the ego threatened by non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death.”[21]  Moreover, this threat also possesses a linguistic dimension, for contact with the ostensible “object” of abjection returns the “subject” to the pre-oedipal state of the semiotic, a state “on which “language has no hold but fright and repulsion.”[22]  Yet ironically, abjection ends up by increasing the instability of the challenged subject, for the act of casting out the pseudo-“object” always casts out part of the “subject” as well.  As Kristeva remarks, "I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself."[23]          

Slothrop's abjection of the excremental Other stimulates a splitting of the ego that Kristeva's model helps to explain.  However, the Lacanian distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic that underlies Kristeva’s theory also renders it problematic for exploration of Slothrop’s dissolution as a character.  For Kristeva, the semiotic, the realm of libidinal chaos during the period of an infant's dependence upon its mother, is a locus of subversion of paternal law and of the institution of language associated with the Symbolic.  Nevertheless, since the semiotic "is invariably subordinate to the Symbolic,"[24] eventually subversion must be enacted from within the borders of the Symbolic.  The alternative, extended association with the semiotic, leads to psychosis.  In Kristeva’s model, confrontation with filth and defilement always refers metonymically to a confrontation with the feminine, which gives way to the Symbolic with the establishment and enforcement of the incest prohibition.  Kristeva does not offer a model for extended subversion outside of the realm of psychosis, and thus her theory applies more to "rudimentary subjects"[25] than it does to fundamentally reformulated notions of subjecthood.  If we allow that Slothrop's progressive disintegration as a character does not necessarily indicate a descent into the psychotic, but instead posit that he undergoes a far more ambiguous transformation that is tinged with both terror and hope, and that sets into motion both a dissolution and a proliferation of selves, Pynchon’s representation of him—in Kristevan terms—ultimately appears untenable.

We might then wonder if Pynchon’s novel would be better served by a theoretical approach that addresses the problems of discussing the role of the subject with regard to its various objects in a postmodern context—an approach, in short, that historicizes the relationship between subject and object that Pynchon calls into question.  Frederic Jameson, who has taken on this daunting task, argues that the postmodern era has witnessed the emergence of new type of space, a “postmodern space” that can include the “built space” of a fictional narrative.[26]  Jameson views this space as a type of “object,” but claims that its transformation has not yet been accompanied by “any equivalent mutation in the subject.”[27]  For Jameson, the disjointedness associated with the present historical period derives in part from living in an era in which we have radically reconstituted the “object,” but have failed to reformulate the “subject.”  I suggest that we view Pynchon’s novel as a “postmodern” transformation of narrative space, and Slothrop’s response to that space as a similarly radical transformation of the subject.  Yet, according to Jameson, the disjointedness of the postmodern period results from the failure of the subject to metamorphose in response to its environment.  Why, then, does Pynchon’s text seem to inspire a sense of destabilization in its readers?  Why do critical interpretations of Slothrop as a character engage in a process of restabilization that limits the meanings we may attach to his presentation in GR just as we purport to celebrate the novel’s teeming polyphony?

The answer, I would argue, lies in critical resistance to Slothrop.  Scholars who have discussed Slothrop’s fragmentation as a character tend to replicate their desire for unity of character in their criticism.  Writers like Dwight Eddins, for example, have argued that Slothrop undergoes an “Orphic transformation that involves absolute unity with earth.”[28]  Kathryn Hume, at the other end of the spectrum, has asserted that Slothrop exemplifies the dangers of a “society in which humankind mates with machine.”[29]  But Pynchon frustrates any desire for linear character or plot development that we may harbor; his protagonist grows increasingly less psychologically and physically coherent as we turn the pages of the book.  The very fact that one critic can view Slothrop’s fate as an “absolute unity with earth,” while another views the same character as a warning against “absolute unity” with machine, suggests that such critics are fostering a sense of moral stability that Pynchon has resisted throughout the novel.  He insists upon Slothrop’s radical fragmentation as a layering of potential identities and actions, with the possibility that all or none of these potentials may be realized.  Resistance to Slothrop channels these potentials into more easily assimilable venues, imbuing GR with a tangibility that serves as a type of antidote to Pynchon’s militant ambiguity.

Michel Foucault’s seminal essay “What Is an Author” helps us to understand the significance of the cultural work performed by critics who limit the field of meanings we may locate in a particular text, including a text like Pynchon’s.  Foucault argues that the figure of the author serves, in part, as a brake on the unchecked circulation of discourses.  For Foucault, “the author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and ideas, but also with one’s discourses and their significations.  The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”[30]  The author function closes off areas of inquiry, modes of being, and paths of action.  Critics who propagate totalizing interpretations, like the claim that Slothrop achieves “absolute unity with earth,” are themselves affirming the restricted field of meaning associated with the author function.

Ironically, however, even the tactic of lauding Pynchon’s ability to create a richly textured and often perplexing text can itself act as a form of limitation.  While critiquing the mode of criticism in which scholars respond to Pynchon’s text with the discursive brake of the author function has its appeal, the opposite pole—unqualified attribution of unlimited meaning to Pynchon’s novel—has its place in the limiting realm of the author function as well.  Foucault’s discussion of the “critical” and “religious” approaches to the characterization of writing helps to make this clear:

Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of [writing’s] sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character.  To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which gives rise to commentary).  To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work’s survival, its perpetuation beyond the author’s death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him.[31]

References to the “genius” of Pynchon’s text—and the conviction that we can best celebrate this genius by uncovering GR’s astonishing variety of “implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents”—feed into a hermeneutic drive through which the author function is ultimately affirmed.  For, as Foucault points out, “if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion.”[32]  The critic then steps into the realm of revelation, convinced that he or she brings to the world of interpretation the knowledge that the text possesses certain shades of meaning that have hitherto been obscured, or at least the knowledge that “the truth is in the text,” and that it is our job as responsible critics to appreciate it—even if we can’t figure out exactly what it is.

I am less interested in the “hidden meaning” or “truth” of Pynchon’s text than in the particular modes through which its protagonist both appropriates and loses his hold on modes of discourse designed to preserve his status as a constituent subject. Slothrop’s resistance to his own instability assumes a distinctive form, a form strongly influenced by racialized modes of thought that anchor him in a system of familiar cultural constructions and thus sustain the possibility that he may be able to remain intelligible as a part of that culture.  Significantly, however, he fails to acknowledge that the Firm and its paradigm of interpretation in fact help to shape the form that threats to his identity will assume in his sodium amytal dream.  Early in the Roseland Ballroom episode, Slothrop evinces only a vague mistrust of the "people he knows" lurking in the toilet's "waste regions."[33]  He refuses to look beyond his excremental phantasms toward what the "eerie light" that shines in the toilet might disclose,[34] because this illumination would reveal a more powerful danger to his autonomous selfhood than that posed by sodomy and excrement. 

These dangers have been looming since Laszlo Jampf's conditioning of the infant Tyrone's erectile responses to Imipolex G.  The Man hopes that the adult Tyrone will lead him, through his conditioned sexual responses to the plastic, to the elusive Schwarzgerät and therefore to success in the implementation of Operation Black Wing, the mission formed by "The White Visitation" to overcome the rebel Enzian and his Schwarzkommando.  When Slothrop agrees to assist "The White Visitation" in what it presents to him as research into "racial problems in his own country,"[35] he submits to an epistemological framework that sets the stage for the racial Other to become the "problem" in his fantasy.  Furthermore, at the beginning of his truth-serum session, Slothrop hears "Eastern prep-school voices, pronouncing asshole with a certain sphinctering of the lips so it comes out ehisshehwle."[36]  These "prep-school voices" call to mind the Harvard friends whose excrement Slothrop classifies in the toilet as less threatening than "Negro shit."  Before Slothrop dreams about Malcolm X's crew, his preoccupation with "racial problems" and with the "ehisshehwle" condition the ostensible “objects” of his abjection.  Behind these phantasms lies the psychological and financial power of the rocket cartel, which deflects attention from itself by inducing in Slothrop what its members later call the "Dark Dream.”[37]

Nevertheless, within this Dark Dream lie possibilities for an active reformulation of selfhood through appropriation of the semiotic chaos first introduced by the Slothrop's variations on "You never did the Kenosha Kid."  Tchitcherine's musings after another sodium amytal session with Slothrop indicate that Slothrop has continued to exercise his linguistic play in what Tchitcherine labels the "Blackphenomenon.”[38]  Here, blackness manifests itself in a variety of unconventional associations:

The Sodium Amytal session nags at the linings of Tchitcherine's brain as if the hangover were his own.  Deep, deep—further than politics, than sex or infantile terrors... a plunge into the nuclear blackness... Black runs all through the transcript:  the recurring color black.  Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkommando.  But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät.  And he also coupled "schwarz-" with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through.  Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream... The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously.  Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear to flower separately?  Or has he by way of language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words...

Well, the man is a puzzle.[39] 

In Tchitcherine's contemplation of Slothrop's Blackphenomenon, the linguistic variability first explored with Kenosha Kid phraseology has flourished in the fecund environment of the Dark Dream and its excremental world.  Tchitcherine questions whether this linguistic "flowering" possesses a hidden center or merely reproduces the "German mania for name-giving... setting namer more hopelessly apart from named."  The first scenario would suggest an essential linguistic core at the heart of semiotic chaos.  The latter implies a "hopeless" disjunction between namer and named that produces no meaning at all, but rather a “puzzle.” 

Slothrop, however, discovers different possibilities in his experimentation with the molecular nature of the alphabet, and attains an almost magical transformative power through linguistic play.  Already this power has imbued Slothrop with mobility of identity.  His facility with "the mathematics of combination" has led to his incarnation as Rocketman, a figure uniquely suited for navigation of the Zone's postmodern space.  As the narrative progresses, and as Slothrop learns that the Zone supports a number of plots that do not center around himself, he mutates further, moving through a stint as the Pig of Plechazunga and finally eluding the Man's pursuit by becoming a "plucked albatross... Plucked, hell—stripped.  Scattered all over the Zone.  It's doubtful if he can ever be 'found' again, in the conventional sense of 'positively identified and detained.'  Only feathers [are left]... redundant or regenerable organs.”[40]  While Tchitcherine hopes that Slothrop's Blackphenomenon will lead him to Enzian, instead, the semiotic realm it opens to Slothrop enables him to split into unidentifiable, undetainable fragments.  The fact that these feathers may be "regenerable organs" suggests that the Pynchonian paranoia planted in Slothrop by his Dark Dream has caused a scattering that at once enables him to escape Their hold (if not to negate Their presence) and preserves the possibility that his selves will once again proliferate.  This challenge extends the boundaries of a theory such as Kristeva's, for whereas abjection operates within a state of pre-oedipal anxiety, Slothrop's dissolution and the linguistic chaos that surrounds it imbue the fragments of his split self with extended potential for heightened mobility.  The Firm has sent Slothrop "into the Zone to be present at his own assembly... and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't.  The plan went wrong.”[41]  The white albatross, "corporate emblem" of the Man,[42] in effect removes himself from the Firm's letterhead. 

We have seen that blackness and excrement first repulse Slothrop, catalyzing a splitting of self that initially threatens him, but then offers mobility and regenerative possibilities through an active fragmentation of identity.  The ambiguity of blackness and the interpretive possibilities it opens is particularly evident in "Shit 'N' Shinola," Säure Bummer and Seaman Bodine's discussion about these seemingly incompatible categories late in the novel.  Shit represents death, disgust, and revulsion; Shinola implies "hopes for love" and "meltings of snow and ice."[43]  While these categories appear to share little common ground, there is "one place where Shit 'n' Shinola do come together, and that's in the men's toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place where Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet."[44]  The passage that follows warrants quoting at length, for it elucidates the connections between repulsion and transformation, between fear and hope, that GR’s excrement holds:

Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of.  Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate.  That's what the toilet's for.  You see many brown toilets?  Nope, toilet's the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain's the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death.  Shinola shoeshine polish happens to be the color of Shit.  Shoeshine boy Malcolm's in the toilet slappin' on the Shinola, working off whiteman's penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit 'n' Shinola.  It is nice to think that one Saturday night, one floor-shaking Lindyhopping Roseland night, Malcolm looked up from some Harvard kid's shoes and caught the eye of Jack Kennedy (the Ambassador's son), then a senior.  Nice to think that young Jack may have had one of them Immortal Lightbulbs then go on overhead—did Red suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just enough gap in the moiré there to let white Jack see through, not through to but through through the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop's shoes?  Were the three ever lined up that way—sitting, squatting, passing through?  Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got murdered.  Slothrop's fate is not so clear.[45] 

In this passage, excrement is the "stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's warm asshole"; flushing it away banishes the presence of death.  Shinola is associated with the use of a black shoe polish, and thus with Malcolm X's "ragpopping," his transmutation of the color of shit through shoe-buffing.  However, Pynchon directs attention to the space beyond the surface.  Blackness holds powers evident when one looks not "through to," but "through through" the shine to its causal agent, while whiteness signifies sterility, negation, and "Odorless and Official Death."  The narrator's conjecture on the link between Slothrop, Malcolm X and Kennedy allows for the possibility of an "Immortal Lightbulb... to go on overhead," which conjures both the cartoon icon symbolizing the birth of an idea or inspiration, and image of Byron the Bulb, the anthropomorphized, immortal light bulb who is a recurring character in GR.  Byron contends with the attempts of the international light-bulb cartel to unscrew him, destroy him, and otherwise squelch his revolutionary desires.  Exhausted but lacking the consolation of the ability to burn out, he "is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything.”[46]  Malcolm X and Kennedy, on the other hand, "burn out" in the flames of controversial assassinations.  Yet Slothrop may escape through a "gap in the moiré," creating a tear in the fabric of Their conspiracies and becoming a thread woven into numerous alternative narratives. 

Roberto Dainotto claims that "Slothrop's 'death' serves the purpose of recognizing fictions and social 'master-plans' for what they are, thus liberating the subject from his/her dependency on artificial constructs."[47]  While Dainotto recognizes Slothrop's fragmentation as a method of escaping The Firm's hold, Slothrop does not simply learn to recognize "artificial constructs" as if "fictions" were opposed to an authentic self that the Firm has obscured.  Indeed, Pynchon presents us with little that could be construed as a “liberation of the subject.”  Rather, Pynchon moves Slothrop into a realm of semantic flux, breeding fictions rather than defeating a pervasive "master-plan."  As a late spokesman for the Counterforce reflects in the novel, "opinion even at the start was divided... Some called [Slothrop] a 'pretext.'  Others felt that he was a genuine, point-for-point microcosm."[48]  Still others "believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own.  If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering."[49]  The characters who have interacted with Slothrop in the novel lose the ability to recognize Slothrop as a cohesive persona: they “[had given] up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept."[50]  Slothrop's fragmentation liberates him from the Firm, but also stymies any possibility that he will become a figurehead for the Counterforce, who can pinpoint neither a “figure” nor a “head” in Slothrop.  He becomes a pervasive but elusive legend, an endless collection of pieces to a puzzle that each person assembles differently, if at all.

This paper's meditations on Slothrop's mutation of self in the “postmodern space” of Pynchon’s novel offer one possible reading that is not intended to be comprehensive.  Indeed, Pynchon's text resists the application of direct spatial correspondences.  In a section of the novel appropriately entitled “Listening to the Toilet,” the reader, paradoxically, waits for the text to fulfill its promise of a moment of silence: the descent of a “sound-shadow,” [51] which ostensibly refers to a glitch in the cosmic aether that will cause a brief interruption of sound, but also calls to mind the shadows of blackness we have glimpsed in Slothrop’s excremental journeys.  The narrator then lists the locations where the “sun-silence” will have enveloped us, but pauses for a mocking taunt:

Well, you're wrong, champ—these happen to be towns located on the borders of Time Zones, is all.  Ha, ha!  Caught you with your hand in your pants!  Go on, show us all what you were doing or leave the area, we don't need your kind around.  There's nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.[52] 

Pynchon’s sentimental surrealist waits inside a "white tile greasy-spoon"[53] with his hands down his pants, metaphorically masturbating into a spatial void before the Firm arrives to sweep him away during "hosing-out time."[54]  One cannot help but think that with this reference, Pynchon has in mind not only the characters in his book, but the legions of critics who will indulge themselves onanistically by writing about it.  Furthermore, the greasy-spoon cafe reminds the sentimental surrealist of a place like Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he may once have been identified as the linguistically facile "Kenosha Kid.”  He anticipates a short interval of nothingness, unsure whether he is even in the right location.

However, the Kenosha Kid does experience the descent of the "sound-shadow" he has been seeking.  This shadow creates a "partial eclipse" that hides him from the "great Vacuum in the sky he has learned from Them.”[55]   The question then becomes whether or not this Vacuum is in turn one of Their fictions, constructed to promote paranoid paralysis:  "What if there is no Vacuum?  Or if there is—what if they're using it on you?  What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void?  Not just the Earth in space, but your own life in time?"[56]  This fiction would then signal the institution of the Dark Dream, the vision They induce in order to keep their subjects under control.  However, the Dark Dream, as we have seen in Slothrop's excremental voyages, offers Shinola, a method of looking "through through," as well as paranoia.

Moreover, the narrator's sarcastic attempt to disorient the reader's spatial orientation—"you're wrong, champ—these happen to be towns located on the borders of Time Zones, is all"—links rather than divorces the spatial metaphor of the "Zone," which figures prominently as a location and section in GR, to temporal categories.  In the Zone, according to Mondaugen's Law, Slothrop's "personal density" decreases as his "temporal bandwidth" narrows.[57]  As he grows increasingly attuned to the multifaceted "now" of Pynchon's persistently present-tense narrative, he becomes less solid, less anchored in the past and in the future.  This temporal narrowing allows for spatial expansion:  Zonal legends simultaneously reconstruct Slothrop in their narratives, many of which contradict each other.  In addition, the "consistent personae" that may have sprung from his fragments fan out into various locations, challenging the notion that a subject must occupy a single space in any given "now."

For most of us, however, the text ends before the moment of our own transformation as readers, still reeling out narrative spaces that we have difficulty inhabiting with confidence:  "in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see...it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know."[58]  Pynchon undercuts the hint of epistemological certainty in the phrase "a face we all know" by ensuring that we do not definitively recognize the face that he evokes.  The movie projector has broken, and we cannot pinpoint the nature of the image we have last seen:  "it may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the first star."[59]  On the other hand, "it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death."[60]  If the "face we all know" is in fact the tip of the rocket as it descends upon the crowd at the theater, then Pynchon has plunged us into the middle of another paradox, for the enclosed edifice of the theater, with us among the audience, would putatively prevent visual tracking of the rocket's parabolic descent.  If the rocket falls only on the "dark expanse of screen," then we are witnessing the descent of an "angel of death" who compels the viewer or reader, but does so in a manner that underscores its status as one of many fictional possibilities in GR.  Jameson notes that the inability to choose between fictions characterizes a peculiarly postmodern quandary:  the spectator "is called upon to do the impossible, namely, to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference."[61]  Slothrop’s scattering enables him to perform on several screens simultaneously.  Pynchon's readers, on the other hand, must cohere at least marginally if they are to attempt the task of finishing the book.  We resist the alienation that the text fosters, and instead pay homage its fecund ambiguity—by engaging in the act of criticism, we reconstitute our own status as cohesive subjects.  Paradoxically, we admit that we do not know how to see all that Pynchon sets before us in response to his suggestions that we cannot see.  The postmodern world, Pynchon ultimately suggests, is a text we are still learning to read.