Excerpts from the Introduction to

Because of Pynchon's incessant and dynamic irony and self-awareness, his novels are never manifestos. Gravity's Rainbow, for example, does not wear its political agenda on its face. Or, it wears so many meanings on its face that its face is empty. Although the characters in Gravity's Rainbow are irredeemably caught in They-systems and despotic control, the novel as a whole is not. It offers a unique line of escape from coercion and fascism. This is because the novel itself is schizophrenic. I use the terms "schizophrenic" or "schizoid" in the sense developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their two-volume work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They resist the psychoanalytic categorization of schizophrenia, so I am not diagnosing a pathology in the novel, in Pynchon himself, or in his characters. Deleuze and Guattari argue that schizophrenia is a product of capitalism because capital itself is schizophrenic; it can move into any identity, but tends to resist identification altogether. Just as capital fragments labor into specialized units, the schizophrenic process is of decomposition and segmentation: molar unities are continually broken into segmentary parts. I argue that Gravity's Rainbow follows capital into this schizophrenic process, and that the self-awareness with which it does so enables it to form a political critique that is schizoid, not revolutionary or utopian. The novel breaks down the structures that control our lives or, even the idea that there is such a control. The novel uses a unique regime of signification to constantly enact this schizophrenic process, and in so doing, opens a space to escape from the seemingly inescapable They-systems, when simple resistance or revolution would only reinforce those systems.

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In Gravity's Rainbow, his characters are also irredeemably caught within a System. Much of the novel is obsessed with the networks of paranoiac control that deny any possibility of autonomy or free will. Whether these murky networks of coercion actually exist in the (fictional) reality of the novel, or whether they are created in the characters minds (Slothrop, for example) is completely irrelevant. Sometimes the novel seems to hint that they are real, other times the reader finds him/herself convinced that they are absolutely imaginary. But their importance does not come from their fictional ontology, but rather from how absolutely central they are to the novel. How inescapable they are, especially to the characters (Slothrop). But this is exactly what enables the reader to escape from them; to the sympathetic reader, Slothrop's paranoid They-systems offer a self-aware critique of the power systems of the world that we inhabit, presumably alongside Pynchon himself, wherever he is. The obsessive extent to which Pynchon uses systems of coercion and paranoia forms a satire of the post-fascist power structure that commands our lives. Although the corporate paranoias of Gravity's Rainbow are ridiculous and ironic, they seem disconcertingly familiar.

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As I wrote this paper, Capitalism and Schizophrenia declared war on Gravity's Rainbow in my head, and Gravity's Rainbow launched an aggressive defensive effort. On the battleground of my mind, Deleuze and Guattari sought to constantly impose themselves on every aspect of Gravity's Rainbow, to inform every aspect of my reading. In some respects, Gravity's Rainbow submitted utterly to this onslaught of signification; for example, it allowed me to read through its paranoiac systems to see the despotic structures that Deleuze and Guattari describe. The novel agreed with their theoretical link between capitalism and schizophrenia: that decoded capital is schizoid and produces schizophrenia.
In the areas where Gravity's Rainbow defended its autonomy, it did so by being fiction, and thereby resisting the all-encompassing systems by which Deleuze and Guattari describe political realities of signification and repression. After all, Deleuze and Guattari seek to describe the systems that force real subjects to desire the repression of their desires, they seek to understand why escape or revolution seems to be impossible in the modern world. But Gravity's Rainbow is pure fiction, and it can imagine repressive paranoiac systems with many times the power of the despotic systems that control our real lives, but it can also imagine a route of escape from those systems of repression, even if that escape only arises out of the convoluted schizoid coagulations of language and form, which refuses to be simple even when it is simple. Indeed, that route of escape is schizophrenia itself, and would not be available in a less schizoid text. The schizophrenic line of flight does not lead to a utopia at its end it only leads endlessly back into itself, back into its own critiques and paranoias.This does not take away from the political functionality of the text. The very process of reading this schizophrenic text serves to decompose the political totalities on which despotic power depends.The text can decompose, but it cannot erect utopian thinking out of the rubble of capitalism. This point is proven by Vineland, which is a much more conventional narrative, but ceases to be able to imagine any escape from paranoia or despotism; in Vineland, the Revolution has failed.

Although Tyrone Slothrop and many of the characters in Gravity's Rainbow are irredeemably caught in paranoid systems of despotic control, the novel as a whole is not. To the contrary: the novel offers a completely unique line of escape away from coercion and fascism. If (political) control is paranoiac, then the only escape is Schizophrenia. It is Pynchon's writerly self-awareness and our self-aware reading that enables this schizophrenic reading. The book constantly falls apart, defies singularity and identity. It falls apart in my hands when I read it; perhaps you have a newer copy with stronger glue in the binding. Where a schizoid is simultaneously many people, the novel is simultaneously every genre: historical fiction, science fiction, musical, comedy, tragedy, sermon, limerick, Western, Orientalist, sado-masochist porn, and so on.

The schizophrenic process in Gravity's Rainbow opens a new ground for political critique to escape the self-enforcing binary between power and revolution (this is the very binary that Vineland demonstrates to be irresistible). It does so by deterritorializing signifiers: by detaching signifiers from their meanings, it is able to re-attach them to multiple new meanings, just as the schizoid subject attaches him/herself to multiple personas. This enables Pynchon to build and then decompose structural constructs within his text that reveal and then undermine the structures of power. The example of this that I use is the deterritorialization of the signifier "blackness" ("schwarz"), which is attached to race, colonial power, and sexual exploitation, but is also attached to the Rocket, the primary center of signification in the schizoid landscape of the novel. Through this association, the signifier "schwarz" becomes a functional unit of the narrative instead of a simple signifier; some readers begin to seek it out in pursuit of narrative continuity. But the schizoid disruption of that continuity breaks down the binary structures on which raced power is founded, and ends up providing the reader an imaginary escape from those repressive structures.