ABSTRACT
Not so far into Gravity’s Rainbow-when the narrative arch is still grounded in Southern England-Pynchon pays special attention to one of the inmates at “The White Visitation.” It is late December 1944. Counting from the German invasion of Poland, it is the sixth and final Christmas of World War Two.3 Against all the odds, there are still a few carols in the air. It is a kind of seasonal reflex, programmed in at birth like Slothrop’s erections, half festivity and half lament. The Christmas period still carries with it a lingering promise of redemption: the “rising fragment of some ancient scale . . . filling the
entire hollow of the church . . . no counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom . . . only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach . . . praise be to God!” (GR, 136) Interestingly, stories of Christmas in wartime seem to have fixed themselves in the popular imagination. There is a huge jumbled register of half-truths and apocrypha to contend with here, which begins in the trenches of World War One and steadily blossoms outwards-from the Crucified Canadian Soldier at Ypres4 to the famous AngloGerman football match in No-Man’s Land (often presented as a far more dignified affair than later sporting encounters between the two nations). This, as Fussell explains, is one of the central paradoxes of war-experience. A world of “reinvigorated myth,” of “superstitions, talismans, wonders, miracles, relics, legends, and rumours,” is created amidst the “triumph of modern industrialism.”5 The status of such tales, as I have already suggested in chapter 3, is intimately bound up with Pynchon’s political understanding of war, with the way that war reorders both the body and the mind. They reflect the patterns of mechanized suffering whilst at the same time recalling a very un-modern, preindustrial world. They are “romantic contradictions” to the dominant order, “temporal disparities,” which can be used to formulate a new politics of resistance.6 Christmas or not, however, the strange business at “The White Visitation” carries on regardless. The war has its own calendar.
