Ilse/Lies: Nietzsche and/in Pynchon‪.‬

Nietzsche and Pynchon have, as has been said recently of Nietzsche and Emerson, an "elective affinity" (Stack). This affinity is especially close on questions of truth and knowledge, and closest in Nietzsche's later philosophy and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (hereafter GR). While Nietzsche's early theories of truth and knowledge have won most attention recently, his later writings--from On the Genealogy of Morals (hereafter GM) onward--reject these theories as being indebted to a Schopenhauerian representationalism and pursue the claim that knowledge is perspectival. (1) In this essay I argue for an affinity between Nietzsche's later philosophy and GR on questions of truth and knowledge. In particular, I focus on the ways GR rejects theories of truth and knowledge based on objectivity and coherence, and offers instead a theory of truth and knowledge similar to Nietzsche's perspectivism. A substantial body of GR readings argues that the novel presents a system of knowledge supported by a model of ontological coherence. These arguments take many forms, but they most often appeal to the convention of character coherence to justify their claims. The episode that frequently serves as an example of character-level coherence is the Pokler episode. (2) According to this logic, the episode tells the story of "poor harassed" Franz Pokler (GR 426), whose desire for "impersonal salvation" (406), transcendence (cf. 400), leads him to fall under the control of Nazi power despite a coexisting desire for "personal identity" (406) constantly at odds with his being subsumed. This struggle--set up as a battle between Pokler's proper or true identity and, as his colleague Kurt Mondaugen puts it, "the pure, the informationless state of signal zero," impersonal transcendence (404)--is thus ripe with pathos: the hero eventually succumbs or sacrifices himself to the salvation of impersonality, and paradoxically realizes his error too late, after anything like "Pokler" might have been salvaged. This hermeneutic of tragedy could extend Pokler's story to the condition of the preterite in GR as a whole: preterites' proper selves are constantly threatened by the various They-systems scheming to possess them for malevolent purposes.