Max Sachsa's Bad Karma in Enzian's Bathtub: A Bus Ride Through Gravity's Rainbow's Textscape (Place) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Given the narrow employment prospects in present-day German academia, one is always on the lookout for professional alternatives. During the days of our trip "Into the Zone 2000," I wondered whether bus driver could be such an alternative for me, and thus add another illustrious species to Molly Hite's cabinet of ordinary people who burn for Pynchon ("For a long time, the most ardent Pynchon fans that I knew were a weight lifter, a short-order cook, and a pizza deliveryman" [Hire ix]). In the meantime, the dyed-in-the-wool Pynchonite and the Zoneproof driver in me have made up their mind, and would like to offer you a very special kind of excursion: a ride into the textual landscape, or textscape, of Gravity's Rainbow itself. "[T]he bus is idling, waiting--passengers will now reclaim their seats" (GR 413) ... but wait! Before we start moving, a couple of preliminary remarks on the itinerary or, for that matter, on my bus's special tachograph that will help register our way into a territory like Gravity's Rainbow's--a territory where whether its words truly represent what they stand for is more than doubtful. As Hanjo Berressem observes, "[a]lthough the landscape seems real, in the Schwarzkommando's search for the 'True Text' ... it becomes a 'Real Text'... an ambivalent, even paradoxical territory in which ... real and symbolic registers constantly oscillate" (131). What ultimately holds true, then, is not so much the realness of the text sign's referent, or signified; what holds true is rather the realness of the textual sign itself as it stakes a claim, a Zone saturated with significational flickering and semantic ambiguity.