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Slothrop’s wisdom is a key: he recognizes that although the pigs are fated
to die, their symbolic value retains vitality. The dichotomy of the Elect
rocket and Preterite pig promises devastating results if one should falter:
to follow the rocket signifies human progress and advances in technology,
but ultimately leads to destruction; to follow the improprieties of the pig
is the freedom to give into sensual desires, but also regression into chaos.
Amongst the numerous symbols the pig represents in Gravity’s
Rainbow, the pig as syncretized symbol is perhaps the most significant.
When the pig becomes a heterogeneous culmination of salving symbols,
the pig and rocket dichotomy becomes possible. The dichotomy must
be upheld without one overtaking the other; regression and progression
counterbalance each other from eminent entropy—chaos on the one
hand, destruction on the other. It appears that as the novel concludes,
the symbolic balancing act of the rocket and the pigs is lost as the scales
have fatally tipped in the rocket’s favor, with devastating results for the
narrative and reader. As 00000 descends upon a movie theater, Pynchon
metafictionally places the reader within the text, saying “There is time, if
you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between
your own cold legs” (775) with only a hymn written by William Slothrop
for comfort on the final page. The text linguistically self-destructs with
the reader figuratively placed within the confines of the theater, the end
of the reading experience coinciding with the destruction of the cosmos
contained in Gravity’s Rainbow. Seen in this light, it becomes apparent that
as we read Gravity’s Rainbow, we are to Pynchon what William Slothrop’s
pigs were to him: hapless and unsuspecting creatures being (mis)guided
to our deaths. Thus, the final scene of Gravity’s Rainbow simultaneously
illuminates both a new interpretation of the novel’s ending and one final
swinish symbol: reader as pig. The death of the reader (metafictionally
blasted by the rocket) is the death of the pig symbol (finally overcome
by the rocket). Pigs do not only function internally within the text to
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sustain the narrative through counterbalancing the rocket, but we as pigreaders
also sustain the narrative through our active reading of it. With
the dichotomy of the opposing of forces diminished, the narrative cannot
continue; the rocket fulfills its death wish in a culminating, implosive
end. The destruction of the swine symbol, then, is significant in its
demonstrating that Gravity’s Rainbow becomes unsustainable without its
pigs, the ultimate demonstration of the swinish syncretism.
Our figurative fate as Preterite reader-pigs predestined to face 00000
is, then, a paranoiac premonition to the 1973 reader—aware of the alltoo-real
implications of the Cold War—that he or she is doomed to suffer
the literal destruction of the world at the hands of Them and their nuclear
missiles, and that modern civilization has selected the rocket as its path
of entropy. Nearly forty years later, Gravity’s Rainbow still resonates as
we are left to surmise whether we are slouching further along that path,
or whether we’ve regressed enough to counterbalance the death wish
of progress. Either way, Pynchon’s saturnine offerings are not for our
choosing; we pigs can only follow the path They have designed for us.
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