Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 33

Avatars of the Third Other

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the suffering of an old sailor in the "nighttown" episode, represent
Pynchon's concern with American self-absorption. In both Lot 49 and
in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon dramatizes the Faustian consequences
of cultural narcissism by lifting into attention the perils of
immachination. Immachination is the ontological hybridization of
man-with-machine, as in the cultural invention of machine
metaphors (the computer, for instance) for human systems (the brain).
Pynchon makes fun of immachination in his series of rocket limericks
in Gravity’s Rainbow;
There was a young fellow named Hector,
who was fond of a launcher-erector.
But the squishes and pops
of acute pressure drops
wrecked Hector's hydraulic connector.
Or:
There once was a fellow itamed Moorehead,
who had an affair with a warhead.
His wife moved away
the very next day—
she was always kind of a sorehead (306-307).

The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow describe a society
which is deeply entrenched in the third stage of "Otherness" in
American culture. What Melville perceived in the 1850s as a budding
American fondness for ontological surfaces-in language, in lifestyle,
in human intercourse- now threatens to become a new metaphysics of
culture. As interpreted by Todd Gitlin, the sunglasses of a Renault
driver in a recent television ad are, for instance, the direct
descendants of Bartleby's blank wall:
Gazing into his sunglasses, his ensemble of admirers
see only themselves; there is no one home, nothing but
the reflection of his beholders. The mutation of
mirror shades is itself a revealing indication of
ideological change: on the motorcycle cop of the late
sixties, mirror shades were a sign of the sinister; in