DECONSTRUCTING THE ENEMY OF COLOR: THE FANTASTIC IN GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

Gravity's Rainbow?what one reviewer frustrated by its length, structure, and seeming lack of control tagged "a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture"2?was probably the most unread best seller in America during 1973, and perhaps ever. It teetered at the bottom of the New York Times Book Review list for two weeks late in April and another two early in May before it toppled off altogether to make way for the likes of Susann's Once is Not Enough, Forsyth's The Odessa File and, of course, Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the last of which was soaring toward its sixtieth week as Pynchon's text tumbled.3 When later that year a team of distinguished judges met for the fifty-eighth annual Pulitzer Prize decision and recommended it, the journalists on the advisory board overturned their verdict because for them it was "unreadable," "turgid," "over-written," and "obscene."4 Nonetheless, almost immediately critics like Richard Poirier and Edward Mendelson placed it in the company of other encyclopedic works such as Dante's Divine Comedy, Rabelais' books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Goethe's Faust, Melville's Moby-Dick, and Joyce's Ulysses.5 And since then Gravity's Rainbow has generated a critical industry of its own, an academic cult, and more exegetic "apoplexy than any novel since Ulysses,"6 as one reader has commented, examined as it has been in a host of essays and