The Character of Preterition: An Apology for Pointsman

David Letzler IPW 2010 10/12/22

The Character of Preterition: An Apology for Pointsman

Readers of Gravity’s Rainbow don’t like Dr. Edward Pointsman.

According to critics, his scientific principles exhibit “the

uncontrollable impulse to dominate the weak” (Lacey 17), while

the man himself is “inept,” “repulsive” (Lynd 7, 9) or just

simply “evil” (Earl 231). In this way, Pointsman is an

interesting illustration of a paradox surrounding Gravity’s Rainbow:

despite its purported “openness” and “indeterminacy,” somehow it

manages to provoke, among admirers and detractors alike, nearly

unanimous critical commonplaces. These responses to Pointsman, I

think, provide an example of at least two. The first is the

notion that the novel does not depict fully-realized characters,

instead peopling itself with shallow cartoons (cf. Spilka 215,

Moore 63-64). The second is that the novel espouses a paranoid,

near-Manichean worldview that pits an evil conspiracy of “Them” –

a multinational conglomerate of “elect” white, imperialist,

capitalist warmongers – against “Us,” the downtrodden and

powerless “preterite” (cf. Kuberski 145-147, Mackey 27-28). For

admirers, these characteristics constitute a radical critique of

contemporary society (Hulme 252, McHale 105); for detractors,

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they exhibit a sophomoric puerility that is politically

irresponsible and undercuts any possible seriousness (Wood 150,

Sanders 158). But widespread though these views are, they strike

me as inadequate. I’m going to make two arguments: first, that

the novel’s characters are not as thin as typically described;

second, that the usual political and philosophic response to the

book is, to my mind, vastly oversimplified and greatly reduces

the book’s moral questions. In both cases, I think these views’

inadequacy is most pronounced in dealing with Pointsman.

Inasmuch as I will argue that, though not to be admired, he must

be taken more seriously, this talk will constitute an apology for

Pointsman.

The most common description for the cartoonishness of the

characters is that they are flat or superficial (cf. Hulme 243).

As E. M. Forster defined them, “flat” characters – who, of

course, have always been a part of the novel, particularly longer

ones – are those whose entire function “can be expressed in one

sentence” (68), while his test for a rounded character is

“whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way” (78)—

that is, whether it can defy whatever one-sentence formula we

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assign. It is true that we can give most of Gravity’s Rainbow’s

four hundred characters a word or phrase that sums them up, from

Bodine’s anti-establishmentarianism to Marvy’s cowboy vulgarity

to Pudding’s fear at the changing world.

But not all of Gravity’s Rainbow’s characters are flat. To get

a better idea of how roundness works in the novel before we look

at Pointsman, I’d like to look at the Nazi scientist Franz

Pökler. Initially, it seems like we can define Pökler as flat,

able only to quietly acquiesce to his commanders. He registers

how their manipulations chip away his humanity, but does nothing:

he does not question the use of his work, nor flee as his wife

and daughter do, nor rebel when they are sent to a camp (403-

440); as the narrator says, “Pökler chose silence” (416). We

watch Pökler maintain this silence over years, even to the point

where he not only cannot identify whether the girl his overseers

send to visit him annually is his daughter, but is not sure

whether he cares, continuing to acquiesce to each new indignity.

Then, in one scene, his visiting daughter asks to enter his bed

[see passage #1]:

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He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible blow. That took care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged her up on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands already at the buttons of his trousers, her white frock already pulled above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath, nothing all day ... how I’ve wanted you, she whispered as paternal plow found its way into filial furrow...and after hours of amazing incest they dressed in silence... (427).

The passage continues for a while longer, to give us time to

assimilate whatever shock this event provokes. There is probably

not much: we’ve already seen the success that institutions have

had in conditioning sexual desires (73, 404), and have been

prepared for pedophilia and incest by earlier scenes of deviant

sexual behavior. Pökler’s submission to the manipulation would

fit his formula perfectly…except that it’s not what happens.

After describing their post-coital activities, the narrator

revises the scene [see passage #2]:

No. What Pökler did was choose to believe she wanted comfort that night, wanted not to be alone. Despite Their game, Their palpable evil, though he had no more reason to trust “Ilse” than he trusted Them, by an act not of faith, not of courage, but of conservation, he chose to believe that (428).

Pynchon’s trick shows us how much we had been willing to grant to

Pökler’s submissiveness – to his flatness – and then up-ends it

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by generating the type of surprise that, for Forster, defines

roundness. Despite everything, even Pökler can make a choice

between two possible acts.

Back to Pointsman. Most critics treat Pointsman as a flat

character, taking him at his word when he proclaims his Pavlovian

wish to find “the true mechanical explanation” for human behavior

(90), which they associate with Them’s attempt to totally control

humanity (cf. Cooper 120). They further oppose it to Roger

Mexico’s probabilistic worldview, thus flattening two characters

at once (cf. Clerc 13, Schaub 92-93). And it is true that the

novel contains several direct critiques of that inhumane

mechanistic worldview critics associate with Pointsman, as in

this account of a rocket attack [see passage #3]:

...half of St. Veronica’s hospital in the morning smashed roofless as the old Ick Regis Abbey, powdered as the snow, and poor Spectro picked off, lighted cubbyhole and dark wardsubsumed in the blast and he never hearing the approach, thesound too late, after the blast, the rocket’s ghost calling to ghosts it newly made. Then silence. Another “event” [...], a rounded-headed pin to be stuck in his map, a squaregraduating from two up to three hits, helping fill out the threes prediction, which lately’s been lagging behind...

A pin? Not even that, a pinhole in paper that someday will be taken down, when the rockets have stopped their falling, or when the young statistician chooses to end his count, paper to be hauled away by the charwomen, torn up,

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and burned... [...] alone, shaking his head no... inside me,in my memory...more than an “event”...our common mortality...these tragic days...(141)

Treating a lethal rocket explosion as a mere statistical “event,”

a data point whose only purpose is to validate a scientific

model, exhibits the kind of inhuman, rationalist callousness

critics associate with Pointsman; the surrounding metaphysical

and apocalyptic speculation aligns better with the typical

critical sensibility, as well as the mindset we might expect from

Mexico. Except that’s not quite what’s happening. This critique

is being made by the interior monologue of Pointsman, berating

Mexico’s coldness. And the fact that this sort of passage is not

that infrequent in the novel’s first two parts is why we have to

reconsider Pointsman.

Interestingly, Pointsman himself believes, at least

nominally, in the flatness of character—without it, a “true

mechanical explanation” is not possible, and even the word

“pointsman” itself suggests a sort of reductive, mechanical

thinking. But “pointsman,” of course, does not just refer to

someone who prefers points to continuums, but also to the

railroad worker who could cause a train to switch tracks. Though

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this figure seems binarist to some now (Earl 232) it had a

different symbolism in the nineteenth-century, particularly to

thinkers like James Clerk Maxwell. According to one recent

critic, “The lesson of the pointsman was that consciousness

matters, and that the physical world cannot be properly explained

without considering how our role as conscious, willful beings

might impact it” (Stanley 491). While against Pointsman’s

overall mechanist philosophy, this is consistent with his other

thoughts [see passage #4]:

By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy [...]. It all comes down, as it must, to thedesires of individual men [...]. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is (231).

This struggle between his scientific philosophy and his practical

activity – and also that between himself as a member of the

establishment and as one fighting against it – prevents us from

summing him up simply.

The practical implications of this struggle affect the novel

profoundly. Though most critics focus on the association of

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Pointsman with the nefarious Them, his job at the novel’s outset

is to defend British lives against Nazi rockets, which seems to

me unimpeachably moral. Despite those critics who harangue his

focus on zeroes and ones – celebrating instead Mexico’s on the

“space in between” (233) – Pointsman has a justified reason for

doing so: Mexico’s use of the Poisson distribution to determine

how many sections of London will experience a certain number of

rocket hits data impresses everyone (56), but it is useless in

aiding British defense1. As Pointsman acutely critiques: “What

will you do with the sieve you’ve laid over London? How will you

use the things that grow in your network of death?” (57-58).

This worry is not merely about their job performance: as we’ve

seen, he has vivid fears of mortality (141). Nor is his fear

entirely of self-preservation, as we see during his Christmas

mourning for his five colleagues killed by the Nazis, seeing them

as stars on his tree. In other words, as Frenesi in Vineland

notes, life and death are a matter of one and zero, not in-

1 At best, it can aid emergency resource management (e.g., if they determine that there’s only an infinitesimal chance of any square receiving five or morehits over a given period, they can arrange they rescue teams so that they onlyneed to cope with four or fewer), but this kind of information might be as easily intuited from the raw data.

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between (72); it seems unjust to critique Pointsman for

understanding that.

It is at least partly to save life that he undertakes the

Slothrop experiment, as hazily ethical as it is. Most critics,

who generally assume, I think, that anyone in power must be

solely motivated by the worst reasons and never even fractionally

by better ones, are attracted to excerpts like [passage #5]:

By the time of the Normandy landing, Pointsman’s season of despair was well upon him. He came to understand that the great continental pincers was to be, after all, a success. That this was, this State he’d come to feel himself a citizen of, was to be adjourned and reconstituted as a peace—and that, professionally speaking, he’d hardly got a thing out of it. With funding available for all manner of radars,magic torpedoes, aircraft and missiles, where was Pointsman in the scheme of things? (77)

This passage (and others like it) does seem to demonstrate

Pointsman’s desire for power—but I will add that, like much of

the novel, it is related via an indirect discourse. It is not

clear if this is a representation of Pointsman’s consciousness,

or the narrator’s, or someone else’s—in fact, the next paragraph

is clearly from the perspective of Brigadier Pudding, who is

obviously not an impartial judge. (For the same reasons, we

should not credit too much Mexico’s impression of Pointsman as

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having an “evil look” (91).) Given what we see of Pointsman, and

the fact that Slothrop’s erections are Britain’s best

intelligence lead (87), Pointsman’s stated desires to “solve the

mystery of why the rockets are falling as they do” (92) and come

up with “a physiological basis for what seems very odd behavior”

(91) seem at least as accurate as any other motivations ascribed

him, and – given the possible benefit of their results – not

wholly awful.

The effect of running such an experiment appears to take a

horrible toll on Pointsman, though. As the war reaches its end,

though, Pointsman begins to change. To help his career, he

schemes to separate Roger and Jessica during their post-V-E-Day

vacation. Yet even here his process in making this decision is

not merely cold calculation. After Pointsman is caught saying

odd things about an “unpleasant hallucination,” we read this [see

passage #6]:

What the somewhat disconnected Mr. Pointsman has been hearing all this time is a voice, strangely familiar, a voice that he once imagined a face in a well-known photograph from the War to have:

“Here is what you have to do. You need Mexico now, more than ever. Your winter anxieties about the End of History seem now all well comforted to rest, part of your biography

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now like any old bad dream. But like Lord Acton always sez,History is not woven by innocent hands. Mexico’s girl friend is a threat to your whole enterprise. [...] I’d jump at it, if I were you.

Pointsman is about to retort something like, “But you’re not me,” only he sees how the others all seem to be goggling at him. “Oh, ha, ha, ha,” he sez instead. “Talking to myself here. Little—sort of—eccentricity, heh, heh.” (281-282).

Here we see the damage that his war efforts have made to

Pointsman’s mind. His internal conflicts have caused him to

maintain two separate identities, one of a calm military

professional strategizing to save Britain, the other as a man

terrified of his powerlessness and mortality. Post-war he can no

longer reconcile them—and still, he primarily identifies with the

second, seeing the first as a hallucinated alien (“you’re not

me”). But to save face in front of the others, he’s forced to

claim identity with the former (“talking to myself”), and this

assimilated alien dominates his later appearances in the novel

via his Nayland Smith fantasies (281, 644). James Earl claimed

that the irony is in Pointsman’s “inability to be his own

pointsman, though he tries to be everybody else’s” (233), which

is true enough. But as I think his goals are more worthy than

grotesque, the irony is more tragic than satiric.

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Before we continue, I want to spend a moment on another

Pointsman passage. As William Vesterman noted, most of Pynchon’s

verses are comic, satiric songs (106-107). Yet there is one very

prominent exception in Gravity’s Rainbow [see passage #7]:

Thus, reaching for some flower on my table,I know the cool mosaic of my roomBegin its slow, inhibitory dissolveAround the bloom, the stimulus, the needThat brighter burns, as brightness, quickly suckedFrom objects all around, now concentrates(Yet less than blinding), focuses to flame.Whilst there yet, in the room’s hypnotic evening,The others lurk—the books, the instruments,The old man’s clothes, an old gorodki stuick,Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits,Or memories I kept of where they were,Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame:The reach toward the frail and waiting flower...And so, one of them—pen, or empty glass—Is knocked from where it was, perhaps to rollBeyond the blank frontiers of memory...Yet this, be clear, is no “senile distraction,”But concentrating, such as younger menCan easily and laughing dodge, their worldPresenting too much more than one mean loss—And out here, eighty-three, the cortex slack,Excitatory processes eased to cindersBy Inhibition’s tweaking, callused fingers,Each time my room begins its blur I feelI’ve looked in on some city’s practice blackout(Such as must come, should Germany keep onThat road of madness). Each light, winking out...Except at least for one bright, stubborn bloomThe Wardens cannot quench. Or not this time. (229-230).

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This stunning poem by Pointsman glosses a comment by Pavolv. I

could easily spend a full paper talking about it, but for now I

will only make three points. One: for a man supposedly

representing a “Them” that hates all otherness, Pointsman here

poignantly identifies with someone other than himself. Two:

Pointsman’s speaker, instead of empathizing with the forces of

The War, fights against them. Three: the speaker’s awareness

dissolves under the weight of the surrounding night, causing him

to hide in a dark space so that he can concentrate. Taking these

points together, it seems to me that Pointsman’s speaker shares

an awful lot with Tyrone Slothrop—a point to which we will return

later.

For now, though, let us move to the novel’s worldview.

Politically and philosophically, the novel is usually taken to

pit the evil “Them” against a persecuted “Us” whom it favors,

often identifying the former with The War, Technology, and other

abstract, all-powerful agents referred to in several extended

passages (cf. 224-225, 529-530, 657-658, and 710-711, for just a

few examples). We should note, though, that these passages are

rarely in the narrator’s voice, but from characters’ inner

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monologues, and many of them recant these thoughts upon

reflection (441, 530; see also Lacey 9). There are actual

conspiracies in the novel – notably the one against Slothrop –

but the notion that They constitute an omnipotent power structure

is belied by feelings of impotence and rebellion among

collaborators like Pointsman and Webley Silvernail (233).

I’m primarily interested in how the divide between Us and

Them is read into the Calvinist distinction between the elect and

preterite. Generally, the novel is taken to endorse the

preterite, as part of Pynchon’s championing of the weak against

the powerful (cf. McClure 40, Seed 178-179). But a number of

moments in the novel disturb this, even when we examine its most

obvious preterites, the Hereros. For instance, what do we make

of this thought by Schwarzkommando leader Oberst Enzian [see

passage #8]: “Who will believe that in his heart he wants to

belong to them out there, the vast Humility sleepless, dying, in

pain tonight across the Zone? The preterite he loves, knowing

he’s always to be a stranger...” (746). Why is Enzian, the

leader of the Zone’s Hereros, a man who has (quite literally)

been fucked over by the powerful all his life, feel like a

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stranger to the preterite?

We can understand this problem better by examining the

original logic behind the correlation of wealth and election

theorized in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

According to Weber, the great Calvinist anxiety is wondering

whether or not one is elected (110). Calvin claimed that one

could feel election internally, but also distrusted purely inward

modes of spirituality, insisting that any of the truly elect

would be so filled with the spirit of God that he would act

industriously to spread His glory (113-114). As Weber notes,

Calvinists’ subsequent devotion to productivity is an effort at

“getting rid of the fear of damnation” by demonstrating to

themselves that they are elected (115). The association of

election and wealth is not a point of doctrine; it’s a

psychological device designed to cope with the doctrine. From

this we can see that since one’s life is either saved or not – a

one or zero with no in-between – and we cannot know whom God has

elected, any earthly method of determining election can only be

subjective, an existential model for imbuing one’s predetermined

life with meaning. Furthermore, this implies that anyone could

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choose his own psychological-coping model of election and by

extension define anyone who does not meet it as preterite. The

blueblood elect use the idea that election is signified by

material success, but other models read worldly suffering as a

sign of election and success as preterition.

For obvious reasons, few define themselves as preterite,

which is what makes the Hereros interesting. Like Ivan Karamazov

and Huck Finn before them, they believe that if going to heaven

requires suffering on Earth (theirs or others), they want no part

of it. But Huck was never a rigorous thinker, and Ivan was

driven mad by his philosophy. If the destiny of preterition is

unredeemable death, we can understand why Josef Ombindi wants

Enzian to lead the Schwarzkommando to mass suicide (324-325).

This, I think, explains Enzian’s alienation from preterition.

Though he cannot quarrel with Ombindi’s conclusion, he cannot

accept a life so meaningless. And so he attempts to define a

model of election for his life and that of his followers. Though

we do not know how exactly he does so, his possession of the

00001, whose last digit affirmatively contrasts to the 00000’s

total negation, suggests some success.

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The problem with election is that it can only be proved by

transcendence. This problem is best negotiated via a Christ-

figure, a topic handled interestingly in Tyrone’s ancestor

William Slothrop’s pamphlet On Preterition [see passage #9]. Despite

the approval his doctrine has received, it does not seem to me

that many have grasped or taken seriously its moral philosophy:

William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that [...]. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? Couldwe feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. (565)

In response to this, his descendant wonders, “Suppose the

Slothropian heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper?

Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more

mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?” (565-566). At first, this

passage aligns with the typical division of elect and preterite:

“the Elect in Boston” seem to be ancestors of Them, and the

“second Sheep” of Us. Actually, it undoes it, because of the

inclusion of Christ. The last people that Jesus – the pacifist

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pauper who preached that the meek would inherit the earth and

that the persecuted would gain the kingdom of Heaven – would

represent would be the blue-bloods and the military-industrial

complex. By invoking Jesus, William Slothrop’s elect/preterite

formulation cannot simply contrast the haves and have-nots. What

it does instead, I think, is show how any model of election

requires an opposing preterite. That is, in any method of

justifying our lives – in selecting a Christ who both exemplifies

and transforms them – we also must define everything that opposes

it as bad, associated with an emblematic Judas, even if this

Judas has done no worse than select a different model of election

upon the same quest for meaning as we. What Slothropian mercy

suggests is not simply benevolence for the downtrodden; it

spreads it to any whom we must hate for the sake of our

worldview.

And once we abandon the idea that preterition and election

are simply about money and power, it should become apparent that

the man figured most as Christ throughout the novel is not one of

Them, but one of Us—Tyrone Slothrop. It is he who is sent out

into the Zone to suffer, he who is destroyed by it, and he who

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inspires a movement of followers for whom his sacrifice is a

motivating symbol: the Counter-Force Spokesman notes years later

that “Some called [Slothrop] a ‘pretext.’ Other felt he was a

genuine, point-for-point microcosm” (753), a formulation similar

to contemporary Christian debates over how to interpret the

import and effect of Christ’s sacrifice. Far from being purely

preterite, Slothrop is the path to transcendence, particularly

for characters like Pirate, who is nearly lost before setting off

with the Counter-Force to save him.

If Slothrop is Christ, who is his betrayer? Who is his

purported ally, who gives him up to destruction in exchange for a

promise of money and power? His Judas – the man William Slothrop

would have us forgive – is clearly Edward Pointsman. Pointsman

does not hang himself in penance, but he is politically exiled,

“officially in disgrace” (625-626), and perhaps worst of all, he

is damned by Mexico to be perpetually chased by the Counter-Force

to “the last room...and you’ll have to live in it the rest of

your scum, prostituted life” (649). This is his eternal

punishment for trying to find The Truth and instead succumbing to

The War: he must be the preterite that the Counter-Force (and

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literary critics) may loathe in search of meaning.

From a Christian worldview, William Slothrop claimed we

should forgive Judas because without him Christ’s sacrifice would

have no meaning. From a humanist standpoint, we might make the

same judgment by concluding that any meaning requires the

rejection of its opposite, and that mercy means that we should

empathize with even those who promulgate that opposite, for we

share with them both mortality and a will to transcend it. This

does not mean that their model must be equally valid to ours – it

may be hideous – but it does mean that the human condition is

fraught with anxiety, violence, and terror, and that if it causes

some people to do horrible things, those mistakes are not because

they are fundamentally inhuman and different from us, but human

and the same. In light of the endless pillorying of Pointsman, I

am not sure that many critics of Gravity’s Rainbow have appreciated

this. Suppose we were to allow this position to consolidate and

prosper—might there be less critical bile spewed in the name of

political grandstanding, and more mercy in the name of forgiving

Edward Pointsman?

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CitedClerc, Charles. “Introduction.” Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow.

Ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1984. 3-30. Print

Earl, James W. “Freedom and Knowledge in the Zone.” Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State,1984. 229-250. Print.

Forster, Edward Morgan. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. New York: Harcourt, 1957. Print

Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton, 2000. Print.

Hulme, Kathryn. “Repetition and the Construction of Character inGravity’s Rainbow.” Critique 33.4 (Summer 1992): 243-254. Print.

Kuberski, Phillip. “Gravity’s Angel: The Ideology of Pynchon’s Fiction.” Boundary 2 15.1-2 (Autumn 1986): 135-151. Print.

Lacey, Robert. “On Preterition: Thomas Pynchon and the Politics of the Apolitical.” 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. August 28-31, 2008. Unpublished conference paper. Print.

Lynd, Margaret. “Science, Narrative, and Agency in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Critique 46.1 (Fall 2004): 63-80. Print.

Mackey, Louis. “Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition.” SubStance 10.30 (1981): 16-30. Print.

MacAdam, Alfred. “Pynchon as Satirist: To Write, To Mean.” Yale Review 67 (1978): 555-566. Print.

McHoul, Alec and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1990. Print.

Mendelssohn, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1976. Pp. 161-195.

Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: U Missouri P, 1987. Print.

McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens, GA: Georgia, 2007. Print.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987. Print.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

---. Vineland. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1990. Print.

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Richer, Carol F. “The Prismatic Character in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 12 (1983): 26–38. Print.

Sanders, Scott. “Pynchon’s Paranoid History.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1976. 139-160. Print.

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Schaub, Thomas H. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1981. Print.

Spilka, Mark. “Character as a Lost Cause.” Novel 11. 3 (Spring 1978): 197-217. Print.

Stanley, Matthew. “The Pointsman: Maxwell’s Demon, Victorian FreeWill, and the Boundaries of Science.” Journal of the History of Ideas, (July 2008): 467-491. Print.

Vesterman, William. “Pynchon’s Poetry.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1976. 101-112. Print.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1904. Trans.Talcott Parsons. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1998. Print.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008. Print.

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The Character of Preterition: An Apology for Pointsman

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