I've been noticing a lot about opposites in the book and I think it's interesting how it often relates to male and female itneractions.
On page 409,
"...he [Mondaugen] seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus--."
"Valency," Pokler protested, "a condition of the outer shells, that's all."
Then on page 572 Andreas explains the importance of the mandala to Slothrop. It's a long paragraph so I won't type it all out, but basically there are two types of the letters on the mandala, male and female letters representing different directions. This came from the way that in their tribal villages, women and men lived on opposite sides of the village. The female letters represent fertilization, birth, breath, and soul, while the male letter represent activities, fire, preparation, and building, It says, "Each opposite pair of vanes worked together, and amoved in opposite senses. Opposites together."
There are two things I thought when I read this. First, there's been a lot of talk about the sexism of the book and the lack of female representation. The rocket's launching capabilities are described aboved as a combination between male and female quanitites. I wondered from the quote o 409, who is supposed to be the "creation" and who is the "destruction." Sincce women are capable of birthing and men are the ones navigating the war, it seems like maybe Pynchon is saying something negative about stereotypical "manliness." However, the two quotes show that both the male and female need to come together to be of any use. This reminds me of William Slothrop's belief that Jesus is only important because of Judas, and that without the preterite there is no elect.
Lastly, (this is a lonnnnngg post) on page 587 it says, "...there came over Laszlo Jamf...a hostility, a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future at all, the bond must be improved on--some students even read "transcended." That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond--where electrons are not shared, but caputred. Seized and held!..." I'm not sure how this anti-cooperation idea fits into everything, but maybe it has to do with the fact that the story takes place during a war in which countries (Germany) are trying to take over each other..
I think there are definite connections between the male/female and preterite/elect dichotomy, but I'm not so sure that Pynchon is exalting the notion of difference coming together in some sort of unified totality. In fact, I think Pynchon opens up the possibility of precisely the opposite through his exploration "beyond the zero" and the possibility of fenceless, completely deteritorrialized political space. The profundity of William Slothrop's affirmation, or at least acknowledgement, of the Preterite does not come through when the category combines with Elect to form a closed off whole. Instead, I think something much more poststructural is going on: once we give treatment to the Preterite, they are not subordinate anymore; thus we sweep away the hierarchical foundation of the (false) binary, and thereby deconstruct, that is, render more or less meaningless, the original distinction. Because that's the curious thing about binaries: we say it's a choice between male/female, life/death, rational/non-rational, but really we want to affirm one pole and erase the other. The real coming together of male and female (or any two such poles) might not be the modern myth of Utopian unification, but something much more heterogeneous, open, active, alive - and, incidently, antithetical to pretty much all dominant modes of thought and political structures.
I think the opposites theme also stretches into the prophised (sp?) Cold War in "Gravity's Rainbow".
Affirming one pole and erasing the other...sounds like the Cold War to me. Now, my feeling is that the two sides, Russia and USA, weren't really all that different, but the two sides tried to convince their population that it was a fight of polar opposites...
In class last week we talked about how Jamf loved the ionic bond more than the covalent bond because instead of an equal sharing, there is a siezure of electrons. Someone hypothesized that this represented the need for people to control each other. At the time I was reminded of a quote from a while back about colonizing. It said (roughly), "What's the point of conquering a nation if there aren't any natives left?" We discussed the roles of sexual dominance in class and in last night's reading I came across another quote that I thought was important. Page 751: "Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in povwer. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power fame. There it no joy in it, only power." The idea is that it is natural to crave a position, whether it be the position of controller or controlled, and that society is based on having these two positions. If people have an outlet for their desires of dominance or submission, then they won't dominate or be controlled in society, which is what holds society together. Perhaps this is what Pointsman was trying to accomplish with Pudding.