"[a plastic bag] wraps around my head, so superfine and transparent I don't know it's there really until too late. A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death...." (
GR 756).
A recurring theme at the end of
Gravity's Rainbow is that it is too late. It's always too late. Slothrop has nowhere to go, especially once we have sufficiently demystified his relationship to the V-2; the trauma was done too long ago to do anything about it now. It's obviously too late for Bianca. Tchitcherine can't or won't recognize his half-brother. Poor Roger Mexico. And of course the War is over. It's been over more or less since Part II, yet we go on and on in the Zone, somewhere after point zero. The trauma of the
post. And to make matters worse, we realize we're not living just a few months after the war, but some of the last pages remind us of what we already knew all along, but hid from consciousness: we're actually some forty years after the war. But isn't this the point the text tries to arouse-- this
l'esprit de l'escalier vision that reminds us human consciousness is nothing more than one instance of being too late after another.
This recalls to mind a Wharton story, "Afterward." The premise is that the main characters will encounter a ghost, they are warned, but won't recognize it as such until afterward, long afterward, once it is too late. The movement of the plot is thus predictable, as its whole thread is given away in the first line ("Oh, there
is one, of course, but you'll never know it"), which itself is given too early, before context, and thus the very meaning of the words (and the climax of the story) comes too late. Anachronistic by nature, the ghost (c.f. King Hamlet) always arrives tardy-- we can do nothing to prevent the late king's death; all that's left is vengeance or counter-action (c.f.
Counterforce). Poor Mary Boyne, too attentive to sorting out the past, looking for what ghosts she could have encountered, that she fulfills the prophecy by overlooking the present moment when the obvious ghost arrives.
On a final note, "Berenice" by Poe figures a man who is always living too late, starting at (or even before?) his death, which simultaneously announces the death of his mother. Growing up in a library, removed from "reality," he develops a sort of
inversion whereby reality-proper is foreign and illusory and the fantastic and supernatural tales of narrative fiction around him don't simply represent the real, they
are the real. Thus, like
Gravity's Rainbow, this narrator configures a mode of being that is not predicated on cause-and-effect, but rather on effect-and-cause (in other words, it's not that the portrait of Gertrude Stein looks like Stein herself, but rather that Gertrude Stein looks like her portrait). The tragedy of our narrator in this Poe story is realized when, after waking from some trance-like blackout, he slowly comes to realize what he has done: he has pulled all of the teeth from his recently-deceased beloved. The realization of the action comes--narratively speaking--before the action itself. It is this action, interestingly enough, that seems to materialize a ghost of his beloved who, having died a few pages earlier, awakens screaming (though with the explanation that she was merely in a catatonic epileptic trance herself, only appearing dead). The ghost has risen, but unfortunately--for as difficult as teeth may be to extract, they are far more difficult to implant; this I know--it is too late for her.
"It may be too late to go home" (
Gravity's Rainbow 744).
