The Hitchcock Connection: Pynchon's Play with MacGuffins in Gravity's Rainbow

This essay examines Thomas Pynchon's unrecognized debt to Alfred Hitchcock by considering the extensive and innovative use of Hitchcock's motif, the famous MacGuffin, in Gravity's Rainbow. It reads Gravity's Rainbow through Hitchcock's MacGuffin, interrogating its various functions in the novel as a plot device, as an object-cause of desire, as the Lacanian objet petit a, and as a Derridean mode of critique of presence and causality. In doing so, the essay focuses on three aspects of Pynchon's novel: its narrative strategy, its critique of western epistemology, and the games Pynchon plays. I interrogate Pynchon's use of the Hitchcockian MacGuffin as the novel's central narrative strategy and as a mode of epistemological critique. Further, I investigate the use of games and play to facilitate the use of the MacGuffin device and to expose power and control. I argue that Pynchon plays with Hitchcock's MacGuffin in a variety of ways and re-signifies the plot device as the Derridean play of différance to critique the desire for presence and fixed meaning in Western epistemology. I maintain that the MacGuffin, when operating as a critical mode of critique of the metaphysics of presence, is the major source of the text's indeterminacy. I conclude that in playing the game of the MacGuffin as a narrative device and mode of critique, Pynchon plays on and critiques the reader's desire for presence and fixed meaning.