People who only read the classics are sure to remain up-to-date - Maria von-Ebner Eschelbach
Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow is a difficult book to read and especially challenging to read alone. Its narrative structure skips around, digresses and requires some understanding of history, science, psychology and mathematics to gain a toehold on its meaning. On the other hand, it's imaginative, clever, humorous, challenging, and provides insight to the world as we know it. The goal of the reading group is to share the burden of this novel, allowing people to talk about the book without boring spouses and partners, friends, and innocent bystanders who might be foolish to inquire about "what you are reading" while standing in line at the coffeeshop. Also, after reading Gravity's Rainbow you are allowed to used the adjective "Pynchonesque" at your leisure.
More importantly, the purpose of this page is to collect notes of the Gravity's Rainbow Support Group (GRSG). Warning: this page will not always be coherent. For a more coherent take on the book, visit the essay, "A Screaming Comes Across the Sky: Rereading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow," which appeared in Dog Days Classics section of the Tropics of Meta, Historiography for the Masses.
Background Sources
There are several recommended sources that assist you in understanding the book:
Writers for the 70s: Thomas Pynchon (1974) by Joseph Slade. This is one of the better guides, a pocket paperback which gives an overview on all of Pynchon's writing up through Gravity's Rainbow. I found my copy in a potpourri and antique store in Lindsborg, Kansas of all places. You can find copies on line. Trivia note: the other authors in this series were Kurt Vonnegut, Carlos Castaneda and Richard Brautigan. Hmmm.
Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel (1983) by Steven Weisenburger. There is a newer edition with about 20 percent more material (I am told) than this highly detailed breakdown from the early 80s that I am familiar with. The episode-by-episode synopses, which I have distributed via postal mail have come from the first book. My copy of the book has been disintegrating, but it is invaluable. I have no idea where I found my copy, but the new edition published in 2006 is available but pricey.
Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow (1983), edited by Charles Clerc and published Ohio State University Press. This is a series of essays where each contributor (including the aforementioned Joseph Slade) concentrates on some aspect of the novel. A little scholarly. I am not exactly sure where I found this book. Maybe I saw it at the Wichita State University library and ordered it.
If you can somehow find it read Lawrence C. Wolfley's Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel. The scholarly article appears in The Modern Language Association-Publications. October, 1977, Volume 92 #5. You may be able to access or purchase it at JSTOR.
Internet
The major website about Gravity's Rainbow https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/ has some valuable resources : The Alphabetical Index includes the 300+ characters who appear in the 760+ page book, and a page by page annotation (but it is not as through as the Weisenburger book), and the character map E-R diagram which shows the relationship of the some of the main characters. Unfortunately, it does not display easily. Also, many of the links on this website are dead and out of date. There is also a link to Richard Poirior's (Pynchon's most sensitive critic who wrote the best general introduction to GR according to Wolfley), entitled."Rocket Power."
A Word About The Style
One of the aspects of this novel that makes the book a challenge is Pynchon's style and wide use of the analepsis, "a literary technique that involves the interruption of the chronological of events or scenes of an earlier occurrence" (Merriam Webster's definition). What makes it even more challenging is that these "shifts in focalization, all without any of the spatiotemporal markers by which writers conventionally signal them to readers (Weisenburger). One GRSG member pointed out that this is the same technique used by William Faulkner in such novels such as The Sound and the Fury. Adding to the confusion is Pynchon's use of ellipses. I was recently reading an essay by Paul Chaat Smith that complained about a friend's elliptical writing style: "Stream-of-consciousness rambling and contempt for sentence structure are surefire indications of sloppy thinking and worse writing, of an undisciplined mind, of feckless anarchy." Even if you don't think Pynchon is being sloppy (and I don't), it does make the book more difficult to read.
Warning: Episode 9 (pp. 47-53) and Episode 14 (90-113) are especially nasty with the analepses.
Themes
As Charles Clerc can attest to there are many approaches that one can take to understand the book to chose from:
Historical - Set at the end of World War II, September 1944 to September 1945, the book is kind of an historical novel as many of scenes have a factual correctness to them. (Pynchon studied The London Daily Times and borrowed extensively details about what was going on.)
Paranoia and how multinational corporations control the world - especially IG Farben. In Part Two, Pynchon introduces his Proverbs for Paranoids.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: “You man never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”
Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: “The innocence of the creatures is in inverse to the immorality of the master.”
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: “You hide, they seek.”
Proverbs for Paranoids, 5: “Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”
Science and technology - Werner Von Braun (1912-1977) and rocket scientists and how at the end of World War II, there was a competitive rush by the Soviet Union and the United States to gather as many scientists into their ranks as possible, which was discussed at Yalta in early 1945. There is a joke about the NASA put a man on the moon first -- "Our German rocket scientists were better than their rocket scientists." The book's opening quote from Von Braun is basically the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.
There were 15,000 rocket designers, engineers and technicians in Germany at the end of the war (Clerc-Tololyan, p.49). Another major player was General Walter Dornberger who led the German rocket-research group as early as 1932 and after the war came to the United States and later became a leading innovator at Bell Aircraft Corporation and influenced the development of the Space Shuttle.
The enlistment of German rocket scientists into the United States (despite their use of death camp labor) was part of Operation Paperclip, which has recently received some new notoriety in the Amazon series "Hunters," which takes this historical moment and fictionalizes to the extreme.
"The V-2 looms large in GR as the focal point of a 'grisly romance' between men and technology." (Clerc-Tololyan, p 45)
Psychology - The White Visitation, Pavlov, behaviorists.
Notes from the GRSG first gathering on June 6, 2020
Attendees: Francis Walker (two others already dropped out)
This is Francis's third time reading GR but the first time since the late 1970s and this was my second time. My first reading was in the early 1980s. Good news! We both agreed it's easier reading the second or third time. Perhaps you know what you are up against or since you know the basic plot its a little easier to hang in. For me, this time I had the guides (mentioned above) and that kept from being totally lost for long passages.
- Gravity. What does the title Gravity's Rainbow mean? "Gravity is, after all universal: every bit of matter exerts a force on every other." (Clerc-Friedman, p.75) Does the rainbow just indicate the shape (a parabola like the flight of the V-2 rocket. Gravity is invisible, meaning invisible forces? Rainbows have many colors, so is GR a book of the host of invisible forces that are upon us every moment. From Francis:
So, I have been thinking a bit more about gravity and color and Pavlov. We sometimes use gravity to tell us about time (like an hourglass, or like waiting for a ball or frisbee thrown in the air to come down, or waiting for the other shoe to drop. We, also, sometimes use color to tell us about time. It is hard to do with the gray English skies (a recurring theme you pointed out that helped me see this connection), but at the ocean we can tell by the colors if it is morning, noon or evening and we can tell by the flash of an bomb or lightening that an explosion or thunder will follow--or the red of a rocket burning that a missile is on the way. I think that's why he likes Pavlov, it is the time locked nature of two stimuli (a bell and food) that creates the conditioned response. He seems fascinated by the possibility that perhaps things could go in reverse.
- How do we cope with these invisible forces? Paranoia (a subset of which is conspiracy theories). Myth and religion, which reminded Francis of a couple of quotes: "There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths."- Bertrand Russell. And another from Boris Pasternak: "As for men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth." Here in time of COVID-19, we struggle to understand why one person is struck down with the disease and another is not. (like in the battlefield, why is one killed by a bullet and the other person next to him is not.) There are tough things to ponder. William Osler once said, "To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is ridiculous."
- A discussion of the evils of large corporations discussion: including IG Farben, Krupp, Anthony Sampson's The Sovereign State of ITT, which was published in 1973 the same year as GR. Another book that may be of interest is The Order of the Day (2017) by Eric Vuillard, which is a brief history about the titans or German industry who supported Hitler as early as 1933, which solidified his power. An excellent book. William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp is also highly recommended.
For some good background reading about this same period of history I found these two books most useful:
Johnson, Paul. In Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Revised) New York: Harper Perennial, 1992 (more specifically the chapter "Superpower and Genocide."
Roberts, Andrew. Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
- Brief discussion of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, and is constant if and only if all processes are reversible. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy. "Entropy is time's arrow," attributed to Arthur Eddington. This reminded me of joke that was posted on the door of physics professor where I worked. "Time flies like and arrow, but fruit flies like a banana."
Notes from the GRSG second gathering on June 26, 2020
Uhhhh! Lost notes or didn't take notes but Francis sent this email after our discussion which was mentioned earlier on this page about gravity and color and Pavlov.
Notes from the GRSG third gathering on July 20th, 2020
Much of this discussion centered around the essay I was working for Tropics of Meta entitled "A Screaming Comes Across the Sky: Rereading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow," which was published on August 10, 2010. We talked more about paranoia and what roles multinational corporations
Notes from the GRSG fourth gathering on August 13, 2020
Notes from the GRSG fourth gathering on September 7, 2020
Notes from the GRSG fifth and final gathering on October 2o, 2020
One of the topics discussed was on the nature of time. Francis pointed out these passages from GR:
Three hundred years ago mathematicians ere learning to break the cannonball’s rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height delta x and delta y allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again the patter of their feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. ….They would peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, delta x by delta y, flightless themselves, ….film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. (p. 566)
Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here, at this moment…… (p. 509)
Each moment has its value, its probably success against other moments in other hands, and the shuffle for him is always moment-to-moment. He can’t afford to remember other permutations, might-have-beens—only what’s present, dealt him by something he calls Chance…. (p.613)
..get him a power base in Berlin, he’s already hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do is develop the knack (Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close to the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually an epileptic fit! ….. –Page 648 This is a reference to the character Byron the Bulb.
Places in Gravity's Rainbow
Although the book spends time in London, Nice, France and other locales around the world, the majority of the book is set in northern Germany.
The V-2 Rocket
"The V-2 rocket Vergeltungswaffe Zwei) was literally the vengeance weapon." (p.71 Clerc, Tololyan). "England was struck by 1,115 V-2s, and Antwerp,...was hit by 1,265 more. In London the toll was 2,340 dead and 6,000 wounded... In the end, the most accurate judgment is perhaps that of the British scientist who suggested that 'the vast A-4 project had been conceived not out of military expediency but to quench the innate German sense for romanticism.' Pynchon's vision is predicated on a similar judgement, so that the V-2 looms large in Gravity's Rainbow as the focal point of a grisly romance between men and technology." p.45 Clerc, Toylyan).
The V-2 is also known as the A-4 program and that may because it refers to the rocket design itself. V-1 was a different type of weapon more of a cruise missile than a rocket. It was being fired on England beginning of June, 1944 from France, but it did not have a great range and when the Allies overtook France that ended the use of that weapon. But September of 1944 was the first V-2 rocket launch. The V-1 actually caused more death and casualties and was also referred to as the buzz bomb. Ironically, there was replica of the buzz bomb in my hometown of Milford, Illinois.
Since the V-2 is the focal point - the quest of the book or in the opinion of Slade, "the protagonist of the story...an annunciation of the new technology (p. 178)."
The Rocket has two aspects. Conceived for death, ostensibly evil, it offers life. It is a "star" an "angel" a "Text." It is the means by which man can escape Gravity and Earth itself. It is the pinnacle of man's technology, symbol of a new state, or at least, a new city, the Raketen-Stadt."
Many of the characters are directly involved: Franz Pokler (chemical engineer at Peenemunde and Nordhausen), Lt. Tyrone Slothtrop (Rocketman), Enzian (the Herero pilot of the Schwarzkommandos, and Blicero-Wasserman, one of the main commanders of the project.
More V-2 - At the Military History Museum
In the fall of 2021, I was visiting my daughter in Berlin and we made a trip to Dresden and visited the Military History Museum of Dresden (more about the unusual architecture here). It ended up being an opportunity to see the V-2 up close. It is much larger than I imagined and though the rocket was unmanned, it certainly looked large enough to squeeze someone into it like Enzian.
Film and Cinema Motifs
Beginning with the ellipsis boxes that designate the different episodes that separate the text in each chapter, there is a heavy influence of films and moviemaking in GR. Beginning with some of the characters of the book:
Gerhardt Von Göll - aka Springer which is German for "chess knight" - the "knight who leaps perpetually across the chessboard of the Zone." Von Göoll is a German filmmaker, which Pynchon pays homage to classic German expressionist films such as Metropolis. He makes makes a short film for the Allies about the Schwarzcommandos, black tribesman from the Herero tribe in Southwest Africa who worked on the German rocket program. It's intended as a propaganda film, but turns out to be true.
Before the war Von Göll also makes the erotic film Alpdrücken (German for nightmare) with actress Greta Erdman (aka Margherita and Gretel). The movie has a profound effect as Greta is raped by co-star Max Schlepzig during the filming of the orgy scene filming (Schlepzig could be Von Göll ?) and she ends up having a child Bianca. Another character Franz Pölker is seduced while watching the film. Franz returns home to have sex with his wife Lena and they conceive of a child Ilse. Pölker is a rocket engineer who is forced not to question what he is doing in order to see Ilse.
Imaginative Passages
One key to reading Pynchon is appreciating the imagination, description or the humor (often slapstick) that it is intertwined with the narrative and the larger themes. Here are some of the favorites identified by the GRSG.
A squadron of B-17s in flight (page 87). "Behind these Fortresses the undersides of the cold clouds are blue, and their smooth billows are veined in blue--elsewhere touched without grayed or purple."
In the lab with Pavlov (page 90). " Yesterday we got him to go ultrapardoxical Beyond. When we turn on the metronome that used to stand for food--that once made Dog Vanya drool like a fountain--now he turns away."
Mrs. Quoad's "wine jellies" (page 116-118). Slothrop sips "herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy -- oops, but that's a mistake right, here's his mouth filling once again with horrible, alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the back palate where it digs in."
Sex scene with Slothrop and Katje (page 197-) "He dangles two pillows and watches here. 'One more step,' she giggles, Slothrop dives in goes to hit her across the ass whereupon she lets him have it with the Seltzer bottle, natch. The pillow bursts against one marble hip, moonlight in the room is choked with feathers and down and soon with hanging spray from jets of Seltzer.
Death camp description (page 431) Pölker walks through the death camp at Dora next to Nordhausen. (Pölker is one of Pynchon's more multi-dimensional and feeling characters in the novel. And Pynchon's description reminds one that he can write "just as seriously" as anyone.
Somewhere aboard the hedonistic Anubis (~page 492). "the monkeys drunk holding vodka bottles with feet."
The rescue of Spring reminds one of a passage out of Stanley Crawford's novel Gascoyne.
What Happens If You Don't Read the Assigned Text
Before being allowed entry, you may be asked to read aloud to the calls pages 235-236 the graphic description of Brigadier Pudding chomping on a turd. As grotesque as this sounds (and it is). Wolfley (see background sources) seriously calls it "an incredible tour de force, as powerful as anything in the novel. (p.881, Wolfey).
AFTERMATH #1
We finished GR on October 20, 2020, but are you ever really finished with Thomas Pynchon? Sharing and digging deep into books seemed like a worthy continuation of our group.
Nabokov
A writer who knows one human being can portray a hundred - Marie von Ebner Eschelbach
On November 9, 2020 we opted for Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (1953) - a short novel that is similar in tone with Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim satire about academia. As expected, Nabokov's writing was superb and Francis provided some of his favorite quotes from Pnin:
“All three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars.
''And all these are worlds,'' said Hagen.
''Or else,'' said Clements with a yawn, ''a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.”
“His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.”
"―just as she was -- with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don’t believe it, but suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in me and in life ---”
―
“…two lumpy old ladies in semitransparent raincoats, like potatoes in cellophane…”
“What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.”
“A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.”
“Because of a streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor in any queue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp.”
“The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown.”
“Both Erica and Liza Wind were morbidly concerned with heredity, and instead of delighting in Victor's artistic genius, they used to worry gloomily about its genetic cause.”
Another evocative Pnin quote about pencil sharpeners appeared in The Book Shopper blog piece Into the Spinning Void on November 6, 202o.
AFTERMATH #2
Beginning on December 1st we started the first half of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1973).
There is a connection between GR and The Denial of Death, which were completed within a few years of each other, which extends beyond Woody's Allen's reference to the film Annie Hall, when Diane Keaton calls Allen out about how all of his books have the word, "death" in them.
Topics discussed at the December 17, 2020 meeting:
- How did a book like Becker's ever win a Pulitzer? No one knows for sure. Becker was at Berkeley in the 1960s and was extremely popular among the students (much more than his fellow faculty members.) His book was cross-disciplinary and was a book that also on the radar of the clergy. The book did seem to encapsulate the work of many thinkers -- especially psychotherapy and Sigmund Freud.
- What does neurosis mean? We discussed how "neurosis" has been something that has been out of vogue for a quite some time. Part of the reason is that medical professionals were unable to define neurosis. (Something like Woody Allen = neurosis doesn't really work.) It illustrates that many Becker's explanation of how our repression of death factors into psychotherapy. Much of it is not really accepted nowadays, but Becker always brings up interesting sources and ideas worthy of discussion.
- Why does a near death experience interrupt our perception of time? There was discussion about various theories including "the speed of thought."
- Speaking of its relationship to Gravity's Rainbow, is Slothrop a Becker heroic figure. We think maybe so. More discussion.
- We liked The Denial of Death, but not sure Becker's posthumous Escape from Evil (which is considered a better and shorter book.) Otto Rank's Art and Artist is another book that has come recommended.
- The work of Norman Brown factors heavily in Becker's Denial of Death. Lawrence C. Wolfley's bridged the gap between Becker and Pynchon in his article "Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel." The scholarly article appears in The Modern Language Association-Publications. October, 1977, Volume 92 #5. You may be able to access or purchase it at JSTOR.
For more books, visit GRSG-2021.
After Gravity's Rainbow, Pnim and The Denial of Death we read and "studied" and discussed other books listed below:
The Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilbert Faust
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner -- in conjunction with
The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra
Practicing History: Selected Essay by Barbara Tuchman, which inspired
Stillwell and the American Experience in China (1911 - 1945) by Barbara Tuchman
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch
The Odyssey by Homer -- in conjunction with
Homeric Moments Clues to the Delight in Reading The Odyssey and The Iliad by Eva Brann.
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky
An Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
GRSG - 2022 Reading Notes for the Everything Listed Below
The Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
Mountains and a Shore: A Journey Through Southern Turkey by Michael Pereira
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Grant by Ron Chernow
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
The U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
-- The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money
Under the Net by Muriel Spark
Two Wheels Good: The History and the Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen
Red and Black: A Chronicle of 1830 by Stendhal
