Gravity's Rainbow

"Even more so than Underworld , Gravity’s Rainbow shows us the broad sweep of United States history. It shows it across a much broader period of time. Tyrone Slothrop, who is the protagonist of the novel, is always harking back to his Puritan ancestors. He’s thinking of his behavior now as somehow consistent with the things that his Puritan ancestor, William Slothrop, was involved in. It’s all the same sorts of things that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ancestors were—and this, for Pynchon, is a direct line back to the very beginning of United States fiction. So the novel goes from that Puritan period that is alluded to here and there—we get some longer passages about it and it’s always present—through to the turn of the century, and then right through into the Second World War, and the rumblings of the Cold War. Gravity’s Rainbow spatially disconnects the history from just the landmass of the Americas. It opens in London, England. It’s all about military and scientific think tanks, secretive groups that are coming up with new ways to wage war, including psychological warfare. In the pre-modern period, it was about physical might: you had to go and vanquish your enemy with muscle. We have undergone a passage through the 20th century from a much more muscular way of exercising power to softer and softer power. I think this is what Thomas Pynchon shows in his novel—that soft, esoteric, hidden power being used and explored by governments all over the world. They’re all trying to cohere around this psychological warfare that we fight now. There’s the physical warfare too, because they’re obsessed with the building of bombs and rockets. The novel also goes to Germany and to Southern Africa. One of the characters is an ex-Nazi and goes to participate in the Herero and Namaqua Genocide in what is modern day Namibia. So there is lots and lots going on, lots of historical periods, lots of geographical areas—which is perhaps the reason why Gravity’s Rainbow is such a challenging book to read. The whole thing is quite dizzying. For that, I would suggest that you just persevere over a longer period of time. You can chunk it down. If you find a companion reader that tells you how to split it up, you can say, ‘OK these are the sections on (say) the Holocaust’ and go and read those parts. It’s a book to read slowly, because there’s so much in it that it can be overwhelming to take in in one go. It’s about the trajectory of a V2 rocket. The trajectory of the rocket corresponds to dozens of different philosophical or scientific theories about how rockets fly and what rockets do. The end of the novel is quite instructive for this idea of a trajectory because it breaks down into little cameo sections. They’re little philosophical tracts, of 500 to 1000 words. They give you a perspective, a closing thesis on what it is that we’ve been reading about. Some of them are jokey stories, some of them are explicitly tracts or theses. One is called “The Ascent”, the last one is called “The Descent”: we get the actual trail of the rocket as it moves through the sky. There’s a horrible determinism because the rocket is descending upon a crowd of people and they’re asked to “reach between your own cold legs’’—in other words, to masturbate. This is how Pynchon ends the novel. What he means is that you don’t have any effect over the falling of this bomb, so enjoy it. It’s very odd. But what those last moments also do is link together the two themes that have been running through the novel, which are sex and death. One of the main plot points that runs through the story is the fact that Tyrone Slothrop was part of a Pavlovian experiment in his childhood where his sex response was linked to the movements of a rocket. During the whole course of the novel, Slothrop believes—and we’re never sure, if he really does believe it—that whenever a rocket is launched anywhere in the world, it causes a sex response. So the launching of a rocket and an erection are the same thing to Slothrop. This, to me, just wonderfully illustrates this idea of the determinism of history, the historical events that Slothrop lives through. It happens to many characters in the novel—that the historical events that they live through are not external to them in any way, shape or form. They invade the most personal components of their own being. Sex is a very personal component of anyone’s being, and we would like to think it was separate from the blind, automatic determinism of history. But Pynchon questions this. He says, ‘What if all your sexual responses, all your responses of pleasure of any kind, are all determined by material, historical forces that are completely beyond you?’ This is the horror vision of Gravity’s Rainbow , I think, and you see it throughout the novel. There’s one minor character—a wonderful character—who believes that his entire being has become synonymous with World War One. So World War One and him are the same thing. He even believes that when World War One ends, he will physically die. He doesn’t have an identity outside the historical milieu in which he lives. It’s required reading as an Americanist. If you don’t read it, you might as well pack up. But as a book, when you start reading it, especially if these things are of interest to you… I’ve written a lot on the effect of history on the individual and I’m interested in phenomenology. I think that the vast material movements of history and the individual are in a dialectic: that neither one or the other is in control. We are co-creational of the world we’re in. So that’s my philosophical point of view, and I take that from people like Maurice Merleau-Ponty. And I think if that’s your philosophical interest—or if you’re interested in the mechanical determinists like Ivan Pavlov—then this is more than a novel, it’s a philosophical tract as well. No one knows anything about Pynchon because he won’t talk to anyone, but he is extremely well-read. I’m not sure how much he knows about Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, but it’s in there anyway. He’s certainly read Pavlov till it’s coming out of his ears. He knows about the theories, the science, the philosophies and the history of philosophy. If you’re looking for a philosophical novel, you can’t get a better one than Gravity’s Rainbow."