Let's Smoke Pot and Tour Europe

Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow

V2 Rocket (Germany: Unknown)

KAZOO’S, nonsense anecdotes and puerile songs make strange bedfellows for the sublime and beautiful prose of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It is a book I have read a great many things about, ranging from high praise to the allegation that it’s utter drivel. As you can see from the amount of time since the last post, this novel has taken a long time to read - it is difficult and at times laborious. I thought that a few of the asides in the novel were a bit drawn out, but I think I might have responded a bit better if I was more into drug culture. Aside from this, it was a nuanced, challenging and entertaining read.

Two interesting central themes that the text revolve around are fate and determinism, and paranoia. These themes do tie into one another in quite a meaningful way. The various agencies that seem to be attempting to hinder and control the “main” character, Slothrop, can be linked back to the theme of fate, so that his paranoia can be seen as his own struggle against this allotted fate. The fact is, there are agencies trying to control Slothrop’s fate, and he has indeed been conditioned to react to the presence of the plastic Imipolex G in the V2 rockets. For the reader, this has the effect of transforming this paranoia from something self-destructive into something like a defence mechanism.

The Schwarzkommando and Herero society in Erdschweinhöhle have there own method for avoiding fate. The Empty Ones wish to commit racial suicide by avoiding breeding as much as possible, creating a society of pornography and sodomy rather than procreation. The very fact that this society practices with religious fervour – and the pseudo-religious, impersonal way in which the Herero society is described, reminds us very much of a sermon or religious text – seems to irreligious twists Pychon’s conception of fate further away from the traiditional tie between religion and fate.

Enzian, who seems to be planning on building his own rocket to succeed the 00000 (who takes his name from a WWII surface-to-air-missile, which takes its name from a type of flower), describes his plan for history:

What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need a design change. Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new one. The Erdschweinhöhle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place… - Gravity’s Rainbow, Chapter 3

Enzian here is speaking of a human-centred fate, one that is controlled by people. Similarly the Phoebus cartel, perhaps the Illuminati and the surveillance perpetrated by Pointsman, portrayed so mysteriously throughout the novel have human origins – are part of a kind of fate exclusively determined by one person and given to another.

Pychon certainly drops little hints about who They are throughout the novel. But that doesn’t reduce in any way their mystifying effect. Tchitcherine speaking of freedom from this human-defined fate says:

[Slothrop]’s more useful running around the Zone thinking he’s free, but he’d be better off locked up somewhere. He doesn’t even know what his freedom is, much less what it’s worth. So I get to fix the price, which doesn’t matter to begin with. - Gravity’s Rainbow, Chapter 3

Pretty authoritarian. But here, Russian agent Tchitcherine is describing how Slothrop doesn’t even fully comprehend what it would be to be free from the web of fate he is enmeshed within and seems to even be adding his own level of control.

            Slothrop attempts to escape his particular fate by a series of costume exchanges throughout the novel. He takes on several different guises, Rocket Man, a mythical pig, and a Russian officer. He manages only to evade his fate for a certain amount of time or by shifting into another guise. For instance, when he is dressed as a mythical pig, he ends up switching costumes with Marvey, who ends up getting castrated in his place. It seems to be working though and eventually not only does he seem to escape the plans that have been laid for him, but he seems to break down and disappear within the narrative – fade into the background of a slew of anecdotes, or short “side-stories” during the last pages of the book.