The Literature Book

297

Calm/restlessness

Th

e^ r

ain

bow

imp

lies^ ca

lm^ after^ a^ downpour. (^) Ho
weve
r, (^) Py
nch
on’
wa s
rtim
e^ and
postwar
world is perpetu
ally (^) r
estl
ess
.
Harmo
ny/entropy
See also: Moby-Dick 138– 45 ■ Les Misérables 166 – 67 ■ War and Peace 178–81 ■ Ulysses 214–21 ■ Catch-22 276 ■
Infinite Jest 337
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
The central symbol in the book is
the German V-2 rocket, an image
both of transcendence and of a
frightening, unknown future. The
book’s opening words describe the
sound of a V-2 hitting London: “A
screaming comes across the sky.”
Symmetrically, at the end of the
novel, a rocket is about to detonate.
In between, numerous plots and
subplots propel the characters
through a succession of wildly
improbable scenarios, in which
paranoia and fear of death are
often rendered with black humor.
The book’s main plot lines
revolve around the quest by several
characters to uncover the secret of
a V-2 rocket numbered 00000. One
such character is an American
GI, Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual
encounters in London occur at the
precise sites where V-2 rockets will
fall. Slothrop later rescues a Dutch
girl named Katje, who is a double
agent, from an octopus conditioned
to attack her. The octopus has been
trained by Laszlo Jamf, who had
conducted Pavlovian experiments
on Slothrop as a child and is the
inventor of an “erotic” plastic from
which a capsule in rocket 00000 is
made. When the rocket is launched,
a young boy, Gottfried, is strapped
inside this capsule: he is the sex
slave of the book’s Nazi arch villain,
who by sacrificing Gottfried seeks
to transcend his mortality.
Such bizarre scenes are shot
through with a profusion of ideas,
including allusions to science
and philosophy. The reader, like
Slothrop, struggles to find meaning.
Paranoid truth seeking
All systems by which we might
make sense of our lives, whether
they are scientific, mystical,
religious, or political, are described
at a certain point in the novel as
paranoid. Against human attempts
at rationalization, Pynchon posits
a complex reality in which events
occur according to inscrutable
laws—while perhaps entertaining
the idea that true paranoia lies in
precisely such a world view.
In his short story “The
Secret Integration” (1964), white
schoolchildren with a black
imaginary friend experience adult
racism, after which their dreams
“could never again be entirely
sa fe.” Gravity’s Rainbow traces
a parallel loss of innocence on
a massive scale, and Pynchon
no doubt relished the idea that
reading itself could no longer be
entirely safe after his virtuoso
feat of fictional black magic. ■
The V-2 rocket is a key presence
in Gravity’s Rainbow, which features
a project to assemble one, while
embracing a profusion of chaos,
perversity, and paranoia.
The sheer scale and complexity of
Gravity’s Rainbow make it notoriously
resistant to interpretation. It is possible
to tease out themes by looking at the
symbolic implications of the rainbow,
and their opposites, and pinpointing
their relevance to the novel.
Or
de
r^ in
the
nov
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ne
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d^ but
leaks^ away,^ throu
gh (^) e
ntr
op
y.
Th
e^ r
ain
bow
can^ be (^) bo
th (^) a
n
ar
c
an
d^ a
half

• hidden (^) c
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  Un
  f^ nis
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  US_296-297_GravityRainbow.indd 297 08/10/2015 13:10