Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s manic schizophrenic novel, originally titled ‘Mindless Pleasures’, is a quasi-sequel to his previous work V, which had appeared in 1963 to literary acclaim. In V, Herbert Stencil raced across Malta, New York, the Sudan and German South-West Africa, hunting for a lady indicated by the initial V, who never died and who was in some sense mechanical. Gravity’s Rainbow expands the historical framework of this premise.
In the period just after the surrender of the Nazi Reich, Tyrone Slothrup is sent into the crumbling remnants of Germany – ‘The Zone’ – to find the mysterious rocket 00000 and its cargo, the Schwarzgerät, in order to explain the mystical correspondence between his erections and the grossly phallic and destructive V-2 rockets. Yet this quest becomes a journey of self-discovery, into his forgotten history of Pavlovian conditioning that has ensnared his sexual desire to destruction and mechanical death. What isn’t in this book?
The dominatrix heroine Katje is attacked on a beach in France by a mechanical octopus called Grigori. Slothrup and a black marketer throw custard pies from a hot-air balloon into the face of a German fighter pilot. In the midst of making love, Slothrup becomes his own penis. And let’s not forget the virtuoso orgy scene with sentences as contoured as the postures of the hundred fellating protagonists. Unlike his contemporaries Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut, who knew first hand the macabre insanity they were writing about in Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5, Pynchon served in the U.S. Navy in the 50’s but never saw action. Instead, working for the Boeing in-company magazine, he accessed their archives on the V-2 rocket, and gained a boarder view of war as an institution. The search for peace out of the debris of the Second World War is helter-skelter, a pantomime of clowns and scatology, a lunatic carnival, a catherine-wheel sparking in multiple trajectories.
In the Zone, Slothrup’s identity fluctuates to the superhero Rocketman, to Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero, before dissolving under the pressure of history, language, and the threat of castration. His disappearance towards the end of the book is the literary equivalent of Lea Massari’s vanishing in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, disappearances which the reader finds hard to grasp, which threaten the reader’s own sanity. Yet although there are remarkably few battle scenes or scenes of atrocity in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s vision is not whimsical or glib. The Vietnam War, still raging when it was published in 1973, is all over the text. Slothrup heads up-river in the boat Anubis, finding not a heart of darkness, like Martin Sheen, but the military industrial production that underlies peaceful civilised society, the business deals in slaughter and the deviant sexuality that creates the phallic V-2 rocket 00000.
His World War 2 is not a straight battle between good and evil. Rather, it is the Playboy bunny scene of Apocalypse Now writ large. Pynchon’s humour is excoriating, but if nothing else, reading Pynchon is an education in the roots of the modern age and its moral ambiguity. He traces the roots of the Holocaust into the genocide of the Herero people of German South-West Africa; and he foregrounds the dubious connections between the concentration camps and big business – how IBM helped optimise administration in Auschwitz through a new system of punch-cards and IG Farben, the German conglomerate, manufactured Zyklon-B for the concentration camps at a profit. Through this, Gravity’s Rainbow opens up perspectives on our own time.
For readers accommodated to a world of tired political rhetoric, compromised international institutions, and universal indifference over African atrocities, there is a clear relevance in revealing the commerce that continues to underpin our ‘peace’. And for readers used to a world of advertising, public relations and the commodification of desire, it is clear that Slothrup’s Pavlovian conditioning has bought his compliance. What could be more revealing than the scene in which our hero, in the midst of Potsdam Peace Conference and under the nose of President Truman, sneaks in to steal a massive quantity of hash? Mindless Pleasures indeed.
by Angus Mcfadzean
