Gravity's Rainbow at 50
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Gravity’s Rainbow
By Thomas Pynchon
Viking Press, 1973
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
Those are the first two lines of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow released fifty years ago last month. I have published several belated reviews in these pages. Although “too late” (for many humans) is a refrain in the novel, I believe it’s never too late to urge people to read what I think is the most important American novel published in, yes, the last fifty years.
The screaming is the sound of rockets raining down on London in World War II. Nothing to compare that sudden death from the air to then, but now we can see daily photographs of the death and destruction rocketing down on Ukraine. Palestinians occasionally launch rockets into Israel, but Ukraine seems to be the first extended rocket and drone war, asymmetrical until recently when Ukraine began sending armed drones into Russia. We don’t need Gravity’s Rainbow to feel the horror of death without warning, but on this anniversary of its publication we would do well to read or read again a novel that predicted and continues to illuminate fundamental forces of our own time.
Writing about 1945 in the late 60s and early 70s, Pynchon was using the then recent past to comment on what he called, in German, the “Raketen-Stadt,” the rocket city or state that the United States had become—with the assistance of German engineers who launched the V-2s--in response to Russian success with rocketry that could deliver nuclear payloads across vast spaces. In the novel, Hiroshima is alluded to only on a found sheet of paper, but Pynchon imagines a potential future apocalypse when the novel ends with a rocket bearing down on a movie house in Los Angeles. For the patrons, it is too late.
Perhaps MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction—has made nuclear holocaust unlikely, but rocket terror persists in Ukraine where fear of guided and random missiles has displaced millions from their homes and country. Pynchon wrote about that, too. The beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow describes in affecting detail the nighttime evacuation of children from London. The rest of the novel follows displaced other Europeans, even Americans, Africans, and Russians who wander through what Pynchon calls the borderless “Zone” beneath the rockets’ paths. The characters are like the London children, Hansels and Gretels out too late in the night without their happy ending.
Gravity’s Rainbow is a massive novel dense with historical, economic, political, social, and religious analyses of how rocket states came to be, but Pynchon’s most profound perspectives are anthropological and ecological. The “World just before men,” Pynchon writes, was “Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was such a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures.”
Primitive technology was invented to promote life, extend life. But, for Pynchon, the rise of technology—like the thrust of the rocket escaping gravity—ultimately led in the twentieth century to new and efficient and uncanny ways to “promote death.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, rockets are not just advanced weapons but metaphors for all corporate industrialism that mines the coal and pumps the oil to build towers and fuel machines that seem to promise rising above the “living critter” planet Earth to achieve a high-tech transcendence (which some of our grandiose billionaires are proposing now with off-planet life).
The climactic event and symbolic summary of the novel is the launch of a German rocket with a young man inside, an act of murder and suicide. Humans have been committing murder for millennia. It’s the suicide that our industries have now enabled on a planetary scale that is new. For Pynchon, World War II was just an accelerated incident in humans’ long-running global war on nature. If this seems a truism to all but Republican lawmakers now, remember please that Pynchon was writing his radical environmental novel five decades ago. It is indeed getting late here on this planet heated by that coal and oil.
And rockets are still screaming across the sky from east to west. Ironically and tragically, Putin is using the Nazis’ rocket power to, he has said, “de-Nazify” the government of Ukraine that is led by a Jew. Like the Nazi characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, Putin uses phallic rockets to demonstrate Russian macho mastery and to reclaim territory for the sacred Russian empire that was dissolved when the Soviet Union fell. Pynchon anticipated rocket mysticism, showing through his characters’ erotic and spiritual obsessions that rockets are more than weapons. They are symbols of godlike patriarchal power like the Biblical plagues sent raining down from heaven.
Lest I scare you away with the profound gravity of Gravity’s Rainbow, know please that it is also an encyclopedia or rainbow of humor, what scholars call “the carnivalesque.” Pynchon includes a Huck Finn-like Innocent Abroad as protagonist, a large gallery of fools and frauds, slapstick chase scenes, movie parodies, Catch-22 absurdities and Monty Python stupidities, as well as bawdy songs, Proverbs for Paranoids, and word play worthy of Nabokov, with whom Pynchon studied. I should also mention goofy conspiracies and plenty of sex scenes to please just about every taste (and tastelessness). But be not fooled: the hurdy-gurdy carnival is present to conduct you into the big tent, where gravity-defying high-wire acts of human rocketry occur.
In the space I have I cannot begin to describe Pynchon’s plot in which several main characters from different nations quest for the mysterious rocket 00000, a kind of Grail in the rocket state. As in a medieval romance, the characters move through settings both super-realistic and magical and ultimately hallucinatory. Some get close to the 00000, but they are too late. It has been launched.
I also can’t summarize or even list all of the essays and books that have been written about Gravity’s Rainbow, ways of supporting my assertive thesis about its importance, both philosophical and literary. But I will insist against some critics that Pynchon doesn’t belong only to the professors (like I was) and that the novel, sometimes called heartless, is deeply empathetic to the victims of rocket states, those who Pynchon called the “preterite,” the unchosen.
I can mention forerunners such as Moby-Dick and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and coeval admirers such as the systems-influenced novelists Joseph McElroy and Don DeLillo, whose Underworld is the closest in orientation and achievement to Pynchon’s novel. For literary influence, I can report that Gravity’s Rainbow is referred to within four of the most ambitious American novels of recent decades: Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. If you have read and appreciated one or more of these science-influenced mega novels, consider that it may be time to go back to the writer Powers called “Pop Pynchon” and Wallace called the “patriarch.”
If you are somehow unacquainted with any of Pynchon’s work, avoid the sloppy Inherent Vice and begin with the short satiric novel The Crying of Lot 49 or the long humorous ramble of Mason & Dixon. But the one that drills deepest and rises highest, the one that comes closest (Ukraine) and spreads furthest (the whole planet), the one that delves furthest into past and future, the one that could alter your brainscape (if it’s like mine) is Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s not too late. In the final words of the novel, “Now everybody--”
Tom LeClair has written about Gravity’s Rainbow in The Art of Excess and in his most recent novel/memoir/photobook Passing Again, from which this essay is adapted.