That “whinnying” is a typical Pynchonian touch, suggesting a distressed horse and exemplifying the animate-inanimate theme. When Katje escapes, the narrative slides back to the present, where Osbie, smoking some mushroom fragments and “lost in a mooning doper’s smile”, listens to Prentice describe why he carries an old-fashioned, heavy Mendoza pistol rather than the standard-issue Sten. Pirate says it’s his “crotchet,” a word with many etymological resonances, another Pynchon trademark.
Crotchet in this context means eccentricity, and is the root of the more familiar ‘crotchety’, but it also means hook, and it seems to set Katje off thinking about her ancestor, Frans Van Der Groov, who exterminated dodoes in Dutch Mauritius in the 17th century using his heavy haakbus, i.e. hook-gun, an old-fashioned weapon, but Frans said he didn’t mind “the extra weight, it was his crotchet”. The slaughter of the dodoes has obvious genocidal resonances and, as well as the Holocaust, reminds us of the earlier genocide of the Hereros. In due course, we will also learn that the rocket-battalion commander is actually Weissmann, who has adopted the SS code name ‘Blicero’, meaning White Death.
Next, we fade back out to Osbie chatting with Pirate, who says he doesn’t know what the filming is all about, but it’s “something that involves a giant octopus.” Then we cut to ‘The White Visitation’ where Grigori floats in a tank, watching a projector screen:
“In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders…”
So the episode ends with the same words used to describe the film being watched as were used to describe it being made, giving the episode a circular structure and highlighting the numerous correspondences, resonances, doublings and synchronicities: The episode also connects the two ends of a rocket’s journey, the firing site in Holland and the target location of London, at both ends of which we have a captain, and so on. This multi-layered meshing of connections, presented in a fragmented, nonlinear narrative, is typical of Pynchon’s dizzyingly complex technique.
Gravity’s Rainbow is often very funny, but it’s also deeply subversive and political, presenting a dense tangle of interconnections which form a sort of hidden history of World War II and beyond. Pynchon relegates the obvious villains — the Nazis themselves — to the sidelines and instead concentrates on a number of entities lurking behind the scenes, in particular those multinational corporations who had a “good war,” who were well-placed to profit no matter which side won, companies such as Shell Oil, whose Dutch subsidiary’s headquarters had a transmitter on the roof which helped guide the rockets, built with slave labor, to London. Pynchon casts a cold eye on the connections between commerce and death:
Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.
Most sinister of all was the vast, cephalopodic IG Farben cartel, which exerted immense economic and political power, produced Zyklon B poison for the gas chambers, and had close contacts with the Standard Oil Company in the U.S. In the book, IG Farben is responsible for Imipolex G, a type of plastic used as a protective sheath around rockets, a material which plays a crucial role in connecting many of the book’s central elements. Its chemical structure, formed by manipulating polymers and aromatic rings, resembles the structure of Gravity’s Rainbow itself. The book is full of circles, rings and mandalas, and many episodes have a circular structure. It has been compared to a mosaic, or a kind of 3-D jigsaw, with no guiding picture or assurance that all the pieces are in the box.
Pynchon is often perceived as difficult, but he never appears to be saying, “Look at all this clever, complicated business which I, the Great Oz, have figured out for you.” Instead, he seems to say, “This is a bunch of highly intriguing stuff I’ve been mulling over; here, you have a go.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, They and Them are always capitalized. They are organized, in control, omniscient, pulling the levers of power behind the scenes. We are powerless, confused, out in the open, running around with our pants around our ankles and suffering from the condition that is perhaps most associated with Pynchon, paranoia. Pynchon outlines a number of Proverbs for Paranoids: “If They can get you asking the wrong questions, They don’t have to worry about the answers”.
Pynchon is famously erudite; after studying both engineering and English literature at Cornell University, he worked as a technical author for Boeing on projects such as the BOMARC missile. Boeing, which he reportedly dubbed “the kite factory,” may have provided Pynchon with the engineer’s quadrille paper on which he hand-wrote Gravity’s Rainbow and certainly provided the model for Yoyodyne, the defense contractor featured in Pynchon’s earlier novel, The Crying of Lot 49, in which he explored the concept of entropy and information theory, in a lysergic melding of technology, conspiracy, paranoia, and the quest for patterns and meaning.
Lot 49 reads like a morose meditation on how the 1960s, having escaped the monochrome world of the 1950s, bloomed into full Technicolor flower, driven by pop music, sexual liberation, and psychedelia, only to turn into a bad trip in the wake of the JFK assassination. Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby could easily have been Pynchon characters come to life, embodying that shadowy nexus of government, organized crime, espionage, and political assassination.
After Gravity’s Rainbow came a long wait, during which rumors swirled and anticipation built to fever pitch. Pynchon broke the silence in 1990 with Vineland, possibly his most accessible yet most underrated work, its exuberant narrative taking the reader on an white-water raft ride through the cultural detritus of the 1980s, cramming in rock music, Godzilla, unsuccessful kamikaze pilots, mall culture, machine-gun toting female ninjas crashing Mafia weddings, and a thousand fast-food variations, including the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple and the Galaxy of Ribs.
The book begins in California in 1984, with affable aging hippy Zoyd Wheeler, a man whose ideals and sensibilities are firmly rooted in the 1960s, waking up to morning in Ronald Reagan’s America. Vineland follows the ‘Nixonian Reaction’ against the 1960s through to the 1980s when campus protesters have been supplanted by business-minded proto-yuppies, aspiring only to designer suits and stock options and perfectly happy with “the whole Reagan program”: “dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past”.
However, in assessing the ultimate failure of the various revolutions of the 1960s to consolidate the forward progress they had made, Pynchon directs a lot of anger and frustration at weaknesses within the 1960s movement itself. He alternately satirizes and sentimentalizes the decade, sometimes simultaneously, as when he notes how TV was used as a tool to ridicule, undermine and ultimately negate the 1960s.
“Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation,” Isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it — but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap….”
Vineland soon developed a reputation as an aberration amongst Pynhcon’s works, a sort of runt of the literary litter, and came to be regarded as Pynchon-lite. Some critics echoed Greil Marcus’s famous reaction to Dylan’s Self Portrait album: “What is this shit?” Pynchon’s more academic and intellectual readers may not have cared for all the low-brow pop-cultural references. What had happened to the sprawling epic Pynchon had been rumored to be working on, they wondered, based on the story the British surveyor and astronomer team who’d given their names to the line separating the American North from South?
That book, Mason & Dixon was eventually published in 1997 and contained Pynchon’s latest curveball: The entire novel was written in 18th century syntax and grammar, with heavy sprinklings of odd punctuation. Many impatient reviewers didn’t take the trouble to acclimate to it and wrote it off as a gimmick. But the novel possibly rivals Gravity’s Rainbow in scope and complexity, and displays the classic Pynchon prose — rhythmic as jazz, smooth as a rhapsody. In a sense, it restored Pynchon’s critical reputation after what Harold Bloom had called the “disaster” of Vineland and also reinvigorated the sense of excitement and expectation attending a new Pynchon novel.
Pynchon doesn’t have a serious rival for the title of the ultimate cult writer. His material, methods, style, and unique narrative voice, combined with his poetic prose, dark sense of humor, and unbridled sense of fun, have given him an undentable aura. Grappling with Pynchon’s work can be daunting, its convoluted complexity making any attempt to impose a coherent meaning on it seems like wrestling a huge Russian Doll which wandered into one of those telepods from The Fly only to be merged with a Rubik’s Cube someone had left lying in the corner. But time and again, Pynchon warns against getting hung up on meaning, and he does it with such verve and elegance that it leaves you reeling. Here’s Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, just beginning to succumb to paranoid panic, driven by the accelerating sense that he is the target of some sort of conspiracy, that They are out to get him:
He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end. He just runs.
Pynchon is full of passages like that: you read them and realize that in the little cloakroom of your heart, where you hang all the things that make life worthwhile, unique, and enjoyable, another hook has just been occupied. In this celebrity-obsessed age, fixated on superficiality, we need him more than ever. Cast aside synthetic substitutes, junk food for the soul, and take a bite of the pungent, organic mushroom offered up by the man from Oyster Bay, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.