God almighty. Gravity’s Rainbow is so good that it will blast you into the air and land you on cloud 9. Bought my dilapidated 1974 copy for only a buck at the used books store. Got my money’s worth more than any other book I own (since it’s over 800 pages), but paid the price mightily with the absence of footnotes. Like Ulysses, there’s so much going on here that no one could possibly put all the pieces together after the first read. Pynchon wanted this book to be studied, but it’s more than just an obscure puzzle. Unlike Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow has an interesting plot. You might not think so judging from the first few hundred disorientating pages because the narrative is parabolic, meaning that the final chapters are just as convoluted as the first. The plot is relatively lucid at the zenith of the parabola, where we get to follow the adventure of a man monitored by an agency that can't figure out why German rockets are landing near places where he's getting erections. Yes, erections. The man, one fugitive Slothrop, is as recklessly courageous as he is comically oblivious, making this novel just as uproariously funny as it is sexually grotesque. It’s set during an alternate history of WW2, mostly on the torn battle-plains of middle Europe. Slothrop’s looking for a specialized rocket that's trying to kill him, and he goes through a quirky series of cartoonish adventures involving all kinds of fucked up people to get there, including two of my favorites; the irate redneck Major Marvy and the sorrowfully beaten Bianca. Pynchon, while highly intelligent, has an uncanny fascination with fecal matter, incest, masochism, paranoia, and kazoos in conjunction with calculus, aerodynamics, metaphysics, chess, tarot, and kabbalah. What makes it great is that all the eccentricities fit together: imagine the madness of a war set to the antics of an erotic circus and the atmosphere would be this book.
Interpretations (spoilers):
The beauty of Gravity’s Rainbow is that both the rationality of the plot and the abstraction of the art give and take from one another, resulting in a massive paradox when taken as a whole. Not only that, but there are an awesome number of metaphors at work here, including the most obvious one- erection and ejaculation with launch and trajectory. During the climax (muffled laughter) Pynchon is making a spectacular metaphor by representing the process of life as the arc of a rocket’s trajectory, while the other half not seen represents the mysterious hauntings of the underworld, life after death, and the plot-holes in the story. But it's a double metaphor: Pynchon wanted Slothrop to represent everyone, including his readers, because everyone has a “Them” that’s out to get them and everyone is going to die because of them (I liked that he led us to believe that “Them” was literally General Electric and other industrial tycoons- so true). The rocket is coming for Slothrop, who’s sitting inside a movie theater in L.A., but often in the novel Pynchon switches the narrative from Slothrop to you, just like he does right at the end, so the rockets after you too, you who were so confused as to who was after you and failed to make sense of things, just like our paranoid protagonist. Perhaps if this book ever gets turned into a movie you will be sitting there in the theater watching the nose of it coming down to penetrate through the movie screen, and you might even be having sex with someone since you've been sexually conditioned (if anyone was jerking off during the book's climax, I really pity you). Aside from that, many other interpretations abound, including an interesting take on its structure that involves a tarot deck, the kabbalah, and the idea that gravity’s rainbow can be a metaphor for the Periodic Table (the rainbow a metaphor in itself; f=ma). It’s really a horny scientist-occultist-paranoiac’s dream book. Clearly original and unlike anything I’ve read before.
I should elaborate on my interpretation of the plot as well. It may be wrong, but this is the only way it makes sense to me. In London Slothrop was attracting the rockets to wherever he was, not the other way around. The Imipolex G in his penis made him a target- all the launches were during his orgasms (good thing he never stayed anywhere too long). His monitors were studying the phenomenon because they didn't understand it... Pointsman and Jamf weren't in on it together. Jamf was working for GE and hence the Nazis, while Pointsman was with the allies. Once they discovered that Slothrop's penis had a mysterious power they went through hell to castrate him, but castrated Marvy by mistake. The allies were after the Schwarzommando (aka Enzian) but they should have been after Blicero (aka Weissman), whom they thought was dead. Blicero had the rocket with Imipolex G, not Enzian, and he was the one who fired the 00001 that killed Slothrop in the end, thus proving to all his corporate sponsors that a mind control agenda using manufactured rockets and skin injections was dreadfully possible. The Counterforce was unsuccessful in locating Slothrop, so they snuck into corporate dinner parties and made obnoxious scenes. The allies didn't necessarily lose, the technology just fell into the wrong hands, the Nazi Blicero who sold the world. I have no idea why Goddfried had to be inside the rocket to find Slothrop. It probably had to do the with the metaphysical dynamics of Imipolex G. It's all pretty sad, but many of the classic sci-fi novels have similar conclusions to show us how technology can be dangerous.
Most memorable parts:
toilet diving scene
slothrop chasing the thief
SS rocket factory mayhem
orgy on the anubis ship
when slothrop becomes the hero-pig
the story of lyle bland
last few pages
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