Actually about Gravity's Rainbow

[David Casseres]

The other night I was leafing through Gravity's Rainbow and found a 
passage I'd read a few weeks back: about p. 410 or so in the Penguin 
edition, the part about Kekule and his dream of the snake with its tail 
in its mouth, and the discovery of the cyclic structures of the 
aromatics.  I had learned this story as a boy, and it was a heroic 
creation myth about modern science, the harnessing of the unconscious to 
yield wonderful insights about nature.

Pynchon, wouldn't you know, has a more interesting idea; to him this is a 
creation myth of Them.  It's the perversion of the integrative vision of 
the collective unconscious, the Dreaming Serpent, the vision of a closed, 
cyclic existence where loss is restored and life is constantly renewed, 
into a crummy, prosy bit of technology, feeding into the birth of the IG 
and the whole evil empire of modern organic chemistry.  It's 
science-bashing at a level I usually object to, but boy is it powerfully 
argued in this passage!

So, my question:  where else does Pynchon give us a creation myth?  None 
come to my mind; strikingly, there is no creation myth offered for the 
Rocket.  Things like the Rocket, and the Schwartzkommando, usw., are 
mostly already there at the point where Pynchon starts telling their 
stories, even when he starts back in the past.  Is he just not very 
interested in the origins of these things?


Cheers,
David