GRGR (33) - The Glass Sphere

[Dave Monroe]

Since wartime innovations like the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden, and
other devastation and gruesomely systematic genocide attempts frame the end of the
war, Gravity's rainbow begins with a supernatural kind of affective expression:

    A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there is nothing
to compare it to now.

The screaming is incomparable even though it has occured before.  Like the Holocaust
or slavery, its effect is beyond description.  It is a paradoxically voiceless kind
of scream.  This ongoing real war does not accumulate history that can be traced.
Pynchon tells of a reality that can only be conveyed in painful metaphor....

"It is too late"--there can only be belatedness in the face of an undeniable
horror.  Even the evacuation from the bombing appears to be merely for show.  And
yet in this "total lackout," no spectacle can be seen, only "great invisible
crashing."  It is as if the enclosure were collapsing in a darkness that precludes
the visualizing of these collapses.  "The fall of a crystal palace" can be felt but
not seen....

Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 1999) pp. 202-3.

jbor wrote:

> One can't really *depict* apocalypse, after all, can one?