To cut to the chase ...

[Dave Monroe]

... which, unfortunately, I might not have time to do just now, but ...
but situtate Gravity's Rainbow in its own time, its own place, its own
situation, perhaps, in the lineage of various postwar productions set
in, and, presumably, "about," World War II, say, to name some obvious
ones, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s
Slaughterhouse-Five, or, again, films such as Stalag 17, The Great
Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Catch-22 (again ...), Kelly's Heroes or (again
...) Slaughterhouse-Five.     In what sense can these productions, these
novels, these films, be said to be "about," to "represent," perhaps,
that War after that War to End All Wars?

They seem just as much to be "about," to "reperesent," even, wars after
that War after that War, inevitabley so, as they are in the wake,
indeed, in the midst of, those wars, say, the Cold War, the Korean War
(the highest recorded temperature of the Cold War?  Maybe even throw in
M*A*S*H ...), all those postwar wars of decolonization, Algeria, for the
French, and, of course, Vietnam (for the French and then for us).   And
do recall not only that Winston Churchill coined teh phrase "The Iron
Curtain," but that JFK positioned himself as WC (making DDE Neville
Chamberlain?), and teh USSR Nazi Germany (if not quite NK as AH) ...

More than anything else, such cultural productions are first and
foremost 'about," and, certainly, of, their own times, places,
situations, in short, contexts (this can be seen acutely in so-called
"science" or speculative fiction, in whatever media, a-and one might
even consider Gravity's Rainbow to partake of the genre, "a world laid
over" our own, or whatever [sorry, citation not handy]).  And more than
just Vietnam was going on as Gravity's Rainbow was gestating (for rather
longer than the nine months over which it largely unfolds) ...

No, never claimed Gravity's Rainbow was primarily "about" the Holocaust,
though it certainly does, by virtue of its setting, because of its
setting, acknowledge, and, I think, responsibly so, more so than many of
the above examples.  And note that Hiroshima (not to mention Nagasaki)
go even less mentioned (albeit no less alluded to), despite the
increasingly obvioulsly nuclear-apocalyptic concerns of the novel.  Not
that anti-semitism had necessarily subsided in Pynchon's, GR's America
(not to mention world), but ...

... but that Civil Rights movement, that Black Nationalism, that Gay
Rights movement, the ecology movement, campus unrest, civil unrest, yr
various subcultures (how does GR phrase it? again, will get around to
specific citations ...), Vietnam, of course, eventually, Watergate
(what's the timetable on that, again?  How far would things have gotten
by the time TRP had to put GR to bed?  Certainly, RMN's legal
difficulties do seem alluded to at the end of GR) were perhaps more
immediately of concern ...

... but I gotta go, will be back ...