Atwill, "Chemistry and Colonialism Gone Ballistic"

[Dave Monroe]

Seeing as I've managed to excavate it, and while I still have it at hand 
again, from William D. Atwill, Fire and Power: The American Space Program as 
Postmodern Narrative (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994), Chapter 6, "Chemistry 
and Colonialism Gone Ballistic: Apprehending the Mass of Gravity's Rainbow," 
pp. 117-37 ...

Few contrasts in visible authority could be greater than those between 
Mailer's style and Thomas Pynchon's.... Pynchon ... is invisible, as void of 
clear agency as the aurally passive "A screaming comes across the sky" that 
opens Gravity's Rainbow. (118)

This need to be present only by way of aftershock, the sonic boom of his 
latest literary passage ... (118)

... Thomas Pynchon has labored to disperse himself in such a way that he, 
too, is a disintegrated presence at his own time's assembly.... his "time" 
is defined and destabilized by the synthetic power of corporate technique 
focused in the metonymy of the Rocket. (118)

Where, for Mailer ... power is still situated in some nexus of government 
and business and only its application for good or evil is in question, power 
for Pynchon has become, or perhaps has always been, some protean force 
slipped beyond the site of any leveling bureaucracy.  (167)

Synthesis and control are key words in Gravity's Rainbow.  Synthesis, in its 
most straightforward sense of "putting together," "combining parts to form a 
whole," is sufficient to speak to the encyclopedic structure of Gravity's 
Rainbow, but its other denotations relating to grammar, chemistry, physics, 
and philosophy are even closer to the center of Pynchon's concerns.... (121)

Similarly, control carries with it not only the sense of power and restraint 
but also the scientific model of "controlled experiment" ....  Add to this 
the definition of control as also the term for spirits who actuate the 
utterances of a medium in a seance and the word begins to inhabit both the 
empirical and the irrational worlds. (120-1)

Pynchon's technique in Gravity's Rainbow is not unlike that of an organic 
chemist running experiments with blind controls on the synthesis of new 
compounds,  Combined in bizarre ways, the flow of information in the novel 
structurally reproduces the cognitive challenge presented by a world as 
informationally complex and relative as ours has become.  Like the world 
around us, Gravity's Rainbow bombards us with data ... with no attempt to 
prioritize, or foreground, those that are significant from those that are 
background.... The reader, searching for clues to priority, selects those 
incidents and images that conform to his or her own preexisting private 
narrative and thereby situate the novel inside a received history. (121)

And yet, despite this effort to subvert the linguisticordering of history 
inherent in any narrative, Pynchon's work does have a tacit chronometric to 
it. (121)

What is relatively stable, though extratextual, is the synchrony of its 
production.  Gravity's Rainbow is indisputably a product of all the social 
upheaval of the 1960s and can be read as countermemory, an effort by Pynchon 
to trace the genealogy of that unrest back to certain failings of 
colonialism in the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. (122)

The moment in which Pynchon wrote Gravity's Rainbow was the moment of 
America's triumph in space and America's disaster in Vietnam. (122)

... the litany of global and domestic upheaval that bombarded the airwaves 
would have had to find its way into the work. (122)

... a postmodern version of the historical novel.  George Lukacs, in The 
Historical Novel ... makes the claim that the

historical novel of today gives only an abstract prehistory of ideas and not 
the concrete prehistory of the people themselves, which is what the 
historical novel in its classical period portrayed.
   As a result [...] the distortion of historical figures or movements is at 
times inevitable; there is thus a falling away from that superb faithfulness 
to historical reality....  The direct and conceptual relationship with the 
present which prevails today reveals an immanent tendency to turn the pas 
into a parable of the present. (123)

[citing Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (trans. Hannah Mitchell and 
Stanley Mitchell.  Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963 [1937]), pp. 337-8]

... Gravity's rainbow is, at the very least, a text that finds the shape of 
[Pynchon's] world formed by the Potsdam Conference in much the same way that 
Scott located his in the battle of Culloden. (123)

... the curious application of this recovery of the historical novel by 
American novelists bent on dismantling the monolithic master narrative of 
World War II that had the United States riding nobly to the defense of 
embattled Europe ... (123)

... once the Wehrmacht dragon was slain, the literature, film, television 
scripts, and histories that were written over the next twenty years sealed 
the war hermetically inside a simplistic struggle of Cold War good and evil. 
  The Allies (read Americans) "liberated" the German people (particularly 
rocket scientists) from Nazi atrocities without ever committing any 
them,selves, while the brutal Russians "captured" other hapless scientists 
and all of Eastern Europe. (123-4)

About the time the Soviet space triumphs of the late 1950s and early 1960s 
began to shake the credibility of official stories, a new generation of war 
novels also appeared.  (124)

[e.g., Joseph Heller's Catch 22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five 
(1968)]

By treating written history as selectively distorted an interest-bound, 
these new novels inverted the concept of the historical novel as a means by 
which culture justifies the necessity of a violent past in order to bring 
about a more settled present.  The parable of the present that emerges in 
these narratives is that of an incomprehensibly grid of interpenetrating 
power running from corporation to government to military to media to school 
to home.  Paranoia and distrust of the "official story" ... (124)

This paranoia is at the heart of Gravity's Rainbow. (124)

History is a convenient fiction put in place by "Them," the elusive powerful 
who control the events of the world in part by adhering to "Proverbs for 
Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't 
have to worry about the answers" ([GR, p.] 251).  Or, failing in that, the 
chronicling of events can be hegemonic: "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" ([GR, p.] 105). 
(125)

To subvert the power of history-making Pynchon has created a novel that is, 
itself, not so much unmappable as multiply mappable.  Through its 
encyclopedic borrowing ... Gravity's Rainbow emerges as a counterhistory of 
all the doomed colonialist enterprises that culminated in World War II. 
(125)

Of all the paranoiac historical plots in Gravity's Rainbow the best one that 
can be read as Lukacs's "parable of the present," the one that perpetuates 
the privilege of the spatial over the temporal in contemporary narrative, is 
Pynchon's account of Kekule's dream of the benzene ring. (125-6)

IG Farben ... (126-7)

The entropic toll taken on the world by this new chemical industry and its 
colonial drain of human and mineral resources are as close as Gravity's 
Rainbow gets to having a thematic center. (127)

[sorry, just not up to the entire particular argument here--again, 
enticement to further reading, perhaps ...]

All the sympathetic characters, Slothrop, Mexico, Katje, Enzian, 
Tchitcherine, are given histories that have their genealogies in colonialist 
enterprises. (128)

The power of language to bring about what it utters is another version of 
the oneiric impulse. (128)

... Pynchon's Soviet version of the Cold War narrative, Tchitcherine ... 
(128)

As the best example of Max Weber's twice-cited "routinization of charisma" 
([GR, p.] 325, 364), the Kirghiz Light episode dramatizes the fleeting 
instability of authority based on the ideal of love and brotherhood.  Though 
it may flourish briefly during the decline of dynastic power, in fact can 
flourish only in moments of extreme disruption, charismatic authority soon 
falls victim to the bureaucratic necessity of administering power and 
becomes abstract and impersonal. (129)

The Kirghiz Light episode also extends the parallel between synthesizing 
fuels for the engines of imperialism and synthesizing pharmaceutical 
compounds that alter the trajectory of human pain and perception.... "... 
our little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure of nations 
..." ([GR, p.] 349).  There is more than an eerie coincidence between 
Pynchon's lines and a memo written by NASA administrator James E. Webb in 
1965 ... "Now what this may mean is that the government-industry-university 
team we have developed under the NASA system [...] might become the pattern 
needed by this nation." (130)

[quoted in Walter A. McDougall, ... from the Heavens to the Earth: A 
Political History of the Space Age (NY: Basic Books, 1985), p. 388.  This, 
by the way, seems THE book on the space race et al.]

... Slothrop shares a heritage closest to Pynchon's. (131)

This "Puritan reflex" ["of seeking orders behind the visible, also known as 
paranoia, filtering in" (GR, p. 188)] is ... a fundamental impulse 
throughout the work.  The clinical characteristics of paranoia that locate 
its debilitating effects in radical self-referentiality--in the belief that 
behind all the seeming chaos of this life there is an order to events and 
that that order is focused in all its sinister energy on the self--is this 
century's and this technocratic state's answer to Calvinism gone ballistic. 
(132)

... no longer the hand of God but the work of economically interested forces 
. (132)

The conspiracy Pynchon creates here is both centrifugal and centripetal. 
(133)

As Pynchon was writing Gravity's Rainbow, the latest version of this 
narrative of Puritan colonization and historical suppression was being 
played out in Vietnam.  Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) explored the 
figurative and literal impact of Puritan sensibility and technological 
firepower on the American psyche. (134)

[hence that line about "Christian advisers" in that Letter to Thomas F. 
Hirsch?]

The technological colonization of America is a counterhistory to the ones 
about freedom and manifest destiny, Pynchon's novel would seem to say.  Not 
THE counterhistory, just another way of organizing the material. (135)

[here see GR, p. 521, "This war was never political" to "needs which are 
understood only by the ruling elite"]

Slothrop's search, then, is for a "set of coordinates" within the whole, 
clear, depolarized space of the Zone which might lead to freedom.  If he can 
take advantage of the interim chaos before the "They" system reorganizes the 
bureaucracy in occupied Germany he might yet be free." (135)

But if we are to believe the narrator, this doesn't happen.  Something goes 
wrong; Slothrop disintegrates, scatters, and is lost to the narrator and the 
novel ... is lost to history.  Which is absolutely what he desires because 
then he cannot be appropriated ....  Pynchon does with Slothrop what he has 
attempted to do with his own life ... (136)

Gravity's Rainbow is, then, anything but apolitical, although it resists 
determining any single incoherenthistorical narrative because that power to 
make the past the concrete prehistory of the present is what perpetuates 
ideological domination.  It w as not the theology of puritanism that created 
the Rocket state ... it was the Puritans' secular professions, the economic 
and scientific expertise the had channeled ... then transferred with them to 
America because, as dissenters, traditional avenues of power ... were denied 
them in England. (136)

... the paranoia of Gravity's Rainbow is not the sinister sense of 
malevolent hands pulling strings, but rather a sense of incredibly subtle 
contingency. (137)

... the fluid dynamic of the Zone is not so much a momentary power void as 
it is a turbulent flow of multiple forces at that point of mixture where no 
clear channel is yet defined.... The Rocket state will be synthesized into 
its agent-absent ever-powerful presence, but not for a while. (137)

Weissmann's launching of Gottfried ("God's peace") in the V-2 is precursor 
to all this.  Though the crude technique exists for someone as death-driven 
as Weissmann to engineer mannedd launch out of a ballistic weapon ... "this 
ascent will be betrayed to Gravity.  But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of 
combustion that jars the soul, promises escape.  The victim, in bondage to 
falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape" ([GR, p.] 758)

.... Pynchon sees the complex pull of human gravity as too great.  Pynchon's 
apocalyptic ending seems to locate the reader in the Orpheus Theater 
watching all that ahs transpired in Gravity's Rainbow as cinema ... just as 
the last delta-t before mega-death strikes in the form of a nuclear missile. 
  there is time yet to reach out to that person next to you or to sing part 
of william Slothrop's suppressed hymn to preterition but no way to reverse 
the Newtonian [not to mention Leibnizian] calculus that has engineered 
extinction. (137)


... also chapters on Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, John Updike's 
Rabbit Redux, Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon, Tom Wolfe's The Right 
Stuff and Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star.  And I would hope the U of Georgia 
Press might show a little appreciation to our gracious hosts here for the 
conspicuous plugging of not one, but two of its obscure little gems here in 
the past twenty-four hours ...
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