Imipolex G

[Otto]

Among the remarkable essays in PN 42-43 there is Thomas Schaub's "The
Environmental Pynchon: *Gravity's Rainbow* and the Ecological context" (pp.
59-72).

Schaub writes:
"In the 1960s the material symbol of man-made linear events was plastic. In
*Gravity's Rainbow*, most of the attention Pynchon gives to plastic has to
do with chemists' development of aromatic polymers and the quasi-fictional
Imipolex G . (...) During the war the Germans made synthetic rubbers out of
styrene and butadiene and called them Buna-S and Buna-G. This is the
historical explanation." (65)

Then Schaub quotes from GR from p. 487-88 where Greta tells Slothrop:
"Someone said 'butadiene,' and I heard *beauty dying*. . . . Plastic rustled
and snapped around us, closing us in, in ghost white. They [...] dressed me
in an exotic costume of some black polymer, very tight at the waist. [...]
It felt alive on me. 'Forget leather, forget satin,' shivered Drohne. 'This
is Imipolex, the material of the future.'"

An interesting thing Schaub has put into a footnote (no. 5):
"When asked about the name "Imipolex," a colleague of mine in chemistry,
Hyuk Yu, told me the following: "Among the trade names of commodity polymers
that end with 'lex' are Marlex, Chemplex and Implex." He added, "there is
also an antidepressant called 'Imiprex,' which was patented in France in
1964, and later in the United States, in 1971." Pynchon's invented plastic
suggests his knowledge of typical polymer names, to which he added the "G"
as a historical allusion to the synthetic rubber Germans made during the
Second World War. It is even possible, as Yu's refernce to the
antidepressant suggests, that the name "Imipolex" came from Pynchon's
knowledge of pharmacology (...)" (69)