David Rando, Reading Gravity's Rainbow After September Eleventh:

[Dave Monroe]

>From David Rando, "Reading Gravity's Rainbow After
September Eleventh: An Anecdotal Approach," Postmodern
Culture 13.1 (2002) ... 

     Since the September Eleventh airplane attacks on
the World Trade Center, it is difficult to imagine
American readers responding to the opening sentences
of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in quite the
same ways as they had previously. "A screaming comes
across the sky. It has happened before, but there is
nothing to compare it to now" (3). Suddenly these
famous words are thrust into new contexts, and yet, I
would like to argue that the idea of "comparison"
still pervades our ways of understanding. Who can
forget the horrifying doubling and déjà vu of the
images of the second airplane crashing into the second
tower? That scene of doubled impact and destruction at
once creates the desire for and, with its sense of
radical singularity, denies bases of comparison.
Pynchon recognizes that in the face of traumatic or
devastating events we seek refuge in the comfort of
comparison, in our sense that what bears similarity
offers solace. 
     Indeed, the events of September Eleventh were
first brought into sense through frames of comparison,
or metaphor. Immediately, evocations of the attack on
Pearl Harbor shot through the media.... helped to
locate September Eleventh within an archetypal
American loss-of-innocence story. But Pearl Harbor did
not offer a metaphor for thinking about the
vulnerability of a major metropolis, terms that newly
pressed themselves upon the imagination. For this
reason, it is fitting that New York Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani was the first person to invite comparisons
between New York and London during the Battle of
Britain.... how tenaciously the mechanism of
comparison occurs to us in the light of contemporary
events and how transparently we appeal to the
relations between events, texts, and contexts. 
     In the wake of September Eleventh, the questions
that literary criticism has asked about the precise
nature of the relationship between text and context,
events and history, and narrative and culture take on
a new kind of urgency. In this essay, I would like to
take seriously Mayor Giuliani's suggestion that we
turn to texts and history in order to make sense of
current events. Specifically, I want to set the
discourse of childhood and innocence in Gravity's
Rainbow in dialogue with the proliferation of
post-September Eleventh anecdotes about children who
selflessly break their piggy banks to contribute to
relief funds.... What is the relationship between
these anecdotes of innocence and charity, the
devastation at the World Trade Center site, and the
United States' present military campaign in
Afghanistan? How are anecdotes such as these poised
in an important position at the nexus of event,
narrative, and history? How can understanding these
recent anecdotes help us to understand Pynchon's
sexualized depiction of children in Gravity's Rainbow?
Conversely, what can Pynchon's discourse of innocence
in that novel teach us about how the recent piggy-bank
anecdotes do cultural work in our current war?
Finally, how might a new understanding of the function
of anecdotes in general contribute to broad efforts in
literary criticism to comprehend the connections
between texts and history? In the process of
addressing such questions, I mean to develop a space
within anecdotes and the anecdotal where texts and
history can have demonstrable and substantial
connections in literary criticism through specific
metonymical and metaphorical devices, where other
historicist methodologies only project metaphorical
connections. Anecdotes, which form at the very skin
between history and narrative, may illuminate such
connections by points of contact as well as by
comparison.
     The status of children in Gravity's Rainbow
continues to be a problem for critics. How do we
account for Pynchon's graphic sexualization of
children such as Bianca, Geli Tripping, or Ilse
Pökler? .... 

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v013/13.1rando.html

Thanks, Thomas.  If anyone needs the full text ...  


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