They , the Rocket, death, the inanimate

[Doug Millison]

"[...] Pynchon's early and middle works, from V. through The Crying of Lot
49 (1966) to a culmination in Gravity's Rainbow (1973), express a vision
similar to Foucault's of a controlling regime just behind events and just
outside perception or consciousness, which facelessly directs history,
providing the possibility of unifying widely dispersed phenomena. In V.,
Stencil pursues evidence of Victoria Wren, Veronica the rat, the kingdom of
Vheissu, and the theft of Botticelli's Birth of Venus all as pieces of what
he conceives of as "the century's master cabal" (226). Throughout his
paranoid quest for order and Benny Profane's non-paranoid reveling in
disorder and disconnectedness, the evidence accumulates that, whether under
the sign of V. or not, the century's hallmark is the declension from the
animate to the inanimate, from the human to the mechanical, from the living
to the dead. In Lot 49, the history of postage stamps, the decimal calendar
of the French Revolution, Jacobean tragedy, a World War II battle in Italy,
and a southern Californian real estate development all give evidence of the
force called Tristero, and Tristero, whether it exists or not, points to a
pattern of dispossession in America. In Gravity's Rainbow, behind the war,
behind the oppositions mobilized to make war, behind the nation-states of
Germany, England, the U.S.S.R., and the United States, Slothrop, Enzian,
and others see another order of force, designated sometimes as They, which
may have staged the war in order to expand their markets or in order to
find supplies and uses for their technologies. "They" are linked throughout
with the chemical company I.G. Farben, as well as with Krupp, General
Electric, Shell Oil, and other multinational conglomerates (Tölölyan
53-64).[18] As the narrative voice says, "The real business of the War is
buying and selling. The murder and the violence are self-policing, and can
be entrusted to non-professionals.... The true war is a celebration of
markets" (105).

22.	In Gravity's Rainbow, They are associated with a historical plot
that leads to death, particularly through the instrumentality of science, a
descent as in V. from the human to the inanimate and the mechanical, the
controlled. In V. the disassembly of the Bad Priest of Malta--with her
glass eyes, gold teeth, sapphire navel, and artificial limbs--provides a
striking instance of the replacement of the human by the inanimate. The
Rocket in Gravity's Rainbow stands as the realization, the emblem, and the
acme of this urge to death: at the end of the novel, the young Gottfried,
encased in the tip of the V-2, becomes one with the Rocket as it rises and
then falls to earth, bringing death both to him and to those on the ground
below. Each of the controlling phenomena in the early and middle works of
Pynchon--V., Tristero, They--eludes or remains on the horizon just outside
full consciousness or complete apprehension. Still, each novel suggests
that these structures have directed the course of history and continue to
provide its motive force. In relation to all such anonymous forms of
historical control, human beings take on the attributes of automata whose
behavior, movements, even desires and thoughts may have been programmed or
controlled.[19] [...]

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/12.1palmeri.html

...a rather straightforward assertion of some interpretations of these
Pynchon works that, depending on who puts them forward, tend to be
considered outrageous or otherwise marginalised by certain handwringers in
this forum.