Confronting the Monolith

[Dave Monroe]

Hamill, John.  "Confronting The Monolith:
   Authority And The Cold War In Gravity's Rainbow."
   Journal of American Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3
   (December 1999): 417-36.

Abstract

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we
consider it as an historical novel of a special kind,
is the way in which “great” political leaders are
barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king,
and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies
history. The explanation here is paradoxically
historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a
constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the
Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in
its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of
authority in the Cold War context has changed.
Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the
modus operandi for authority in the novel and they
parallel the historical formation of Systems theory
and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This
development represents, in the technologies and the
discourses of the military and political strategists,
a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and
threat of Communism. The series of characters we
encounter within the novel reflects different forms of
entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the
authority of the System in what John Johnston has
called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity.
Containment and counterforce become metaphors which
Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral
righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their
defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege
from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is
interested not in the great historical figure, but in
the relation of the individual to the System,
militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

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