Vietnam World War II Gravity's Rainbow

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:51:26 -0400
>From: "bob mccart" <lebishar at gmail.com>
>Subject: Vietnam World War II Gravity's Rainbow
>
>
>In the Mind of P Documentary, much is mentioned often of this World War II
>as Vietnam and the the US as the aggressors just like Germany was during
>world war 2. I could see Gravitys Rainbow as an oblique reaction to 
>Vietnam,
>but I see not direct correlation or reference. What are your thought s on
>this?

I think you're right when you describe GR as "an oblique reaction to 
Vietnam". The only possible reference to the Vietnam War I can find is that 
strange passage in brackets on page 739, where someone (the narrator, the 
spokesperson for the Counterforce?) suddenly starts talking about chasing 
somebody in tunnels:

"We did manage to ambush some of them. Once we caught some in the 
Underground. It was terrible. My first action, my initiation. We chased them 
down the tunnels. We could feel their fright. When the tunnels branched, we 
had only the treacherous acoustics of the Underground to go on. Chances were 
good for getting lost. There was almost no light. The rails gleamed, as they 
do aboveground on a rainy night. [...] Two of them got away. But we took the 
rest. Between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease 
of passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood. Do you want to put this 
part in?"

A pretty dense passage, and one is not sure what the hell is going on. The 
reference to "rails" and the capitalized U in Underground might indicate 
that Pynchon is referring to the Tube in London, but the passage, with its 
reference to the years between 1966 and 1971 and its reference to "grease" 
(Vietnam slang for a hail of bullets), has always reminded me of grunts 
chasing vietcong through tunnels.

GR can't in any way be reduced to a simple parable about Vietnam. Its 
different descriptions of abuses of power and a colonial impulse run amok 
[No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred] all 
point to the same underlying historical principle, and I think that 
Pynchon's subject in GR is this general principle. He chose to write about 
WWII, but I suspect that he could have gotten the same points across by 
writing about Von Trothas Vernichtungsbefehl or WWI, or even the Vietnam 
War.
A relevant quote to this effect can be found in Pynchon's letter to Thomas 
Hirsch, quoted in David Seed's 'The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon'. 
In this letter from 1969 (during the Vietnam War and during Pynchon's 
writing of GR) Pynchon discusses his research into South-West African 
materials in chapter 9 of V. ("Mondaugen's Story"), and suddenly modulates 
into a discussion of Leibniz and Modern Analysis. He then writes:

"This may all sound irrelevant, but it's not. I don't like to use the word 
but I think what went on back in Südwest is archtypical of every clash 
between the west and non-west, clashes that are still going on right now in 
South East Asia."

Right after this, Seed says that he has "made a minor excision here at 
Pynchon's request." I suspect that this passage dealt with the war in 
Vietnam, and that Pynchon asked for the excision because he didn't want GR 
to be read as a mere parable about that inglorious war. GR is just as much 
about the "archtypical" nature of these clashes as it is about WWII or 
Vietnam.

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