Beyond the Rainbow

[eburns at gmail.com]

"By such an anachronism Pynchon intentionally avoids the (unconscious) 
fetishization of destructive up-to-date technology, which might have 
been the problem with GR."

The problem!? That's the best part!!


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-----Original Message-----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
Sender: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 14:26:55 
To: pynchon -l<pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Beyond the Rainbow


The problem with GR might be, that the Rocket is the novel's master 
significant, so to speak. You could also say that inside the 
international socio-technical network in the final days of WW II Pynchon 
pictures, the V2 takes the role of the main protagonist. While we lose 
Slothrop along the way, the Rocket stays with us from first to last 
page. And although Pynchon, there's no question about this, is 
intentionally writing furiously against the military-industrial complex, 
the book's high level of poetic energy also results from Pynchon's 
fascination, even obsession with destructive hightech air engineering. 
The novel ascribes to the Rocket "a Max Weber charisma" (p. 464), but 
for Weber charisma is strictly personal. This can, of course, be read as 
satire, but I think those critics who spoke re GR of "the technological 
sublime" were right. So were the readers who considered it to be a 
'cyberpunk' manifesto. From the perspective of Pynchon 2 (the one since 
VL), Gravity's Rainbow thus may appear to be infected by the 
avantgarde's fascist involvement with techno-rapidity, especially in 
Italian Futurism, which gets dissed in AtD. And that's, imo, the reason 
the question of technology is played down in VL by making a simple 
pistol the crucial weapon of the book. Do also note that the the balloon 
travels of the Chums of Chance are, inside the historical timespan of 
AtD, already a little anachronistic. New and fresh such a setting was 
around 1800 when narrations like "Des Luftschiffers Gianozzo Seebuch" by 
Jean Paul appeared on the market.
By such an anachronism Pynchon intentionally avoids the (unconscious) 
fetishization of destructive up-to-date technology, which might have 
been the problem with GR.