Beyond the Rainbow
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 2 08:44:47 CDT 2011
Ashas been said of Milton's Satan, Milton kinda loves him.
Evil can be charismatic, as, by analogy, the Rocket can be. Pynchon indicts the Rocket with that line and others
and lets us know where he--we---stand. Yet, we are all "half-in-love-with-....death.
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 9:26 AM
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.
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