Beyond the Rainbow

[alice wellintown]

A wonderful reading and some interesting specualtions here. If we
apply Paul's definitions of "problem" we can agree that the problem is
a positive, certainly a paradox--one of the essential elements of both
satire and romance. The biographical specualtions are interesting;
some might argue that a reader can never know what an author thought
or thinks, but others might argue that the author is not the man, the
person, but a constructed persona, constructed by the author and his
readers, and that the Pynchon Industry, like the Industies that
assemble, desconstruct, re-construct other authors, has established,
at least for now, that Pynchon is known, we know what we mean when we
talk of Pynchon just as we know what we mean when we talk of
Hemingway. Certainly the rocket is, as Moby Dick (note, the name minus
the hyphen is the the whale not the book) is in Melville's romance,
Moby-Dick, the protagonist. But a romance like Moby-Dick or Gravity's
Rainbow can be said to have more than one protagonist. So, the rocket
is at least co-protagonist. Now, Slothrop, like Ismael starts off
looking like the only protagonist, but we are told again and again
that Ahab is in the wings waiting to walk on stage. When he does, he
does not push Ishmael and Queequeg off, but eventually the comedy
becomes Ahab's tragedy. Mevlille does this with a stage setting.
Pynchon brings Whiteman Blicero in in much the same manner. But what
of the white whale? What of the rocket? The picaro comedy, Slothrop's
Don Juamisms and the like are merged into the tragic and gothic
strains. This is quite a common pattern of development in American
Literature. Kesey, for example, took this as his model for Cuckoo's
Nest. Of course, the Anxiety of Infliuence is subdued, as Kesey is a
minor poet, younger than Pynchon, but still, he works with the same
material. We never lose Slothrop. No more than we lose Ishmael, but
who is obsessed with the whale or rocket shifts, even when those
obsessed with these non-human protagonists are obsessed with how other
characters can lead them to the rocket/whale  holy grail. For example,
Pointsman is obsessed with Slothrop and Ahab is obsessed with
Fedallah. The Rocket like Moby Dick (the white whale) stays with us
because it, unlike all else in the book, can not die. It is god. But
we can live with this god and live in peace if we sing the Orphic
song.


> 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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