Gravity's Rainbow autodidact, sorta

[Joseph Tracy]

So here is my first installment of abbreviated chapter summaries from the 1st 2 chapters of GR. Discussion is cool but what I really hope listers can help with is to correct plot summary errors  and suggest  any missing elements absolutely critical to the plot line. The point here is that when you are 400 pages into it you can kind of review the action and not lose the connective tissue or lose track of characters. Some chapters have brief comments too. More subjective, but If you think I'm way off let me know.
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A screaming  across sky   first  sonic "glimpse" of rocket from POV of soldiers evacuating downtown london  subway station  in complete darkness ominous with possibility of falling glass 

people in subway journey to narrower, roof damaged, poorer, dirty spaces on periphery of London, like trip to hell one character thinking "of course no one would save us".  Then light comes with dawn and sense of hope//life/expansion.

Pirate ( commando/spy, thief, trader, fast reactor) wakes, shoves cot to catch falling Teddy Bloat.   House is full of men living there or having come there for banana breakfast. House has greenhouse enclosed ( people in glass houses?) rooftop garden growing lots of bananas( boys w bananas  rowdy, playful (primates/animals)) Pirate comes down stairs with bananas.   Bananas: United Fruit- Dulles-Wacky humor- colonialism-monkeys- phallus-guns

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Boys making many banana foods from mead to pancakes.
Pirate also sees rocket coming from holland (possible?) in early light -incoming mail- calls about  radar. later gets call about mail to Greenwich(zero base of time).  Pirate( psychic  able to dream other's dreams, working for for Firm, is driven past americans( singing "colder than a witches tit"  song…) considers  his dream/fantasy history with  the Firm focusing on Lord Blatherard's (sanjak of Novi Pazar) adenoid which similar to War of worlds' grows to enormous size and threatens London. Pirate communicates with adenoid and as a result Blatherard is suffocated in bathtub of tapioca pudding.. 

Final line of this  adenoid passage seems worth considering: *"Prate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of ….though not from WW2, of course,. But by then the Firm was allowing Pirate only homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him. "
            comments
 Several things  are accomplished here at start of GR at the fade out of the adenoid scene. We see that Pynchon is describing WW2 London autumn of 1944 We see that the yanks have arrived with fresh energy and we see a part of military intelligence response to Hitler's attack ( particularly Rockets) that employs psychics, psychiatrists, and spies  and that is as much a response to the prevailing mythology of war( WW1, war of worlds) as to its 1944  global/  technological contours. This final sentence* tells us that there is an authoritarian mindset in the british war effort that was more prepared for the the last war than the one they face, and that along with legitimate fears, the authorities responded aggressively to paranoid delusions and so presumed to be in control and acting for the general good. The tone is lighter than in the 1st chapter but  profoundly darkened by rocket.

Py has already introduced us to 3 layers of consciousness 1) real memory and events from WW2, toned darkly and posing questions about the future( rockets are a futuristic aspect of WW2 still with scary aspect in 1973 and introduced with Von Braunn quote)  2) highly colorful boys in uniforms  with  power, liquor, toys and big bananas who are to be  major characters of narrative line  3) other dimensions of consciousness( sub…, myth ,collective un…): fear of hell in subway scene, Attack of Giant Adenoid, orgy with new messiah, internal comparison between rocket, banana, and phallus. All show a tension between experience and memory, reality and record . If there is a prevailing mythology of WW2 Pynchon seems to be mocking it, and reaching for a less contrived, less reverent (to the point of hilarity) and more frightening mythic landscape where neither evil nor delusions are a binary proposition and rockets are not just in the past.
On Jan 7, 2012, at 1:42 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> My reading history with Pynchon is odd. So is my life history, but I won't bore you with much of that. I was profoundly elsewhere during Pynchon's literary rise having left the mainstream of culture for a spiritual commune and many years of celibacy, prayer, and hard physical work.  I broke from that personal history after much heart searching and a good deal of research into church history, human history, and textual and historic analysis of the Bible. Thank american towns and universities for a great library system. Somewhere around 2000 I was given a copy of Vineland by a  good friend with  whom I played music and shared an attempt to homeschool our children, ours were no longer  home-schooled and graduating High School;  his son 11 years old. Kevin had an English masters and he gave  me Vineland because I have a weird sense of humor and because I had lived in Arcata Ca for years. 
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> So I read Vineland and found it  the funniest most intriguing and oddly structured book I had ever read, then V, then COL49 then GR, then Vineland again while participating in the p-list discussion of it.  I didn't read much Pynchon criticism apart from starting and deciding to leave off Weisenberger and some articles recommended on the P-list; thanks friends.  I then read M& D with a  tad more internet research. The first Pynchon book I truly began to study was ATD.  I found this whole multivalent inquiry and attempt at auto-didacticism  via Pynchonian digression richly satisfying, amusingly wacky, and appropriately weird  leading to books about ancient greek philosopher's, the history of fossil fuels,  and a growing knowledge of relatively underexplored European history. ATD remains my personal favorite Pynchon book but they all seem more and more like a single work.  
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> I had enjoyed and been powerfully influenced by Gravity's Rainbow but did also find it to be the most dense and difficult of P's works.  I put off a thorough second read until now.  Mike Jings translation questions inspired me to begin to read GR again while making summary notes after each segment. The quality , range and subtlety of the prose is striking me. The power with which P immerses the reader in the terror of London under aerial bombardment, while simultaneously making jokes and setting up the trajectory of his alternative history/commentary is wildly impressive. Chasing leads is incredible -the rainbow patch on black over flaming sword that looks like rocket forSHAEF, possible Crowley/Ian Fleming collaboration on luring  Rudolf Hess to Scotland. How he orchestrated all this is boggling.
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> So I will be posting some thoughts and asking some questions about Gavity's Rainbow.  I'm also going to post my chapter summaries with the hope of eliminating errors and adding absolutely crucial information. So if I get some feedback , muchos gracias. If not, sokay too.
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