Re: V2 to Bomarc: Reading Gravity’s Rainbow in Context

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Joshua Comyn writes:

 > From the perspective of /Gravity’s Rainbow/, our destiny as subjects 
is a kind of entombment quite indistinguishable from the entombment of a 
boy whose name means ‘God’s peace’ in the S-Gerät attached to the 00000 
rocket, an entombment that performs an ironic binding through the Rocket 
to a fullness of meaning that can only ever be God’s; a binding that is 
also—given the historical nature of this particular God—a binding to 
death./ But such a death, a death brought about by total thermonuclear 
war, is, as Daniel Grausum has argued, unwitnessable, and therefore 
impossible to narrate insofar as all narratives must by their very 
nature entail endings.And /Gravity’s Rainbow/ does in fact not narrate 
any such ending, only its approach—the approach of the Rocket as it 
‘reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, 
the last delta-t’. <

Still think that the name "Gottfried" is meant to be a bilingual pun - 
"Gott" (god) gets "fried" - and that the character refers to the real 
boy in the rocket, about whom Pynchon likely knew via his Bomarc job.

"Part of the oxygen is routed through Gottfried's Imipolex shroud. In 
one of his ears, a tiny speaker has been surgically implanted. It shines 
like a pretty earring. The data link runs through the 
radio-guidance-system, and the words of Weissmann are to be, for a 
while, multiplexed with the error-corrections sent out to the Rocket. 
But there's no return channel for Gottfried to the ground. The exact 
moment of his death will never been known ..." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 751)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothar_Sieber

 > ... Reconstruction of the flight, which lasted 55 seconds and 
travelled a horizontal distance of 7 km, calculated an average speed of 
about 800 km/h, thus about 14 km were traveled in total. It is assumed 
that during the vertical drop, with the engine firing, Sieber 
inadvertently also became the first human to break the sound barrier.

Things went well at first, but one of the four jettisonable Schmidding 
boosters failed to release and the Natter got out of control. At 500 m 
(1,600 ft) the cockpit canopy pulled off as Sieber intended to bail out. 
He was instructed by radio to keep trying to shake off the booster, but 
inside the clouds he lost orientation as he presumably did not rely on 
the automatic radio guiding system which was designed to lead Natters 
with inexperienced pilots to the heights in which allied bombers 
operated. The Natter probably turned on its back and flew horizontally 
rather than climb, thus accelerating which Sieber may have 
misinterpreted for a steep nose dive, pulling harder on the thrust 
rudder which made things even worse. Also, the brake parachute did not 
open due to the booster still being stuck. When the Natter left the 
clouds, Sieber likely noticed his situation and tried to bail out, but 
due to the high speed he managed only to get out with his left arm and 
leg before the violent impact ... <

After all, Gravity's Rainbow is - also - a historical novel.



On 21.02.2016 11:03, Mark Kohut wrote:
> https://www.pynchon.net/articles/10.7766/orbit.v2.2.62/#bibd2e888
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
> -
> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>

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