BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

[János Széky]

65 (Viking)

"If anybody could've save the harp, betcha Jack could (...) might Jack have
kept it from falling , violated gravity somehow?"

One of the secret topical games in GR, left there to discover:

Slothrop loses his "silver harp" here (and descends to the underworld like
Orpheus; one of P's tacit, non-naming cultural-historical allusions).

Jack Kennedy, one of the very few faultlessly Good Guys in the novel
(belonging to the Catholic/Mediterranean side by the way) might have kept
it from falling, violating gravity (the central concept).

He finds the harp in Part Four, Section 1 (622V), and here Pynchon comes a
step closer to naming, quoting from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus ("And though
Earthliness forget you").

And near the very end the harp reemerges again, now complete with the name,
in the subchapter Orpheus Pits Down His Harp (754V). And here the
protagonist is Nixon, Kennedy's antithesis, the Absolute Bad Guy at the
time of writing. Gravity prevails, the Rocket falls.
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