The Tarot and Gravity's Rainbow

[John Bailey]

>From my limited knowledge, the Death card is the one about destruction
as a catalyst for creation or change, and maybe keys into the von
Braun quote that opens the first part of the book.
The Tower, on the other hand, is bad all the way down. Signifies utter
ruin, tragedy in the dramatic sense, physical calamity, destruction
without an internally redeeming element. In Pynchon's mythos I would
correlate it with the idea that an artificially enclosed system like a
hothouse can't be maintained for long without increasing your bad juju
byproducts, and in GR the almost cosmic level of horror that results
from the scale of the Death Order in place is definitely a Tower
thing.

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 4:45 AM, Jade Becker <jbecker13 at georgefox.edu> wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> Been trying to make sense of Pynchon's use of the Tarot throughout GR. Looks
> like GR has yet again given me an opportunity to plumb the depths of my
> ignorance.
>
> The Tower is referenced frequently, and I see that it signifies, at least in
> part, a kind of destruction=>creation.
>
> I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about how these things work
> throughout the text.
>
> Jade
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