The Tarot and Gravity's Rainbow

[Jade Becker]

Ah, that helps!

I'm curious about what we ought to make of the line in William Slothrop's
hymn toward the end of the novel:

There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
*Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low*
Find the last poor Pret’rite one . . .
Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road,
All through our crippl’d Zone,
With a face on ev’ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev’ry stone. . . .

I took this to refer to the lightning striking the Tower on the tarot card.
Perhaps a kind of "mighty brought low"? If that is so, would you read this
hymn as ultimately hopeful or hopeless? Or something altogether different?

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 5:26 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>



-- 

Jade Becker
(530) 518-6859
George Fox University | Class of 2017
Writing Consultant, George Fox University Academic Resource Center
*The Crescent*, Editor-in-Chief
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