the other Invisible Man....

[Corbeau Castrum]

As it happens, I am currently working on a masters thesis that focuses on Pynchon's representation of the Black experience in Gravity's Rainbow. There is a great monograph on Pynchon and Blackness by David Witzling called Everybody's America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism that traces Pynchon's writing about the Black experience to Baldwin and Ellison. But Witzling is more focused on Pynchon's position as a white writer than on the specific ways that Blackness is represented...

I'm arguing that Pynchon's true interlocutors are Richard Wright (of Native Son) and Frantz Fanon—and that Blackness in Gravity's Rainbow resembles Afro-pessimist discourse à la Frank Wilderson and Saidiya Hartman (who is Afro-pessimist adjacent). Richard Wright (who almost everyone seems to forget) mentored both Baldwin and Ellison, was also a substantial influence on Fanon, and invented the term Black Power. And Fanon greatly influenced the Black Panthers, who are of course linked to the Schwarzkommando and their questions of (revolutionary or not) suicide. I've collected and put online all the quotes in GR that refer to Blackness—if anyone's interested, you can find them here: https://argentoratumobscura.com/writing/black-rainbow/.

As for Slothrop specifically, his reduction to the status of animalistic commodity for the IG Farben penis-conditioning experiment ("I've been sold, Jesus Christ I’ve been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef," 291 in Penguin) mirrors the reduction of Africans to the status of animalistic commodity, and thus their conversion into Blacks (following Wilderson in Red, White & Black). That Slothrop is described as the "schwarzknabe" or Black boy (the title of Richard Wright's memoir whose censored second half Ellison ripped off for Invisible Man) adds to the links between Slothrop and the Black experience. And the name Tyrone links both to Tyrone Power and the Black singer Tyrone Davis, who was enamored with Fred Hampton and performed at a fundraiser for the Chicago Panthers in 1969.

There is also a link between GR's formally ambiguous style and the availability of the Black slave as "an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values" as Saidiya Hartman puts it in Scenes of Subjection (28). But I still have a lot of work to do on that front.

Best,
Cormac