the other Invisible Man....

[Mark Kohut]

I love that "as it happens" , Cormac, very like one of Pynchon's contingent
introductions, "and who, at that moment,came around the corner but Ole,
Etc"

On Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 12:41 AM Corbeau Castrum <filsducorbeau at pm.me> wrote:

> 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
>