Gravity's Rainbow

Criticism

Contemporary Reviews

• Michael Wood, "Rocketing to the Apocalypse" , The New York Review (1973)
• Richard Poirier, "Rocket Power", The Saturday Review (1973)
• Richard Locke, "One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years", The New York Times (1973)
• RZ Sheppard, "V. Squared", Time Magazine (1973)

Later

• M Keith Booker, « History Is Hard to Decode: On 50 Years of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” », Los Angeles Review of Books (2023)

Web Resources

• Pynchon Wiki: Gravity's Rainbow
• Pynchon-l
• The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow

Summary

Part One. Beyond the Zero

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death." - Werner von Braun

Quotes

Part One. Beyond the Zero

• What the dossiers call Pirate Prentice is a strange talent for - well, for getting inside the fantasies of others: being able, actually, to take over the burden of managing them..."
• ...the images often changing scale so quickly, so unpredictably that you're apt now and then to get a bit of lime-green in with your rose, as they say. The scenes are highlights from Pirate's career as a fantasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he went, the mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongoloid point, right out of the middle of his head. He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own. This wasn't through any rigorous daytime analysis of content, but just because he knew.
• 30. "It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces' - to veer into any wind. As if...
• 30. "A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself - its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened - that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable..."
• 55. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements.
• 72. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty...how else would They know?
• 75. And Black Wing has even found an American, a Lieutenant Slothrop, willing to go under light narcosis to help illuminate racial problems in his own country.
• 77. Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him.
• 80. ...that absence of vertical interest...
• 81. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes. that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources...
• 81. The ba-sic theory is, that when given an unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How, he goes a-bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes - will provide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind.
• 84. But a hardon, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student.
• 85. ...a silent extinction beyond the zero.
• 86. When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be.
• 88. 'The act of injuring and the act of being injured are joined in the behavior of the whole injury.' Speaker and spoken-of, master and slave, virgin and seducer, each pair most conveniently coupled and inseparable - 'The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish. One avoids all manner of unpleasant lab work that way, but what has one said?
• 89. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages."
• 89. ..."but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less... sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."
• 90. Pavlov though that all the diseases of the mind could be explained, eventually, by the ultraparadoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the cortex, the confusion of ideas of the opposite.
• 91. ...there must be more, beyond the sense, beyond death, beyond the Probabilities that are all Roger has to believe in."
• 92. We have lost them. No one listened to those early conversations - not even an idle snapshot survives. They walked till that winter hid them and it seemed the cruel Channel itself would freeze over, and no one, none of us , could ever completely find them again. Their footprints filled with ice, and a little later were taken out to see.
• 97. ...she plays at this only... plays at playing.
• 100. God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together.
• 105. She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't foret the real business of the War is buying and selling.
• 105. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.
• 105. The true war is a celebration of markets.
• 107. Indeed, why did she leave Shußstelle 3? We are never told why. But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play - and be unable then to continue in the same spirit.
• 107. ...say fuck it and quit the game, quit it cold.
• 122. ...pictures, well scenes, keep flashing in, Roger. By themselves, I mean I'm not making them.
• 126. His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history - a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable... new life.
• 126. ...nothing was fixed, everything could be changed...
• 131. (The War) wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity...Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness - not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. At "The White Visitation" there's a long-time schiz, you know, who believes that he is World War II.
• 135. ...banish the Adversary, destory the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are...
• 141-2. Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between Outside and Inside. He saw the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between the two, but part of them both. "When you've looked at how it really is," he asked once, "how can we, any of us, be separate?"
• 145. Afterward he can recall nothing. Sometimes, rarely, there may be tantalizing - not words, but halos of meaning around words his mouth evidently spoke, that only stay behind - if they do - for a moment, like dreams, can't be held or developed, and presently, go away.
• 146. ... and interface between the worlds, a sensitive.
• 147-8. ...part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme notes - it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us!
• 148. ...deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told.
• 153. There's no memory on his side: no personal record... and he's been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in the primacy of the "conscious" self and its memories, regarding all the rest as abnormal or trivial, and so he is troubled, deeply.
• 155. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can't use?
• 155. ...look at all the forms of capitalistic expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction - ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer - all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.
• 156. She knows what she has to impersonate.
• 159. Not produce, not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems.
• 159. Try to design anything that way and have it work.
• 165. ...a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority...
• 165. ...messages weave into a net of information that no one can escape..."
• 165. Your are constrained over there (among the living), to follow it in time, one step after another. But here its possible to see the whole shape at once... 'shape' isn't really the right word... Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion?
• 166. But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured.
• 167. These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic... You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go.
• 176. I only want to visit you. You want to possess me.
• 177. You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine". It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible...

Part Two. Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering

• 187. What th' fuck's going on?
• 188. It's a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia filtering in.
• 193. Harvard's there for other reasons. The 'educating' part of it is just sort of a front.
• 194. Welcome Mister Slothrop Welcome To Our Structure We Hope You Will Enjoy Your Visit Here.
• 208. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.
• 209. ...all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to've been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel - where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit...
• 218. Do They never make mistakes, or...
• 228. ...if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous as a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires - on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It's work, that's all it is, and there's no room for any extrahuman anxieties.
• 229. ...this lab here is also a maze, i'n't it now... behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats 'n' mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes their responses?
• 237. Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
• 241. Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
• 244. What's happening is not clear.
• 249. Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it.
• 251. ...do you remember the way in, all the twists and turns? No. You weren't looking. Any of these doors might open you to safety, but there may not be time...
• 251. Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
• 257. The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of...
• 258. Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?
• 258. It'll get easier. Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.
• 260. It's Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens You!
• 262. Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
• 264. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness.
• 267. ...the moment then of doubt, the real possibility that they are something else - that none of it was real before this moment: only elaborate theatre to fool you. But now the screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left. The agents are here for you at last.
• 275. So, when laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born.
• 277. Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control that is out of control.
• 278. How many changes does one get to be a synthesis, Pointsman? East and West, together in the same bloke?... Protagonist and antagonist in one... "Yang and Yin," whispers the Voice, "Yang and Yin..."

Part Three: In the Zone

• 281. Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves. It's like going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there, and finding their quaint superstitions taking you over.
• 281. ...as borders fall away and the Zone envelops him...
• 283. Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not.
• 285. ...a smell from before his conscious memory begins... not a smell to be found out in the world - it is the breath of the Forbidden Wing... essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot survive. Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless... His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis far away...
• 286. A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory.
• 288. But you are free. We all are. You'll see. Before long.
• 290. It's so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements.
• 291. Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone.
• 292. Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
• 294. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren't any... It's all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an 'interregnum.' You only have to flow along with it.
• 297. Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries of the official vision at all... No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror...
• 302. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it... but they lie so close to Earth that from many places they can't be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they fall into completely different patterns...
• 303. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. Thestatus of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence - some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty.
• 317. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.
• 317. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts...No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets...
• 319. The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same.
• 321. We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we...
• 322. North is death's region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. Norhausen means dwellings in the north.
• 323. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he'd seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people.
• 324. Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature... He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood.
• 326-7. ...he can't handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with any he's in danger of losing others... But it's no only the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader.
• 333. There are no zones... No zones but the Zone.
• 348. ...what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction. Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other.
• 349. But 'addiction'? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. 'Compulsion'? Who is not compelled? 'Tolerance'? 'Dependence'? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not plan.
• 362. ...we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being.
• 362. Stay in the Zone long enough and you'll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.
• 373. ...except that here everything's been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside.
• 391. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear to flower separately? Or has he by way of language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, taking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words.
• 412. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide...
• 413. ...we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others... we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps - but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given...