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

Quotes

• 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.

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