50 Years Later, 'Gravity's Rainbow' Finally Came True

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“Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being ‘ass backwards’? I can’t understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying ‘ass forwards,’ if backwards is what you mean.”

“Uh,” sez Slothrop.

“This is only one of many American Mysteries,” Säure sighs, “I wish somebody could clear up for me. Not you, obviously.”

THE LIGHTNING-STRUCK

Let’s say you’re struck by lightning. And you

You survive, but it changes you. Like, a make-you-see-everything-differently kind of change. A distance emerges between you and your loved ones, an irritating cavity that becomes an irreconcilable chasm. “Most people’s lives,” Thomas Pynchon writes in Gravity’s Rainbow, “have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They’re the ones who never get struck by lightning.”

Well, guess what? Jackson, you’re one of the ones who did get struck by lightning, and now you feel as if something has been unveiled to you; something essential, fundamental, about the world, like you finally understand its meaning—or perhaps finally get the joke—and now, you cannot meaningfully connect to anyone whose experience isn’t commensurate with yours. And lo and behold, it turns out you’re not alone. They’re out there, the “lightning-struck,” “secretly organized” and everything, replete with local chapters, membership benefits, “handshakes with sharp cusp-flicks of fingernails,” and, most importantly, a “private monthly magazine [called] A Nickel Saved.” To Joe So-and-So, it would appear a banal periodical, but to those tuned to the right frequency, the magazine actually contains secret messages decodable only by members. This electrified cabal has managed to turn their disillusionment with the world—caused by the strike—into texts that reflect this newly acquired otherness. But you can only locate the true content if you’ve been clued in as to where to look. As Pynchon puts it, “Those Who Know, know.”

This—extrapolated from a few paragraphs of Gravity’s Rainbow—both characterizes the cult of Pynchon and serves as a useful way into one of the weirdest, richest, most frustrating, inscrutable, brilliant, gorgeous, exhilarating, inexplicable, disgusting, hilarious, remarkable, and goddamn frustrating again novels ever published in America.

THE FUTURE OF THE PAST IS NOW

It's all anachronism, Gravity’s Rainbow.

First of all, it’s 50 years old. It’s also a historical novel, set during World War II. It’s a dense, difficult challenge, the kind of book posers carry around to look smart. It is unabashedly, rambunctiously, arrogantly smart, and deeply, confoundingly experimental. It seems to resist total intelligibility, preferring rather to suggest, evoke, gesture toward, wink at. It’s got all the flavors of meaning, but few of its calories. It wants to feed you in other ways. It wants its words to do more than mean.

To sit and read a long, complex novel from a half century ago, set in a period three additional decades earlier than that, written by a straight white dude with an abrasive intellectual flare, all of it strewn with arcane technical nomenclature and uber-hipster bonafides… well, to do all that is to do something deeply un-2023.

Gravity’s Rainbow is, in many ways, a relic. It’s not that there aren’t books with similarly self-assured ambition still being published (there are plenty); it’s that the kind of wide-reaching critical scrutiny that emerged around Pynchon, a writer who’d only published three novels (I personally own seven books about him that all came out before he published his fourth), and the general curiosity of the public, who made it a brief bestseller, feel positively old-fashioned. The fact that a madcap postmodern novel by some beatnik Joyce would have such influence and fascination is the true relic.

But as I read it for the second time, I wasn’t thinking about the 70s or the 40s. I was thinking about today, right now, and wondering how it was that Pynchon saw forward into the future. Tucked into an inscrutable tome about wars and rocketry and Pavlov and entropy—and which, by the way, doesn’t even take place in America—lie some of the origins of our present political reality…

ANALEPSIS

The world Gravity’s Rainbow was born into on February 28, 1973: a post-Kennedy, post-MLK, Vietnam and Nixon era in which cynicism, fatalism, suspicion, and paranoia bloomed. 1973 was the year the Watergate scandal really got going—the trust American citizens had for the government had been waning for years, teetering on the edge before Nixon’s resignation nudged it off the cliff. The old ways seemed to be fading.

Hints of an unfathomable future could be glimpsed in the America of fifty years ago. The year began with the Roe v. Wade decision. In April 1973, two great leaps forward occurred in New York City, one day apart: Martin Cooper made the first call on a cell phone on the 3rd, and the World Trade Center opened on the 4th. In August, DJ Kool Herc launched what would come to be known as hip hop at a party in the Bronx. In September, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the notorious “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match. The American Psychiatric Association excised homosexuality from the DSM-II, and Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, both in December. Things were changing radically, surely the beginning of an unstoppable ascent of progressive ideals…

…but of course we know—and shall learn again and again—that, rocket-like, what goes up must come barreling back down.

That year, Thomas Pynchon’s 760-page mega-meta-epic was unleashed on an America on a delicate cusp between epochs. His novel simultaneously captured the (dis)spirit of the age, contradicted what many pundits predicted, and foretold much about America’s future.

Now that’s getting hit by lightning, folks.

HYSTERON PROTERON

So what’s it all about? What’s the plot?

I do not have the space—nor the skill—to summarize much or any of the narrative of Gravity’s Rainbow, except to relate some facts. It opens in London on December 18, 1944 and concludes on September 14, 1945, although its finale occurs on Easter of that year. The ostensible protagonist is Tyrone Slothrop, who is alternately followed, studied, influenced, and controlled by numerous forces; some he knows, and some he doesn’t. He first draws the attention of these cabals because a map he made of his sexual hook-ups in London happens to match exactly the locations where bombs struck the city. Can his sexual drive predict attacks? Turns out that as a child, a Dr. Jamf conditioned Slothrop to respond to a “Mystery Stimulus” with an erection. As part of any Pavlovian experiment with conditioning, the subject must be de-conditioned and brought back to zero, but in Pynchon’s world, there is a possibility of pushing past “the point of reducing a reflex to zero”; going, in other words, beyond the zero. Which would mean that Slothrop no longer gets a hard-on after the stimulant, but before it. At least, that’s the suspicion. In a city under siege by a supersonic missile “one hears approaching only after it explodes,” conventional notions of cause-and-effect go out the window. Slothrop eventually discovers that the “Mystery Stimulus” is actually a plastic called Imipolex G, which was developed by the very doctor who experimented on him. This sends him on a quest to locate a new rocket being built using that plastic.

To call that the plot is a bit like calling a large constellation the universe. There are hundreds of named characters and dozens of brief histories, as well as relayed anecdotes, unexpected diversions, inexplicable detours, and occurrences the reader isn’t sure they’re supposed to take literally or not. There is an infamous section where we learn the biography of an immortal light bulb named Byron. An octopus attacks people on a beach in the French Riviera, an event which has been painstakingly orchestrated by a top secret agency housed in a former psychiatric facility referred to ominously as “The White Visitation.” A military operation called Operation Black Wing uses forged documents and a staged film reel to invent an African rocket troop called the Schwarzkommando, an attempt at psychological warfare playing on Germany’s fear of the South African Herero people, whom they tried to wipe out forty years earlier. But then, it turns out that the Schwarzkommando are real; Slothrop encounters them. He also encounters Mickey Rooney.

Beyond that—and there is so much more—I’ll let Pynchon himself do the work for me, from his (allegedly) self-written plot description of his 2006 novel Against the Day:

Yeah, that captures it.

ALEXA, WHAT IS MENNIPPEAN SATIRE?

What does erudition mean anymore? What does it look like?

In the many, many books and articles and essays on Gravity’s Rainbow, adjectives like comprehensive, encyclopedic, vast, all-encompassing, and exhaustive (also exhaust-ing) are regularly employed. “There is evidence,” the English critic Tony Tanner writes in his monograph on Pynchon, “of a whole range of knowledge of contemporary ‘specialised’ expertises—from mathematics, chemistry and ballistics, to classical music theory, film and comic strips.” Such an eclectic selection of subjects is itself impressive, but the way Pynchon feels at ease with them all is unusual. Casual and second-natured, like all true experts, he does not seem to flout his erudition, but merely to involuntarily reflect it. Pynchon didn’t simply research these topics; he commands them.

But in 2023, in an age where most have access to supreme erudition at every moment, in an age where not knowing is a rare and unnecessary state of being, what would a book like Gravity’s Rainbow have to offer?

Fifty years ago, Gravity’s Rainbow was like its own little internet. Its value was not in and of itself, but rather in the way it led you elsewhere, elsewheres, plural, its network a circuitous system of interlocking and ultimately diverging pathways, any of which can be followed out of the novel, so that a reader could wind up pursuing engineering physics (as Pynchon himself originally did at Cornell) or history or literature or slapstick comedy—it’s all in there. For a person in 1973 to cobble together such an extraordinary array of disparate subjects would be to spend endless hours in libraries, sifting through countless texts with hardly any guidance. This of course assumes that one had the imagination in the first place to conceive of these eclectic categories cohabiting the same space, which so few of us possess. Pynchon is not like us. As John Stark put it: his “learning overwhelmed readers.” Gravity’s Rainbow, like Moby Dick and Ulysses before it, offered a world.

Now, though, compared to the internet, even an enormous feat of fiction like Gravity’s Rainbow is no longer world-sized; now it’s more like a building. Or perhaps only a room.

And anyway, readers now (and then) prefer fiction with an unfussy, straightforward style, where the author—or the fact of one—is wholly absent from the narration, an enforced order operating invisibly…

THE GAME BEHIND THE GAME

…which brings me back to my initial point about Pynchon’s insight into our present contentiousness, culturally and politically—a point I needed all of those contextual detours to be able to make. Such an argumentative shape—of veering far away before returning—recurs throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, starting with its title, and also represents the kind of authorial organization we’re talking about here: the construction and intention behind the façade.

The horrors of World War II forever altered American consciousness—even cause and effect, it seemed, were no longer self-evident—but whereas post-war America experienced economic prosperity and ascending national optimism, Pynchon uses this psychic shift to capture what was happening to America in the 70s, when that ascension, as we’ve learned, eventually came back down to earth. The institutions of the past had not only shown themselves to be unequipped to meet the needs of the changing times, but had revealed that their true intentions were never about needs at all, but rather about the power of the people who ran them. Governments, churches, corporations—the public was finding out what was really going on behind the scenes, and each entity seemed to have ulterior motives. In the absence of those institutions, now armed with a deep distrust of human enterprises, things could never go back to zero.

Appropriately, everywhere in Gravity’s Rainbow (and Pynchon’s fiction generally), characters seek order, purpose, some organizing principle through which they can make sense of what’s happening to them. Ned Pointsman, a doctor working in The White Visitation for an agency called PISCES (“Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender”), a hush-hush military program developing “psychological warfare” (and the closest thing the novel has to a literal villain), is a devoted Pavlovian whose worldview is extrapolated from the Russian psychologist’s work: “No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages.” Tyrone Slothrop, himself the victim of a Pavlovian as an infant, takes to regular ‘ole paranoia, seeing obscured menace and furtive intention in everything around him, but “he can’t fit any of it into a pattern,” so the paranoia itself becomes the principle. Slothrop is so paranoid that Pynchon functionally shifts the adjective into a verb: “Slothrop paranoids from door to door looking for one that might have something to tell him.” He even creates a series of Proverbs for Paranoids. I’m partial to number 4: “You hide, they seek.”

Conspiracy theories (formalized paranoia) provide their devotees with totalizing explanations for the bewildering multiplicity of existence, albeit mostly of the nefarious variety. Consider QAnon—a figure so absurdly Pynchonian I am 100% certain that they are probably at least aware of Pynchon, if not a huge fan—who assured their followers that a cabal of rich, Satanist, child-trafficking cannibals were conspiring against Trump. Or consider “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy which claimed that the leaked emails of Hilary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta contained coded messages proving that this secret club of evil Democrats held Satanic rituals at a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. (Like, for real: Did Pynchon write this shit?) Such harebrained delusions are psychologically satisfying, because they suggest that beneath the seemingly chaotic miasma of society, there exists order and intention, but they also function as unifying beliefs for disparate people, who can come together over their shared insanity as they pore over the day’s news to decode it for the capital-T Truth. How could you not feel special believing that you’ve discovered the secret behind everything? Such a revelation must feel like getting struck by lightning.

Those Who Know, know.

Now, it may be tempting to look down on these outlandish claims, but as Scott Russell Sanders points out in his essay on Gravity’s Rainbow, “God is the original conspiracy theory.” Religion is bigger and more complete and thus, more satisfying (hence: more popular too), but it’s still merely a way of explaining why things are the way they are. Slothrop hopes to find answers in what was done to him as an infant, and when that doesn’t solve anything, he seeks the rocket (whose name, 00000, should clue you in to its inherent value), then, finally, he descends into paranoia.

But what if there isn’t any sense to it all? What if there is no conspiracy, no Them, no God, no order, no Control? Pynchon consciously conflates conspiracy with religion. Slothrop, squatting in a dilapidated house in Berlin, thinks that “if there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia,” then its opposite, what he calls “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything” is pure terror, “a condition not many of us can bear for long.” Those in control—They—have always been seen as villainous, but what if Their nefarious control was preferable to the purposeless alternative? Slothrop lands on the former: “Either They have put him here for a reason, or he’s just here. He isn’t sure that he wouldn’t, actually, rather have that reason…”

Slothrop finds nothing at the end of the path other than the end of the path, “and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn’t. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered.” His story dissipates without a conclusion. Slothrop never found anything to latch onto, worldview-wise, and thus his grasp is loose, easy to unclasp. Such a bleak fate makes his yearning for a reason—even one supplied by Them—completely understandable.

It’s no coincidence that an age rife with conspiracy theories is also a time when an unsettling amount of people willingly consent to authoritarianism. This is what Pynchon saw: in the absence of formerly monolithic institutions and belief systems, people will not only accept reasons supplied by Them, but they will actively seek them out, and embrace them like long lost loved ones.

THESE MORTALS

Pynchon gets a real big kick out of historical coincidences. As mentioned, the true finale of Gravity’s Rainbow takes place on Easter of 1945, with the launch of the 00000. Everything about the 00000—its destructive contents, its construction through slavery, its murderous purpose—speaks to the evils of humanity, and its launch is deliberately contrasted with a holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. This alone would be the work of an amateur—how obvious to set an amoral event on a day commemorating a figure who represents morality to many—but Pynchon is no amateur. You see, Easter of 1945 happened to take place on April 1, otherwise known as April Fool’s Day; as Steven Weisenburger notes in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, it’s a coincidence that “had occurred only forty-three times since A.D. 500; it occurred again in 1956 but will not happen again during this century.”

But is he simply saying that we’re fools for building and launching the rocket? Well, yes, as Gravity’s Rainbow overflows with foolery. But I think Pynchon is suggesting that our foolishness goes deeper and darker: existence and foolishness are intertwined. Whether we view the world as a series of causes and effects, as the result of elaborate conspiracies, or through the prism of the Rocket (some “see two Rockets, good and evil…of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide”), it’s all the same fool’s errand. The entire arc of humanity is folly.

At one point, Slothrop has an affair with Katje, who works for the White Visitation. This is before he’s discovered the truth about his Dr. Jamf’s experiments, but he senses something—a room somewhere in his past that will explain everything, that will show that “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.” Katje comments on the fact that while he was in London, where the bombs fell, she was in Gravenhage, where they were launched. She says, “Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life.” Then, there is this passage:

In the 50 years since the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow, the World Trade Center collapsed in the attack on 9/11, the cell phone went from useful utility to addictive, life-sucking force, and Roe v. Wade was overturned. What goes up… well—it usually gets shot down, actually.

This arc, this parabola, Pynchon’s most succinct and despairing metaphor—an aspirational ascent leading irrevocably to plummeting destruction—this is the shape of our lives. Only a fool would tell you differently.

AND YET…

Remember the lightning-struck? Those who experienced something profound and rare, so they sought out others who had felt what they felt? Other than the coded messages of their newsletter, there’s nothing conspiratorial to their organization. What it really is is a community. And a community, after all, is just a conspiracy everyone’s aware of, in on, participants in. Sure, the bigger communities become, the more complex their problems and the more corrupt their leaders. But in these niche groups that are only nominally conspiracies, because no one knows who they are, you can find the teeny-tiny instance of grace that can make our meaningless trajectories tolerable, even beautiful: the intimacy of sharing ourselves with another person. Although the lightning-struck have modest aims and probably zero influence, their club has given them a method by which they can communicate to their cabal, their little conspiracy of no importance, and share with others what the lightning gave them, because the only reason Those Who Know, know, is because somebody, somewhere, let them in on the secret…

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