Gravity’s Rainbow Week One

Welcome to the first week of our reading of Gravity’s Rainbow! I truly am your humble guide for the first week, as I am coming into this with a very limited reading history with this book.  I belive I tucked into it in high school, and never went back again…

I love Pynchon though, and have delighted in The Crying of Lot 49, V., Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and recently finished Shadow Ticket (Sorry Mason & Dixon…maybe next time) so I am familiar with his density, his dark humor and propensity for ridiculous character names and acronyms.

But the role of guide this turn in book club is less specialist and more compatriot, so we can all muddle through together, and no one (including me) should feel less than for not “getting it” right away.

So let’s jump in!

– Johanna

Illustration by Zak Smith – borrowed from the Internet Archive

Recap & Reflections

“A screaming comes across the sky…”

We are here, Britain during WWII. The bombs have fallen before, “but there is nothing to compare it to now.” We are at a precipice of new tech, new fears, new ways of destroying each other. And as we will soon discover, new (ancient?) ways to use our minds to compel, control, coerce.

The first vignette sets the tone of grey and dreary London – the years revealing themselves as evacuees are sent into catacombs of an old hotel, below the tracks. I love the image of the rats’ ghosts “still as cave painting, fixed stubborn and luminous in the walls” (p. 4).

In a classic Pynchon transition that you will miss if you blink, we are suddenly with Captain Geoffrey “Pirate” Prentice – the first of some 400 characters we will meet in this novel. Pirate is living in a maisonette with a variety of colorful characters including Teddy Bloat, who Pirate saves from falling off the balcony by pushing a cot underneath him.

As he wakes he sees an unusual contrail in the sky. “Incoming mail” he thinks to himself. The consideration of whether to tell anyone seem the start of a theme of fatalism – does it matter? Is it too late? You will hear it when it’s too late anyway.

Pirate instead decides to pick some bananas.

Pirate has created a lush greenhouse on the roof where he grows incredible bananas. Much description of delicious banana-based breakfast items ensues…This banana reverie is interrupted by a phone call – the mail has indeed arrived. (Love that he is driven by his “batman, a Corporal Wayne” p. 11).

And this is when shit gets weird. Because Pirate has the ability to see into people’s dreams, and we discover this has been weaponized by some shadowy org called the Firm, and Pirate is in their grasp.

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Next we meet up again with Teddy Bloat and his office mates Tyronne Slothrop and Tantivy Mucker-Mafflick. I loved the description of the archaeological layers of Slothrop’s messy desk (p. 19). Bloat is spying on Slothrop’s map of gummed stars, each one indicating a girl he’s dallied with. Bloat doesn’t seem to know who he is bringing this intel to.

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Pirate shows up to collect a piece of a rocket that Slothrop is also persuing through ACHTUNG – described as “the poor relative of Allied intelligence” (p. 20). We learn that the color code of Slothrop’s star map is based on the feeling he got meeting the girls. Slothrop and Tantivy have another conversation about the impending feeling of waiting for the big one, described as a “Word that rips apart the day” (p. 26).

There was some great descriptive language in Slothrop’s story of the northern lights and the light of the hotel fire he witnessed as a child and the connection to the “great bright hand reaching out of the clouds” (p. 30).

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A seance, a room full of characters moving through the space, a description from the mouth of the medium of something that startlingly sounds like AI “A market needed no longer to be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself” (p. 31) and Jessica Swanlake throws a perfectly aimed dart as rocket bombs fall. Is this a meeting of the White Visitation? It sounds like everyone gathered is in some way working on extra-sensory skills or study thereof. We get some backstory on Pirate’s abilities and his love of Scorpia Mossmoon.

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Jessica and Roger Mexico have a little love nest. We learn about the “White Visitation” – the name for this group of tele-phaths, etc. Mexico is the stats man of the group. Then description of the fatigue of war is wrapped in the statistics of the “nth part of a body freed from the nth pile of rubble” (p.42).

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Edward Pointsman is trying to ether a dog. Jessica and Roger are complicit in this for some reason not made clear (unless I’ve missed something). Jessica’s feelings for the poor creature “waiting for…the room to reassemble around it” (p. 44) are so sweet. And then Pointsman gets a toilet bowl stuck on his foot. Hilarity ensues. The dog TALKS?! (p. 45). There is a mysterious Book.