Gravity's Rainbow; Paranoia and Negation

By Raymond Liu

The 1970s marked a slew of artistic and ideological achievements; many of the latter inhabited the former, were byproducts of previously unthinkable arrays of expression. These often bridged the grand ideas of the intellectual world with the intimate particulars of the individual. 1973 brought with it a microcosm of the entire postmodern landscape; it was the year in which Pynchon wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. The title itself is particularly liminal. And as it would happen, it’s the nexus between all the novel’s absurdities. 

The Rainbow extends towards both ends of a binary spectrum. Pynchon's reticular weavings encompass creation and destruction, science and the reality it pursues, highbrow and lowbrow art, oneirism and stark sobriety. Amongst these is the notion of paranoia, the apprehension of a larger hand at play, looming above all characters and constructs. The fear is not secular; it converges on the idea of playing puppets in the theater of transcendent truth. In this vein, the V2 rocket serves as the postmodern Moby Dick. It's the time-appropriate symbol of God, the indiscriminate iron fist tainted only by the men who, in their earthly delusion, seek to control it. But the paranoia is superseded by something infinitely more terrifying. Pynchon is acutely aware of the necessity of a Yang to every Yin, some counterforce that allows the initial construct to exist under any specific definition. And so from the ashes of paranoia rose its negation; a sort of counter paranoia negating the bonds interspersed throughout, rebranding them as atomic phenomena. If the fear gleaned from the notion of an excess of control was already vexatious, then the idea of being lost in infinite impotence must be even more crippling. 

Mankind enters the period of his nightmare hypothesis: that all association and notion of control has been Pavlovian; that the rockets only coincide with Slothrop's sexual conquests, nothing more. Postmodernism's relativity and denial of structuralism ushers in an age of instability, positioning man into the sole paralyzed observer of a crumbling world. The proof of his strength and creative prowess has culminated in his means of destruction, an ultimate weapon functioning on the only universally understood cataclysmic scale. Something impossible to understand, or to apprehend, before it strikes. Even the bellow of its exhaust is silent. The V2 doesn’t destroy anything; it’s a moment of transition, of depolarization, in which there’s nothing to hold on to, not even the understanding it’s arrived. In that moment, understanding is negated; the structures imposed by men are shattered. Yet the structure itself, science, that eternal attempt to map out actuality and render it calculable and subdivisible, was the progenitor of the rocket. We return to the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail. Such is the nature of history: creation and destruction intertwined, to be given causality and metaphysicality, then to be ultimately dispelled only for the next phoenix to rise from the ashes, living under the illusion that it is something else entirely, isolated in and of itself. The oppressive system of the elites traces a similar path; punishment, under the subjugation of gravity, flows downwards towards the preterite, until rebellion reverses the direction of the flow. The cycle self consummates once more. 

Oppressive as it is, this synchronicity bears an ostensive comfort. It’s why the last act of the theater-goers is to touch each other before the rocket’s impact. It’s why they sing a hymn centuries forgotten, steeped in the Slothrop lineage. It’s why the fearful cry of the V2 is juxtaposed with a knife cutting through an apple, a contra-simile that refers to nothing else, remains analogous only to itself. It’s why even the rocket itself, the hand of God, submits still to the oppressive might of gravity’s rainbow.