Gravity’s Rainbow Weblinks

"In this essay I hope to offer an alternative notion of the meaning of literary criticism. My thesis will be developed by demonstrating the similarities between depictions of the characters in GR and Laing’s account of the self-experience of the "schizoid". Both feel themselves not to be autonomous, and to be in someway directed from "outside" – by "voices," "false-selves," or the mysterious "Them". I will argue that this lack of "control" is simulated at the level of form and ought to be considered in an account of the reader’s relation to the text. To be a reader, I will argue, is to be, like Laing’s patient, a "told belle," and reading GR, if we can shake off the objectivist desire for "truth" in the text, may reveal to us, if not the "truth," then at least some of the lies we tell about our selves."

Bind-Bound-Boundaries: The Concept of Paranoia in Charles Brockden Brown, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon — by Bruno Friedrich Arich-Gerz.

Die Enden der Parabel — einige Zitate auf der interessanten Website von Hans Babendreyer.

Vorhang auf für die Rakete — zur Geschichte der Rakete. Von Christel Burghoff:

"Das Historisch-Technische Informationszentrum in Peenemünde zeigt Technokraten Träume der Superlative. Die einstige Waffenschmiede der Nazis ist heute Touristenattraktion." — TAZ 30.9.2000

Male Pro—Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of Gravity’s Rainbow — by Wes Chapman.

A Summary of Gravity’s Rainbow — Dr Larry Daw hat nicht nur einen großen Summary verfaßt, sondern diesen auch noch mit 73 Bildern verziert. This can draw you into Gravity’s Rainbow even if you haven’t heard the author’s name before. Flash required.

Een bom van een boek — Dirk Van Hulle über Regenboog van Zwaartekracht (1999):

"Thomas Pynchon liet zijn encyclopedische roman uitgerekend in de meest chaotische periode van de hele twintigste eeuw afspelen, de overgang van oorlog naar koude oorlog. En hoewel men zegt dat die nu is afgelopen, is zijn boek nog nooit zo actueel geweest. De precisiebombardementen op Servische doelwitten zijn gestaakt, de rust is hersteld, maar de schade nog lang niet. Of dit nu de manier was om het etnische conflict in Kosovo op te lossen blijft een onopgeloste kwestie die de aandacht gladjes afleidt van de vraag welke andere belangen er in het spel waren. Het zou een variatie kunnen zijn op Pynchons derde Spreekwoord voor Paranoïci: Als 'Ze' je de verkeerde vragen kunnen laten stellen, hoeven ze zich over de antwoorden niet druk te maken."

Gravity’s Rainbow Synopsis — Alex Johnstons Zusammenfassung des Hauptplots um Tyrone Slothrop ist bemerkenswert kurz (eine Seite!), und hat gute Tips:

"A synopsis of Gravity’s Rainbow? — The work of a moment !! (…) But: a word of advice, the second that projector breaks down, leave the f***ing cinema."

Paperware to Vaporware, The Nativity of Tyrone Slothrop — der Astrologe Douglas Kløvedal Lannark hat versucht, aus den verschiedenen Hinweisen im Roman ein Geburtshoroskop für Tyrone Slothrop zu erstellen und es zu deuten [auf diesem Server].

Love in Gravity’s Rainbow — by Douglas Kløvedal Lannark:

"I had noticed that the word/term LOVE was not included on the Index of V., GR, and M&D so that "ever-expanding" spirit struck me once again and I decided to mark the word LOVE in all its variations I could find in Pynchon’s novels, starting with GR. As my other editions were so full of multi-colored markings, I bought a fresh copy (my fourth) and with an orange marking pen noted the word and its variations (lovely, lovable, loving, amiable, amore, Liebe, Liebling, Liebchen, etc.) as often as I could. Cover-to-cover it took two months to compile this list which I did do in "love.""

A Rainbow of Possibilities for Fiction — by David Kipen. Nach seinem einleitenden Summary bringt er seinen herrlichen Vergleich mit Moby Dick:

"Please bear in mind that, in the annals of inept plot summary, the preceding paragraph ranks right up there with "So this guy Ishmael goes fishing." To give Pynchon his due, though, hold off on the plot and turn your attention instead to the prose — a heady mulligatawny, both endlessly versatile and instantly recognizable."

A Companion’s Companion — Illustrated Additions and Corrections to Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion — Donald Larssons große Webseite ergänzt den Weisenburger–Companion und legt dabei die Betonung auf die Aspekte Film und populäre Kultur. Viele von Pynchon eingeschmuggelte Referenzen auf die populäre Musik und Filme der vierziger Jahre, aber auch Operettenzitate werden erläutert. Eine Reihe von Abbildungen sowie viele Links zum Thema runden die Webseite ab. Bon!

One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years — by Richard Locke, The New York Times March 11, 1973.

Science, Narrative, and Agency in Gravity’s Rainbow — by Margaret Lynd, Critique, Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Vol. 46, No. 1 (Fall 2004), pp. 63-81.

"By constructing "essential" categories of difference, actual differences are elided and reduced to the familiar litany of binary oppositions, their middles excluded in a process Pynchon calls, quite simply, "bad shit": Self/Other, Black/ White, Male/Female, Civilized/Savage, Man/Animal. In Gravity’s Rainbow, each of these oppositions is subsumed by Pynchon’s Elect- Preterite binary, based on distributions of power rather than on real or imaginary physical or cultural differences. All Otherness is defined against self-perceived qualities of the Elect, measured both by concrete parameters (money, family, occupation) and purely imaginary ones (intelligence, racial purity, moral character)."

A Brief History of Rocketry — from Calvin J. Hamilton’s Views of the Solar System.

Catch-22, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Lawlessness — by Bill McCarron, Oklahoma City University Law Review, Volume 24, Number 3 (1999).

Modernist Reading, Post—Modern Text — The Case of Gravity’s Rainbow — by Brian McHale, Tel Aviv University.

Gravity’s Rainbow Summary — by Alec McHoul, Murdoch University.

Mittelwerke GMBH — zur Geschichte einer der Produktionsstätten der V2 — Bilder, Pläne, Links.

Readin’ — Jeremy Osner, ehemals Mitglied der Pynchon—Liste, hat seinerzeit auch eine Seite mit Kommentaren und Erläuterungen zu Gravity’s Rainbow geschrieben.

Mondaugen’s Law — one of Jeremy’s pages.

The Art of Being an Original Original — 10 Works With One Common Trait: They’re Unique. By Tim Page:

"On one level, the "story" of this vast novel can be told in a single sentence: a missile — a genuine, verifiable WMD — is fired on the first page and comes down on the last. True enough, but one might as well call Moby-Dick a fish story. At 760 pages, Gravity’s Rainbow is both grim and hilarious, with myriad tangled plots and subplots that all conclude in mid-sentence as the Doomsday missile falls and the convoluted little lives, dreams and industries of its 300-odd characters and (not so incidentally) the lives of the narrator and the reader as well are obliterated." — The Washington Post, Friday, January 2, 2004; Page C01.

Peenemuende — Historisch-Technisches Informationszentrum im Kraftwerk, 17449 Peenemünde, Tel. (03 83 71) 50 50.

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow — von Perks Webseite:

"Briljante evocatie van de paranoïde atmosfeer in Londen ten tijde van de tweede wereldoorlog. Het verhaal waaiert naar alle kanten uit, maar niemand ontkomt aan de allesvernietigende krachten die rond hen zijn ontketend. In de centrale metafoor: de regenboog van zwaartekracht, die duidt op de baan die V1 raketten beschrijven, wordt duidelijk dat het niet de Duitse vijand, maar moeder aarde is die de vernietiging bewerkstelligt. Een boek dat tot in de diepste poriën van de geschiedenis doordringt."

Science, Narrative, and Agency in Gravity’s Rainbow — ohne Autorenangabe, Wednesday, 15 December 2004.

Gravity’s Rainbow, the Anabaptist Rebellions in Germany, 1525-35, and the Unfortunate Traveller — by Terry Reilly, Oklahoma City University Law Review, Volume 24, Number 3 (1999).

Das Imperiale Archiv Auszüge aus dem Buch The Imperial Archive von Thomas Richards, Verso 1993. Zu Pynchon, Wells, Verne, Maxwells Dämon, Kybernetik und Kontrolle.

Mark Ross: Pynchons Gravity’s Rainbow — from the Wayback Machine.

Gravity’s Rainbow Character Index — Steve Russillo’s Gravity’s Rainbow website with all the names on one page and some major links.

The "Law" of Simulated War in Gravity’s Rainbow — by Nicholas Spencer, Oklahoma City University Law Review, Volume 24, Number 3 (1999).

"In its treatment of war Gravity’s Rainbow shares many features with poststructuralist theory, especially that of Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. Pynchon articulates the poststructuralist notion proffered by Michel Foucault, Filles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and others that modern societies are disciplined by military structures rather than being ruled by law. Much of Gravity’s Rainbow depicts the end of the Second World War as a significant moment in a process whereby military relations and realities are being extended into the post-war era."

Clausewitz and Pynchon: Post-Romantic War in Gravity’s Rainbow — by Nicholas Spencer

"In an attempt to ascertain the extent to which the romanticist conception of war is active within postmodernism, I shall, firstly, provide a revisionary reading of On War, and, secondly, analyze Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the canonical texts of American postmodernism, in terms of its articulation of romantic and post-romantic understandings of war (…).
In Gravity’s Rainbow, war refers to the post-romantic military procedure itself, and actual military conflict is a simulation designed to disguise this procedure. By taking military theaters such as the Gulf War as their object of analysis, neo-Clausewitzians mistake the ephemera of Clausewitz’s theory for its essence and, in so doing, they are party to this simulation. Pynchon, like Virilio and Baudrillard, seeks to expose this simulatory state of affairs and to suggest that it is absolute war, rather than real war, which has been the engine of armed conflicts in the twentieth-century. Under the conditions of postmodernism, war has finally dispensed with absolute war, the last vestige of its romanticist inheritance, by trading the external annihilation of military conflict for the internalized domination of social control."

The Special Operations Executive — den Verein, dem "Pirate" Prentice angehört, gab es tatsächlich. Mittlerweile sogar als Computerspiel "Commandos:" (Real Enemy)

"This web site tells the story of an extraordinary group of women who worked for the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) during World War Two. It does not intend to glamorise or hero worship the women but to simply show the intricate work they did, the extraordinary courage they showed and the sacrifices they made."

Pynchon’s Prophecies of Cyberspace — a brillant essay by Brian Stonehill from the San Narciso College Thomas Pynchon Home Page.

Scatology and the Postmodern Subject: Tyrone Slothrop’s Excremental Encounters in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — by Shasta Turner

"The project of this paper is threefold: first, I will examine the terms in which Pynchon represents Slothrop’s radical fragmentation and the categories of identity that come into play in the process. Second, I will discuss some of the ways in which both Pynchon scholars and other contemporary theorists speak to—or fail to speak to—the postmodern formulation of identity that Pynchon imagines in Slothrop. Finally, I will explore the phenomenon of resistance to Slothrop, the discomfort that he engenders in readers who struggle with his frustratingly ambiguous fate in Pynchon’s text. Such discomfort crops up repeatedly as a theme both in Pynchon’s novel and in the critical commentary it has generated, and, I will suggest, helps to place ourselves as readers into a particular historico-critical context: a context in which the act of literary interpretation helps reaffirm the notion of the constituent subject by maintaining our cohesiveness and competence in the face of texts that we find destabilizing.
(…)
We resist the alienation that the text fosters, and instead pay homage its fecund ambiguity—by engaging in the act of criticism, we reconstitute our own status as cohesive subjects. Paradoxically, we admit that we do not know how to see all that Pynchon sets before us in response to his suggestions that we cannot see. The postmodern world, Pynchon ultimately suggests, is a text we are still learning to read."

UCLA Marathon Reading 2000 — 300 Studenten, Universitätsangehörige und «Special Guests» lesen Gravity’s Rainbow am Stück. Na, denn man los:

"Total reading time will be approximately 28 hours, beginning at 12 noon on Thursday, May 11, and finishing around 3 pm on Friday, May 12. Die—hard students spend the night in the courtyard, bringing pillows and candles to keep the reading going. The Rolfe Sculpture Courtyard, adorned with the work of sculptor Robert Graham, stands immediately adjacent to the North Campus eating facility, one of the most heavily trafficked locations at UCLA. Each participant will read aloud from a section of the novel for 5 minutes. Special guests may read anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes, depending on their preference and availability."

Thomas Pynchon: Die Enden der Parabel — Besprechung von Dirk Uhlmann.

Review of Gravity’s Rainbow — by Patrick Winslow:

"The page references apply to the original 1973 Viking edition and Penguin paperbacks. For the Bantam edition page numbers, multiply by 1.167 for a reasonable approximation."