Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom

Luc Herman, Steven Weisenburger

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780820345956, 9780820335087
• eBook ISBN: 9780820346557
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

When published in 1973, Gravity's Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchon's extensive references to modern science, history, and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practices taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the book's great theme is domination: humanity's diminished "chances for freedom" in a global military-industrial system birthed and set on its feet in World War II. Its symbol: the V-2 rocket.

"Gravity's Rainbow," Domination, and Freedom broadly situates Pynchon's novel in "long sixties" history, revealing a fiction deeply of and about its time. Herman and Weisenburger put the novel's abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation, and subtle new means of social and psychological control. They show the text's close indebtedness to critiques of domination by key postwar thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt. They detail equally powerful ways that sixties countercultural practices—free-speech resistance played out in courts, campuses, city streets, and raucously satirical underground presswork—provide a clearer bearing on Pynchon's own satirical practices and their implicit criticisms.

If the System has jacketed humanity in a total domination, may not a solitary individual still assert freedom? Or has the System captured all—even supposedly immune elites—in an irremediable dominion? Reading Pynchon's main characters and storylines, this study realizes a darker Gravity's Rainbow than critics have been willing to see.

Index

Abish, Walter, 158

acedia, 1, 207–8

Achtfaden, Horst, 126, 127, 138

adenoid riff, 6, 8, 10, 11, 17, 67

Adorno, Theodore, 58

Advent episode, 109–10, 112–13

Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), 58

“Against Theory” (Michaels and Knapp), 155

Agamben, Giorgio, 15, 144, 145–46, 208–9

al-Awlaki, Anwar, 197, 198

Alphabetical Africa (Abish), 158

Althusser, Louis, 98

“America” (Ginsberg), 40, 206, 211

anthropologists, 155–56

antiwar activism, 4, 206

Antwerp, 214

Anubis (god), 52

Anubis (ship), 77, 78, 96, 121, 122

apocalypse, 216–17

Aquinas, Thomas, 207

Arendt, Hannah, 4, 15, 42, 146

and the camps, 145, 148–49

The Human Condition, 88–89

Origins of Totalitarianism, 88–89, 143, 145, 149

Armies of the Night (Mailer), 59

art, 26, 39–41, 43–44, 48

Art of Poetry (Horace), 40

astrology, 154, 166

Austen, Jane, 74, 171

Austin, J. L., 89

Baartman, Saartjie, 195

“Babysitter, The” (Coover), 158

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 178, 180

Baraka, Amiri, 40, 57

Barber (Rossini), 176–77

Barr, Norman, 207

Barthes, Roland, 155

“Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville), 201, 208–9, 212, 213, 217

Bauman, Zygmunt, 223n7

Beardsley, Monroe, 155

Beckett, Samuel, 48

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181

Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music (Schauffler), 179

behaviorism, 7, 16, 88, 97, 98, 149

Bell, Daniel, 42

Benito Cereno (Melville),...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• “What’s Free?” (An Introduction)
• One. Novel and Decade
• Two. Domination
• Three. Freedom
• “Too Late” (A Conclusion)
• Notes
• Index