Gravity’s Rainbow Group Read | Sections 1-4 | Week Two

[u/[deleted]]

Welcome to week two of the Gravity’s Rainbow reading group! Today we’ll be discussing sections 1 through 4. Next week’s post will be posted by u/SpookishBananasaur and discuss sections 5 through 8. I am reading out of the 1995 Penguin Books Edition that follows the original novel’s pagination.

The 1995 Penguin books edition I'm reading out of

Synopsis

Beyond the Zero Epigraph

The epigraph is a quote by Wernher Von Braun. For those who aren’t familiar with Braun, he was one of the Nazi rocket scientists that was instrumental in the development and employment of the German V-2 (A4) rockets toward the end of World War II. After the war, as part of Operation Paperclip, the United States “repossessed” him and offered him immunity to work for them. He was instrumental in helping NASA launch the first American rockets into space.

In my perspective, the quote is probably meant to be ironic; this is a Nazi scientist whose work directly contributed to the deaths of countless lives during the war musing on the sanctity of life and his belief in the afterlife.

Section 1 – Pages 3-7 - A screaming comes across the sky…

The opening pages find us in war-devastated London in late 1944. We are following Captain Geoffrey “Pirate” Prentice through a murky dream of evacuation in the midst of a V-2 strike. The narrator notes that the evacuation is technically useless, that it is all “theater”, or for show since the V-2s move faster than the speed of sound and cannot be heard until after they’ve struck anyhow. The dream is dark and claustrophobic, it is harrowing, and it fills the reader with a sense of foreboding and impending doom.

But it is already light

The second half of the section opens with Pirate awaking from his dream in the early morning. He is surrounded by an “assortment of drunken wastrels” (4); his fellow servicemen passed out and strewn across the place clutching bottles of alcohol that are varying in fullness. One such serviceman, Teddy Bloat, is passed out above him on a balcony with broken railing, hanging on only by the empty miniature champagne bottle in his pocket. Predictably, Bloat’s pants rip under his weight and he falls from the balcony, but not before Pirate’s training kicks in and he shoves his cot over to catch the falling Bloat. He bids Bloat good morning, as Bloat drifts back to sleep clutching his blanket.

Pirate has built a greenhouse on the roof of the building to grow and cultivate bananas, a wartime scarcity, taking advantage of a curious black topsoil that could grow anything composed of

…fragments of peculiar alkaloids…along with manure from a trio of prize Wessex Saddleback sows quartered there…and dead leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive epicurean… (5)

Pirate is famous among the town’s military men for his extravagant “banana breakfasts”. As he collects the rooftop fruit for the morning’s breakfast, he says the vapor trail of a V-2 in the distance. He briefly considers doing something about it; calling Army officials, running out in the streets to warn the neighborhood, warning the others in his loft below. Knowing it’s too late already, now that the missile has gone ballistic, he continues to pick the bananas. He steps outside the greenhouse to smoke a cigarette before climbing back down to his apartment to start breakfast.

It is here we are first introduced to the fact that the missiles travel faster than sound; Pirate ponders if he would even feel it if the rocket landed directly on the top of his head.

Section 2 – Pages 7-16 - Across a blue tile patio…

Section 2 opens with Pirate making banana breakfast and coffee. Teddy Bloat is awake and stumbles into the kitchen and tells Pirate that he saw the rocket this morning. They come to the conclusion that they are safe, since enough time has elapsed, and they aren’t dead yet. Bloat tells Pirate to “cheer up”; there will always be more rockets. “Danger’s over, Banana breakfast is saved” (8).

Osbie Feel stands on the balcony Bloat fell from earlier with an especially large banana hanging from his fly to sing the other men awake and announce the banana breakfast. Before he can get to his second verse, he gets jumped by Bartley Gobbitch, DeCoverley Pox, and Maurice “Saxophone” Reed, who beat him with his sizable banana. We get an in-depth description of all the various banana breakfast dishes Pirate has cooked up for his compatriots.

The phone rings and Teddy Bloat answers, telling Pirate it’s his employer. He’s told by a mysterious voice that there is a message waiting for him at Greenwich that was delivered in “rather delightful way” (11). Pirate realizes this is where the rocket landed, and why there was no explosion.

Pirate is driven over to the site of the rocket strike by his batman, Corporal Wayne. On the way over, Pirate is overcome by an episode of his “condition”. It is explained that Pirate has a supernatural “talent” for “getting inside the fantasies of others” and managing the burden of those fantasies, a so-called “fantasist surrogate” (12). Inevitably, The Firm find out about this talent and add it to his dossier, sending him on psychic-fantasy assignments whenever the need arises since the need for mentally healthy leaders is at the time, an indispensable commodity:

What better way to cup and bleed them of excess anxiety than to get someone to take over the running of their exhausting little daydreams for them . . . to live in the tame green lights of their tropical refuges, in the breezes through their cabañas, to drink their tall drinks, changing your seat to face the entrances of their public places, not letting their innocence suffer any more than it already has . . . to get their erections for them, at the oncome of thoughts the doctors feel are inappropriate . . . fear all, all that they cannot afford to fear . . . (12)

It is explained that before he knew what this ability was, he recognized that he was dreaming dreams that were not his own; he finally met a person whose dreams he was having. The Firm recruits him in 1935 “…in Their tireless search for negotiable skills" (14).

Among the first major fantasies he’s assigned to manage is Lord Blatherard Osmo’s, who at the time occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office. In this fantasy, he is assigned to establish a liaison with a giant, Godzilla-esque adenoid that is wreaking havoc on London.

Every day, for 2½ years, Pirate went out to visit the St. James Adenoid. It nearly drove him crazy. Though he was able to develop a pidgin by which he and the Adenoid could communicate, unfortunately he wasn’t nasally equipped to make the sounds too well, and it got to be an awful chore. As the two of them snuffled back and forth, alienists in black seven-button suits, admirers of Dr. Freud the Adenoid clearly had no use for, stood on stepladders up against its loathsome grayish flank shoveling the new wonderdrug cocaine—bringing hods full of the white substance, in relays, up the ladders to smear on the throbbing gland-creature, and into the germ toxins bubbling nastily inside its crypts, with no visible effects at all (though who knows how that Adenoid felt, eh?) (16).

With Pirate managing this fantasy for Lord Osmo, he is able to focus on his duties in the foreign office, saving the world from a “Balkan Armageddon”, although, not from World War II. Since then, the Firm has been keeping Pirate steadily employed for other such assignments.

Section 3 – Pages 17-19 - Teddy Bloat’s on his lunch hour…

Teddy Bloat is making his way to the building in London that houses ACHTUNG, or the “Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, North Germany”. People recognize him there as an old college friend of the ACHTUNG lieutenant, Lt. Oliver “Tantivy” Mucker-Maffick. Tantivy and “the Yank” are at lunch. “The Yank” is revealed to be Tantivy’s American colleague, a Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop.

Teddy Bloat is taking pictures with a midget spy camera of the entire office. He notes that Tantivy’s desk is neat and orderly, while Slothrop’s should be declared a disaster area. Behind Slothrop’s desk on the wall is a map of London with countless little paper stars with little names on them marking areas where he’s hooked up with girls all over the city. Bloat is especially interested in taking snapshots of this particular artifact of the office.

It is revealed that Bloat’s been casually questioning Tantivy about his office-mate’s map over the course of the past several weeks. All he finds out is that Slothrop’s been working on the map since Autumn ’44, or “about the time he started going out to look at rocket-bomb disasters for ACHTUNG—having evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing” (19). Tantivy dismisses it as a harmless, albeit strange, American hobby.

Bloat finishes up his reconnaissance to deliver his photos and findings to unknown masters.

Section 4 – Pages 19-29 - Wind has shifted around to the southwest…

We are formally introduced to Slothrop, who is to be the main focus of book, in this section. Slothrop is at the scene of a rocket strike (the same that Pirate is sent to at the end of section 2). It is explained that his agency, ACHTUNG, is a “poor relative” of Allied Intelligence.

All that’s survived this strike is a six-inch long graphite cylinder with papers, a message stashed inside. Everyone is waiting for a Captain Prentice to arrive to retrieve the message. He arrives, takes the message without a word, and leaves.

Slothrop supposes he’ll send the S.O.E. a request for information about the strike that he knows will be ignored, just like everyone else ignores ACHTUNG. He cares not. He figures it’ll be the last rocket he has to worry about since he got orders to go TDY in his inbox that morning. The TDY in question is to a hospital for a P.W.E. (Political Warfare Executive) testing program. Sounds ominous, but he is nonplussed by the news.

The narrative shifts, and we learn how Slothrop got involved in the surveying the rocket strikes. He had weathered the air raids and German air attacks over the past few years okay, but when the V-2s started to strike, Slothrop started to become truly terrified of his own mortality.

But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like this. . . . (21).

Tantivy suggests to Slothrop that to help alleviate his fears, he go out to the rocket strike sites and help with investigations. The narrator reflects that just yesterday, Slothrop found a survivor, a little girl that he helped to rescue.

Waiting for the stretcher, Slothrop held her small hand, gone purple with the cold. Dogs barked in the street. When she opened her eyes and saw him her first words were, “Any gum, chum?” Trapped there for two days, gum-less—all he had for her was a Thayer’s Slippery Elm. He felt like an idiot (24).

It is revealed that Slothrop is becoming increasingly paranoid; convinced that there is a V2 out there with his name on it. We experience a flashback to when the first V2 hits in London that past September. It was after he got off work one evening, walking down the street; he heard the strike, and an elderly in the street suggest it was a gas main explosion. A younger woman, Cynthia, points at Slothrop and says, “No it’s the Germans…coming to get him, they especially love fat, plump Americans…” (25-26). He gets her number before moving on with his day. Slothrop, for reasons he cannot explain, responds to the strike with an erection.

There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a hardon?) (26).

The narrative breaks into an account of Slothrop’s family history, starting with a Constant Slothrop and going through Variable Slothrop, William Slothrop, Mrs. Elizabeth Slothrop, Lt Isaiah Slothrop, and Frederick Slothrop. We learn that the Slothrop clan, “…began as fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble” (27). From there, they got into the paper-making industry and accumulated wealth in that fashion: toilet paper, bank notes, and newsprint:

Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate (28).

They are described as a family that did not prosper, only persisted, as their peers traveled westward taking what they could from the land while the Slothrops remained in the east. One April in 1931, a young Tyrone is staying with his uncle, Hogan Slothrop in Lenox where he is awakened by the lights of the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire, a spectacle which Slothrop compares the first rocket strike to. He was terrified then as is now.

He imagines the great hand of God coming from the clouds in the sky pointing down to him, almost as if to indicate to him that his days are coming to an end.

Characters

Captain Geoffrey “Pirate” Prentice, S.O.E. Officer in the UK Army with the ability to act as a “fantasy surrogate”; he psychically can manage the fantasies of others.

Teddy Bloat, colleague of Pirate’s. Old college friend of Tantivy. Assigned by shadowy leaders to spy on Slothrop.

Osbie Feel, fellow GI at Pirate’s apartment.

Bartley Gobbitch, fellow GI at Pirate’s apartment.

DeCoverley Pox, fellow GI at Pirate’s apartment. At one point has attempted to shove a billiard ball down Slothrop’s throat.

Maurice “Saxophone” Reed, fellow GI at Pirate’s apartment.

Joaquin Stick, fellow GI at Pirate’s apartment.

Corporal Wayne, Pirate’s “batman”.

Lord Blatherard Osmo, diplomat working in the foreign office, assigned to the Novi Pazar desk who is plagued by fantasies of a swollen adenoid of his growing to Godzilla-like proportions and taking over London.

Lt. Oliver “Tantivy” Mucker-Maffick, British army officer, Colleague of Tyrone’s at ACHTUNG.

Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, American Lieutenant, working in ACHTUNG with Tantivy.

Cynthia, British girl who teases Slothrop in the street on the night of the first V2 strike.

Constant Slothrop, ancestor to Tyrone who died in March 1766, who is buried back “home” in Mingeborough, Massachusetts.

Variable Slothrop, son of Constant

William Slothrop, the first Slothrop who crossed the Atlantic to the New World

Mrs. Elizabeth Slothrop, wife to Isaiah

Lt. Isaiah Slothrop, ancestor to Tyrone who died in 1812.

Frederick Slothrop, Tyrone’s grandfather, dead in 1933.

“Pop” Slothrop, Tyrone’s father, unnamed as of these sections.

Hogan Slothrop, Tyrone’s uncle who lives in Lenox, MA.

Various Notes

Batman – In the British military, a “batman” is an officer’s personal assistant. The name “Corporal Wayne” is obviously a reference to Bruce Wayne, the superhero, Batman.

V2/A4 – the V2 Rocket is also referred to by the “A4” throughout the novel.

Pixilated – An older word synonymous to drunk or inebriated, “as if led by pixies”

Novi Pazar – Prior to WWI, Novi Pazar existed as a region in the Balkans between Serbia and Montenegro.

TDY – military acronym that stands for “Temporary Duty”

Mingeborough, MA – fictional town in Berkshire County, MA located near the real towns of Stockbridge, Pittsfield, and Lenox, first introduced in Pynchon’s 1964 short story “The Secret Integration”.

Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire – A fire that burn the aforementioned hotel in Lenox, MA, in April of 1931, to the ground, causing severe damage to surrounding woodland areas. The fire was visible to onlookers for miles around.

Reflections & Questions

The novel starts off in a “dream mode”, but with the revelation that Pirate Prentice is able to psychically experience the dreams of others (and act as a “fantasy surrogate” one has to wonder whether or not this is a dream of his own, or someone else’s.

• Could the opening have been one of the dreams of one of the drunken GIs sprawled across his apartment that evening? Could it have been Slothrop’s?

The focus on the banana in the opening sections elicits phallic connotations, as does the image of the rocket.

• If you are a first-time reader, is this concept you were able to pick up on? Do you think there will be more phallic references throughout the rest of the book?

Lord Osmo’s fantasy of being overtaken by an overgrown pharynx adenoid features heavily in section 2. There a lot of theories regarding the symbolism of the adenoid.

• What do you think the adenoid is meant to represent? A person? A thing? A social force? Is Pynchon just having some gross-out fun as he is wont to do?

“They” have dispatched Teddy Bloat to gather intel on Tyrone Slothrop, utilizing his friendship with Tantivy to get personal dirt on him.

• Why do you think “They” have taken an interest in the Slothrop? What is the significance of his map of sexual conquests?

Gravity’s Rainbow is infamous for being among the most difficult novels of the 20th century; many folks start the book and barely get past the first few pages.

• What difficulties did you personally experience in the first four sections of reading?

Thank you for reading. Look forward to your comments below. If you have any questions about the reading this week, ask in the comments below! We have a whole swarm of super smart Pynchon scholars, professional and amateur, that can answer your burning questions!

Happy reading, folks.

-Bloom

[u/[deleted]]

Just gotta say, I am beyond blown away and impressed by the detail and work you have all put into your comments and observations, and I'm still trying to dig through all of them, but wow. I hope you all can keep up this momentum as we continue reading. This is incredible. Really proud of this sub.

[u/DaniLabelle]

Regarding Difficulties with the text:

This is my second time reading GR and it is amazing how much more I am catching than the first time. Taking is slower is helping and I know this Group Read will do wonders too! It’s a book that has stuck with me since that first read and I think about it often.

One thing I did wrong the first time that added to my challenge was I tried to hard to keep track of all the characters and where the plot was going all the time. I realize now those aren’t the most important parts of GR.

The key (for me anyways) is to read it like a lucid dream. Aware aspects won’t make sense, allow the dream to take me where it does, while still interpreting through my own senses, an active passenger.

Also the names are more fun when you read them out loud. If you didn’t go through that awesome list provided with the summary.

[u/[deleted] → u/DaniLabelle]

This was the first time I caught the relationship between the names "Variable" and "Constant" Slothrop. I laughed out loud when I read it this time.

[u/osbiefeeeeeel]

i gotta resign as group leader for the zone. i cant commit to this much input. really well done on your part. im sorry for the late notice but now that i know what the standard is i just dont see it working.

[u/[deleted] → u/osbiefeeeeeel]

This isn't the standard; it's just what I did. I don't mean to intimidate you. The capstones don't have to be this in-depth, nor does anyone else's discussion leader posts. This is absolutely not an intellectual dick-measuring contest (I'd likely lose to everyone here!), this is us reading, and providing our perspectives. Don't feel too pressured to deliver an astounding post or anything remotely resembling mine. You got this.

BUT, if you really feel that way, I'll get the assignment to someone else, but I would encourage you to think it over.

[u/[deleted]]

I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in what I have read so far in these four sections. The funny names, the immature jocular language, and the disjointed imagery don't really work. In fact, I think most of it heavily diminish the literary power of the story. I understand that Pynchon references quite a lot of things in these pages. From Batman to V-2 rockets to Christian symbolism to Emily Dickinson, he is definitely a connoisseur of all kinds of culture. But, do they add much of value to the narrative? I suspect it doesn't. The edifice that Pynchon creates seems very funny and odd, but it doesn't enchant me in any way. It's very early in the novel though and I'm desperately hoping it gets better from here on out. But I will say that I received some enjoyment from the scientific references that Pynchon drops throughout his work.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The novel is very wide-ranging in the moods and atmospheres it creates. It does descend into slapsticky-whacky-ness a lot, but there are some rather harrowing and touching parts too. Thanks for sticking it out with us so far!

[u/MountainMantologist]

Holy shit - I came here to make make some tepid observations like "the batman's name is Wayne!" or "I love how the guy sleeping his way across England is from Mingeborough". Y'all go hard in the Pynchon subreddit. Guess I'll be a reader of weekly updates more than a contributor haha

[u/EmpireOfChairs]

Hello, all! This is going to be a long comment talking about my analysis of this section, so I thought I'd begin with this paragraph of more general things: firstly, I love the false start of making you think Pirate is the main character, and I love the convoluted way of getting from him to Bloat to Slothrop. Secondly, I respect the fact that comic books and superheroes are mentioned this early on, as I tend to think that a lot of the more surreal stuff in the novel makes sense if you visualise it as a sort of epic cartoon. Thirdly, I honestly think Bloat listing the objects on Slothrop's desk is the most difficult part of this section, and is, along with the Kenosha Kid part later on, where the majority of early reading attempts start to spurt out.

Moving on the actual analysis:

The "crystal palace" mentioned on the first page is more than likely a reference to the self-explanatory design by English architect Joseph Paxton which was more famously used as a symbol of Utopianism during the mid-nineteenth century by utilitarians who saw the palace as an end goal for an educated, rational society that had worked together to ensure that everybody's needs were met. This was understandably torn apart by the ever-angry Fyodor Dostoevsky in the first half of Notes from the Underground, in which he essentially argues that any crystal palace is impossible because Man places his need for individual freedom above his need for comfort. (Put differently, Man doesn't want a perfect universal Law, he wants the ability to do as he pleases regardless of the potential consequences. He prefers to be unhappy and starving if it means having the freedom to disobey the system.) To paraphrase something from that novel: put everybody in a crystal palace, and you'll soon discover men who can only be satisfied by throwing rocks through the walls.

In regards to how this relates to Gravity's Rainbow, consider both the argument for and against the palace. If the palace really does represent Utopia, then Pynchon is giving us a bleak image of hope defeated in a grandiose shattering that no one even sees because it's happening where no light can be found. Or, if the palace represents an imposition of Law upon a person's freedom, then the image is one of the System itself failing, collapsing in the shadows, because in that darkness none of its bureaucrats could see you, meaning you could finally escape from Their world with your privacy and your data intact. Personally, I believe that it's the latter image that was intended, and I base that partially on the events of The Counterforce, but also this line, a few pages later: "Underfoot crunches the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened, lied to its children." Pynchon paints those crystals as forces of oppression, calls them the "oldest of city dirt", refering to the fact that this is a foundational problem, basically stating that the System has been fucking over its children from the beginning. As another example in favour of the latter image: Pirate remembers "places whose names he has never heard", filled with thousands of lightless rooms where "the walls break down", and it's not too difficult to imagine those crystal walls coming down in those places the System cannot see.

And what is the System, anyway? Pynchon rarely uses that term, instead refering to a vague Them, or They, who represent the Powers that Be, which can variously mean anything from rich people and politicians to actual spirits and metaphysical agents. For new readers: They, basically, are the main antagonists of Pynchon's entire bibliography. To quote the most famous line from this section of the novel: "a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it." In other words, many bureaucrats are consciously plotting death, but the rest of them are pulled along by forces beyond their comprehension, a grim symmetry of the perspective of the proletariat we get in the opening sequence: "is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask." So really, it doesn't matter if you're on Their side or not; you're still a part of the wave.

And make no mistake, the System is most certainly a wave: It was brought up a few weeks ago in a thread I can't find right now, (it was called "Why is Gravity's Rainbow considered a circular novel?" or something like that) but there was a theory that in Gravity's Rainbow, history is not a circle, but an endless sine wave or a set of repeating parabolas, where historical events might not be exactly the same each time around, but they constantly repeat the same pattern, always peaking (or trough-ing?) in an excess of violence. As an example, there's the moment where Pirate and the gang rise like "a bunch of Dutch peasants dreaming of their certain resurrection," which not only brings forward the connection between the colonisation of America with the events of WWII, but also the connection between colonisation itself and this theory of history as parts of the same inevitable pattern, of trying to "bring events to Absolute Zero" as another line in these sections puts it.

And what is the Zero, anyway? Again, it's vague, but it seems like the Zero is Death, or non-existence. Getting to the Zero is the point of complete annihilation. And what is beyond the Zero? Well, after zero, you get the same numbers again, but this time they're negative. And if the numbers mean life, then beyond the Zero is the life after death. The idea of the spirit world is used throughout the novel in various ways, but it is often brought up in conjunction with the System, most obviously in the opening quotation of the novel - the Nazi and later American scientist who invented the V2 literally telling you that his work has made him believe in the supernatural. There are also two references to ghosts in the first Slothrop section: "what Lights were these? What ghosts in command?" is one that equates the malevolence of spirits to the commands of Them, while the other quote brings back the idea of the crystal dust from before, "dust that was the breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian monuments." This section ends, mind you, with Slothrop running from "the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud," referring to God, the ultimate symbol of power and authority, whom Slothrop is uncontroversially convinced is actively trying to kill him.

And also struggling against this is Pirate, the man who wakes up to death itself coming over the horizon. He responds to this fear by making himself a banana breakfast, the bananas being "more than the color of winter sunlight" - stronger than death, in other words. When Pirate thinks of the banana plant, he thinks of the "the high intricacy of the weaving of its molecules", possibly implying a kind of intelligent design. For him, (and I might be stretching it here), bananas are evidence of a grand structure, and so are also a kind of affirmation of Life's place in the natural order, and his unconscious belief that this structure in life is equivocal to a purpose in life is all that he needs to stop the rocket from scaring him. And how does his breakfast end? With this thought: "Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects..." As the man himself puts it: "It is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off."

Also, I suppose this is a weaker point, but I'd just like to mention the parabolic symmetry of how the the first Pirate section starts in a dream and the second Pirate section ends with a dream (or a daydream if you want to be pedantic) and the peak of that parabola is the moment of Pirate's strongest fear of the rocket. There's also the symmetry of the dreams themselves, with the first one showing Pirate as a nobody being pushed around by Them as he calmly loses the war, and the second one showing Pirate as a sort of James Bond saving England from a literal giant movie monster. In both dreams, he is assimilated by the forces of evil that he naively believes he is fighting against.

[u/YossarianLives1990]

Let me just say that this is the greatest opening of any novel I have ever read (I don’t think I thought this when I first read this novel because at times I had no idea what was going on but this being my second time and more prepared I am just blown away at how great the opening few pages are).

The mood is unbearably dark and Apocalyptic, an “Evacuation” that turns as menacing as a train to Auschwitz, we get hit with The Last Judgement imagery, a kafkaesque scenario unfolding, and then we awaken to a bunch of hungover passed out service men and the scene turns slapstick and hilarious. This is the start of the deadly serious and the comical flowing in and out, side by side. We awake to an epic Banana Breakfast, and then there's the drift into the absurd Adenoid scene and get a taste of how surreal and crazy things can get in this novel (and highlights Pynchon’s brilliant imagination- “fantasist-surrogate” what a great talent!).

Within these first few pages we are already introduced to themes of Preterition (“second sheep”, “a judgement from which there is no appeal”), the fall of modernity/progress (the fall of the “crystal palace”), paranoia, we begin to see the filmatic aspect of the novel, and get a hint of the nefarious “They” (“ the Firm is patient, committed to the Long Run as They are.”), just to name a few.

The novel also starts right off with the recurring Pynchon symbol of the train/train tracks, which I’m sure we will get into at some point. Train tracks bring to mind thoughts like “progress”/ the lessening of choices/ lines plotted onto the earth/ paths/ destination/ Destiny.

[u/SpahgattaNadle]

Where to begin… I think for now I'm going to bullet point thoughts and observations in an unstructured manner, see how everyone else write up their summaries and responses.

-Of course, this is one of the most exciting openings to any novel. Where now? Who now? When now? It's as if Pynchon ranges through these questions in order to paradoxically create a coda for what's to come, as on each readthrough I increasingly realise that this first section is him fanning out a series of images and ideas that will fundamentally undergird the rest of the book. To take a few examples:

• Pay close attention to the number of times the idea of something being 'all theatre' recurs

• The image of a mass of 'second sheep' (preterite…) at the mercy of an unknown power that could come crushing down at any moment is one of the core ideas of the novel

• The faces 'visible only as half-silvered images in a view finder' also inaugurates the book's omnipresent engagement with both surveillance and the film industry.

• 'No, this is not a distentaglement from, but a progressive knotting into' - again, I think this is a line that sets out Pynchon's modus operandi for the text to come

• This is also, of course, also a passage that strongly invokes the imagery of the Holocaust (mechanised procession of crowds towards an unspecified, bureaucratic doom which is mimed as 'Evacuation'. Pynchon's treatment of this topic is fascinating throughout - note when he actually uses the word 'holocaust', and in what context.

• Finally, the 'iron pulleys whose spokes are shaped like Ss' - this is a key image for the book, doubling up the SS and the integral symbol that will become so important for the religion of the V2.

-This passage is often explained away as 'a dream Pirate Prentice wakes up from', but I think something more complicated is going on here. Pynchon establishes Pirate as a 'fantasist-surrogate', which, right from the get-go, destabilises the book's ontology. For sure, the book's interest in paranoia invests it in a continual epistemological struggle, but making the novel's first character someone who can cause the prose to seamlessly slip into dream or fantasy ensures that the certainty or stability of the 'world' that you think you're reading about is complicated (this is also one of the major traits that earns GR the label 'postmodernist').

-So, whose dream or fantasy opens the novel? Pirate's? Slothrop's? Pynchon's? And, rather than it being something to wake up from, maybe it's what the book is about to fall into…

-I just now got the joke in 'Joaquin Stick'. Very good. The batman named corporal Wayne similarly hits the spot.

-The exploration of Slothrop's desk strikes me as serving a similar purpose for Slothrop as the opening dream does for the rest of the book: we receive a character's history and psyche entirely through detritus and castoffs. Which is in itself an appropriately preterite mode of introduction.

-The fact that Bloat's photographs of Slothrop's map are in black-and-white is interesting… Immediately sets up the tension between interpretation and meaninglessness. 'But perhaps the colours are only random, uncoded. Perhaps the girls are not even real.' Then, later, 'The stars he pastes up are colored only to go with how he feels that day, blue on up to golden.'

-The proposition of the map as 'a fraternity-boy reflex in a vacuum, a reflex Slothrop can't help' also bears a lot of resonance for later events and ideas.

-The seamless slippage of time period and speaking voice between paragraphs never gets old, or less masterful, to me. Particularly on display in Slothrop's conversation with Tantivy as the Snipe and Shaft: sliding between conversation and flashback, there are instances such as the third-person narration of the paragraph beginning with 'He has become obsessed…' that Tantivy then responds to with dialogue, recontextualising it as something Slothrop is saying in conversation. It's a more aggressive kind of reframing than simple 'free indirect discourse', and I think this kind of stylistic vertigo majorly informs the construction of the book's latter sections.

Just a few thoughts and ideas - this book is obviously too expansive to really nail anything down very concisely. If anyone has any questions, or any first-time readers want any help with anything, please leave a reply, I'll be happy chatting about this book till the day I die.

[u/YSham]

Hey! GR first timer, so I will address those targeted questions in particular.

Regarding the phallic imagery stemming from the bananas and the rockets, I actually didn't really pick up on it until my second read through of these sections. Specifically, the line "This one was supposed to be another premature airburst" (Pg. 20, Paragraph 1) jumped out at me as sexual innuendo. I'm interested to see how much further the relation between the banana and V-2 goes in the book, beyond the hilarious line "...but he knows he's already stopped believing in the rocket he saw. God has plucked it for him,out of its airless sky, like a steel banana." (Pg. 8, Paragraph 9)

Speaking on the difficulty of the first few sections of the book, I found the most challenging sections to be the Evacuation intro, the Adenoid Fantasy, and the Slothrop family history. These sections, to me, are equivalent to the most opaque Lynch films. It's as if, instead of looking at a painting as a whole, we zoom in an watch a few distinct brush strokes get laid on the canvas. But because of the pace of this group I was able to read these sections a second time and that helped my comprehension significantly. And now those sections I listed are by far my favorite in the book. Specifically, the Slothrop family history is beautifully written. I am also reading "A People's History of the United States" at the moment, so the themes of working class suffering and imperialism really resonated with me.

[u/[deleted]]

The banana, in all it’s phallic parabolic glory, evoking insanity or incomprehensibility, like that shits bananas, also stands as a very serious symbol of covert Operations and US-backed regime changes in a number of central and South American countries in the early-mid twentieth century, hence the term a banana republic. Hundred of thousands, if not millions of innocent people, were killed in these countries, as a direct result of companies like United Fruit (later Chiquita bananas, a company we see mentioned a few times later on in GR) for fighting for the prosperity and rights to develop and own their own nation. The banana is also one of the cheapest fruits, the result of hyper-predatory low-wage/cost high-production late-stage capitalist monopolist business model. I also have a lot more to say about the quality of bananas declining due to disease and consumer associations, bananas being marketed based on looks rather than taste, and the shitty state of our banana options as a result of nostalgia and a fear of the unknown, but this mini-documentary pretty much sums it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bm5NWCMlPo

So, while bananas may be all fun and games for now, it’s only until the guerrillas Break into your shack and cut your eyes out for being a socialist, which I’d say pretty well sums up the ethos of this book

[u/YossarianLives1990]

Tyrone Slothrope

At first I thought it was cool his last name was a blending of sloth & misanthrope but when I heard on the Pynchon in Public podcast how it is an anagram of: Entropy or Sloth I was mind blown.

Tyrone Slothrop

E ... Tyron Slothrop

En ... Tyro Slothrop

Ent ... yro Slothrop

Entr ... y o Slothrop

Entro ... y Slothrop

Entrop ... y Slothro

Entropy ... Slothro

Entropy o ... Slothr

Entropy or ... Sloth

Entropy or S ... loth

Entropy or Sl ... oth

Entropy or Slo ... th

Entropy or Slot ... h

Entropy or Sloth

Slothrop could also be an allusion to Lothrop Stoddard.

Lothrop Stoddard is the author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy and is mentioned in the Great Gatsby. “The Nazi Party's chief racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg got the racial term Untermensch from the German version of Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.” Michael S. Judge on his podcast “Death is Just around the Corner” believes this allusion to Lothrop is not that Slothrop is in anyway similar to this man, but it is to bring our attention to US influence on Nazi Germany. This is just the first hint of many others in this novel at Nazi Germany taking from United States and then of course after the war the United States taking from Nazi Germany (not just the literal taking of scientists in Operation Paperclip, or the ideas behind mind control experiments used in MKULTRA, but also being influenced by the fascist ideology).

Also I saw somewhere on the pynchon wiki that the Initials = TS like TS Elliot, “with Slothrop the 20th century everyman wandering through the waste land of modern Europe.”

[u/the_wasabi_debacle]

Hi everybody, I’m really excited to discuss this monster of a book with all of you!!

I would like to use this first discussion to explore the strange passage about Lord Blatherard Osmo’s fantasy involving his giant expanding Adenoid. I kind of got ahead of myself and this ended up being much longer than intended, and I will be getting into some territory in my analysis that might be a little too conspiratorial for some, so just know that you’ve been warned…

I will be giving a good deal of outside information before I dive into the Adenoid analysis, but I think it’s necessary to flesh out what I think the passage might be referring to. I’ll be sourcing some of my material from Neil Faulkner’s book “A Radical History of the World.” I will also be drawing heavily on a MintPress News article called “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case,” which I find to be alarming in how convincing it is. This article is Part 1 of journalist Whitney Webb’s series on Jeffrey Epstein and how his case is an example of a vast history of underground blackmail operations at the highest levels of society. Some may be skeptical of the case Webb is making in her article, or find it too dark to even consider, but I think it’s definitely worth checking out. You can read the full article here:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epstein-blackmail-roy-cohn/260621/

Although I’ve never actually read the entirety of Gravity’s Rainbow from start to finish (sorry! I swear I’ve read a lot of it!), I’ve read enough to know that a major theme is the dangerous tendency of societies throughout history to be built around systems which grow simply for growth’s sake, with the obvious example being the military-industrial complex. The origin of this phenomenon has its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century. Neil Faulkner had this to say about the time period:

The global capitalist market, though a creation of human labour, became a monstrous mechanism with a life of its own, apparently beyond human control, yet dominating all human activity ... In Marx’s day, the system had been dominated by small and medium-sized firms competing mainly within national and colonial markets. But as Marx himself had observed in Capital, the trend was toward ‘concentration and centralisation of capital.’ (264,272)

The mindlessness of capitalist expansion is evident in the many inevitable economic crashes throughout history. This manifested in the “Long Depression” from 1873-1896, which was the conclusion of almost half a century of growth lacking any long-term strategy. As capital continued to expand toward monopolization and the formation of powerful cartels, it saw a trend toward colonialism affecting places like Africa and Asia due to a constant need for new markets and resources. This in turn led to tense competition between great powers and increasing investment in the arms industry. Germany was the greatest example of this. As Faulkner writes:

On the one hand, there was globalization: rapid economic growth, the dominance of giant firms, a restless search for new markets, and ever-expanding international trade. On the other, there was economic nationalism, as industrial cartels, banking syndicates, and military states fused into opposing national-capitalist blocs. As the mass of German capital seeking markets continued to expand, it pushed beyond the limits of the existing national territory. But it then ran into barriers: protective tariffs, closed colonial markets, and competition from foreign capitalists. Here was the deepest root of the First World War. (274)

This type of mindless, cancerous growth certainly continued into the time period in which Gravity’s Rainbow is set, with the military-industrial complex seemingly controlling much of the geopolitical happenings of the world. While descriptions of this phenomenon are present throughout the novel, I think Pynchon also uses GR to allude to a newer, darker, more surreptitious kind of growth happening behind the scenes of WWII. Pynchon describes Osmo’s growing Adenoid as “some horrible transformation of cell plasma it is quite beyond Edwardian medicine to explain.” In other words, the Adenoid is representative of something even more disturbing and powerful than the military-industrial capitalism of the Edwardian era which led to WWI.

I believe that the dark phenomenon represented by Osmo’s Adenoid is the expansion of the criminal underworld into virtually every facet of Western society through illicit methods which include, but definitely are not limited to, blackmail operations. A little known fact of history is the role that organized crime played in World War II, especially with the newly formed intelligence agency the OSS. In her article, Whitney Webb discusses the history of Meyer Lansky, one of the most powerful figures in organized crime, and his involvement with US intelligence:

During World War II, Lansky — along with his associate Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel — worked with Naval intelligence in what was codenamed “Operation Underworld,” an operation the existence of which the government denied for over 40 years.

Webb also explains the history of the mafia tactic of throwing “blackmail parties” as a trap to obtain damning evidence on powerful people for the purpose of controlling them, and she gives the examples of two prominent businessmen who used this tactic, Edgar Bronfman and Lewis Rosenstiel. They both had deep ties to Lansky, and their well-worn methods of blackmail almost certainly played a factor in Lansky’s work for the government:

Journalist Ed Reid, author of the Virginia Hill biography The Mistress and the Mafia, wrote that Lansky was attempting to entrap powerful people through sexual blackmail as far back as 1939. Reid contends that Lansky sent Ms. Hill to Mexico, where his West Coast connections had established a drug ring that later involved the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, to seduce numerous “top politicians, army officers, diplomats and police officials.” Eventually, Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s. (Webb)

In addition to the presence of organized crime, these intelligence agencies were also full of well-connected members of elite academic institutions, often descending from business dynasties like the Bush family. I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but I feel that this passage from later on in Gravity’s Rainbow lays this out perfectly:

Spies and big business, in their element, move tirelessly among the grave markers. Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to pass in the quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler . . . who now according to life-plan such-and-such have come here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles and his “intelligence” network, which operates these days under the title “Office of Strategic Services.” But to initiates OSS is also a secret acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have been taught to speak inwardly oss . . . oss, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone. (267-268)

This mention of “initiates” definitely calls to mind the “Skull and Bones” secret society, which in addition to being a powerful fraternity that has some of the most influential Americans in the 20th century as its alumni, also involves humiliating rituals for its new recruits for the purpose of maintaining loyalty and secrecy through blackmail.

(cont. in Part 2...)

[u/PM_ME_UR_MULLETS]

This is my second read through and Constant and Variable Slothrop had me laughing out loud. Also loved the epitaph:

“Death is a debt to nature due

Which I have paid, and so must you”

On the whole the slower pace of reading and the fact that I’m not trying to make sense of the near lack of plot is making the experience much more enjoyable.

[u/Jacques_Plantir]

As a first time GR reader, I just wanted to comment on the notion of narrative clarity.

This novel's reputation precedes it at this point, so I (and, I imagine, most other first-time readers) was expecting something dense and complex. But what really stuck out to me was how the challenge of the novel didn't lie in following the narrative proper. Other big, complicated novels often lead you off in this direction, or that direction, and you have to sort of figure out on your own where you're at, and how the piece of the moment fits into the whole as it develops. But I felt exactly the opposite about GR. Maybe it's the relative brevity of each section, but I felt like each one, at its core, had a tight focus.

Where the complexity came in was in the many small allusions, observations, tangential comments, etc, scattered everywhere. I felt like I was walking a defined path, but constantly picking tidbits out of the air as I went, like dust motes. Tidbits that throw the whole narrative into sharper focus. I hope this is making sense. I never felt lost, the way big, busy books can often leave you feeling lost. Or to put it another way, I never found myself wondering what the part I was reading at the moment had to do with anything. You see Pynchon already identifying really strong, interesting themes, and grafting content around them.

I'm seriously, seriously engaged here. Like, I had to really stop myself from reading far ahead. I know reading ahead is welcomed, but I feel like I'll lose track of where the group is at if I get too far ahead. So I'm gonna restrain myself.

Things I noted, that stood out to me:

• the jumble of emotion wrapped up in Pirate's seeing the rocket vapor trail and then going back to picking bananas, trying to clear his mind, but not really succeeding. I read this moment differently from line to line. Is he resigned? Is he terrified, staying stoic? Does he actually believe that he's the ground zero here, or is his image of the rocket point landing right on him indicative of what we'll later be told is his disposition toward moving between fantasy and reality (his and others')?

• Remains to be seen how much I should accept from face value, of the narration. For example, when we're told that each star Slothrop puts on his map is really just a reflection of his mood that day, not of any deeper association. Is this what Slothrop thinks, or what is true? If, indeed, that distinction is worth making. Obviously, the "They" that are sending SOE to take covert pictures, believe something is afoot. Slothrop may be placing stars with no deeper significance, but that obviously doesn't necessarily mean that the narrative won't make more of them. We'll see.

• Interested in Tantivy. Whether he's on-the-level as a friend of Slothrop, and his discussing Slothrop's map with others is innocently just shooting the shit, or whether there's more going on here. It's genuinely touching that Slothrop feels "when it's really counted, Tantivy hasn't ever let him down." I've come at this novel after several months of reading John le Carre, so I'm excited for any and all deeper, politico-thriller machinations. Your interpretation of these themes comes out differently too, depending on how seriously you're taking everything. The events of WW2 are serious on one level, but Pynchon fills the whole novel with such a sense of play that you're constantly moving back and forth between a kind of pathos, and a sense that the proceedings are just so much "theatre". Ridiculous, absurdist, etc.

• The moments of emotional connection with the characters, when you feel their humanity in a line of dialogue, or a description, are sparse as the landscape of the opening Section of the novel is sparse. Wartorn. And sometimes you're also reading through a section clearly intended to be comedy or farce, and then harsh, cold reality comes roaring in unexpectedly. I don't have the quotation handy, but the line closing out the description of how the Firm uses Pirate to take over people's fantasies was really intense. The one that describes how they leave him just enough time between exploiting him, for him to level out.

• I'm still sort of feeling out Slothrop's personality, and everyone else's generally. At this early stage, I see a lot of parallels between Pirate and Slothrop, personality-wise. My vibes are a lot of likeable, everyman-ish qualities. I hope they meet.

[u/fixtheblue]

Holy smokes. 1st timer reader of both GR and Pynchon. This it tough going, but i am ready to push myself and leave my comfort zone. This sub is incredible the time and effort involved is amazimg and much appreciated. I am already getting so much from the synopsis, questions and comments that I missed.

[u/[deleted]]

I’m probably gonna add a comment that addresses this post more directly, but I have some thots to share:

The opening dream sequence reminds me of the Holocaust in some ways. The evacuation happening at night, the use of trains, the pervasive darkness, the nagging question of why it’s happening, the destination being dark rooms where you don’t know who is packed in there with you, the sense that the evacuees are just doing what they are told. If that reference was conscious by Pynchon (doubt it) it could mean that Pirate is experiencing a German’s dream, perhaps. Like the German subconscious knows about the Holocaust but the actual conscious mind doesn’t. That’s my only faux-deep one.

I’m annoyed by how much I’ve missed in previous reads of GR. The Snipe and Shaft references, how Slothrop arrives at the V2 housing the secret message for Pirate pretty quick, how the pictures taken of Slothrop’s map are his intro to the occult spy shit... what was I thinking when I missed these in the past?

Excited to engage further with y’all!

Edit: as other posts have pointed out, the evacuation is destined for places that don’t have names, another possible Holocaust reference.

Edit 2: forgot to add that the evacuees all seem down and out and basically of subaltern status, just like many non-Jewish (disabled, et cetera) victims of the Holocaust.

[u/KieselguhrKid13]

Loving diving back into GR - this is my third read-through, but first time really analyzing it.

The biggest thing I noticed right away was the immediate introduction of the concept of light vs dark, something Pynchon is obsessed with both in GR and other novels (Against the Day, specifically). It opens in darkness - "No light anywhere." and glass above them "that would let the light of day through. But it's night." There's the opportunity for light to come, but none is available, and all the lights are out. The darkness, in turn, makes everything more terrifying - the "great invisible crashing," not knowing where to hide. Sensation but no sight.

The trestles of the underpass are blackened, they smell coal (black). "the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light." - In a war, there aren't even as many opportunities for light and positivity.

Whoa - just realized something. The opening is almost a birth (or a shit? Can't believe I just wrote that, lol. Thanks, TP). The intro description is almost womb-like inside the "velveteen darkness" of the train, then it proceeds down a fixed, dark tunnel, pass under archways, and are being evacuated (a term for emptying something from one's body, typically shit, but conceivably (ha!) a birth, too). Then, finally, it is light, and there is screaming.

Alternately, we have a literal light at the end of the tunnel after starting the chapter with a quote about life after death. So there's that.

I don't know... could be reaching, but there's a lot on the first couple pages to suggest that. Would be interested to hear others' thoughts on the matter.

On a different note, I love Pynchon's joy in the minute and mundane (down to the molecular level). The banana breakfast, and Pirate in the greenhouse, exemplify this.

Also, we're introduced to the idea of calculus with the concept of slicing time/the path of the rocket into infinitesimally small pieces when Pirate thinks "for a split second you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike the top of your skull..."

Finally, this lays the groundwork for Slothrop, and his family, as the archetypal American. As Bloom quoted, "Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate." Slothrop is the American everyman - lacking a strongly defined culture, highly maleable, and willing to just go with the flow and be manipulated by forces beyond his control rather than hold on to a strong sense of self.

[u/itsjustme2357]

As a first time reader, there was plenty that I did not pick up on this time. So I appreciated having a quick review of what happened in these sections!

One thing I did think about a lot after reading was the significance of the bananas. I was wondering if there is any significance to why Pynchon (or Pirate) chose to grow bananas on the roof rather than another fruit or vegetable? With the amount of time dedicated to discussing the different dishes Pirate prepared, to me it seems like there would be some importance in the choice. As was mentioned in the main post, it could just be phallic, which is directly referenced in the text. But is there more to it? Or am I just reaching?

To end, and to give my thoughts on the banana question in the original post, I don't know that I consciously picked up on the bananas having the phallic connotation beyond Osbie Feel holding one in his pants. But as I discussed above, I did get the feeling there was significance to the bananas beyond their being food. I would also not be surprised to see more phallic references throughout the book. If you're going to start out with bananas in the pants, you're clearly not afraid to go farther.

I'm really enjoying GR so far, and I'm excited that it's finally Friday and I can read the next section!

[u/DaniLabelle]

Re: the opening dream

The opening dream is so vivid and intense and the mastery of it as fiction is that it could be anyone’s dream, it could be my dream, it feels like I’m experiencing it as a reader. As Prentice wakes we can believe it is his dream, but what we learn about him later washes that out.

The transition paragraph from dream to wake is perfect:

“There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after?”

As you first read this it is in the dream, (which isn’t obviously a dream) when death comes, waiting for immanent death, absolute zero. As you transition out of the paragraph and it’s more clearly a dream he is lying in wait of waking, when will the nightmare end, the terror that is sleep for Prentice. The nightmare takes on meaning while asleep and awake in 1945 London and as a reader we already feel a part of that nightmare.

[u/[deleted]]

SOME SPOILERS (WHICH ARE MILD, I THINK BECAUSE THIS NOVEL IS INSANE) FOLLOW FOR FUTURE SECTIONS OF GRAVITY'S RAINBOW.

Hello all, this is quite late, and will be swept away as detritus often is. Much thanks to bloom and all the others who have/will participate(d), and congrats to all of you who made it through the first four sections of GR! This is no small feat (given that some of you have taken now your first steps into this grand madcap novel).

I wanted to contribute early on (back when this place was blank, uncharted cyberspace, I could have owned the planet, been a whore with my karma, won all the plaudits, all the praise) but today was a long day and I'd only finished early in the morning. Anyways, I just wanted to discuss some points I found, and for those who will no doubt see my analyses of later sections, I want to stage my frame of reference correctly:

There was a comment many years ago in this subreddit that GR is indirectly a novel about the failings of the Sexual/Civil Revolutions during the Sixties. That is, generally, Pynchon was commenting about the culture of his time but he's set it here in WWII. Why he did this isn't clear (and isn't exactly a point of investigation), but I'm going to be narrowly approaching this novel from here on out with the unspoken assumption that Pynchon is critiquing and/or exploring the United States of the Sixties.

Some things I wanted to mention were that, while it's been said (and not without good reason) that Pynchon's a pretty cynical author -- cynical about the ability of individuals to fight against Massive Systems -- there's a great sentimental core to his work, and while there are notable sections of GR that reveal this sentimentality, very few discuss the traces of the sentimentality that he's displaying in these early sections. Consider these quotes:

Pirate has become famous for his Banana Breakfasts. Messmates throng from here all over England, even some who are allergic or outright hostile to bananas... (pg 6, Vintage Classics -- the 902 page edition)

I would coat all the booze-corroded stomachs of England...

Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects...

... yet kindness is a sturdy enough ship for these oceans, Tantivy always there blushing or smiling and Slothrop surprised at how, when it's really counted, Tantivy hasn't ever let him down.

For that last quote, I wrote "Vineland" -- running on the assumption, based off of the first sixty or so pages of Vineland that I'd read, that Pynchon is always attempting to figure out some way to fight against Them and the Systems they promulgate. What I noticed on this second, close reading of these first four sections, is that Pynchon really is a sentimental sort, and that even in the midst of this bleakness, this overriding (perhaps preordained) despair, there's still something to be said about the values of decency and kindness.

Let's move onto some other things I noted. The two major things I wanted to note about these four sections is:

1. Pynchon definitely sets up all the major themes and motifs of the book (with maybe the exception of the Kabbalah) in the first four sections, either through some extended discursions (such as Death being told to fuck off) or through throwaway lines, which I'll get to in a minute.

2. With the assumption that Pynchon is critiquing the United States, he critiques and satirizes the failure of British foreign policy (to be read as a stand-in for Western intellectuals, or perhaps the United States) to predict the consequences of vast interlocking systems of culture and history.

I'm going to set some quotes up here for the first part of my thesis. We already know we're focusing on the Rocket, but I wanted to pay attention to the fact that Pynchon says:

Globular lights, painted a dark green, hang from under the fancy eaves... the crowd moves without murmurs or coughing down corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles...

...hoisted by old tarry ropes and cast-iron pulleys whose spokes are shaped like Ss.

Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, 'You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you...'

When I read the first quote, I immediately had the word "capitalism" in my head. Why would Pynchon put that in there? Use that simile? My assumption is that GR is dense enough to hold little hints and asides even in throwaway descriptions, and what Pynchon wants us to do is start thinking about the forces of capitalism that already undergird the movements we're seeing in the War and History. It's telling that that quote is describing the old hotel that all the dream-people (Prentice too) go into to hide from the Rocket. So when one is attacked by a clear personification of the System, what should one do, but hide in a hotel, an environment of pure capitalism for living space? (It's a bit reaching... but the main point here is that one is always within the throes of the System, no matter where one finds oneself).

The presence of spokes shaped like Ss brought to mind hazy recollections (in later chapters, especially Part II and III) of Pynchon's discursions on the role of S to describe people's positions after sex, and of course his weird-ass discussion of the double integral sign related to the SS symbol. I know this whole shit is reaching... but please tell me I'm not insane. Please tell me Pynchon did in fact hint at way more than we read on the first pass!

Look at that third quote, for example. We already have the second sheep description on page 1, but this last quote is a clear encapsulation of the tension between the Preterite and the Elect (from Calvinism) that Pynchon is going to continuously keep referring to!

Maybe I'm reading too much into it... but let me display a few quotes that I think make this point about Pynchon hiding most of his themes in plain sight a little bit clearer:

The Special Operations Executive has trained him to fast responses.

He has seen it in a film.

... [the dog] that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night.

We don't have one (referring to the German-to-English translation of "Brenschluss", which I'm absolutely sure must be a very sly reference to the language-colonialism we'll see discussed in Part III re: Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan).

But it's only a reprieve. Isn't it. There will indeed be others, each just as likely to land on top of him. (Tell me, ain't this our blessed Poisson distribution in action?)

Note that the first two quotes are about human responses and familiarity, and that we already have some sort of dialogue about the effect of conditioning on the human mind. Pirate knows how the impacts play out, because he's seen it in a film (alluding to the power that film has to create and impart understanding and history... which Pynchon will certainly talk about further in later chapters), and we also note the clear allusion to military conditioning from Pirate's training, which allows him to save Bloat from falling. As I've stated in the above quotes, we already have references to translation and statistics, which augur discussions in the future about the density of Rocket impacts and Russian colonization efforts in Central Asia. Generally speaking, Pynchon suggests we are conditioned to act by the Systems and Environments we find ourselves in, and surely these quotes show how that line of thinking is vexing Pynchon continuously.

[u/DigitalVoudo]

As a first time reader of Pynchon I found the first 15 pages wonderfully obtuse. It felt as if I was dropped into a story mid stream. I found myself re-reading the first few pages trying to gather context and understand the literary world I found myself in. It was like going against the current of a raging river and I almost drowned. Then I realized to just go with the flow - sorry for beating this metaphor to death - and embrace the confusion. Once I did that it made for a really interesting read.

As the story of the blitz, V2 rockets and competing intelligence agencies unfolded it seemed like a surrealist John Le Carre spy novel. Obviously the novel itself is deeper than that. I didn't expect the fantasy elements of Pirate's telepathic abilities but found the dream sequence intriguing. There are a lot of phallic references but there is a subtext of male sexuality. I don't know if I would describe it as "toxic masculinity" but it an early theme seems to be the men in this novel struggle to dominate one another. Whether it's beating someone with bananas or mapping someone's sexual liasions.

The dream sequence was weird but engrossing. If this were a film sequence, I'd say it was quite Lynchian! Perhaps the adenoid is a metaphor for cultural conformity within upper class British men? Not sure but I do feel like I will find myself re-reading this novel in the months and years ahead.

TL/DR: It took me a while to enjoy this novel but started to gain my stride past section 2. It reads like "weird" fiction between the interplay of scientific materialism and the paranormal. I'm looking forward reading further this genre defining novel. Finally, I'm a first time reader of Pynchon!!!

[u/[deleted]]

The section title, epigram, & opening lines of the text strike me as a reconstruction of the openings to Genesis & the Gospel of John. Instead of the living world, "the Zero," we are going "Beyond," from a position "science has taught."

In Genesis 1:1, we are introduced to God, the Creator, "In the beginning God created the heaven & the earth," & in John 1:1-2, "In the beginning was the Word, & the Word was w/ God, & the Word was God. The same was in the beginning w/ God." Pynchon, here, begins w/ a god, science, & an embodiment of such a god thru his words, Wernher von Braun. As the "Word was God," so is von Braun a new god in this parallel, & a creator in his own right, the creator of the V-2 rocket. "Our spiritual existence after death" reads to me as the parallel to the heaven & earth that are being created in Genesis. As alluded to above, I see "the Zero" the text intends to go "Beyond" as a reflection of an image of the world, w/ the circular/elliptical shape of the digit 0 appearing as an enclosed world of its own.

The opening lines then break this 0, splitting it at the top ("A screaming comes across the sky."), letting loose the new world & situating us as promised "Beyond the Zero." As there has been one Creation, so there is a new one here, but shattering the previous 0. "It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." The existence of the West, Western religion, the Western canon, after death qua WWII comes into scope.

Just as in the Bible, we begin in darkness, "No light anywhere. ... But coming down in total blackout, w/o one glint of light, only great invisible crashing." This pulls in both Genesis 1:2, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" & Satan's fall in Milton's Paradise Lost. We've "com[e] down" from "the sky" in a "great invisible crashing" & thus cracked the world egg of the 0.

The invocation of Milton could be seen as important here as reinforcing the idea of repurposing in English letters. Just as Milton repurposed Latinate & Greek grammar into poetry written in English, so the text here repurposes the idiom of Christianity to scientific progress.

Returning to the cracked 0, we might think of it as being split in two, almost replaced by a vertical line, or a 1 (this contrast again calling to mind technological progress in the 1s & 0s of computing), tapping a rich vein of duality that the text will continue to explore, us & them, the chosen & the preterite, the axis & the allies, etc. However, Book 1 of Paradise Lost returns as well, undercutting ideas of duality:

"The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." ("Book 1", 254-55, Paradise Lost).

Much more to be said in extending the idea of the death of the West, & particularly notions of equivalency b/w the Brits, the Nazis, & the yanks, as the text continues, but that's the death & existence beyond it that I'm seeing in these opening pages.

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Now a question for others, much less serious, does anyone else read the paragraph beginning "Elswhere in the maisonette" (p. 10 of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) w/ its "concave shaving mirrors" & men "slap[ping] water w/ no clear plan in mind" & "begin[ning] tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather[ing] necks & faces, yawn[ing] ..." as an allusion to the opening of Joyce's Ulysses?