Gravity s rainbow

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity s Rainbow. New York Viking, 1974. 

In this sense a supermolecule is defined as a large entity composed of molecular subunits which could be applied equally to a covalently linked polymer as to an assembly held together by weaker interactions. It is in this context that Thomas Pynchon used the word metaphorically in 1973 when describing a character in Gravity s Rainbow as ... 

In Gravity s Rainbow Walter Rathenau, former German foreign minister and prophet and architect of the cartelized state , speaks from the grave during a seance to the assembled crowd of Nazis and an ig Farben director.2 He speaks of two stuffs - the base materials of the Industrial Revolution - that he perceives as qualitative opposites of each other. 

The opposites, substitutions, reversals that Synthetic Worlds traces are manifold and the themes accumulate as wilfully and refractedly as in Gravity s Rainbow. Here too chains of connection and flashes of conjunction are found between the colour wheels of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dreamers such as Goethe and Philipp Otto Runge, the rainbow of synthetic colours and the arc of the v-2 rocket. 

Richard Sasuly, ig Farben (New York, 1947), p. 216. Sasuly s book had a curious afterlife. Thomas Pynchon quoted passages from it virtually word for word in his novel of 1973, Gravity s Rainbow. 

Werke concentration camp on the outskirts of Auschwitz, comparable to the rocket-building labor camp at Peenemunde that hosts one of Pyn-chon s set-pieces in Gravity s Rainbow. Seed says that Pynchon concentrates on IG as a process, a steady relentless agglomeration of power through mergers, takeovers and contracts [...] IG becomes the model of the totalitarian state . It is, indeed, the prototype of the modem military-industrial complex but one in which the tentacles of power are entwined with elements of the occult and chthonic. 

But that is a complaint about power stmctures, not technology per se. And in Gravity s Rainbow Pynchon is more interested in exploring the genealogy of this stmcture than in formulating an anti-technological stance. 

Beck, U. 1992, Risk Society Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter, Sage, London. Black, J.D. 1980, Probing a post-Romantic palaeontology Thomas Pynchon s Gravity s Rainbow , Boundary, 2, 8ii, p. 233. 

Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity s Rainbow. The Viking Press, N.Y. Pp. 760. XP... 

The first was a novel published in 1973 by Thomas Pynchon, Gravity s rainbow, which I read shortly after it was published and from which I get part of the title for my talk this afternoon. Even those who have read the book may well have forgotten the general story, so I will go over that very briefly. 

As the reader may have guessed by now. Gravity s rainbow, like Pynchon s other novels, is a book about paranoia. It is certainly no surprise when a book about World War II and the immediate post-war period has paranoia as its main theme that LG. Farben is one of the main characters. The I.G., with its technical wizardry and complex web of international business relationships, lurks behind the scenes throughout the book. And it is clear that this fictional portrayal of the firm and its dealings has a certain accuracy, as the contributions of Mira Wilkins and Kathryn Steen attest. 

---