Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 168

Jameson, Pynchon allegorizes the effect of contemporary media and
technology on the modern world. 70
Pynchon's next topic, the ambitious and brilliant Gravity's
Rainbow , published in , took the theme of the technologizing

of the modern world to extremes. A summary of its impossibly
complex plot is impossible. (Indeed the only adequate summary
could only be the text of the topic itself, similar to Borges's map at
the same scale of the territory it represents.) Set in

1973

, and revolv-
ing around the final stages of the War in Europe the topic concerns
the V-

1944

rocket programme. The rainbow of the title alludes both to
the arc that describes the novel's elliptic set of connections as well
as the trajectory, literal and historical, of the V-

2

rockets. It revolves
around a bewildering number of characters, including American
lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, whose peripatetic sex life exactly
predicts the location of V-

2

targets in London; the Pavlovian Edward
Pointsman who obsessively captures stray dogs for his experiments;
the 'antipointsman' statistician Roger Mexico, whose love for Jessica
Swanlake offers a salve against the terror of the War; the beautiful spy
Katje Borgesius, lover of both Slothrop and Blicero, a.k.a. Weissman,
the V-

2

commander, who engages in orgies based on the story of
Hansel and Gretel with Katje and Gottfried; and so on. It incorpo-
rates mysterious wartime organizations such as PISCES and 'The
White Visitation', the latter dedicated to psychic research. According
to John Johnston, Pynchon's intention, in this extraordinary and
confusing melée of characters and episodes, is to trace the 'birth of
a “rocket-state” that will unify as a “meta-cartel” an international
network of new industries - plastics, electronics, aviation - growing
out of the ruins of World War II. In a tentacular expansion, this
network will soon provide the material basis for a technopolitical
world order.' 71
Johnston suggests Gravity's Rainbow 'maps or projects a set of
concerns, in fact a whole sensibility conspicuous in America in the
late

2

1960 s, onto events in Europe at the end of World War II'. 72 The