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employed as an 'engineering aide' at Boeing. He worked on Gravity's
Rainbow for seven years, completing it in 1973. It is said (although we
should always be cautious about the Pynchon legend) that the novel was
unanimously selected for the 1974 Pulitzer prize, but was turned down
by the advisory board, who considered it not only 'turgid' and 'overwrit-
ten' but also 'obscene'.
No doubt the same charges (and worse) were leveled at Rabelais in
the sixteenth century, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel are again the
obvious literary forebears of Pynchon's extraordinary, sprawling work.
Peppered with songs, scatology, science, and mathematical formulae (it
is the only topic I have ever seen with an algebraic joke), Gravity's
Rainbow is impossible to categorize or to summarize. It is a text of Joy-
cean complexity which eschews the conventions of traditional narrative
even to the extent of allowing the central character to fade from the stage
many pages before the end. For the present purposes, we need to know
only that the events the topic describes take place towards and immedi-
ately after the end of the Second World War, and that they are concerned
with the development of the rocket program that began with the German
V2 flying bombs, the arcing trajectory of which is alluded to in the
topic's title. What emerges is that the tail end of the war begins to look
less like a conflict of nations and more like a business enterprise orches-
trated by a conglomerate of companies within which the German chemi-
cals cartel IG Farben looms large.
As in White Noise , the reader is thrown off balance, uncertain what is
'real' and what is 'fantasy'. Whereas DeLillo used such a narrative mode
to mirror the vague forebodings of risk and danger in the minds of his
characters, Pynchon recreates in this way a sense of the paranoia felt by
his protagonist Tyrone Slothrop - Pynchon's equivalent of Joseph
Heller's Yossarian, the wise-cracking, sympathetic yet helpless every-
man - who is thrown this way and that by forces beyond his control or
understanding. “Pynchon gives the impression of a politico-economic
process taking place which can only be glimpsed and which seems to
baffle logic”, according to literary theorist David Seed (1988).
IG Farben is (or at least seems to be) the prime mover in this grand,
behind-the-scenes plot. It is, of course, the ideal choice for such a villain,
for the cartel manufactured Zyklon B poison gas and ran the Buna-
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