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Werke concentration camp on the outskirts of Auschwitz, comparable to
the rocket-building labor camp at Peenemünde that hosts one of Pyn-
chon's set-pieces in Gravity's Rainbow . Seed says that Pynchon “con-
centrates 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 modern military-
industrial complex; but one in which the tentacles of power are entwined
with elements of the occult and chthonic.
This again could be interpreted as a kind of ecological 'rage against
the machine', and indeed the critic J.D. Black has, in Seed's words, “lo-
cated Pynchon in a tradition of anti-technological dissent which presents
man as the destroyer of a vitalistic earth” (Seed 1988). According to
Black (1980), Pynchon “describes a Nature which has been ruthlessly
violated, quantified, and technologically transformed by the irreversible,
exhaustive process of history.”
But again this seems simplistic. It is true that Pynchon expresses a
profound distaste for the military-industrial complex: he has said that,
As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower
prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power estab-
lishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us
average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put
it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go
on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day
less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. [Pynchon 1984]
But that is a complaint about power structures, not technology per se .
And in Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon is more interested in exploring the
genealogy of this structure than in formulating an anti-technological
stance.
A mysterious but central role in the nascent rocket technology is
played by an ominous polymer called Imipolex G, which was developed
in 1939 for IG Farben by Professor Laszlo Jamf. Jamf was taught by a
pupil of August Wilhelm Hofmann, the German chemist whose student
William Perkin triggered IG Farben's original line of business in dye
manufacture with his discovery of the mauve coal-tar dye in 1856. (It is
hinted darkly that there is some deep symbolic significance in that 'un-
folding' of a new color from the molecules of long-dead organisms in
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