Sayed’s Comments (group member since Mar 19, 2019)

Sayed’s comments from the A Rainbow in Winter: A Gravity's Rainbow Reading Challenge group.

Late to the game, but this clip of an interview of Jules Siegel, a journalist and former classmate of Pynchon's, helped contextualize a lot of the book for me:

https://youtu.be/fJ1eu9MX95A

In the video, Siegel suggests that Pynchon might have been involved in (or at least aware of) CIA mind-control programs during the 50s and 60s in which, among other things, LSD was tested on humans, sometimes illegally. (Look up "Project MKUltra", e.g.) That Gravity's Rainbow might have, in fact, been Pynchon's attempt to "confess" such involvement.

Whatever the truth may be, this does correlate with Pynchon's portrayal of PISCES in the book and its use of psychological and chemical means to control Slothrop and others. It also identifies Pynchon with the various White Visitation defectors at the end of the book--Pirate, Mexico, Katje, etc. And, in a way, it might explain Slothrop's spiritual awakening (in pig form). LSD, as Siegel explains, was a drug initially intended to control the masses, but ironically wound up "liberating" them (60s hippie counterculture, etc). In the same way, PISCES's psychological manipulations of Slothrop, while initially intended to control, wound up liberating him.