Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn’t even an awareness—not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life.

The true king only dies a mock death. Remember. Any number of young men may be selected to die in his place while the real king, foxy old bastard, goes on. Will

the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless destroying signalings of love.

And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one—something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there’s too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody’s around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who’re naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they’re wondering s...

Yes, recant, grovel, oh fabulous—but before whom? Who’s listening?

I should . . . should have. . . . There are, in his history, so many of these unmade moves, so many “should haves”—should have married her, let her father steer him, should have stayed in Harley Street, been kinder, smiled more at strangers, even smiled back this afternoon at Maudie Chilkes . . . why couldn’t he? A silly bleeding smile, why not, what inhibits, what snarl of the mosaic?

Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that’s vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can’t accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference. .

Destiny waits, a darkness latent in the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river—dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you.

Destiny, for a woman in Leni's time and position, is to be married off. Also,

They are using him—have been, various theys, for ten years. But he never knows how, except by rare accident, an allusion, an interception of smiles. A distorting and forever clouded mirror, the smiles of clients. . . .

The "they" can change but the elect always end up using the preterite.

Why do they want Rathenau tonight? What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you’d expect to get from them—it says exactly nothing. The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history—at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud—will never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else. What will Rathenau, past the moment, years into a new otherside existence, have to say about the old dispensation? Probably nothing as incredible as what he might have said just as the shock flashed his mortal nerves, as the Angel swooped in. . . .

What is the truth that the victim would pass onto the assassin in the moment of death? Does the victim, the ignorant of power, come to understand the true power in death?

Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion—even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs”—a bit of a murmur around the table at this—“as you all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata—epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.

“You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go. . . .”

“Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?” It is Heinz Rippenstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. “Is God really Jewish?”

“Nothing comes through my hos-pital but fail-ure, you see.” Staring with a fixed, fool-alcoholic smile. “What can I cure? I can only send them back, outside again? Back to that? It might as well be Europe here, com-bat, splint-ing and drug-ging them all into some mini-mum condition to get on with the kill-ing?”

“In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found below. In others the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live inland. Now in London, here is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing as the river widens to the sea. I am only ask-ing, why? Is it because of the ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use, especially those relating to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu, surviving down all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly. The people out here were meant to go down first. We’re expendable: those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don’t mean the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac dreams, it’s not accessible to us. Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary . . . or of waves of darkness . . . waves of fire. . . . Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It’s none of my business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don’t deny it—known, Pointsman! that the front in Eu-rope someday...

It is also what the present dispensation often does to decent men and women entirely on this side of the grave. In neither process is there any dignity, or any mercy. Mothers and fathers are conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving themselves cancer and heart attacks, getting into motor accidents, going off to fight in the War—leaving their children alone in the forest. They’ll always tell you fathers are “taken,” but fathers only leave—that’s what it really is. The fathers are all covering for each other, that’s all. Perhaps it’s even better to have this presence, rubbing the room dry as glass, slipping in and out of an old chair, than a father who still hasn’t died yet, a man you love and have to watch it happening to. . . .

If the rockets don’t get her there’s still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband’s orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn’t make. .

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine.” It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible. . . .

You’re catching the War. It’s infecting you and I don’t know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don’t leave me. . . .

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where’s his basis for comparing?

He gave up questioning orders long ago—even questioning his exile. The evidence linking him to the Bukharin conspiracy, whose particulars he has never heard, might somehow be true—the Trotskyite Bloc might have known of him, by reputation, used him in ways forever secret . . . forever secret: there are forms of innocence, he knows, that cannot conceive of what that means, much less accept it as he has. For it might, after all, be only another episode in some huge pathological dream of Stalin’s. At least he had physiology, something outside the party . . . those who had nothing but the party, who had built their whole lives upon it, only to be purged, must go through something very like death . . . and never to know anything for certain, never to have the precision of the laboratory . . . it’s been his own sanity, God knows, for twenty years. At least they can never— No, no they wouldn’t, there’s never been a case . . . unless it’s been hushed up, you’d never read it in the journals of course— Would Pointsman— He might. Yes.

I’m— I feel I’m only useful to him in a way I can’t see. Being tolerated for as long as he can use me. The old University connection. I don’t know if you ever felt it at Harvard . . . from time to time back in Oxford, I came to sense a peculiar structure that no one admitted to—that extended far beyond Turl Street, past Cornmarket into covenants, procuring, accounts due . . . one never knew who it would be, or when, or how they’d try to collect it . . . but I thought it only idle, only at the fringes of what I was really up there for, you know. . . .”

Nothing. “Did that Tantivy move out, or what?” “He may have moved in, with Françoise or What’s-her-name. Even gone back to London early, I don’t keep a file on him, I’m not the missing-persons bureau.” “You’re his friend. . . .” Bloat, with an insolent shrug, for the very first time since they met, now looks Slothrop in the eyes. “Aren’t you? What are you?”

Around the tables, Empire chairs are lined up precise and playerless. But some are taller than the rest. These are no longer quite outward and visible signs of a game of chance. There is another enterprise here, more real than that, less merciful, and systematically hidden from the likes of Slothrop. Who sits in the taller chairs? Do They have names? What lies on Their smooth baize surfaces?

There may, for a moment, have been some golden, vaguely rootlike or manlike figure beginning to form among the brown and bright cream shadows and light here. But Slothrop isn’t to be let off quite so easy. Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room is really being used for something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never.

Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself—here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in dust—rooms full of dust that will cloud the shapes of inhabitants around the corners or deeper inside, that will settle on their black formal lapels, that will soften to sugar the white faces, white shirt fronts, gems and gowns, white hands that move too quickly to be seen . . . what game do They deal? What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect? “Fuck you,” whispers Slothrop. It’s the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that.

Ghosts of fishermen, glassworkers, fur traders, renegade preachers, hilltop patriarchs and valley politicians go avalanching back from Slothrop here, back to 1630 when Governor Winthrop came over to America on the Arbella, flagship of a great Puritan flotilla that year, on which the first American Slothrop had been a mess cook or something—there go that Arbella and its whole fleet, sailing backward in formation, the wind sucking them east again, the creatures leaning from the margins of the unknown sucking in their cheeks, growing crosseyed with the effort, in to black deep hollows at the mercy of teeth no longer the milky molars of cherubs, as the old ships zoom out of Boston Harbor, back across an Atlantic whose currents and swells go flowing and heaving in reverse . . . a redemption of every mess cook who ever slipped and fell when the deck made an unexpected move, the night’s stew collecting itself up out of the planks and off the indignant shoes of the more elect, slithering in a fountain back into the pewter kettle as the servant himself staggers upright again and the vomit he slipped on goes gushing back into the mouth that spilled it . . . Presto change-o! Tyrone Slothrop’s English again! But it doesn’t seem to be redemption exactly that this They have in mind. . . .

Making a long arm, hooking a finger on a spoke to stop the wheel. The ball drops in a compartment whose number they never see. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.

The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed. It’s the past that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and, sneering disagreeably, gooses its victims. When They chose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean by it? What Wheel did They set in motion?

He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That’s all.

The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel—where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit. . . .

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children. . . .

Slothrop, we’re all such mechanical men. Doing our jobs. That’s all we are.

Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die. . . . “I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. . . .”

The great cusp—green equinox and turning, dreaming fishes to young ram, watersleep to firewaking, bears down on us. Across the Western Front, up in the Harz in Bleicheröde, Wernher von Braun, lately wrecked arm in a plaster cast, prepares to celebrate his 33rd birthday. Artillery thunders through the afternoon. Russian tanks raise dust phantoms far away over the German leas. The storks are home, and the first violets have appeared.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

Roland shivers. Is this the one? This? to be figurehead for the latest passage? Oh, dear. God have mercy: what storms, what monsters of the Aether could this Slothrop ever charm away for anyone?

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

Worried, all right. By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some Presence so large that nobody else can see it—there! that’s that monster I was telling you about.—That’s no monster, stupid, that’s clouds!—No, can’t you see? It’s his feet— Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities . . . or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening. . . . “It’s only a ‘wild coincidence,’ Slothrop.” He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others. It is a bookish kind of reflex, maybe he’s genetically predisposed—all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones—all the materials and dimensions. Data behind which always, nearer or farther, was the numinous certainty of God.

Scales and claws, and footfalls no one else seems to hear. . . .

Who’d know better than an outfit like Shell, with no real country, no side in any war, no specific face or heritage: tapping instead out of that global stratum, most deeply laid, from which all the appearances of corporate ownership really spring?

The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple ribbon. Keychain’s there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutiérrez. During the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, young Gutiérrez was set upon by a carload of Anglo vigilantes from Whittier, beaten up while the L.A. police watched and called out advice, then arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge was allowing zoot-suiters to choose between jail and the Army. Gutiérrez joined up, was wounded on Saipan, developed gangrene, had to have his arm amputated, is home now, married to a girl who works in the kitchen at a taco place in San Gabriel, can’t find any work himself, drinks a lot during the day. . . . But his old zoot, and those of thousands of others busted that summer, hanging empty on the backs of all the Mexican L.A. doors, got bought up and have found their way over here, into the market, no harm turning a little profit, is there, they’d only have hung there in the fat smoke and the baby smell, in the rooms with shades pulled down against the white sun beating, day after day, on the dried palm trees and muddy culverts, inside these fly-ridden and empty rooms. . . .

This chapter is largely silly and extreme with Slothrop proving himself somewhat heroic, but it ends with this tragic story of a victim of police brutality. Also, Pynchon's black humor is on full display as the silver lining is that at least those good-looking zoot suits are being worn by someone in Europe rather than being left hung alone in the houses of the original owners.

But Duncan Sandys is only a name, a function in this, “How high does it go?” is not even the right kind of question to be asking, because the organization charts have all been set up by Them, the titles and names filled in by Them, because Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

They did it. Took his friend out to some deathtrap, probably let him fake an “honourable” death . . . and then just closed up his file. . . .

“Why did you leave,” the sad whisper ringing as if through a telephone receiver from someplace far away, “they wanted to help you. They wouldn’t have done anything bad. . . .”

American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do . . .

The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of. . . .

Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”

“It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.”