Gravity's Rainbow Part II: Section One

The first chapter is called "Beyond the Zero" and I don't know what that means yet. The chapter heading is followed by a quote from Wernher von Braun, the most famous German engineer who helped develop the V-2 rocket, a major character in this book. Like really major! The quote is some nonsense about how science has taught Wernher to believe unscientific pablum. That's important because a lot of this book relies on groups conducting paranormal research for reasons which become almost immediately apparent! This book is like an episode of The X-Files if The X-Files had too many characters with silly names and scenes which seamlessly slipped into different scenes from different times without warning you that everything you were reading has suddenly changed and now something else entirely is happening.

The book opens like this: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

After I got done giggling about a screaming coming all over the sky, I decided to think about it for awhile. Opening lines are important and you'd know that if you ever heard anybody say, "Call me Ishmael," and then nod twattishly as if they'd just recited four of Shakespeare's plays in a row. Or maybe one time somebody wanted you to think they were smart and so they said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." If they really wanted you to think they were smart, they would continue with "It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." But that's really gilding the lily a bit and also it's calling a bit too much attention to how A Tale of Two Cities has kind of a crappy opening. Is it really profound to say, "It was everything but it was also nothing. Think about that, prick!"

Just a second. I have to make a note for a new book I just decided to write because I thought up that great opening line.

Gravity's Rainbow starts off much better than those other dumb books I mentioned which I can pretend I've read because this is the Internet and you don't know me. These first two lines tell you something concrete about the setting.

A scream is a warning or an indication of tragedy or catastrophe. It's a portent of danger. Also a portent: anything that comes screaming across the sky! That's why the next line says this has happened before. Portents of death and the end of the world are as common as terrible opening lines in novels. But the next line is all, "But hold up, Grandma! This isn't like any portent you've ever seen before! This is postmodernism!"

The reason the current "portents" have nothing to compare them to now is that they don't portend doom after which doom follows. These new screaming portents kill before the warning comes. They travel faster than the speed of sound and so they smash into you and you die and then they scream their warning. Like, how is that fair?!

The next line might be a bit confusing until you've come to reckon with the idea that the screaming portents kill before anybody knows they're coming. "It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre." Because the missile has already hit. Whoever was going to die, has died. Now it's time to get everybody to safety! I suppose there will be fire and rubble and stuff that you want to move people away from but that's just picking at nits.

The modern age has found a new way to terrify people with the specter of death. Most people think, "Oh boy! I'll live life and then when death comes, I'll probably have time to prepare or I'll have lived a good life or I'll somehow be at peace with it." But now it's more like, "Oh boy! I'll live life and then...." Well, you're dead. Just like that! Bye bye!

Most of my favorite books are about escaping the world rather than fighting back, books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I sometimes include The Grapes of Wrath in that because in one sense, Tom Joad flees into the shadows while his family must struggle on. But inherent in his flight is that he'll always keep fighting against injustice. So while it's one of my favorite books, I can't keep grouping it with the others. But Pynchon might be starting out Gravity's Rainbow with the inherent idea that there will be no escape and there might not even be a chance to fight. What's going to happen to you is going to happen to you and, well, you've got a lot less control over that than you might feel good about. While being evacuated, the evacuees all think, "Is this the way out?" And the answer is no, not at all. The Evacuation "is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into." Each one, believing they're the only one to think it, thinks, "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow...."

In this chaos, we are introduced to Captain Geoffrey Prentice, also known as Pirate. In the morning after the evacuation, he notices a V-2 vapor trail rising into the sky against the horizon. He knows that means only a matter of minutes before the V-2 slams into London. He thinks about warning somebody in authority, or waking those around him, but ultimately realizes he might as well put it from his mind and go about his business. If it's going to hit, he's already dead anyway.

This is the setting which begins Gravity's Rainbow. It's heavy, like gravity! But it's not pretty like a rainbow. Maybe rainbows have negative attributes that I never learned. I know they're a symbol of God's pact to never again drown all mankind! Sometimes people say it's God's pact that he won't kill all mankind again but he's a shrewd businessman, that God, and specifically writes up in his contract that he won't drown them all. What a jerk.

The last thought about the V-2 Pirate has in this section, before he simply wipes it all from his mind and gets to making banana breakfasts for everybody, is this: "What if it should hit exactly—ahh, no—for a split second you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike the top of the skull...."