Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom

When published in 1973, Gravitys Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchons extensive references to modern science, history, and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practices taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the books great theme is domination: humanitys diminished chances for freedom in a global military-industrial system birthed and set on its feet in World War II. Its symbol: the V-2 rocket. Gravitys Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom broadly situates Pynchons novel in long sixties history, revealing a fiction deeply of and about its time. Herman and Weisenburger put the novels abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation, and subtle new means of social and psychological control. They show the texts close indebtedness to critiques of domination by key postwar thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt. They detail equally powerful ways that sixties countercultural practicesfree-speech resistance played out in courts, campuses, city streets, and raucously satirical underground pressworkprovide a clearer bearing on Pynchons own satirical practices and their implicit criticisms. If the System has jacketed humanity in a total domination, may not a solitary individual still assert freedom? Or has the System captured alleven supposedly immune elitesin an irremediable dominion? Reading Pynchons main characters and storylines, this study realizes a darker Gravitys Rainbow than critics have been willing to see.