A Gravity's rainbow companion : sources and contexts for Pynchon's novel PDF
Preview A Gravity's rainbow companion : sources and contexts for Pynchon's novel
A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion This page intentionally left blank A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel Second Edition, Revised and Expanded by Steven C. Weisenburger The University of Georgia Press Athens and London © 2006 by the University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 All rights reserved Set in Trump Medieval by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed and bound by Maple-Vail The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 C 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 P 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s rainbow companion : sources and contexts for Pynchon’s novel / by Steven C. Weisenburger. —2nd ed., rev. and expanded. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-8203-2811-9 (alk. paper) ISBN-10 0-8203-2811-1 (alk. paper) ISBN-13 978-0-8203-2807-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10 0-8203-2807-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s rainbow. I. Title. PS3566.Y55 G7395 2006 813(cid:2).54—dc22 2006011956 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Contents Acknowledgments (1988)/vii And More Acknowledgments (2006)/ix Introduction/1 Part 1 Beyond the Zero/13 Part 2 Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering/121 Part 3 In the Zone/175 Part 4 The Counterforce/319 Bibliography/385 Index/397 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments (1988) I nmany ways doing this book was fun. It meant readings in American pop and material culture, the occult, varieties of pseudoscience, real science, vernacular geography, and forty-year-old news periodicals—to mention just a few fields I wandered into. A new discovery each week, at the peak of my research, sometimes tedious but always-enjoyable work because of friends and colleagues who took an interest. I am grateful to all who helped it along. Roger Sale, for two reasons: for showing that one could enjoy these serendipitous paths of scholarship and for sharing his reading of Gravity’s Rainbow when the novel was first published. Malcolm Griffith, for sug- gesting (in 1978) that I should write this book. I put the idea aside for four years, but once the project was under way it was helped by a number of friends and colleagues. Staff members at the M. I. King Library at the Uni- versity of Kentucky provided invaluable assistance, and I especially want to thank Roxanna Jones and Barbara Wight of interlibrary loan, as well as Rob Aken, Dan Barkley, Brad Grissom, and Laura Rein of King Library’s reference department. Steven Moore, fresh from a similar project on Gaddis’s The Recognitions, made wise suggestions as I prepared the first draft. Molly Hite gave suggestions and encouragement. To all of Pynchon’s scholarly readers, acknowledged in the notes and listed in the bibliography, I owe innumerable debts. Colleagues at the University of Kentucky answered what must have seemed the oddest possible salmagundi of queries and requests. For their help and encouragement I am especially grateful to Tom Adler, Gerald Alvey, Roger Anderson, Tom Blues, Joe Bryant, John Cawelti, Guy Daven- port, Joe Gardner, and John Shawcross. Thanks to Bob Hemenway for sup- porting the work while he was chairman and, in particular, for helping me find funds and time off from my departmental responsibilities at a crucial time. The research and preparation of the book were assisted by grants from the University of Kentucky Research Foundation. To complete the final draft, I also managed to steal time from another project that was being as- sisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Janis Bolster did an epic job of copyediting, down to the last line-number refer- ence. And at the University of Georgia Press, Debra Winter has guided this project with care for all the details that matter. Again, thanks to all. Finally, to Susan, still my best friend, who knows this project as an oral history: this book’s for you. Lexington, Kentucky This page intentionally left blank And More Acknowledgments (2006) S ince this book first appeared Pynchon has published two novels, Vineland(1990) and the long-awaited Mason & Dixon(1997). He’s less the invisible writer. He wrote (for example) the liner notes for a disk of Spike Jones classics (Spiked!,1994), contributed a New York Timesessay on sloth to a quirky series on the seven deadly sins and a fine introduction to the Centennial Edition of George Orwell’s 1984(2003). He was written up on (but said nothing publicly about) winning a 1988 McArthur “Genius Award.” We heard that he married, became a father. One day while walking with his son Jackson he was photographed publicly for the first time in decades. In 2003 he made a television voice-over appearance on an episode of The Simpsons—a cool move, given his satires of The Tube in The Crying of Lot 49and Vineland. Gravity’s Rainbowitself had a cameo on “The John Laro- quette Show” in 1993. More significantly, Penguin published a special paper- back edition of Gravity’s Rainbowhonoring it—in company with novels like Heart of Darkness, Swann’s Way,The Age of Innocence, The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road,and Beloved—as one of twenty “Great Books of the Twentieth Century.” Thirty years after its release his novel stands as a classic. New readers keep coming to the book, old ones keep turning back to it, and occasionally I hear from one such person. Weeks after this Companion was published in 1988 I began receiving and have periodically found in my campus mailbox various cards, e-mails, letters, even packages from readers wishing to correct and/or add to these annotations. Gracious, kind, and uniquely cultured, every one of these good people has contributed to this re- vised second edition. I thank each and all for their earnest care over detail and meanings. In many instances these correspondents were providing in- formation others had previously submitted (my errors were that apparent). In some instances, they supplied—at last!—long sought answers to enig- matic references in Gravity’s Rainbow. A number glossed quite technical matters in electronics or mathematics, others heard Pynchon riffing on song lyrics or movie dialogue that I—child of the next generation after Pynchon— wouldn’t have caught. Receiving these submissions over the past eighteen years has been a delight. Here I get the space to name these correspondents along with others who variously contributed to this book. So at last I send my gratitude and bless-
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