Views from Above, Views from Below

AUTITH screaming comes across the sky, Gravity's Rainbow 'kV wrenches us into the world of The Rocket. Just so, the V-2 magnetically draws the novel's characters into that same world, its fields of force generating the major actions and informing the images. Time and again, the rocket imposes its code on elements of the story: Tyrone Slothrop becomes Rocketman; marriage turns into union with a rocket; orgasm corresponds to launching; towers and chimneys are called stationary rockets; a graffito-mandala proves to be a schematic of a rocket seen from below; future urban life is invoked as Rocket-City.... Out of this nexus of the ballistic missile and everything associated with it, especially the bombs, a rocket subtext crystallizes. Forty times, or every nineteen pages in this mega-novel, Pynchon works another variation on his basic elements, which consist of an aerial force of destruction, the targeted city, and the cowering creature awaiting annihilation. Significantly, the image-complex is not rendered from the sidelines, from the distanced perspective of bystander or artist. Rather, readers experience these views as if from above and below, mostly directed down toward or up from within a city. Not all the elements of the image-complex are present in each manifestation of the subtext, but in the course of the novel, these vertiginous vantages and labyrinthine cityscapes cumulatively cohere into an icon outside of space or time. We ultimately experience the viewpoints of rocket and victim through dual or simultaneous vision. This subtext is central to the organization of Gravity's Rainbow in at least three fashions. (i) In philosophical terms, it sheds light on the hotly debated values of the novel. Intrinsic to these aerial views of the city are answers to such questions as what

Art · Literature · Optics · Physics · Rainbow · Subtext · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Modern American Literature Studies · Narrative Theory and Analysis

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