The Comet and the Rocket: Intertextual Constellations about Technological Progress in Bruno Schulz's "Kometa" and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

At one point in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the protagonist Tyrone Slothrop comes up with what he calls a "Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period." The period is the summer of 1945, the setting is Germany, and in one of his wishes Slothrop implores: "Let that only be a meteor falling" (553).¹ Slothrop's anxiousness evidently roots in the existence of more dreadful alternatives to "only" a meteor, two of which will be dealt with in the following investigation. The falling object could of course be a supersonic rocket like the one that constitutes the thematic center of Pynchon's 1973 novel: a device, to be more precise, which figures as that technological means which preserves the power for a mysterious in-group of illuminati (whom Pynchon's book about paranoiacs calls in true paranoid fashion "They") over the out-group of so-called preterites (or "We-system"). The falling object might likewise be be a celestial body, a larger and usually more destructive one than a mere meteor—a bolide, in other words, like the one described in the 1938 tale "Kometa" ("The Comet") by the Polish artist-writer Bruno Schulz.² The rocket and the comet have in common that Pynchon and Schulz ascribe a special significance to their respective flight curves and, more specifically, to the turning point of this parabola. Although this must be measured against the obvious differences of the two objects—the first a result of technological progress, the second a natural phenomenon—both are presented as immobile objects menacingly pending at the peak of the parabola. Pynchon furthermore associates the issue of immobility at the rocket's turning point with that of transformation. Bruno Schulz, one of the most influential representative of Polish literary modernism next to Witold Gombrowicz and Stanis´law Ignacy Witkiewicz, likewise connects transformation and immobility; moreover (and not surprisingly for a writer whose special concern was with matters of symbolism) he does so with reference to cyclists transmogrified into frozen firmament riders.

The imagery of the celestial rider is similarly invoked by Pynchon. Obviously, the reason for this correspondence is that Gravity's Rainbow and Schulz's narrative share a common intertextual reference point in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the outstanding German lyricist of the 1910s and 1920s. In the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke links one of the major topoi of his poetry, the yearning for transformation, with a constellation of new stars named "Rider." In Gravity's Rainbow, it is the sinister Nazi official Weissmann, a fervent Rilke reader, who seeks and in the end apparently indeed achieves this kind of transformation at the rocket's peak point. Metamorphosed into the supernumerary sky constellation, he comes to portend absolute oppression for those who stay behind. Schulz endows the Rilkean imagery with an altogether different significance, although he, like Pynchon, converts the poet's original rider—a celestial horse rider—into the rider of a bicycle. In "The Comet," the stellar cyclist is presented as a chiffre of ambivalence. At first, the bicycle stands for technical progress and, ultimately, for man's tendency for self-destruction when the cyclists seek to transmute the pending annihilation through the comet into a trick-cyclist's end of the world. The blind belief in progress emblematized in the bicycle is checked, however, by the quasi-divine intervention of the narrator's father. His realization that the only alternative to the apocalyptic threat is the relinquishment of technical progress results in a contrived (and phantasmagoric) salvation of the world. The celestial bicycle outruns and finally defeats the comet.

Pynchon's fiction describes technological progress as a means to divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, whereas Schulz champions the cause of relinquishment as the only way to prevent self-annihilation. The final section of the article will confront these conclusions from the Rilkean intertext with the distinctly non-fictional writings of the Germany-born rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. Gravity's Rainbow...