Gravity’s Rainbow Domination and Freedom by Luc Herman, Steven Weisenburger (review)

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is Thomas Pynchon’s Big Rocket Book. He may have written physically larger books like Against the Day (2006), which weighs in at a portly 1,085 pages, but Gravity’s Rainbow will always be the Big One: the Badass, to use one of the writer’s preferred terms of endearment. Turned down by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize board for obscenity (though winning the National Book Award the same year), Gravity’s Rainbow is a landmark text that has dominated Pynchon’s oeuvre for over four decades, showing off his remarkable qualities as a “surrealist, pornographer, [and] word engineer” (17), as he once described himself, and many other interesting things besides. Unsurprisingly, then, the novel, set principally at the end of World War II and focusing on a quasimystical version of the German V-2 rocket, has often been singled out from the author’s other writing to become the subject of a series of important monographs: Kathryn Hume’s mythography, for example; Thomas Moore’s unpicking of its connectedness; Molly Hite’s study of its systems of order; or Mark Richard Siegel’s treatment of its creative paranoia.

But despite all the critical attention, Gravity’s Rainbow resists exegetical burnout. Steven Weisenburger has published two companion volumes to this difficult text (1988 (2011), providing generations of grateful scholars with sources and contexts for Pynchon’s allusive labyrinth. Now he and Luc Herman, well known for his “genetic criticism” of the writer, have collaborated on a new monograph dealing with the Big Rocket Book, considering its historical context more programmatically. In a tone that is at once scholarly and engagingly, ironically humorous, Herman and Weisenburger argue that Pynchon’s novel hasn’t yet been sufficiently understood as a literary product both of and about the “Long Sixties” (21): the period running from the later 1950s of the Beats and Burroughs to the tail end of the counterculture in the early 1970s.

So alongside a wealth of cultural and social history detailing the emergence of what we think of as the sixties, from Howl to the Fugs to art-anarchist groups like Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, the writers frame their study with some key critical texts that helped shape the period and with which, they suggest, Pynchon engages in his fiction. Frankfurt School avatars Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse join Norman O. Brown as the three most prominent figures here; the themes of domination and freedom of the book’s title are largely refracted through this diverse and influential body of thought, displacing, we should note, Max Weber, Marshall McLuhan, and Norbert Weiner as earlier critical touchstones for Pynchon’s work. Involved in the debate also are contemporary ideas of positive and negative freedom popularized by Isaiah Berlin.

The study is divided into three parts. The first interweaves Gravity’s Rainbow with Fromm’s attention to the self-enslaving practices of Protestantism, Marcuse’s dialectical understanding of the impotent freedom of art, and Brown’s revolutionary sense of the polymorphous sensual body. Notions of the collusiveness of freedom with its opposite are much in play here and are ingeniously deployed to read the novel as a Long Sixties document. The Counterforce invasion of the Krupp Wingding, for example, anticipates those Yippie antics so easily co-opted by what Marcuse termed repressive tolerance. Fromm’s thesis that Calvinism encourages surrender to powerful groups helps us understand some of the sadomasochism in the text as an ongoing metaphor for affective political conformity: a detailed portrait of engineer Franz Pökler’s “escape” “from Bürgerlichkeit into a masochistic steady-state accented with romantic idealism [Nazism]” (120) is drawn later in the study.

Less obviously, Herman and Weisenburger also pick up on the unsavory character Thanatz, noting his suggestion that “the state would disappear if sadomasochism were practiced generally within families” (33). Within Thanatz’s family, of course, it is practiced. In a twist on Fromm toward Brown...