A Gravity's Rainbow Companion
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
Steven C. Weisenburger
Copyright Date: 2006
Edition: REV - Revised, 2
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Pages: 440
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n9p4
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Book Info
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion
Book Description:

Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."

eISBN: 978-0-8203-3764-7
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. Acknowledgments (1988)
    Acknowledgments (1988) (pp. vii-viii)
  4. And More Acknowledgments (2006)
    And More Acknowledgments (2006) (pp. ix-xii)
  5. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-12)

    The first draft of Gravity’s Rainbow was written out in neat, tiny script on engineers’ quadrille paper. The idea had grown, parts of it during a stint in Mexico, from V. , Pynchon’s first novel. It had been put aside for a second book, The Crying of Lot 49 (“in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up till then,” Pynchon would later lament, too harsh a critic of his own work [Slow Learner 22]). It was completed in southern California and New York. Visitors to his cave-like rooms perched two blocks up from...

  6. Part 1 Beyond the Zero
    Part 1 Beyond the Zero (pp. 13-120)

    Part 1 of Gravity’s Rainbow (herein abbreviated GR), entitled “Beyond the Zero,” spans nine days of the Advent and Christmas season, from December 18 through December 26, 1944. There are also a number of carefully orchestrated analepses: to the day several months earlier when the first V-2 rocket fell on England; to an Easter 1942 air raid by Allied bombers on the German city of Lübeck, which first prompted Hitler to warn of the coming Vergeltungswaffe, or “revenge weapons”; to prewar Britain; to the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of Mauritius; and to Puritan America, with all its millennial hopes. Braiding these...

  7. Part 2 Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering
    Part 2 Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering (pp. 121-174)

    Part 2, whose French title means “A Furlough at the Hermann Goering Casino,” opens around Christmas 1944 in Monaco. It ends five months later with Tyrone Slothrop departing from Nice for “the Zone” of occupied Europe and, back in England, with Pointsman and Company visiting Dover for Whitsunday, May 20, 1945. Thus part 2 of GR is bounded symbolically and ironically by the birth of a savior and the proof of his resurrected glory, two key moments on the Christian liturgical calendar. The dominant astrological sign of part 2 is Aries, the Ram, a fire sign and an omen of...

  8. [Maps]
    [Maps] (pp. None)
  9. Part 3 In the Zone
    Part 3 In the Zone (pp. 175-318)

    Free? What’s free?” Slothrop wondered during his first day in Nice. Part 3 of GR explores that question. Set in the occupied zone of middle Europe during the summer of 1945, its dominant astrological sign is Leo, a fire sign and, as Marc E. Jones (Astrology 263) has phrased it, a time when “the bringing of facts into a simple conformity to the ideals held for them is a necessity.” Here the possibilities for Slothrop’s freedom are put to the test. Is there any way for him to wrest his being away from the logics and mechanics of submission and...

  10. Part 4 The Counterforce
    Part 4 The Counterforce (pp. 319-384)

    Part 4, “The Counterforce,” begins shortly after August 6, 1945, the Feast of the Transfiguration (in the Roman Catholic Church), though we also return to August 6 during an analepsis in episode 1, when Slothrop is shown miraculously recovering his long-lost mouth harp. This signals a transfiguration that inverts the Christian myth: here, Tyrone Slothrop becomes “The Fool” (V724.28–29), the eighth and last of his avatars in the novel. Stretched crosswise on the earth, he is Christ-like. With his ragged and ruddy appearance beneath the phallic sign of a “stout rainbow cock” (V626.17), he recalls Krishna, Vishnu’s priapic avatar...

  11. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 385-396)
  12. Index
    Index (pp. 397-412)
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