NEIL SCHMITZ
121
Although the plot of
Gravity 's Rainbow
is not easily summarized , its
general outline can be sketched . One crowded narrative line traces Slothrop' s
peregrination chrough the last years of the war into the beginning of the
postwar period, a journey that takes him from London (where the rockets are
falling) to Peenemunde (where the rockets are built and launched) . This
particular arc of the plot mordantly describes in its multitudinous events and
sub-plots , its tales within tales, the chaotic, conspiratorial, strife-torn world of
the historical, the world of the preterite. An esoteric branch of British
Intelligence dominated by an obsessed Pavlovian scientist, Edward
Pointsman, detects a correlation between V-2 strikes in London and the
random scores ofan American officer (Slothrop) who has placed stars on a map
in his office to indicate the places where his seductions prospered. He is sent to
France (without understanding the nature of his mission) to
be
used as a
human dowser,
set
loose and then followed as he erotically senses and tracks
down a mysterious rocket the Germans have assembled, possibly the rocket
whose mysterious Schwarz-gedit is a rudimentary nuclear device. A maniacal
behaviorist who resembles Dr. Benway in
Naked Lunch ,
Pointsman is an
exemplary would-be Demon , the omnipotent transmitter sorting, sending
and controlling human (and historical) behavior. Like his SS counterparts in
Dachau and Buchenwald, Pointsman has no scruples in experimenting with
human subjects . At "The White Visitation ," formerly an insane asylum, he
has assembled a research team that combines psychics and psychologists,
white and black magic , whose single-minded purpose is the pursuit of
control. Pointsman looks beyond their immediate task, the knowledge and
prediction of the unknown, that inexplicable rain of flying bombs, and
envisions a world that looks very much like B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, the
earthly paradise ofa benevolent concentration camp. In this account Pynchon
retrieves all the punning and word play he had exercised in
V.
on the concept
and insti tution of Intelligence. The bureaucratic conflict and the career–
making that embroils Pointsman's establishment in constant turbulence
mirrors the actual struggle that went on between Duncan Sandys and Lord
Cherwell as British Intelligence sought to comprehend the threat of the V-2
rocket in the last days of the war. Similarly it reflects the struggle that involved
the Germans on their side of the Channel as the Wehrmacht and the
Luftwaffe contended for the privilege of launching the rocket. All the demons
in
Gravity 's Rainbow ,
the knowers and spies, are doubled-Germans and
British , Americans and Russians . And what they all seek to know is
the
Demon , the secret of the rocket that will enable whoever finds it to rule the
world , control its destiny, impose the peace. Thus the second half of the novel
ironicallyfollows the well-known race toward Peenemunde and the capture of
its mysteries, the capture ofWernher von Braun.
Yet
all this plotting , both
