Gravity's Rainbow - Part 1 - Chapter 0: It Begins and Ends with Oil

Gravity's Rainbow Analysis: Title, Dedication, and the Title and Epigraph of Part 1, Beyond the Zero.

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"Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet" (166).

And where do they meet?

Well, that is what Gravity’s Rainbow is really all about — the how, why, and where they eternally come in contact; how the forces at play create a world built from these substances, their precursors, their derivatives; what we have done and are willing to do to continue their extraction; what hidden worlds they have unlocked which should have always remained invisible to our eyes and our mind; why we do not need to live like this, why we should not continue to live like this. It is an unheard warning written fifty years ago — but it is a warning that, despite our original discounting, can be heeded any time we so choose to fight back. Though it must be understood first.

The title poetically describes the rising and falling parabolic arc of a V2 rocket — one which rises and accelerates with the burning of fuels until brennschluss: the cessation, the fall back to Earth. It is the unnatural use of our resources which rocketed death up to points that should never have been reached, now allowing nature, gravity itself, to take its course. The rainbow should have come after rain — an image in the sky that is revealed like parting curtains after the gloomy cloud cover departs. Yet, it is not so in this situation. Again, our destruction of nature has reversed the process. The rainbow, the parabola, comes first, and the gray clouds demonically rise and plume after.

One of Pynchon’s best friends, whom Pynchon dedicated Gravity’s Rainbow to, Richard Fariña, was a countercultural writer and musician who died just days after the publication of his novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. While I haven’t read the novel, one would suspect that the main character (who regularly attacks authority figures and was an anti-establishment activist) was not one that the establishment would care much for. Nor would they care for Fariña’s own political activism, demonstrations, or overtly political protest music. He died in a mysterious motorcycle accident, travelling ninety miles-per-hour with a stranger — who survived — two days after his novel was released. (Take that as you will). If he had survived, he likely would have agreed with Pynchon’s ideas on our destruction of the natural order to create a new, far more evil, society.

And, so comes Part 1 of Gravity’s Rainbow — Beyond the Zero. A funny little joke because, well, the massive "1" above the title is clearly "beyond zero." But it is also a reference toward an infinite number of the zeros that we perceive (or don’t perceive) every day: it is the x-axis, the real grounded plane on which we exist, or time itself, where the parabola rises above and falls back down to. What is beyond it? Well, there is of course the obvious infinite points on the y-axis, where we see the rise and fall of the rocket, or the high point on which our characters observe the brocken spectre phenomenon. It is also the negatives, the below world — where agencies lurk to propagate whatever nefarious plans, they may have to further outrace time, creating a life for themselves in which they will rise vertically, beating time itself, leaving us to rot and sink further beneath the ground. Or it could even be the often unseen third plane, where hidden meanings and worlds lie — the supernatural, the mythic legends that live in the recesses of our thought, the opening of red curtains where we see a scene transformed into song, or a dream world that shows the true happenings of society as people are shuffled off to hotel rooms to die while the elite hurtle out of the danger zone at vast speeds. This is what this Part and what this novel concern — those things that lie beyond reality, whether supernatural or not.

Wernher himself

And who better to introduce this section than Wernher von Braun himself — "former" Nazi rocket scientist, who made use of slave labor for certain projects, brought over to the US post-WWII in order to assist us in our own series of weapons manufacturing-related desires, sins entirely forgiven. (I would highly recommend doing some research into Operation Paperclip if you don’t know much about it. America’s post-WWII science scene was plagued with sheltered Nazis who helped build the world in which we live, and which Pynchon describes within Gravity’s Rainbow).

The quote itself could easily be misread as a sort of hopeful, religious belief in the afterlife (i.e. Beyond the Zero once again), but given speaker, its intentions hold far less beatitude.

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

- Wernher von Braun

The first sentence calls to mind the séance scene far later in the novel, from the same passage of which I started this piece, where it describes Earth’s resources, oils and coals, as once living creatures now brought back to life, but not brought back from "death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured" (166). Life has passed and sunk beneath the Earth, transforming into whatever substance dead organic matter will, and then extracted to become another form of death: fuel for the rocket.

Notice also how he states that this is what "science" has taught him. Gravity’s Rainbow is as much a condemnation of society’s adoption of science as the end-all be-all, the infallible doctrine, as it is a condemnation of anything else. Our world’s ignorance of any humanities or any sort of human solidarity has led to belief in pure, reproduceable fact — chemical, biological, physical, or whatever. No nuance can be delved into, no complexity in regard to emotion or what we really need. Just that ‘x’ leads to ‘y’ and there is nothing that could surpass this in importance.

Finally, he speaks now of "our spiritual existence after death," our own Beyond the Zero. If the decay of past creatures has created oil, plastics, coal, fuel, what will we leave behind? If they were transfigured into a new form of death, what will the remnants of Death’s creator be used for? A new and unfound form of death, or something that surpasses death itself?

The answer lies in the book itself. Hopefully I can help unpack those answers.

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All quotes will come from the Penguin Books Paperback with the original cover (the orange sky with the yellow glow over the silhouette of a city and a blue block lettered title). Each post will encompass either an entire chapter or one of the transition areas, unless I come across something that merits its own post.

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