The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Pynchon · a novel in four parts · Viking Press, New York, 1973 · scored on Pynchon’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Encyclopedic novel of the Second World War; systems novel, picaresque, vaudeville and apocalypse in one narration
Mythos
The Rocket as fate, mandala and sacrificial ascent; a Grail knight in a ruined land, scattered like a dismembered god; the Oven of Hansel and Gretel, the Venusberg, Orpheus, and the serpent that bites its tail
Phase
From December 1944 in London under the V-2 to the late summer of 1945 in the occupied Zone of Germany, closed by a frame in a Los Angeles cinema in the early 1970s
Presentation
Fiction; four titled parts under four epigraphs, the episodes divided not by numbers but by a row of small squares, the last part broken into short titled pieces; songs, limericks and hymns throughout
Register
From calculus, ballistics and organic chemistry to comic song, pornography and the Book of Revelation; the long periodic sentence beside the dialogue of the music hall
Scale
One American scattered across the Zone, a vast cast, and the war as a market reaching from South West Africa to Central Asia
Governing Proposition
In London under the V-2 the stars on an American’s map of his conquests fall where the rockets fall, and the men who study him cannot say why; he follows the rocket into the occupied Zone of Germany in the summer of 1945, among armies, cartels and the people the war passed over, and is scattered before the end, while the last rocket stands over a cinema in Los Angeles. The wager of the novel is that the war was also a market and a laboratory, that one web of control ran through its weapons, its sciences and its desires, and that a book built to the rocket’s arc can make its reader live inside that web.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” The rocket is a V-2, and it travels faster than its own sound: the blast comes first and the scream after, so that the effect arrives before its cause can be heard. From that reversal the opening widens into a dream of all London evacuated, through glass and ruin. The book holds to the order the first sentence sets. What happens is known before it is announced, and every cause in it is sought after its effect has already fallen.
Around that order stand four parts, each titled: “Beyond the Zero”, “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering”, “In the Zone” and “The Counterforce”. Their shape is the shape of a flight: a long first part, a short second, a very long third, and a fourth that breaks into short titled pieces. Within the parts the episodes are divided not by numbers but by a row of small squares, which critics have most often read as the sprocket holes of film stock. Four epigraphs stand over the parts. Wernher von Braun begins the first: “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.” Merian C. Cooper promises Fay Wray the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood; Dorothy, arriving in Oz, tells Toto they are not in Kansas any more; and over the last part Richard M. Nixon says one word: “What?”
The main action runs from December 1944, in London under the rocket, to the late summer of 1945 in the occupied Zone of Germany, by way of the south coast of England, the Riviera and Zurich, with Peenemünde and Nordhausen in memory, then Berlin, Potsdam and the Baltic. A frame in the last pages sets the final rocket over a cinema in Los Angeles, in the early 1970s, the present of the book’s own making. The matter is as wide as the map. Calculus, ballistics and organic chemistry stand beside comic song, pornography and the Book of Revelation, and songs, limericks and hymns break into the prose throughout. Pynchon has not revised it; the text of 1973 is the text.
Movement II
In London an American, Tyrone Slothrop, keeps a map of his amorous conquests, marked with stars. The stars coincide with the strikes of the V-2. The men who learn of it want to know why. Roger Mexico, a statistician, fits the strikes to a Poisson distribution, which describes how they fall and gives no reason for any one of them. Pointsman, a Pavlovian, wants a cause, and sees in Slothrop a reflex that can be traced and used. Chance and cause are set against each other in the plot, and the book never lets either win.
The cause, if there is one, is older than the war. Slothrop was conditioned as an infant by Laszlo Jamf, and Pointsman’s designs on the man continue the experiment on the child. The behavioural sciences appear here as a proposal to make the person a conditioned reflex, and the proposal is not a satire of science but a description of a programme. The book’s comedy runs alongside it without softening it. The man whose body seems to know where the rockets will fall is the subject of a study that began before he could speak.
The first part ends in the dark of wartime Kent, at an Advent evensong, where Roger Mexico and Jessica stand among the people gathered there. It is the book’s warmest passage, and its subject is the Preterite: those whom the Puritan doctrine of election passes over, the many left out of every plan. An earlier Slothrop, William, in Puritan New England, wrote a heresy on preterition, and the question of who is passed over runs through the book from then on. Its long catalogue of the forgotten, the waste, the passed over, begins here, in a church full of the people the rockets fall on.
Movement III
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” It is the third of the Proverbs for Paranoids, and it states the book’s theory of knowledge. Paranoia here is not only a symptom. It is an epistemology adequate to a system that does in fact connect everything, and it is also the system’s instrument, since a mind that sees connections everywhere can be led to the wrong ones. The proverb cuts both ways, and the book keeps both edges.
The system is named only as They. Behind the war stand cartels of chemistry, electricity and oil that cross the lines of combat: IG Farben, Shell, the makers of the electric lamp. The war is a market and a laboratory as well as a war. The plainest disclosure of it is a comedy. Byron the Bulb, a light bulb that will not burn out, is hunted by the Phoebus cartel, whose business requires that bulbs die, and his immortality is defeated. The joke and the history are one thing; the book never separates its laughter from its charge.
At the centre of the web is the rocket, which joins Eros to Thanatos in a technology its makers desired. Slapstick and atrocity obey the same physics of connection and control, and the book’s own counter-law, chance against cause, runs inside that physics without resolving it. Kekulé’s dream of the serpent biting its tail, recounted at a séance, becomes the book’s figure for a system closed on itself. Even gravity is drawn in, in Lyle Bland’s discovery that it binds the living world.
Movement IV
The third part is the longest, and it is set in the Zone: occupied Germany in the summer of 1945, between armies, with the old state gone and the new ones not yet made. Slothrop leaves Zurich and goes into it on the rocket’s track, through Berlin and Potsdam to the Baltic, in a long picaresque. Not every episode presses the argument; some, the Rocketman romp through Potsdam among them, could go. But the Zone is the book’s proof that the war’s order survives the war.
Others are seeking the rocket for their own reasons. Enzian leads the Schwarzkommando, Herero who have come to Germany from South West Africa, and his people’s history is the book’s deepest charge: German colonial genocide against the Herero stood before the death camps and the rocket works, as their precondition. For the Herero the Rocket is a mandala and a destiny of return. Tchitcherin is Enzian’s half-brother, and the book also tells his pursuit of the Kirghiz Light on the steppe of Central Asia: the colonies of two empires meet in one family.
The most humane pages belong to Pökler, at work on the rocket. Each summer a daughter, Ilse, is brought to him at Zwölfkinder, and he cannot be sure that she is the same child from year to year; he refuses to find out. The state that builds the rocket holds his private love in its power, and his not knowing is the price of keeping it. Behind him are the rocket works and the slave labour at Nordhausen, held in memory. The father’s doubt and the factory’s camp are one order seen from two sides.
Movement V
The fourth part is the descent. The narration breaks into short titled pieces, and Slothrop breaks with it: the Grail knight of a ruined land is scattered across the Zone like a dismembered god, and the book does not mention the dispersal so much as perform it. The hero dissolves, and the form dissolves around him. The cost is real, since the breaking loses more than the design requires, but the descent of the man and the descent of the book are one movement.
The last rocket is Blicero’s. With Gottfried and Katje he had played a game of Hansel and Gretel, with an Oven, and the fairy tale was the war’s furnace. The Venusberg and Tannhäuser, named earlier, have been lived. Now the 00000 is fired with Gottfried inside it, bound into the Schwarzgerät, and for Blicero the launch is a sacrificial ascent. The parabola the title names, the rocket’s rise and fall, gravity’s own rainbow, is fate itself, and the boy inside it is carried to the top of the arc.
Then the frame. In a cinema in Los Angeles named for Orpheus the film has broken, and over the roof the rocket stands, at the last instant before it falls. The audience waiting in the dark is the book’s reader, revealed under the warhead. The screaming that came across the sky in the first line is above the roof in the last, and has still not been heard. The book ends on a hymn by William Slothrop and an invitation to sing that breaks off: “Now everybody”, followed by a dash and nothing more.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it bites hard. Whole episodes could go without visible loss to the argument: the drill of disgusting English sweets at Mrs. Quoad’s, a good share of the limericks, the Rocketman romp through Potsdam, much of the picaresque of the third part after Slothrop leaves Zurich. The defence is real. The subject is a system that takes in everything, and the Preterite it passes over; a pared version would be the Elect’s book, all signal and no waste. The core is required: the evacuation dream, the conditioning of the infant Tyrone, the Herero history, Pökler, the firing of the 00000. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that plenitude as argument makes excess permitted, not each part compelled, and the cap is cleared by one tenth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The war of 1939 to 1945 was also a market and a laboratory, run through by cartels of chemistry, electricity and oil that crossed the lines of combat. The rocket joined Eros to Thanatos, in a technology its makers desired. The behavioural sciences proposed to make the person a conditioned reflex: Laszlo Jamf with the infant Tyrone, Pointsman with the man. German colonial genocide against the Herero in South West Africa stood before the death camps and the rocket works as their precondition, and Enzian and the Schwarzkommando carry it. Paranoia is disclosed as an epistemology, adequate to such a system and exploitable by it, as the third of the Proverbs for Paranoids warns. These are meanings, not moods, and fifty years have strengthened them.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The book rises often and from many directions. The opening, where the screaming of a rocket that arrives before its own sound becomes a dream of all London evacuated through glass and ruin, is grandeur and terror at once. The Advent evensong that closes the first part, with Roger Mexico and Jessica in wartime Kent, is its warmest height, the Preterite gathered in the dark. Tchitcherin’s pursuit of the Kirghiz Light on the steppe, Pökler’s yearly daughter and his refusal to know whether she is the same child, and Gottfried’s ascent in the 00000 are sublime each in a different key. Held down because the height is broken, deliberately and often, by slapstick, puns and vaudeville, and the breaks are not always earned: the frequency is high, the summit lower than the highest.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The Rocket bears the load: for the Herero a mandala and a destiny of return, for Blicero the vehicle of a sacrificial ascent, for the novel a parabola whose rise and fall is fate itself, the rainbow of the title. Slothrop is a Grail knight in a ruined land, scattered at the end like a dismembered god, a dispersal the plot enacts rather than mentions. Blicero’s game of Hansel and Gretel with Gottfried and Katje, with its Oven, turns a fairy tale into the war’s furnace; the Venusberg and Tannhäuser are named and lived; Orpheus names the last cinema. Kekulé’s dream of the serpent biting its tail, told at a séance, becomes the figure of a system closed on itself. Held a step down where some archetypes are density of allusion rather than structure.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The book departs from the American novel it inherited, at full risk. It refuses a stable protagonist, since its hero dissolves; a stable register, setting calculus, ballistics and organic chemistry beside comic song, pornography and the Book of Revelation; and the settled order of cause and effect, opening on a weapon whose effect comes before its sound. The wager was on no proven path: no novel had yet made technology, the cartel and the systems of postwar power its whole matter. The cost was paid in public. In 1974 the Pulitzer fiction jury recommended the book, the board refused it, and no fiction prize was given that year; the same year it shared the National Book Award for fiction.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its episodes are divided like frames of film; it ends in a cinema where the film has broken and a rocket stands over the roof, so that the reader is revealed as the audience under the warhead. Its structure is the rocket’s: a long climb through three parts and a fragmenting descent in the fourth, where Slothrop’s dispersal is carried by the narration’s own breaking into short titled pieces. It trains its reader in paranoia, demanding connections it will not confirm, so that reading becomes the condition the book discloses, and it sets Mexico’s chance against Pointsman’s cause in the plot itself. The cost: the fourth part’s dissolution, though designed, loses more than the design needs, and the third part’s episodes do not press the argument equally.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. Fifty-three years of criticism have not exhausted the book. Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (1988; revised 2006) annotates it page by page and has not closed it; a journal of Pynchon studies has run for decades, and an international conference meets on his work. The book yields on several layers at once: historical, in the cartel history of IG Farben, Shell and the electric lamp, where Byron the Bulb’s immortality is defeated by the Phoebus cartel; scientific, in calculus, the delta-t, rocket guidance and chemistry; theological, in Puritan election and preterition and William Slothrop’s heresy; formal, in the film frame and the parabola. Each return finds a connection missed. Held below the top because some of the yield is a puzzle solved rather than a deeper sense.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is the postwar novel in English, and the book reorganised what it could hold after Joyce, taking the war, applied science, corporate power and the counterculture into one encyclopedic structure. Within three years Edward Mendelson’s essay on encyclopedic narrative (1976) set it in the line of Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville and Joyce. The reach was immediate, not delayed: it reached its field at once and redirected the systems novel within a decade, and no discount applies. What holds it there, and not higher, is that its reach has run chiefly through one lineage of the novel, rather than reorganising the whole field as Ulysses did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the systems novel of the following half century descends from it, cyberpunk took up its paranoid technological sublime, and “Pynchonian” names a mode.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated, and no discount is made for age. The form is wholly legible and the text unchanged since 1973; Pynchon has not revised it. Its presence has been continuous: in print, taught, translated and argued over, with no fabric lost. Fifty-three years is a real demonstration, and the book has outlived the Nixon of its last epigraph, the counterculture whose idiom it uses, and the Pulitzer board that refused it. What holds the axis below the top is surface, not age. The comic idiom of the 1960s and 1970s, the dope humour, some of the slang and the vaudeville, is fixed to its moment in a way the setting of 1944 and 1945 is not, and the claim that it will last as the eldest works have is still partly prediction.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on Pynchon’s English, the original. The command of registers is wide: the long periodic sentence that carries a rocket’s trajectory, a chemistry lecture and a dream at once; sharp comic dialogue; the lyric pages on Pökler and his daughter; parody of film, comic book, music hall and scripture; the grammar of technical manuals turned into prose music. The first sentence sets sound, motion and dread in six words. The making is load-bearing: the shifting registers are the book’s account of a world in which every discourse is controlled by another. Charged: the command is not uniform. The puns can be sophomoric, the songs are uneven, the comic set pieces sometimes run past their point, and a hostile hand can find pages of slack, indulgences the form permits and the making does not need.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Byron the Bulb, an immortal light bulb hunted by an electrical cartel, and the Herero genocide. They obey one law, the book’s system of They, a web of corporate and state control that uses every life and passes over the Preterite. Slapstick and atrocity are governed by the same physics of connection and control, and the range so governed, of tone and of matter, is one few novels attempt; narrowness would have been easier to hold. The book builds its own counter-law into itself, Mexico’s statistics of chance against Pointsman’s causes, and leaves it unresolved, a tension inside the physics, not a breach of it. Held down by tone: the comic and the grievous do not always sit in one frame, and Pudding with the Domina Nocturna, or the drill of sweets, answer to appetite for excess more than to the law.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders of reality are held in one structure. Consciousness, Slothrop’s and many others’, down to the dead at the séances; the family, Pökler, Leni and Ilse, and Enzian and Tchitcherin as half-brothers; labour and industry, the rocket works and the slave labour at Nordhausen; the state and its war; corporate capital; applied science; colonial history, in South West Africa and Central Asia; religion, from Puritan New England to the Kabbalah of the Herero rocket text and Advent; sexuality; cinema and popular culture; and the natural order as a living Earth, in Lyle Bland’s discovery that gravity binds the living world. They are integrated, not listed: each runs through the rocket, which joins chemistry to sex, the state to the family, the colony to the market. The limit is at the edges, where some orders are present more than held.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 9.3. A departure from the American novel it inherited that refused a stable hero, a stable register and the order of cause and effect, and was paid for in public; and the orders of reality, from one consciousness to colonial history and a living Earth, joined through the rocket. Next below them, The Bottomless Well at 9.2: fifty-three years of annotation and return that have not closed the book.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, held by the episodes the book could lose without visible loss to its argument: the drill of English sweets, many of the limericks, the Rocketman romp through Potsdam, much of the picaresque of the third part. The plenitude is part of the argument and the core is required, but the excess is permitted, not compelled. Next above it, The Sublime, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.7: a height often broken by slapstick, a comic surface fixed to its decade, and a law that does not govern every episode’s tone.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by one tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, published by the Viking Press, New York, in 1973, and scored as one novel in four parts, with its four epigraphs and its part titles, which are part of the work. Pynchon has not revised it, and the text of the first edition is the text. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Pynchon’s English, the original, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased. English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening two sentences, the first sentence of von Braun’s epigraph, Nixon’s, the four part titles, the third of the Proverbs for Paranoids and the last two words; the other two epigraphs are paraphrased. The reading of the small squares between episodes as sprocket holes is the critics’, not the book’s. Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion and Edward Mendelson’s essay on encyclopedic narrative are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page and word counts, the number of episodes and their division among the parts, the size of the cast, the month of publication and the circumstances of the prizes, are not given. Citations are by part.