Chapter 6. Caught In The Web Cosmology and the Point of (No) Return in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Abstract

MoRE THAN ANY OTHER writer in this study, Pynchon grasps the full implications of the field concept, including both its promise of a reality that is a harmonious, dynamic whole and the problem it poses of how to represent that reality in the fragmented medium of language. Pynchon's response to this dilemma is to create a text that at once invites and resists our attempts to organize it into a unified field of meaning. Gravity's Rainbow is notoriously difficult to read because its complex and recurring allusions constantly tempt the reader to search for, and recognize, the extensive patterns of interlocking images to which the text owes its remarkable coherence and density, 1 while at the same time frustrating this attempt by a variety of techniques that tend to obliterate or contradict the emerging patterns. Any coherent account of this narrative will have to come to grips with this deconstructing