Gravity's Rainbow By Thomas Pynchon Analysis

Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow

....."Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs..." These words begin the wondrous passage that introduces us to the world of Thomas Pynchon's latest masterpiece, Mason & Dixon. In an obvious parody of "A screaming comes across the sky," the opening of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon sets the mood and pace for the rest of the novel. In contrast to the mindless pleasures, hopeless desperation, and ubiquitous death that dominate virtually every page of his apocalyptic earlier work, this novel begins with a joyful snowball fight between children on the streets of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Indeed, the rest of the novel generally maintains this playful and happy tone. Unlike the sexually disturbed

At this point Imperialism and Mercantilism, including the work of organizations such as the East India Company, have setup most of the trade routes and infrastructure for the modern global economy. Adam Smith was busy working on his economic philosophy, which is encompassed in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Companies such as IG Farben and General Electric, which play a sinister role in Gravity's Rainbow, were built in an economic system founded on the developments of this era. At the same time, the social philosophies that Kant and Hegel were developing, supplied absolute standards for judging the level of "civilization" a culture had achieved (Schmidt). Of course these standards placed those who set them at the top of a chain of Social Darwinism, providing the ideological justification for much of the West's abuse of foreign resources and people. It would come as no surprise to find that von Trotha had read his fair share of this "Enlightenment" philosophy before exterminating the Hereros, or that Nazi policy makers had done the same before they proposed a final solution to the Jewish problem. Furthermore, in the realm of science, Franklin and his followers paved the way to vastly more powerful forms of communication and war, as has already been noted. Finally, not to be lost in this whirlwind of crucial events is the birth of a new nation that will dominate the next

It is a hope for an existence expressed by the beings Dixon encounters in the Terra Concava, "Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,-- ev'rybody's axes converge,-- forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another,-- an entirely different set of rules for how to behave" (MD 741). In the modern world, we can walk the streets, sit in subway cars, stand in elevators, and do countless other things, always surrounded by people, but never acknowledging their humanity. In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon condemns this isolation. He writes, "We will never know each other . . . we're strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows aisles, exits, homegoings" (GR 663). But in Mason & Dixon the prospect of a more humane global village still exists, and it is indelibly linked with the undiscovered frontier. Dixon relates, "'Once the solar parallax is known,' they told me, ' once the necessary Degrees are measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to seek another Space'" (MD 741). In other words, our hopes, symbolized by the Terra Concava beings, always exist just beyond the reach of what we consider "inescapably" certain. To some extent, the drive towards discovery, towards "knowing" our planet and our universe, is fostered by