Image borrowed from Goodreads.
This intricate plotting and world-annihilating, phallic, homosexual imagery are well-known characteristics of paranoia. Indeed, an explicit project in all of Pynchon’s works is the exploration, celebration, condemnation and proliferating dramatization of paranoia. In an essay on “The Mechanism of Paranoia” (1911) Freud himself discusses a classic case and connects his clinical observations with the tendencies in German literature (“Faust”) and music (“Tristan and Isolde”) that Pynchon draws on in his novel. “We should be inclined to say,” writes Freud, “that what was characteristically paranoic about the illness was the fact that the patient, as a means of warding off a homosexual wish-phantasy, reacted precisely with delusions of persecution . . . . At the climax of his illness, under the influences of visions which were ‘partly of a terrifying character, but partly, too, of an indescribable grandeur,’ [the patient] became convinced of the imminence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world . . . . [Soon he believed] he himself was “the only real man still surviving,’ and the few human shapes that he still saw — the physician, the attendants, the other patients — he explained as being . . . ‘cursory contraptions.’”
Such is the mental world of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon has brilliantly combined German political and cultural history with the mechanisms of paranoia to create an exceedingly complex work of art. The most important cultural figure in Gravity’s Rainbow is not Goethe or Wagner, however, but Rainer Maria Rilke, Captain Blicero’s favorite poet. In a way, the book could be read as a serio-comic variation on Rilke’s Duino Elegies and their German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture. The “Elegies” begin with a cry: “Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I would fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror that we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.”
- Richard Locke, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), New York Times Review, March 11, 1973, found at ThomasPynchon.com.
