Gravity's Rainbow

In a short epigraph, the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun discusses his “belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death” (3).

The novel begins with the description of a German rocket attack on London during World War II. The narrative follows the people in the city as they hear the “screaming” sound of the rocket and begin to evacuate. Despite the rigorous planning, the evacuation procedures are all theater because the rockets cannot be avoided.

The next morning, one of the central figures in the evacuation is revealed to be Captain Geoffrey Prentice, otherwise known as Pirate. At dawn in a small house in London, Pirate wakes up and hears his friend Teddy Bloat. After a night of drinking, Bloat is on the cusp of falling from the gallery. Pirate moves a cot in time to break Bloat’s fall, and Bloat “smiles briefly and goes back to sleep” (5). Pirate has a garden on the roof of the small house. He grows bananas and uses these fruits to make breakfast for other young officers. Another young officer, named Osbie Feel, also lives in the house, and he uses the garden to grow so-called “pharmaceutical plants.” Pirate stands on the balcony and watches a “short vertical white line” (6) trail across the sky. He believes that the vapor trail is produced by the Germans’ latest, most advanced, most secretive rocket bomb. Pirate knows that there is nothing he can do except pick bananas.

Pirate cooks one of his famous banana breakfasts for the other men, and as Bloat walks through the house, he slips on one of the banana peels. When he recovers, he discusses the vapor trail with Pirate, who refers to the new rocket as the A4. The rocket seemed to fail, but Bloat assures Pirate that “there’ll be more” (8). The banana breakfast is huge, with many different banana-based dishes for “Pirate’s mob.” Pirate receives a telephone call from the mysterious man to whom he refers as his “employer” and who tells Pirate to recover a message from the rocket that fell on London.

Before learning more of Pirate’s time in London, the reader should understand that Pirate has an unusual backstory and special abilities: He can dream on the behalf of others, or experience others’ daydreams. This ability as a “fantasist-surrogate” has been co-opted by the military, who use Pirate to experience the exhausting daydreams of important people, thereby freeing up the schedules of these important people so that they can focus on winning the war. After experiencing someone else’s sexual fantasy in 1935, Pirate was recruited by “The Firm”—Pirate’s name for a British intelligence organization that works with resistance groups across Europe. When Pirate vicariously experienced a dream belonging to a British Foreign Office worker called Lord Osmo, this alerted The Firm to his existence. In the dream, Lord Osmo’s “own growing Adenoid” (13) became so huge that they threatened London until it was satiated with vast amounts of “the new wonderdrug cocaine” (14).

Now, Pirate has arrived in the southeast London town of Greenwich, where he searches for the bomb site. He then experiences one of his strange daydreams: This one belongs to “an exiled Rumanian royalist who may prove needed in the very near future” (10).

Bloat visits a building near Grosvenor Square, visiting the Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany (abbreviated to ACHTUNG). He finds the cubicle shared by his “old Jesus College friend” (15) Oliver Mucker-Maffick, also known as Tantivy, and an American named Tyrone Slothrop. Bloat takes photographs of Slothrop’s filthy, cluttered desk and his map of London, which is annotated with small colorful stars, each with a woman’s name.

While Bloat is in Slothrop’s cubicle, Slothrop goes to the crash site in Greenwich where everyone stands around, waiting for Pirate to arrive and take the papers stashed inside the unexploded rocket. Afterward, Slothrop is ordered to visit a hospital to take part in a mysterious experiment conducted by the Political Warfare Executive (abbreviated to P.W.E.).

Slothrop can remember the first wave of V2 rockets that fell on London. The silent, destructive rockets terrify him. Slothrop has many flings with London women, whom he tracks on the map in his office. The map puzzles Tantivy as “Slothrop really doesn’t like to talk about his girls” (18), though Slothrop begins to suspect that the shy Tantivy would like his help meeting women. During one V2 attack, Slothrop noticed being sexually aroused; he has a “peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky” (21), and he now believes his erections during V2 attacks may be related. Because he comes from a family who lost their fortune during the Great Depression, he was raised in “a hilltop desolation of businesses going under” (23). In 1931, he witnessed the aurora borreliosis. The rockets and explosions of the war remind him of the Northern Lights.

A medium named Carroll Eventyr hosts a séance at the White Visitation, a former psychiatric hospital that is now a psychological warfare research facility named PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender). Carroll is possessed by the spirit of Peter Sacha, a dead German man, who speaks to the spirit of a dead German rocket scientist named Roland Feldspath. Through the psychic, Feldspath describes systems of “control.” A woman named Jessica Swanlake observes the séance. She is currently romantically involved with a man named Roger Mexico, who sits in another room with Pirate as part of their “usual Mysterious Microfilm Drill” (25) in which Pirate passes along Bloat’s photographs of Slothrop’s map. Pirate is involved with Operation Black Wing, an operation organized by the Firm, and he seeks to earn the trust of a mysterious group he refers to as Them. Mexico complains that the research into the paranormal could be ruined by old anti-witchcraft laws, and Pirate warns him that he is “losing the old objectivity again” (26). When Jessica enters, Pirate notices the way Mexico looks at her. Pirate remembers how much he once loved an “executive’s wife” named Scorpia Mossmoon, and he understands how much Mexico loves Jessica, even though she is currently in a relationship with a man named Jeremy Beaver.

Later that night, Mexico and Jessica drive together to meet Ned Pointsman, a “high-class vivisectionist” (29) who conducts psychological experiments on stray dogs. Mexico remembers the first time he met Jessica, offering her a lift in his car when her bicycle broke. As they drive toward their meeting, they do not stop to help the fire bridge extinguish a fire. Both are “alumni of the Battle of Britain” (32), so they are used to the Nazi bombings in Britain, and they have become numb to the fires and the deaths. Now, Mexico and Jessica feel themselves becoming alienated from the ongoing war effort, feeling “the beginnings of gentle withdrawal” (32). They spend whatever time they can on their secret trysts in an abandoned house in an area that is supposed to be evacuated. They talk little, though they are “in love.” They both dislike the war.

Mexico, Jessica, and Pointsman meet in a ruined building where Pointsman is trying to catch a stray dog. He plans to name “tonight’s quarry” after a Russian scientist, as he does with all his experimental subjects. When Jessica makes a comment about her boyfriend, it riles Mexico’s jealousy. He and Pointsman try and fail to trap the dog; Mexico worries that Pointsman is starting to be affected by the very ether he wanted to use to knock out the animal. Mexico wonders whether the despondent Pointsman ever views him as a potential human subject for his experiments. After the meeting, Mexico and Jessica take Pointsman to a hospital to talk to Dr. Kevin Spectro about his work on Pavlovian responses. Mexico and Jessica drive away in the rain.

Spectro and Pointsman talk at the hospital. As part of that night’s shift, Spectro is tasked with sedating any patients (whom he refers to as Foxes) who are experiencing “war-neurosis.” Pointsman complains about Brigadier Pudding, his boss, before the conversation switches to the subject of Slothrop, whom they know to have been “one of Laszlo Jamf’s subjects” (37). They believe that Slothrop’s erections signal incoming German rockets. Spectro talks about his treatment programs for his patients with repressed emotions; Pointsman envies Spectro’s access to the human test subjects, especially the “pretty children.” Even though Pointsman would rather have human test subjects such as one of Spectro’s “fine Foxes,” he is told to experiment on an octopus named Grigori. Spectro convinces Pointsman to take the octopus.

Jessica is woken from her dream by the sound of an exploding rocket. Mexico, lying beside her in their secret meeting place, also wakes up. He quickly returns to sleep while Jessica gets out of bed for a cigarette. While smoking, she remembers Mexico’s loneliness when they first met. She recalls him telling her how everyone is “equal in the eyes of the rocket” (44) as she sees a rocket fall with a “terrific blast” on a nearby village. She once mentioned the danger of staying in an evacuated zone, but Mexico (a statistician) used mathematics to explain that no one place is safer than another. He’s complained that he is surrounded by “statistical illiterates.” and though Mexico does not believe himself to be anything like the paranormal practitioners at the White Visitation, his colleagues believe that his statistics prowess is practically magical. They hail him as a prophet, but Mexico disapproves of their lack of understanding of his field. Mexico’s outlook on the world and the nature of probability markedly differs from that of Pointsman, who is almost his opposite.

Slothrop, who’d earlier been ordered to participate in experiments conducted by the P.W.E., writes a series of letters from the research hospital. The scattered, seemingly nonsensical letters all reference “the Kenosha Kid” (47). On the ward, Slothrop regains consciousness and notices a needle in his arm; the PISCES group drugs Slothrop as part of their psychological experiments. One researcher, who is interested in racial anxieties, talks to Slothrop about “the Negroes, in Roxbury” (48), which causes Slothrop to describe a jazz concert in Boston in either 1938 or 1939. The drugs take effect, and he feels as though he is back in the memory; he becomes delirious with half-memories, half-hallucinations, and feels sick. He drops a harmonica in a toilet while vomiting and decides to crawl into the toilet to retrieve it. He pauses, worrying that diving in will leave him vulnerable to sexual assault by the men attending the concert. Slothrop climbs in anyway, hearing the distant music and identifying the different fecal stains that are “elaborately crusted along the sides of this ceramic (or by now, iron) tunnel” (50).

Slothrop hallucinates crawling through the toilet into a strange underworld. Here, the narrative changes to a “westwardman” named Cruthfield or Crouchfield. During his journey west, Crutchfield encounters many things. These things only ever appeared in a solitary form as “one of each of everything” (53), including Native Americans, snakes, ethnic minorities, buffalo, and so on. Then, the narrative changes again. Now, the scene is set on a battlefield in northern France. Then, in a cold winter night in back Boston. Slothrop meets someone in the alley who claims to be “Never,” and Slothrop questions whether this Never did the Kenosha Kid.

The narrative now switches to Pirate, who must decrypt the message from the Greenwich missile. The message is written in Kryptosam, a type of invisible ink. To reveal a message written in Kryptosam, the reader must touch the writing with semen. The ink was invented by Dr. Lazlo Jamf while working for the Agfa Corporation in Germany. In addition to the message, documents taken from the rocket include a pornographic drawing of Scorpia Mossmoon to help stimulate Pirate’s fantasies. He masturbates and uses his semen to reveal a coded message, which suggests that “there is a time given, a place, a request for help” (55). Pirate burns the message and resolves to learn more about its cryptic suggestion.

Propaganda posters are everywhere in Germany in the winter of 1944. The White Visitation plays a key role in researching psychological warfare, “seeking to demoralize the German Beast by broadcasting to him random thoughts of the mad” (56-57). As the winter chills the inhabitants of the former psychiatric hospital, the members of Operation Black Wing (housed at the White Visitation) investigate extant racial tensions in the German national psyche to develop more effective propaganda. The members of Operation Black Wing learn about the Hereros, an ethnic group from a former German colony in Africa who were brutally crushed following a rebellion in 1904.

According to the Operation Black Wing propaganda, the idea that Black Herero scientists are working on the V2 rocket program will cause division and distrust among the white German community. The research into racial anxieties is helped by experiments on men like Slothrop. Pointsman reviews his role in the seemingly inevitable victory against the Germans; for all his hard work, he has very little to show for himself, and he fears that the end of the war will limit funding for his research, so now he is constantly “scheming after more money” (58). Brigadier Ernest Pudding, an elderly veteran of World War I, does not quite understand the “newer geometries” of the current moment. Most of his briefings are mere gossip and reminiscences. While conducting experiments into the Pavlovian reactions of dogs, Pointsman argues with fellow scientist Dr. Géza Rózsavölgyi about the link between Slothrop’s erections and the V2 rockets. Pointsman favors the behavioralists’ idea of exposing Slothrop to such a rocket and examining his reaction.

Pointsman continues to discuss Slothrop’s unique condition with Pudding, who worries the experiments on Slothrop are “all rather shabby” (64). In the past, Dr. Laszlo Jamf experimented on a much younger Slothrop: While working at Harvard University, Jamf instilled a certain stimulus-response in Slothrop’s mind. To Jamf, Slothrop’s erections were a simple binary demonstration of whether the stimulus was successful—however, Jamf never deconditioned Slothrop’s mind. After investigating the photographs of Slothrop’s decorated map, the White Visitation researchers realize the sites of all his dalliances happen to exactly match where the V2 rockets fall. They discuss how Slothrop can achieve this, debating whether he has some form of precognition, telekinesis, or whether—as Mexico believes—this is just a “statistical oddity.” However, the sheer oddness of the anomaly forces Mexico to rethink the foundations of his knowledge of statistics. According to Pointsman, Slothrop’s ability is the result of Jamf’s experiments. However, Slothrop meets the women on the map before the bombs fall, meaning that stimulus and response are in the wrong order; the researchers are confused because the causal relationship appears reversed.

Later, Mexico and Pointsman discuss their research methods. Mexico defends the more esoteric researchers, though Pointsman disparages any form of mysticism. He is also interested in the paranoia indicated in Slothrop’s recent personality tests; the paranoia-associated parts of Slothrop’s brain were more stimulated than in most people. While Pointsman hopes to finish the work started by his hero, Pavlov, Mexico believes he is “obsessed.” Like Jessica, Mexico has an unnatural, inexplicable fear of Slothrop. Elsewhere in the White Visitation, two members of Operation Black Wing observe “their magic Negro, their prototype” (70) ice skating.

A young woman named Katje from the Netherlands is being secretly filmed at the house shared by Pirate, Bloat, and the other men. She is “alone in the house, except for the secret cameraman and Osbie Feel” (71), who prepares psychedelic mushrooms in the kitchen. (This film of Katje will be shown to Pointsman’s octopus, Grigori, as part of the Operation’s elaborate scheme to study Slothrop.)

When Osbie, who is preparing his mushrooms, opens the oven, Katje seems to react; it reminds her of something: a German officer named Captain Blicero, with whom she was engaged in a sadomasochistic romantic relationship in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Katje, Blicero, and another man named Gottfried experimented sexually, cross dressing and adopting one another’s identities. They pretended to be related to one another or that they were servants, geese, or characters in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel; in the fairy tale, Katje “must push the Witch into the Oven” (hence Katje’s reaction to the oven) (74). Blicero suspected that Katje may be a British spy and that their roleplaying games were leading to his inevitable death as “his Destiny is the Oven” (75). He was a fan of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and spent time in the German colonial military apparatus, taking part in “his own African conquest” (76) that brutally crushed the Herero rebellion. At that time, he sexually exploited a young Herero male, who (in Blicero’s words) was “corrupted” by Christian missionaries and who then grew up and traveled to Germany. Now in 1944, he is in the Harz Mountains. Blicero gave him a nickname: Enzian, which he took from a Rilke poem. Gottfried reminds Blicero of Enzian, even though Gottfried is white.

Katje left the violent relationship and defected to Great Britain with the help of Pirate. However, she quickly outlives her usefulness, so when she is “worth nothing to them” (80), Pirate suggests to Katje that she move to the White Visitation. Eager to please due to the guilt she feels for the Dutch role in the Holocaust, Katje accepts. In the past, Katje’s ancestors played a key role in Dutch colonial activities, and one of them helped “systematically killing off the native dodoes for reasons he could not explain” (82) after their island was colonized by the Dutch. Operation Black Wing plans to plant evidence of Herero involvement in the Nazi rocket program for the Germans to find at “a counterfeit rocket-firing site in the Rijkswijksche Bosch” (86).

Slothrop is released from the medical experiment. Afterward, he feels increasingly as though he is stalked or surveilled. When he tries to lose these hypothetical stalkers in London’s East End, he meets Darlene, a nurse whom he dated some time before. Slothrop and Darlene go to her apartment, and later, they lie together in bed after having sex. A V2 rocket explodes nearby. After the shock and the blast, Slothrop realizes that he has an erection, which seems “reasonably part of the white light” (91) as it does with every V2 rocket. Slothrop and Darlene have sex again while someone watches from outside.

Mexico and Jessica have been in a relationship for some time. Still, Mexico frets about Jessica’s actual boyfriend, Jeremy Beaver. He remembers a time when he and Jessica were caught in a sexually compromising situation while driving in his car. When Mexico wakes up one morning at the White Visitation, he realizes he is sexually aroused. He finds a hair belonging to Jessica in his mouth even though some time has passed since their last tryst. He suspects his colleagues may be playing a prank on him. Worrying that they can read his mind and that they’re conspiring against him, he thinks about requesting a transfer. At the same time, Jessica struggles to resolve her own problem: She tries to make herself choose between the loving but depressing Mexico and the “safer” option of Jeremy.

Pointsman thinks about himself, addressing his thoughts to himself in the form of the pronoun “you.” He thinks about paradoxical phases, a key part of his Pavlovian theories in which a seemingly weak stimulus can nevertheless elicit a strong response. Pointsman’s train of thought is interrupted by the Welsh scientist Thomas Gwenhidwy knocking on his door. Gwenhidwy reports that a rocket hit St. Veronica’s hospital shortly after Slothrop was discharged, and Spectro was killed by the rocket. Pointsman adds Spectro to the map of rocket strikes. He thinks about “the Book,” a rare edition of lecture notes by Ivan Pavlov that was bought together by the White Visitation researchers. Now, among those seven scientists, only Pointsman and Gwenhidwy are still alive, and Pointsman worries about “the Book and its terrible curse” (106). These days, he hopes that the research into Slothrop’s condition might win him a Nobel Prize. He knows that Slothrop was with Darlene when the rocket fell; he wonders whether Slothrop might have influenced the V2 rocket. He believes that they “must never lose control” (109).

Carroll Eventyr, the medium who works at the White Visitation, thinks about the “new varieties of freak” (111) who are now arriving at the institution. These include a man who, able to alter his skin pigmentation at will, has been very helpful when shooting race-orientated propaganda. Carroll also thinks about the “splendid weakness” that is his relationship to the dead spirits. He never remembers their conversations; he surrenders himself completely to the spirits. Back at the White Visitation, he contacts the spirit of “the habitually cool and sarcastic Peter Sasha” (111), a German medium who was killed by a police officer during a riot in Berlin in 1930. Sasha is a useful point of contact because he can recall the spirits he has met, such as someone who knew Blicero, the man who ran the rocket site in the Netherlands. At the time, Blicero was named Lieutenant Weissmann and had with him a young Herero boy named Enzian. Carroll, Mexico, and a man named Edwin Treacle discuss the White Visitation’s paranormal research. Though Treacle argues that “the dead are as real as the living” (116), Carroll has no memories of his spiritual communications. Instead, the transcripts of the séances between Carroll, Treacle, and Sasha are detailed accounts of Sasha’s life. Sasha describes his membership in the Communist Party and his love for Leni Pökler, whose husband Franz worked on the early research into rockets:

During the Weimar Republic era, Leni left Franz “for good this time” (116). She took her daughter, Ilse, with her and found refuge in a student dormitory where the other residents discussed politics, revolution, and sex. As the students talked about sex, Leni harbored romantic thoughts for “a Jewess” named Rebecca. In the student quarters and struggling to find food for Ilse, Leni accepted a small piece of bread from Rebecca. Increasingly desperate, she searched for Sasha and found him at his home, conducting a séance with high-ranking members of the “corporate Nazi crowd” (123) in attendance; a meaningful exchange of glances between Leni and Sasha explained to him that she had left Franz. At this séance, Sasha contacted the dead German-Jewish politician Walter Rathenau, who was considered the “prophet and architect of the cartelized state” (124), and the Nazis asked him questions about running a country, using him for their own purposes. Rathenau gave a list of inventions and innovations, then asked the guests about the nature of synthesis and the nature of control. One of the Nazis asked Rathenau whether God is “really Jewish.”

On Christmas Eve, Pointsman gives himself an “Xmas present”: Slothrop. He wants to examine Slothrop’s mind for insights into Lazlo Jamf’s experiments. However, he must keep his experiments and his excitement a secret, the thrill of which sexually arouses him throughout the day. Elsewhere, Thomas Gwenhidwy works in a hospital in the East End of London, attending to the ethnic minorities who are suffering and starving due to the war and the social prejudices against them. Pointsman (who typically works with rich white people in London’s West End) visits him and listens to Gwenhidwy’s theories about the Welsh people being Jewish and why the East End is hit by a higher number of rockets than any other part of the city. His theory is that the British have driven the poor into certain neighborhoods because they are “expendable.” That night, “several enormous water bugs” (131) crawl over Gwenhidwy’s research documents. The bugs eat the paper (and everything else) and turn the research into feces. In this respect, they are “agents of unification” (131) who turn diverse things into the same thing.

On the evening of the day after Christmas, Mexico accompanies Jessica on a visit to her family. Already that day, Mexico has taken the children to see a performance of Hansel and Gretel. The show was interrupted when a rocket fell nearby. The actress playing Gretel burst into an impromptu song that ended on a depressing note about “children who are learning to die” (132). Now, Mexico feels as though he is sure to lose Jessica. He is convinced that he will be “forgotten” as soon as the war is over. When she blows her nose, he hears bird song. Rather than catching a cold, he thinks she is “catching the War” (134). He does not want her to leave him.