Sex and Plastic Man

Count this.
If you'll look at the time on this post, you'll notice I was dedicated and stayed up really late to catch up on all my reading, like a perfect student! Whether you believe that or not is up to you.

I wanted to remark on a few things, and pose some questions for general consideration. First thing is, the title of the novel. I think that on a literal level, the reference of “gravity’s rainbow” is clear. It refers to the path or smoke trail of a rocket in the sky. It goes up, then gravity pulls it down, forming a smoggy rainbow in the sky. But what about this book can we take at face value? So on a deeper level, it also refers to the paths of people. Katje is said to follow a parabola in her life, but I suppose Slothrop does as well. Where we’ve left him, at page 269, he’s climbing the parabola. Soon he’ll get to the top, and then eventually he’ll fall (if he’s not even in the last part of the book, he must fall fairly hard). This might be a part of the post-modern worldview, that everything is eventually going to turn to shit and fall apart, opposed to the Enlightenment Project and the Hegelian Dialectic. Maybe the entire planet follows gravity’s rainbow.

Now, I promised you some talk about sex. What I’m curious about is, why is the novel so overtly sexual? You could say that most modern (small m) work is very sexual, since sex has lost a lot of its taboo nature in our society, but a show like Sex and the City is much more concerned with portraying realism than GR is. It’s entirely possible that Pynchon is throwing in so much sex purely because sex is a part of life. I think personally that he’s playing off the mythos of the American Hero, the John Wayne or the Indiana Jones, or even James Bond (though technically British, he’s become an American fantasy). Scoring chicks is all part of that rougish Western Male image. This only explains why Slothrop gets so much slap-and-giggle, though. What other reasons could there be (besides a raw desire to offend on Pynchon’s part) for all the graphic sex?

Lastly, Plastic Man. On page 206, Slothrop is reading a Plastic Man comic book. The superhero phenomenon, particularly in the WWII era, makes perfect sense when linked to Slothrop’s status as The American. “Good guys vs. bad guys” and “might makes right” are very much tied into the American consciousness (just listen to W. talk about the war sometime). But if Pynchon just wanted a superhero, he could have used Superman. Plastic Man is a weird choice because… well, he’s weird. No, seriously, he’s weird. Plastic Man is fucking weird. I point this out to show how much control Pynchon has over every detail in this novel; even the smallest props are appropriately bizarre.

Oh, and when I read That Scene, I had a short bout of dry heaves. Actually, I think I might have thrown up in my mouth a little. Thanks, Scott!