Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Don't miss this amazing video about Gravity's Rainbow winning the National Book Award, including a recording of Professor Irwin Corey's hilarious acceptance speech.
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Etymologies
Apache
From http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Trails/1942/i_nav_n1.html
The Navajo, on the other hand, are part of the Apache, a proud, mobile, independent group that has been traced to roots in Canada's Northwest Territories and Alaska. Their language is of Athabascan stock, and can still be understood, to some degree, by tribes in the North-Country. The name "Apache" is a corruption of a Pueblo term, Apachu, variously suggesting a translation as "strangers" or "enemies," depending on the context. This reveals the age-old antagonisms that have existed between the Pueblo (including the Hopi) and the Apache.
The Apache were hunter-gatherers who survived by constantly moving into new, fresh hunting grounds, drifting on as game was thinned, and by being tough and aggressive. This tradition of expansion and migration repeatedly brought the Apache into conflict with the prior inhabitants of the new lands which they were entering Relations between the Apache and the more-settled groups that they met during these wanderings were generally strained, at best.
The following from Pynchon List member Don Larsson:
"Apache" is a French slang term for a certain kind of Parisian thug, often sporting sideburns and a striped shirt. The "Apache dance," where the guy flings his partner about in a somewhat brutal fashion, was once a cultural icon of sorts. The name itself, of course, was to indicate the "savagery" of the thugs--"another example of white men's lies."
Igor Blobadjian
According to Thomas Moore's The Style of Connectedness, "there was a conference, the VTsK NTA, [...], to decide which alphabet should be made standard; bitter disputes, complete with the 'religious angle' (354), erupted between Latinists and Cyrillicists. [...] [A] delegate, Badjbildin, name-connects to 'Igor Blobadjian'. (p.100)
Hank Faffner
Thomas Moore": "Hank Faffner [...] is the giant Fafnir [in Teutonic mythology], who, with his giant-colleague Fasolt, comes temporarily to possess the Nibelungs' hoard, and the magical Ring, in the myth dramatized in Wagner's Rheingold." (p.255)
Gottfried
Thomas Moore: "Gottfried von Strassburg, the premier poet of Tristan in the German Middle Ages, may give Gottfried his name." (p.107)
Hand of Glory
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable:
"In folk-lore, a dead man's hand, preferably one cut from the body of a man who has been hanged, soaked in oil, and used as a magic torch by thieves. Robert Graves points out that the Hand of Glory is a translation of the French main de gloire, a corruption of mandragore, the plant mandragora (Mandrake), whose roots had a similar magic value to thieves." (p.466)
"Silent Otto" Kretschmer
Born May 1, 1912, Otto Kretschmer was a German U-boat Fregattenkapitän during World War II. He was quite successful, sinking a total of 44 Allied ships, mostly in the Atlantic in 1940 and 1941 before being captured by a British destroyer HMS Walker southeast of Iceland on March 17, 1941. He earned the moniker "Silent Otto" because he attacked on the surface at night, relying on the small silhouette of a U-boat not to give them away and the superior speed of the craft to get them away from the scene of devastation as quickly as possible. His motto was "One torpedo ... one ship." A ruthless U-boat commander, he was awarded the Knight's Cross with oak leaves (equivalent of Victoria Cross) by Hitler.
Kretschmer was accused by the British of war crimes for conducting a disciplinary hearing against another German submarine officer who had been accused of cowardice while they were both held in the same POW camp--it being contrary to the Geneva convention for POWs to hold a court-martial. Kretschmer argued that he held a 'council of honour' which did not pass sentence against the officer. In any case, charges were not pressed and he was later released.
After the war "Silent Otto" served 15 years in the "Bundesmarine" (post-war German navy), his last rank was the "Flotillenadmiral."
Ludwig
Ludwig, like his namesake Beethoven, held dear to him a lemming whose kind was racing headlong into the sea and oblivion ("submitt[ing] to the demands of history"). Beethoven's lemming was, of course, (to quote Gustav) "the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all the notes get an equal hearing [read: high entropy]." As Gustav asks Säure (regarding another exemplar of that same dialectic), "Where was there to go after Webern?" Pynchon also seems to make this link between musical evolution and entropy in V..
Oliver "Tantivy" Mucker-Maffick
Adjective tantivy: a galloping gait
Verb to maffick: described the jubilant celebrating of British troops
after they successfully defended Mafeking during the Second Boer War (1899-1900).
mucker: British slang for one who employs himself in low pursuits; also for a friend
Dr. Edward W.A. Pointsman
From Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49:
"Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken, switches closed, the faceless pointsmen who'd thrown them now all transferred, deserted [...] impossible to find ever again." (Lippencott: p.104; Bantam: p.76)
From Gravity's Rainbow:
"Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back there. [...] He is the pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. [...] The pointsman has made sure we'll go there. He hardly has any work at all. The lever is very smooth, and easy to push. [...] But look what a lot of work he has done, with just one little push. [...] That is because he knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the only kind of man who puts in very little work and makes big things happen, all over the world." (p.644-45)
Peter Sachsa and Maj. Marvy
From James S. Martin's All Honorable Men:
"Major Tilley and the Standard Oil investigation which he was making for Phil Amram dropped from sight for a few days while the Major's party searched in the field for records. [...] Colonel Kelam handed me a note from Major Tilley, dated from Frankfurt the week before: 'Dr. Bütefisch, chief of I.G. Farben synthetic oil production, Leuna, has admitted that Dr. Hahn, his deputy, has hidden papers, including secret documents and letters from and to Ringer, at the following address: Bad Sachsa, Haus der Dynamit A.G.' "Bad Sachsa showed on the map as a point in the midst of the Harz Mountains, a few miles from the Devil's Pulpit on the Brocken, a traditional site of the Witches' Sabbath. The Hitler Youth had revived the legend and held Walpurgisnacht celebrations annually on May first."
Also, Walter Dornberger, in his V-2 (Trans. James Clough and Georffrey Halliday. New York: Viking Press, 1958) says that Wernher von Braun and his staff holed up in Bad Sachsa before giving themselves up to the Allies. (p.266)
"Basher" St. Blaise
Saint Blaise (d. c.316) was an early Christian bishop and martyr in Armenia. One of the most popular medieval saints, he was solemnly venerated as the patron saint of sufferers from throat diseases. Although Christianity had been adopted c. 300 as the state religion in Armenia, the Roman emperor Licinius began a persecution of the Christians, and Blaise was taken prisoner. While in prison he miraculously cured a boy from fatally choking. After being torn with wool combers' irons, Blaise was beheaded.
Ah, but here's the kicker. St. Blasius (as the Germans call him) is always depicted holding the head of a pig. As Evan M. Corcoran, a contributor to this web-guide, relates it, a wolf stole a widow's pig, whereupon Blasius called the wolf back and compelled it to return the pig, alive, to the widow. When St. Blasius was imprisoned, the widow slaughtered the pig to feed the saint and brought the pig's head to him.
Shatsk
Shatsk is a town in the Volynskaja oblast [political subdivision], in the Ukraine.
Skippy
Thomas Moore believes "Skippy" alludes to the Percy Crosby cartoon strip Skippy, of 1920s-1945 vintage:
"Skippy, like Orphan Annie, led a schlemihl's life, always threatened by evil forces of change, which meant, for the politically reactionary Crosby, Rooseveltian changes in the direction of liberalism, urbanism, and the homogenized Global Village." (p.170n.)
[Skippy/Percy Crosby Home Page]
Tyrone Slothrop
Tyrone Slothrop is an anagram for "Sloth or Entropy"
S. Lothrop Thorndike published a volume on shape-note singing: The Psalmodies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1895.
Another stretch, but ... Samuel K. Lothrop (S. Lothrop) was an anthropologist who worked in Central and South America. J.D. Argles emailed me that Lothrop discovered "giant solid stone balls somewhere in Costa Rica, which were never explained. He also had a mild stutter." According to my rather hasty research, his speciality was/is in Pre-Columbian art and archaeology. He was the author of Pottery of Costa Rica and Nicaragua and edited a volume entitled Some Costa Rican Jade Motifs. In Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Samuel K. Lothrop (Ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
And Pete Marcus muses:
Surely his initials, TS, are related to Pynchon's debt to Eliot, with Slothrop the twentieth-century Everyman wandering through the waste land of modern Europe? Or is that too obvious?
John Stark posits in his book Pynchon's Fictions:
"The name of Tyrone Slothrop [...] presents great difficulties. W.T. Lhamon, Jr., argues that this name combines 'sloth' and 'ROP,' 'the term used when an editor has the right to place an ad wherever is convenient in a paper.' Although the second part of this interpretation makes some sense--despite Slothrop's free movements and those determined by his search for the rocket--the first part ascribes to him a quality that he does not exhibit. Also, Pynchon used this name earlier for a character in 'The Secret Integration' [Dr. Slothrop and his son, Hogan]." (p.13)
William Slothrop
William Pynchon is Thomas' colonial descendant, born in Springfield, Essex, England on 11 October 1590. He married Anne Agnes Andrew about 1623. The family emigrated to New England on Winthrop's fleet of 1630, Anne dying soon after their arrival. A few years later, William married Frances Sanford of Dorchester. William was the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts and one of the Bay Colony's leaders until his publication of a book about justification and redemption, The Meritorious Price of our Redemption (1650) [Available in the, ahem, HyperArts BookShop].
From William Pynchon: Merchant and Colonizer (Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1961), by Ruth A. McIntyre, p.33:
The Massachussetts elders were shocked at a layman disputing the opinion of learned divines on such a question as the nature of Christ's sacrifice and man's justification.
[...]
With the printing of his treatise, The Meritorious Price of our Redemption...in London, [Pynchon] entered upon the exposition of his religious opinions which was to absorb his attention until his death. [...] Briefly, he questioned the accepted doctrine that Christ had actually endured the Hell torments of God's wrath to redeem men's souls. He had concluded after extensive study that the price of man's redemption was Christ's perfect obedience, of which His atonement was "the masterpiece." He could not conceive that God's wrath had forced the sinless Christ to bear the curse of suffering for man's guilt through imputation.
He returned to England to enjoy greater religious freedom and died at Wraysbury, England on 10 October 1662.
Spörri
The characters (Spoerri [no umlaut, i.e.,the non-German spelling], Hawasch and Wenk) are from Fritz Lang's 1922 film "Mabuse, der Spieler". Spoerri and Hawasch are two of Mabuse's henchmen. Spoerri is the weak, coke-sniffing valet who assists Mabuse in his disguises. Hawasch is the snaggle-toothed rotund forger who works under the city. Dr Mabuse is, of course, the master-criminal who seeks to control the populace through mind-control, fear, and market manipulation. State-Attorney Wenk is his dogged pursuer.
In Fritz Lang's 1922 film Dr Mabuse, der Spieler, Spoerri is a weak, coke-sniffing valet who assists Mabuse in his disguises. Also, possibly Spoerri is name-connected to Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri who was part of the "Nouveau Realisme" movement in France in the early 1960s and associated with the English avante-garde group Fluxus, also in the 1960s. His book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (with Robert Filliou) was published in France in 1966 and more recently has been translated into English.
Der Springer
Provided by Mike Stinson
I was looking at one of my textbooks and noticed that it was published by a company called Springer that uses chess knight for its symbol. I searched on the web and found out that Springer is a German publishing company, founded in the late 1800's, that publishes scientific textbooks and technical journals. This maybe something that inspired Pynchon (or at least something he came across before writing GR) considering his techinical writing backround. The headquarters was in Berlin, but was destroyed during the WW2. Being the most prominant German scientific publisher any of the German scientists in the novel would surely have been familiar with it.
Here are the websites for Springer Publishing: http://www.springer.de/
and the history of the company: http://www.springer.de/press/about/history.html
Ursula
According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
St. Ursula: A 5th-century British princess, according to legend, who went with 11,000 virgins on a pilgrimage to Rome and was massacred with all her companions by the Huns at Cologne. One explanation of the story is that Undecimilla (mistaken for undecim millia, 11,000) was one of Ursula's companions. (p.1119)
Somewhat appropriate name for a lemming, eh?
Stefan Utgarthaloki
Thomas Moore: "This is the enchanter-king Utgarthaloki [in Teutonic mythology], who entertained [...] the gods Thor and Loki when they visited him at his castle in disguise." (p.255)
