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.
Mythology
"'Wütende Heer,' that company of spirits who ride the heaths of the sky in furious hunt, with great Wuotan at their head" 75
"different versions of Homo Monstrosus [...] cyclops, humanoid giraffe, centaur " 82
"a mandate from the submontane Venus he could not resist" 88
"along the clew" 88
"Venus and Ariadne" 88
"Ariadne, the Minotaur" 88
"children out of old Märchen [fairytales]" 94
"this Northern and ancient form [...] the strayed children, the wood-wife in the edible house, the captivity, the fattening, the Oven--shall be their preserving routine" 96
Märchen und Sagen [fairytales and myths]" 97
"the archer and his son, and the shooting of the apple...yes and the War itself as tyrant king" 102
"southern stars too thick for constellations teeming in faces and creatures of fable" 109
"The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness" 130
"the old Dutch fussing over the old stove" 132
"Minotaur blood the fucking beast" 142
"Ariadne consumed" 143
"Might Pointsman have a go at the Minotaur after all?" 143
Jenny Greenteeth, 147
"his rainbowed Valkyrie over Peenemünde" 151
"Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness." 155
"an-cient tribal tabu" 172
Hansel and Gretel, 174
"malachite nymphs and satyrs paralyzed in chase" 194
Brunhilda, 200
cherubs, 204
"cherub-crusted halls" 226
"She doesn't seem to care for mass slaughter as much as for myth" 234
"allegorical painting of Virtue and Vice in an unnatural act" 248
"a dream of Atlantis" 269
"unicorns, chimaeras" 282-83
"perhaps Titans lived under this mountain [Mittelwerke]" 296-97
"Venus, Frau Holda, her sexual delights" 299
"the goat-god's city" 303
"gnome-size German civilian" 305
"oversize elf" 309
"Mukuru ... first ancestor ... Adam" 322
"the one-armed warriors, the one-legged and one-eyed, who fight the sun each evening" 322
"a Herod myth [Enzian's] admirers still like to bring up" 323
"Titans had to live in these mountains, or under them" 330
"it's as still, and lost, as Atlantis" 331
"the singing of Furies" 334
"Tannhäuser, the Singing Nincompoop" 364
"Troll scouting parties" 366
"Trolls and dryads play in the open spaces" 367
"subdeb trolls" 367
"elfin finger" 370
"the Wonderflower" 375
"on Midsummer Eve, between midnight and one, fern seed fell in his shoes. He is the invisible youth" 379
"the mouth of the troll below" 398
"corroded Hansel in perpetual arrest. Gretel's eyes lock wide open, never a blink" 398
"Gorgon's head writing with pipes" 406
"one of the Atlantes of chemistry" 411
"I'd much rather bee/In a Greek trage-dee" 415
"Hoard of the Nibelungen" 419
"the elf king and his queen made a royal progress every noon with a splendid retinue of dwarves and sprites" 419
"the fanged mouths of dragons" 419
"gift of Daedalus that allowed [Pökler] to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring" 428
"Do you talk to elves, Franz?" 430
"decaying mythical statutes" 430
"Nordhausen, a city of elves" 431
"tricorned messengers coming in from out of the long pikes" 435
"Webern's brother was in the black market. [...] Do you know what kind of myth that's going to make in a thousand years?" 440
"supersonic flow. It was surrounded by myth, and by a pure, primitive terror" 452
"madness of Donar" 455
"a gilded winged jackal under the bowsprit" 459
"jackal men" of Alpdrücken, 461
"the golden jackal, the only being abaord that can see through the fog" 468
"In her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dange or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone" 471
"behind the ravening jackal" 472
"think of all the folklore among these people about radioactivity" 479
"[Blicero] was seeing the world now in mythical regions: they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. [...] It was his own space" 486
"A German Odyssey" 486
" a chalice of methyl methacrylate, a replica of the Sangraal" 487
"across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship's toilet" 490
"dowser's wand" 490
"brine stream from the golden jackal mouth" 491
"her mother is hardly a destroying goddess" 494
"the mythical return Enzian dreamed of" 519
"We now come in sight of mythical Rügen" 527
"The ancient Slavs put up a temple here, to Svetovid, their god of fertility and war. Old Svetovid did business under quite a number of aliases! Three-headed Triglav, five-headed Porevit, SEVEN-faced Rugevit!" 528
"Last Secretary to the embassy in Atlantis" 564
"Thursday being named after Donar or Thor, the thunder-god, who sent down the giant pig. The old gods, even by the 10th century, still had some pull with the people. Donar hadn't quite been tamed into Saint Peter or Roland" 568
"wooden Thor's hammers" 568
Roland, 573
"the scales of the Dragon" 578
"some nervous drive toward myth he doesn't even know if he believes in--for the white light, ruins of Atlantis" 579
"Automotive Age Myth or some shit" 581
"Folies-Bergères maenads, moving in for the kill" 584
"the half-mystical Putzi himself" behind the rheostat for the Eisenkröte, 604
"the fleet and jittery rule of Mercury" 614
Magician and the mandrake root, 625
[See also "some golden, vaguely rootlike or manlike figure beginning to form" 202]
"pale Atlantis" 635
"Atropos is who severs them to different lengths. So, God under the aspet of Atropos, she who cannot be turned" 643
"prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the night, reaches into the true Night of the Other" 649
"struggles they thought were all myth" 650
"griffins and flower-ships, ibexes in mid-leap" 651
"Pan's whisper inside the dark grove" 656
"the horns of grove-dwelling beasts" 657
"Pan was a lousy lover" 657
"toad to prince, prince to fabulous monster" 660
"like mischievous Ophelia just having glimpsed the country of the made and itching now to get away from court" 663
"bareback dwarves with little plastic masks around their eyes" 664
Robin Hood, 664
"station Metatron, quadrant Fire, stall Malkuth" 680
"But when they do come on it's like society-gig Apollos, striking the lyre ZONGGG" 694
"the Titan's drum of his heart" 697
"The terrible politics of the Grail" 701
"mythic-symmetric bearing" 707
"Seems people can be reminded of Titans and Fathers, and laugh" 708
"Nordhausen felt like a city in a myth, under the threat of some special destruction" 718
"The region is lonely and Pan is very close" 720
"the shrieking-outward, [...] out in the luminous spaces Pan will carry her to" 720
"the World before men [...] it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad" 720
"A few keep going over to the Titans every day" 720
"Pan leaping--its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful Serpent, its coils in rainbow lashings in the sky" 720-21
"the morning shift at Siemens with the centaurs struggling high on the wall" 725
"Busy Elf Routine" 740
"a Procrustean bed" 750
"Orpheus Puts Down the Harp" 754
"inside this chiming and fable-crowded passage" 758
