3 - Gravity’s Rainbow

Summary

Biographical and historical contexts

In November 1970, Thomas Pynchon took a sheet of quadrille paper and wrote Cornell English professor and F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener. Then living in Manhattan Beach, California, Pynchon was well into writing Gravity's Rainbow (1973). About that work he volunteered: “the further I get into this wretched profession the clearer it is I am doing very little consciously beyond some clerk routine – assembling, expediting – and that either (a) there is an Extrapersonal Source, or (b) readers are the ones who do most of the work, or all of the above. Which is not a bringdown to realize.” Option (b) describes what Roland Barthes had just named the “writerly text” – a fiction that invites readers to actively engage with and thus in a sense to write the text. Option (a) playfully attributes his work to some paranormal process, though again there is nothing unusual about it. Historians commonly remark that following a broad and deep research effort one's narration of past events, things, places, people and their expressions will spill from one's notes onto pages. Thus the Archive seems to write itself into narration, hardly “a bringdown” because it frees the writer to concentrate on what lies beyond the “clerk routine” – the analytical and critical work of historiography.