Power and the Obscene Word: Discourses of Extremity in Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

Abstract

Readers of Gravity's Rainbow have been struck by novel's wide range of discourse from actual mathematical equations reproduced in text to extended excremental episodes and sexually explicit graffiti. The linguistic extremes of equation and obscenity are two of many voices in Thomas Pynchon's elaborately polyphonic novel, but they are more than just specialized discourses in a multivoiced work: equations and obscenities form parallel yet antithetical languages of power which voice desires of Elect and Preterite respectively in their struggle for control or survival. The novel's language of equations epitomizes political, magical, and religious aspirations of ruling technological class, what Pynchon terms the Elect. But in Pynchon's bifurcated world of Elect and Preterite, Force and Counterforce, Them and Us, austere language of equations has a potentially liberating counterpart. For every kind of vampire, Pynchon writes, there is a kind of cross (540). Surprisingly, linguistic counterpart of equation is obscenity. The obscene utterance borne through gesture, shout, or graffito -becomes purified language of Preterite, not completely powerless cry of dispossessed. Pynchon's use of scientific and technological language and concepts has received a good deal of critical attention from discussions of how science can be incorporated as a tool for metaphor and (Friedman 100) to explications of his debt to modern theoretical physics.' But while Pynchon's narrative style communicates respect and wonder regarding science, novel clearly locates technological