For the average postmodern reader of literature, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow may seem overly demanding, with its encyclopaedic intentions and groundbreaking narrative innovations. Critics have rightfully entertained the idea that this complicated novel deserves to be interpreted with the help of established philosophers’ works (consult, for instance, the index of the 1998 collection of essays Pynchon Notes 42-43 for references to Hegel, Kant, Freud, Derrida, Bergson, Buber etc.). Gravity’s Rainbow has also earned its connections to canonical literary texts such as Ulysses, Moby Dick and Rilke’s Elegies, securing its place among works of high literature. However, as much as this first part is true, we must also acknowledge the presence of low and middle class culture in Pynchon’s novel. Unmistakably, elements of military slang, TV ads, commercial products, popular songs and movies are all part and parcel of what makes this book, also considering the above-mentioned associations, an all-encompassing piece of literature. Pynchon sports a wide range of symbols closely connected to each other, irrespective of their belonging to high- or lowbrow culture. One motif that has caught my attention is the banana, in all the shapes, sizes and metamorphoses it comes in throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. My aim is to interpret the role of the banana qua banana in Pynchon’s text, relating it to the primary images of the rainbow, the rocket and Slothrop’s erections. I shall first give an account of Pynchon’s usage of postmodern allegory in order to keep everything “paranoically” connected, and then proceed with the analysis of the banana trope in the text. I shall discuss the significance of Pirate Prentice’s banana breakfast and of Chiquita Banana in relation to the entire novel. Slightly moving away from the primary text, my paper shall consider the hermeneutic implications of the banana image in the 60s, spread by figures such as Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. My conclusions shall deal with the metaphorical significance of the banana as rocket, penis and rainbow, and, final implications on the idea of control in Gravity’s Rainbow.
1. PYNCHONESQUE RHETORIC: FIGURES OF SPEECH IN POSTMODERNISM
“[E]verything is connected, everything in the Creation”
– Gravity’s Rainbow (703)
Pynchon begins his novel with a most revealing quote from German rocketeer Wernher von Braun stating that ‘[n]ature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.’ This can provide a valuable starting point in order to consider Pynchon’s ‘style of connectedness’, as critic Thomas Moore has expressed it. Since Gravity’s Rainbow is a book about the V-2 rockets in World War II, a great deal of symbolism falls under this very image, thus subordinating other objects, elements or ideas and creating a whirlpool of dependent interpretations. Naturally, for the sake of the present paper, I have placed the banana in the centre as the novel’s structural metaphor (the way Lakoff 1 and Johnson define the said figure of speech), although critics have seldom centred their research on the fruit, preferring to comment on the importance of the V-2.
In The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon Deborah Madsen 2 stresses the importance of individual consciousness in interpreting an allegory, which ‘is, and works upon, the idea of culture – not the political, social and economic realities, but the explanations and justifications of them that culture provides’ (Madsen 3). In order to grasp an allegory, one needs to work at the level of the language and transcend the literalness of words to reach the real interpretation, which is what we as readers often do by linking fragments or seeing beyond what is merely written. Madsen proposes a series of opposed concepts that define this figure of speech: signifier and signified; the real and the unreal; visibilia and aenigmata; ‘a finite and temporal perspective, and an infinite or atemporal potential for meaning’ (Madsen 7-9). Consequently, the banana reads as a more complex image through which the great themes of the novel find alternative expressions. To the explicit picture of a banana in Gravity’s Rainbow corresponds the subtle innuendo of V-2s, male sexual organs, rainbows and arches.
Stephen B. Henkle3 considers the metaphoric character of Pynchon’s writing, more specifically exemplifying the instances of explosions (which come back in the form of orgasm, eating and defecation). Images undergo repetitions, be they serious or playful, and this is precisely the mnemotechnical process that transforms them into inter-related material for the reader (Henkle 276). Returning to von Braun’s motto, we can read into it Pynchon’s interest in organicism, or transcendentalism, explained by Hugh Kenner: scientifically, this belief intends to correct Newtonian physics and explore ’the hierarchic interdependencies in nature and in history and in myth and in mind’ (Moore4 24).
Molly Hite5, echoing Lakoff and Johnson’s theory, calls Gravity’s Rainbow a ‘metaphoric novel, which derives its ultimate coherence from a governing structural metaphor’ (Hite ‘Ideas of Order’ 97). She identifies the metaphor as the parabola of the V-2 and the rainbow in the title, themselves representations of 20th century linearity: ‘according to the general theory of relativity, the Euclidean straight line is warped into a curve by the presence of a gravitational field’ (Hite 97). Newton’s discovery of gravity eliminated the necessity of a God in order to explain the world, and with the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, gravity was placed under a higher principle: the irreversibility of physical processes (Hite ‘Ideas of Order’ 106). It is a well-known fact that Pynchon makes use of his scientific knowledge accurately, be it physics, chemistry or rocketry that he is talking about. Slothrop’s name, for instance, stems from the abbreviation of the previously-mentioned second law of thermodynamics: Tyrone stands for the embodiment of entropy in Gravity’s Rainbow: he is a ‘thermodynamic surprise’ (GR 143). By discussing science as correctly as possible (often after having investigated obscure matters that lead to discoveries, such as Kekulé’s dream about the benzene molecule), Pynchon wishes to place special emphasis on development. The scientific element is explained in so much detail in the novel that it cannot be overlooked in a literary commentary, giving birth to secondary imagery and interpretations.
The rainbow symbol can be traced back to the covenant between God and Noah that the earth shall not perish by water, but, ironically, is to meet its doom by the rocket’s fire (Hite ‘Ideas of Order’ 105). Surely there is no need to mention how seminal the V-2 threat proves in the novel, as the characters have already become used to the rocket’s presence in their everyday life. The fall is a recurring theme in Gravity’s Rainbow: Hite claims it explains ‘the tendency of experience to diversify beyond prediction and control’. The presence of these two latter concepts is all the more terrifying than the lack thereof because it condemns the universe to an already-settled end (Hite ‘Ideas of Order’ 115).
Most of the characters that do not belong at the top of the novel’s status hierarchy act resigned in the face of the V-2s; Pirate, Jessica, and Roger simply register the presence of yet another rocket falling dangerously close by. By extrapolation, the curve that the fall entails synthesizes the trajectory of the novel in that it begins with the shooting of a rocket and ends with the pending explosion. In this respect, the first page of the novel is ominous as to what the ending will be like, with no possibility of escape from an eventual explosion: ‘It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre’ (GR 3).
The various forms that arcs take in the novel are, in Amy Elias’s view, manifestations and trajectories of power (Elias 2366). As said before, the curve is the most representative shape in the 20th century; it also carries a special significance in Pynchon’s work, where it often stands for an ideological system of power control (Elias 240). This idea shall return time and time again in my discussion of the banana motif and the imagery adjacent to it.
2. STRANGE FRUIT: THE BANANA QUA BANANA
Stephen Weisenburger’s Companion offers the banana the privilege to be featured on the cover of Gravity’s Rainbow‘s most seminal secondary read, explicitly linking it to the major symbol of the novel: the V-2 rocket. However, the content of the book fails to provide an analysis of bananas to match the investigation of other tropes—such as angels or pigs, to mention only a few. Since the aim of young literature researchers is not to ‘mind the gap’ but ‘find the gap’ within a certain topic and fill the breach with their own documented answers, it is the slightly ignored banana that fascinated me enough to want to dedicate an entire paper to it—to my knowledge the only one of its kind that has been written so far.
Why are bananas so significant for a critical reading of Gravity’s Rainbow? What meaning do they contribute to the text? For a novel that is so obviously submerged in the realm of scientific explanations, it is appropriate to begin with a basic statement of precisely this nature to restore the fruit among the serious themes in the book: bananas defy gravity. ‘Why are bananas curved?’ is one of those tricky questions people usually ask just to be able to answer in a did-you-know manner and surprise their interlocutor with the fact that bananas grow upside-down. This phenomenon is called negative geotropism or gravitropism, which means that in ‘pendant bunches, typical for most bananas, the negative geotropic response results in an upward curvature of the fruit’ (Monselise7 49). In 1880, Darwin and his son co-published The Power of Movement in Plants8, a study in which they defined the terms ‘geotropism’ (the growth of a plant or the part of a plant in relation to the earth) and ‘heliotropism’ (vegetal growth in relation to the sun).
Bananas are still widely exotic for cultivation purposes in first-world countries and direct observation of their growth is not immediately possible. Even though today’s globalized and Internet-bound population has easy access to information—so one should not assume its ignorance, but rather the opposite—, the exoticness of bananas was indeed perplexing for people half a century ago, including the readership of Gravity’s Rainbow. The Westerners had to be educated through Chiquita Banana commercials to know how to consume the new and strange fruit (the worldwide distribution brand United Fruit under which Chiquita produce was sold shall return later on in this part of my paper). Thanks to these affirmations on the growth of bananas, we can easily understand that Pynchon has chosen this fruit in order to reinforce the imagery of curvedness and the idea of submission or resistance to higher forces (gravity in the case of bananas, and political control on a more general level).
Pynchon imbues the novel with related imagery of objects rising and falling, both literally and figuratively. I shall continue with a discussion of bananas as a central image and detail the points I have made in this paragraph in the course of the following pages.
Let us direct our attention towards the beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow, featuring Pirate Prentice’s Banana Breakfast. The scene belongs to a special niche of literary genres, discussed by Christopher Ames under the term ‘festive literature’, which is meant to replace organized religion in modern societies, ‘with its possibilities for comic communion and catharsis’ (C. Ames ‘The Life of the Party’9 7).
According to Lionel Trilling in Ames’s study, modern literature will be able to provide the spiritual substance of life as religion is gradually failing to do so, given the gradual secularization of the world. Moreover, feasts and celebrations depicted in literature incorporate religious force due to their resemblance to rituals. If we consider the meaning of festivity in its cultural anthropological acceptation it will become easier to see Pirate’s breakfast as a ‘“charm” against aerial bombardment’ (C. Ames ‘The Life of the Party’ 7). The element of religious reverence consists in the presence of people who are ‘allergic or upright hostile to bananas’ (GR 5), simply ‘because they wish to revere the miracle of tropical fecundity in freezing war-time England. […] It contains the essence of Pynchon’s religious reverence’ (Ramapriya10 230).
The ‘fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast’ (GR 10) is the way men at Pirate’s cottage house in London cope with ‘the loosely clustered forces of death—the war, the winter, the rockets’ (C. Ames ‘The Life of the Party’ 235)—which ultimately threaten the feast that brings joy into their lives: ‘though it is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off – […] so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail’ (GR 10).
For Den Tandt, the banana breakfast represents ‘a male homosocial celebration of auto-eroticism’ through which the ‘characters oppose to the violent phallic logic of the Rocket their own, presumably more autonomous sexuality’ (Den Tandt 88). Osbie Feel even makes the allusion explicit by placing a banana inside his pants and letting it protrude through his fly, in case we still needed the confirmation that in Gravity’s Rainbow the fruit largely stands, among others, for an erect penis.
Instead of alerting the authorities right after having seen the V-2, Pirate decides to pick bananas and go through the morning ritual that has made him famous among people who ‘throng here from all over England’ (GR 5), thus ignoring his official duties in an act of political subversion. Pirate’s diligence at building the greenhouse, providing the fertile soil and making a deal to get banana trees from Brazil on his own evokes an utopian act by staking his autonomy and control against corporate powers (Den Tandt11 88). Through his decision to bring banana trees from South America and grow the fruit in the UK, Pirate is enacting political revolution on a small scale: if we regard how ‘unnatural’ climate-wise it is to cultivate exotic fruit in London, during one of the coldest winters ever (as Weisenburger confirms), we can see how the character is revolting against a limiting natural system. Furthermore, by circumventing the restrictions of a market that does not provide year-round access to the fruit—and when it does, it resorts to controversial corporate companies such as United Fruit—Pirate is making his own way into a freer world. One of the revelatory aspects in Gravity’s Rainbow is the exposure of how modern-day cartels came into being, and Pynchon does not ignore the problematic United Fruit Company, repeatedly accused of work abuse on plantations in third world countries.
The fact that Prentice is offering and others are accepting proves that demand for bananas among the common people exists, despite higher forces—a land less fertile than the Equator—not allowing them to grow there naturally.
Pirate has the gift of ‘getting inside the fantasies of others: being able, actually, to take over the burden of managing them’ (GR 12). In a time when the world is at war and there is a banana shortage, he caters for other people’s desire to eat, or simply see bananas. There is little wonder that later on in the novel, when a tuba player at Peenermünde is asked by an alarmed orchestra-fellow what is happening to them, the former simply replies ‘[h]ave a banana’ (GR 506) with his own mouth full of the said stuff. Soon afterwards, Felix, the tuba player, is caught ‘eating a banana, and living for the moment’ (GR 508). The fact that these two actions are simultaneous is not a coincidence: Pynchon systematically equates the consumption of the fruit with a hedonistic manner of living. In episode 2, Osbie Feel, having placed a banana in his pants, bursts into a satirically cheerful song about going to war, in which for the first time in the novel one is urged to ‘have a bana-na’ (GR 8) in order to forget about problems. Felix’s enjoyment of the fruit is synonymous to mental and emotional isolation from greater issues that transcend the present moment, as it is for Pirate Prentice and his group.
The soil itself—‘an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas’ (GR 5)—is yet another symbol of resistance to what is generally accepted by society, axiologically speaking. Instead of earth and fertilizer, Pirate has combined vomit, faeces and dead matter, and managed to make grow out of this mixture a ‘rich and natural thing, […] nutritious, fragrant, contributing to man’s health and not his destruction’ (Henkle 273). Such contrast can subscribe to the discussion of the Preterite and the Elect, as formulated by William Pynchon, the novelist’s Puritan ancestor. His tract, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650), aimed to do away with the idea of predestination—that God has already chosen the ones he will save and the others will be discarded without the possibility to redeem through their actions in their lifetime.
William Pynchon believed that Jesus died on the cross for both the Elect (the chosen ones) and the Preterite (the discarded), thereby establishing equality—in terms of chances for salvation—that others at the time regarded as heresy. The Preterite include the common, the base; in other words, anyone that does not seem to be privileged by God and will eventually have to perish. The extinct dodo bird on page 111 of Gravity’s Rainbow is a good example of the extermination of the weak and useless by the hand of the Elect. In Pirate’s breakfast scene, the soil can be seen as an embodiment of the Preterite idea; it is vile and made of residue that no-one wishes to save. In spite of this, Pirate symbolically redeems the mixture and puts it to use for a noble purpose: growing bananas and catering for people’s desire to enjoy this fruit. Prentice actively participates in the recuperation of that which is not meant to be saved, and mirrors William Pynchon’s messianic mission.
Through this analogy, the breakfast episode successfully contributes to the relevance of the Preterite-Elect discussion of the entire novel. Christopher Ames, in another article of his, comments: ‘The phallic, comic banana, glowing fruit of the manure, seems to share the charmed “conjuror’s secret”- the capacity for telling death to fuck off […] with a success derived from the fertility of waste, the power of shit, the potency of that which is excluded or discarded by the official culture’ (C. Ames ‘Power and the Obscene Word’12 197). We remember Henkle’s reification of the rocket’s explosions—transmuted into reaching orgasm, eating or defecating—to be part of the metaphoric style in Gravity’s Rainbow (Henkle 276). This provides us with a comprehensive reading grid when dealing with the following passage: ‘He trudges through black compost in to the hothouse. He feels he’s about to shit. The missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on the peak of its trajectory by now… beginning its fall… now.’ (GR 7).
The celebration reaches Pantagruelian proportions, as the reader is presented with a comically decadent menu of banana-based dishes, which as Ames interprets, ‘provides a moment of magnificence that, indeed, is not the war.’ Moore also credits this initial scene in the novel for distinguishing between the organic (Pirate’s hothouse as a symbol of human life spreading DNA molecules) and the dead (embodied by the war, the cold winter and the rocket) (Moore 178). However, Pirate’s share of joy ends with the phone call he makes to announce he has seen the rocket.
Upon returning, he can feel the separation that has come between him and the men he has made breakfast for, after just a minute of being gone: ‘He gazes [...] back down at the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude [...]. Pirate’s again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast’ (GR 11) Pynchon makes Pirate withdraw so as to show the power that war has to separate people and interrupt their communion.
Private celebrations are destroyed by the great official reality of war, although Gravity’s Rainbow as a historical novel unconventionally pushes conflict out of the reader’s sight, thus turning war into a mere pretext for literature (C. Ames ‘The Life of the Party’ 235-36).
Apart from the uplifting effects that bananas are shown to have on the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, the fruit is, in addition, efficiently stored in the memories of comedy lovers as part of the old slapstick joke of making another person slip on a peel. Pynchon does not leave this aspect aside: there is the clear example of Teddy Bloat falling victim to a banana peel in the breakfast episode. However, a more obscure and telling scene in the second half of the book provides Thomas Moore’s study on interconnectedness with material for analysis: the ‘banana peel that had caused Miklos Thanatz to slip overboard’ links to what the narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow imagines to be William Pynchon’s ‘stews, spilled on deck, being shaken off “the indignant shoes of the more elect” (GR 204)’ (Moore 134). Moore describes Thanatz’s fall as originating on the decadent ship Anubis and ending among Europe’s Preterite, with which the character is forced to interact—even though he ‘wasn’t supposed to be left with you discards’ (GR 667).
Thanatz himself understands this when he confesses the following: ‘The white Anubis, gone on to salvation. Back here, in her wake, are the preterite, swimming and drowning [...] churning, mixing, rising, falling. [...] Men overboard and our common debris [...] there is a key, among the wastes of the World... and it won’t be found on board the white Anubis because they throw everything of value over the side’ (GR 667-68). Pynchon’s choice of words in this fragment relates to the vocabulary that characterises the soil of the banana hothouse: a fermenting mixture of vile composition. Thanatz’s slip on the peel sends him into the realm of the base, yet a category of the base that is aware of its real value and therefore rebels against the elect. He realizes that it was the decadent Anubis that was, in fact, unworthy of salvation, in the light of the human degradation and debauchery taking place onboard. Thanatz is ultimately happy to have rid himself of the ship and to stand out as valuable, similarly to Pirate’s banana tree soil: it proves fertile and beneficent for cultivation (‘contributing to man’s health and not his destruction’, Henkle 273) against all odds and doubts that might stem from a conservative idea of what good standard soil should be. The resistance in this case is enacted against a source of false authority.
Let us reconsider slipping on a banana peel from a second angle: Richard B. Schwartz13 believes the slapstick joke ‘demonstrates the triumph of gravity over humanity, but the professional clown acts out our enslavement to gravity by falling and then rising, teaching us, in the process, both the nature of our limitations and the possibility of our survival’ (Schwartz 110). This is a perfect example of reading an allegory according to Deborah Madsen’s opposition of visibilia and aenigmata in my first chapter.
The punctual scenes of Thanatz or Teddy Bloat slipping on a banana peel give rise to a more generic interpretation, one that comes from the readership’s critical apparatus. Therefore, slapstick ceases to be mere slapstick: it is sublimated into information whose meaning is culturally bound. More exactly, our knowledge of the world allows us to read more into the banana trick than simply as part of a comedy show. In Molly Hite’s terms, the fall belongs to the uncontrollable part of human experience: as with the rocket, the only certain thing is that what goes up must come down, but we do not know the how, the where or the when. The arched shape—a symbol of power control in Amy Elias’s view—that the rocket’s trajectory takes symbolizes the V-2s compliance with the universal law of gravity, of which no-one is spared, be it rocket, or be it man (the clown in our particular example). Stephen B. Henkle, as already quoted, reinforces the parodic nature of the banana that will never match up to the rocket, ‘arching as if in its own parabolic flight away from its branch, ending in its own Brennschluss’ (273). Both being phallic symbols, they correspond to Pynchon’s comical style: ‘the metaphorical reduction of the fearful into the playful. Control of the ominous by converting it imaginatively into a subject for ludicrous parody of all its elements […] is […] the poet’s chief way of keeping alive humane illusions in the face of depersonalization’ (Henkle 273-74). Man’s defeat in the face of gravity is mirrored by the mark left by the Earth’s pull on bananas: the curve will forever symbolize the fruit’s struggle to reach upwards, in the same way the clown has to slip in order to get up and personify the hope that comes with having challenged gravity.
Moving away from the anonymous house-grown bananas of Pirate Prentice, we come across the worldwide recognizable figure of Chiquita Banana, evoked in the fourth part of the novel by the famous commercial Chiquita song and by Carmen Miranda’s presence in the novel. The banana parabola extends from the beginning of the novel with the breakfast scene, all the way to the end when bananas are discovered in Slothrop’s fridge and a general panic gets hold of the narrator: ‘who-who’s been putting banana--In-the-re-frig er a-tor!/O no-no-no, no-no-no! Chiquita Banana sez we shouldn’t! Somethin’ awful’ll happen!’ (GR 678).
This fragment is a direct reference to the actual song in the Chiquita commercial, whose goal was to popularize the consumption of bananas at a large scale and to instruct people on how and when to eat them: ‘Me? No, not yet, my dear./ The greenish way you’re looking/ means that you are ripe for cooking. / How about me? No, no. / When you are fully ripe my dear,/ those little flecks of brown appear./ Me? You’re most digestible my friend, / delicious, too, from end to end […] But bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator./ So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator[…] Si, si, si, si!’14 (see annex for full lyrics).
The brand is currently part of Chiquita Brands International Inc., which has produced and distributed fruit for 140 years now, until 1970 under the former name of the United Fruit Company. The Chiquita Banana emblem was created in 1944 by Dik Browne; he drew inspiration from Brazilian singer and actress Carmen Miranda famous for sporting her signature fruit hat: ‘These are Carmen Miranda hats, for example, bananas, papayas, bunches of grapes, pears, pineapples, mangoes, jeepers even watermelons’ (GR 664). For decades, the animated banana has been the star of several commercials. The official Chiquita website boasts 376 daily plays on the radio in the U.S. during the jingle’s heyday. In the late 80s, designer Oscar Grillo replaced the banana with the figure of a woman, the way the logo is known nowadays.
Upon the re-release of the classic 1944 jingle, Sanford Ames 15 quotes the New York (sic) edition of 20th October 1986 published an interview with a Chiquita representative claiming the jingles were meant to make people think of the lyrics at the mere uttering of the word ‘Chiquita’, the way many nostalgists would still begin to sing at the sound of the word.
In the eye of the consumers, this assured the company’s close tie with the main fruit it produced, and discouraged competition so that solely United Fruit’s image campaign would prosper (S. Ames 25). By the end of the century, bananas had become the most consumed fruit in America 16, not unlikely because of the aim for monopoly of the Chiquita Company.
Recent promotion includes variations to the jingle; one version that Sanford Ames notes is the one saying: ‘I’m Chiquita Banana and I’ve come to say/ I come from little island down equator bay/ I sail on big banana boat from Caribe/ To see if I can help good neighbor policy. / […] I make big hit with ‘mericanos/ Singing song about bananos […]’.
Ames reads this as a flirty address that has incited the imaginations of many, such as the effect of the vintage commercial that has affected Slothrop’s brother: ‘Hogan’s in love with Chiquita Banana, Tyrone’s come in the room plenty of times found his brother with banana label glued on his erect cock for ready reference, lost in masturbatory fantasies of nailing this cute but older Latin lady while she’s wearing her hat, gigantic fruit-market hat, and a big saucy smile’ (GR 678).
However, the jingle can be interpreted as trying to make up for the scandals Chiquita Inc. has been involved in, one of the most famous being the massacre of thousands of workers protesting against bad working conditions in 1928 in Ciénaga, Columbia17. Writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez has voiced the damage brought to his country by the company in his chef d’oeuvre, A Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which Pynchon might have very possibly read by the time of Gravity’s Rainbow’s publication.
The jingle could very well be aimed at clearing the company’s name and catering for the regional welfare of Banana Republics (‘a small country that is economically dependent on a single export commodity, such as bananas, and is typically governed by a dictator or the armed forces’18). The commercial makes the Chiquita mascot as Latino as possible—she comes from the Caribbean islands, she rhymes using Spanish words (although ‘banano’ seems to be a calqued option to the more common Spanish plátano). This new image of Chiquita first and foremost targets the English-speaking audience from the U.S. in simulating a turn of tactics for the fruit company: what was meant to transpire in the consumers’ minds is that Chiquita is so Caribbean that it is impossible for the company to think of doing anything that would harm the ‘good neighbour policy’ in the region.
The idea that even fruit producers would join in the 20th century scramble for profit and engage in unfair trade conditions turns even such seemingly nature-friendly companies into cold-blooded cartels as those political and economic associates present in the novel. Pynchon here could very well be contrasting two contemporary ways of practicing agriculture. On the one hand, there is Prentice with his small-scale home-grown banana crop—not to mention the fair trade nature of his plantation: he does not exploit human beings or gain profit from his undertaking, and he has obtained the trees as a result of a transparent barter deal, ‘in exchange for a German camera’ (GR 5). On the other hand, we read of monopolizing companies such as United Fruit, engaging in work abuse across the Caribbean for big-scale fruit production, all in the name of the tyranny of profit. From a more general perspective, Chiquita can be associated with the evil cartel in Gravity’s Rainbow surrounding the V-2 rocket. What keeps the war going, and at the same time using it to make profit, is a secret corporation made up of IG Farben, Shell Oil and ICI (GR 250), to mention only a few controversial companies. A relevant and revealing passage in the novel describes the real nature of business in times of war, during which anything amoral is accepted: ‘Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. [...] The true war is a celebration of markets’ (GR 105).
Pynchon heavily resorts to the concept of a higher power, past the reach of any common earthling, able to control and pull the invisible strings of the world’s political and economic mechanisms: these chosen few are called ‘They’. As opposed to the meek and honest ‘We’, ‘They’ stand for the despotic elect that, having self-proclaimed themselves as the authority, monopolize global markets, not very differently from the way the United Fruit Company has proceeded over the years. In the light of this argument, Chiquita Banana’s jingles echoing in Gravity’s Rainbow cease to sound as innocent and cheerful as they do to the uninformed consumer.
3. THE SIXTIES OF ANDY WARHOL AND THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
Before commencing my interpretation on what relevance Warhol and the Velvet Underground have for Gravity’s Rainbow I first need to make some remarks about my proceedings for the third part of my paper. As I have mentioned in the introduction, most criticism on Pynchon draws on established figures in philosophy or classic socio-literary studies in trying to keep up with the same level of complexity and eruditeness that the novel itself exhibits. It has, therefore, been a breath of fresh air and an inspiration to read Brian McHale’s article on angelology19, and convince myself of the fact that academia—once too many times accused of elitism—does not ignore popular culture as TV programmes or advertisement signs, for example.
Visual products like Chiquita Banana commercials and the Velvet Underground and Nico album cover can indeed become the object of scholarly articles and provide the freshness and unpredictability of such references for the sake of an actively engaging read. McHale, however, is dealing with the legacy that Gravity’s Rainbow has left pop culture—with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, Wim Wenders, and REM borrowing angel imagery from Pynchon—whereas I am researching the banana motif in cultural products preceding the novel’s publication. Another stimulating material was Molly Hite’s article20 on teaching Gravity’s Rainbow, whose importance relies on a very specific hermeneutic approach: interpreting the novel according to Pynchon’s alleged sources and interests at the time of the text’s writing—Marcuse’s theories and the Yippie collective.
In attempting to periodize the 60s, Fredric Jameson regards the decade as a break between two capitalist modes of production resulting in unlimited expansion; this was caused by various socio-economical means and the lack of a clear authority to confine freedom. The 70s contrast with the previous years due to a return to a reality that once again had a face, as opposed to the confused 60s (Miller21 88). ‘For Jameson, “postmodern,” “accessible,” “easily grasped,” and “democratic” become synonyms, and cultural products possessing these features are assumed to have the potential of engendering resistance to or participation in politics’ (Tölölyan22 761). In Malcolm Bradbury’s view23, Kennedy’s election brought about the experimentalism of the Beat poets, of theatre groups and of pop and op artists (768).
Pynchon has expressed his fondness of the Beat movement as a group that wished to subvert the official system (Moore 18). Censorships being lifted, sexuality and experiments were allowed once again on American bookshelves. Spontaneity was in high demand in poetry, in Warhol’s ‘random art’ and theatrical happenings (Bradbury 768).
We know that Pynchon, in writing about the 40s, brings a considerable amount of commentary on the 60s left to be inferred by hints at, for instance, WW2 as a mirror to the War in Vietnam, still ongoing at the time of the novel’s creation. One of the novel’s links with Jameson’s portrayal of the 60s as an oasis of freedom can be the way Pirate Prentice is able to cultivate his own bananas and thereby create an escape space where he is not forced to meet his official duties. Also not to be left aside is Pynchon’s highly explicit style (cussing, sexual violence, taboos), which, although it did not get the book banned, made it lose the chances for the Pulitzer Prize. The critical reception of Warhol’s artistic career contributes to the contextualization of both Gravity’s Rainbow and the cultural scene of the 60s. Popism is the term Warhol invented for a movement that championed artistic pluralism capitalizing on ‘the immediacy and pleasure of commercial culture’ (Shattuc24 35). The appeal of pop art counted on the visceral youthful public and brought together elements of the American underground art movement of Warhol, Ginsberg and the Velvet Underground. Art involves the listener and talks about current issues in a playful manner, though overshadowed by the world’s fear of the A-bomb (Shattuc 39). This is yet another element that, in Gravity’s Rainbow, critically affects the way its first readers perceived the main theme: in 1973, the publication year, people still feared the proportions of the Cold War and the possibility of the world coming to an end as a result of atomic bombing. Certainly for them, unlike for us 21st century readers, the V-2 evoked a grimmer prospect.
As a patron, Warhol has fathered one of the most critically acclaimed bands of all time, although in retrospect, by funding, creating and setting up performances for the Velvet Underground. Surely among Warhol’s top 5 best known creations one will come across the banana silkscreen from his Exploding Plastic Inevitable psychedelic show running until 1967, a print more commonly known from the cover of the 1967 The Velvet Underground and Nico album. Warhol’s multimedia spectacle, for which the band provided live music, was a product of the underground art scene and served the purpose of resisting institutionalized pressure by offering a new full experience for the mind and body. The limited edition of the music album featured the sign ‘Peel slowly and see’, which encouraged listeners to remove the banana peel and reveal a phallic pink member underneath. Stephen Weisenburger’s cover of his Companion is probably the most efficient and immediate element to connect Warhol’s creation to Gravity’s Rainbow. The power of visual representation sends the viewer of the book’s cover straight to the artwork of the Velvet Underground album. The significant link I mean to draw in this chapter is between Warhol’s silkscreen print and Pynchon’s usage of the banana motif in Gravity’s Rainbow as part of the writer’s commentary on sources of control. Pirate Prentice’s banana-eating crowd more or less consciously enacts a revolution in the face of the higher authorities at war; the hothouse provides the means for a short-term oasis of happiness.
Similarly, Warhol had rounded up a number of artists to create the Exploding Plastic Inevitable show (featuring the Velvets live in concert) that would rebel against the established visual art world of the 1960s. Both Pynchon’s and Warhol’s bananas suggest sexuality in a celebratory manner: exhibiting a banana ultimately asserts the mindlessness that Pynchon thought of when using the well-known working title for Gravity’s Rainbow. This squares with the fact that Pirate Prentice, Felix the tuba player (GR 508) and Osbie Feel (GR 8)—as I have already commented in the second chapter—associate the fruit with a temporary mental relief from issues (mainly, the war). The phallic symbolism of bananas has been more than once proven authentic for the novel’s content.
Warhol also prizes the banana as an opportunity to submerge into tongue-in-cheek sexual innuendo. It is not the first time Warhol draws on this image: his movie Harlot (1964) features actor Mario Montez in transvestite’s clothes devouring bananas for seventy minutes, exploiting the ambiguity between man and woman, and between banana and penis (Gemunden25 241). It is interesting for our discussion to trace back the way Lou Reed’s band got its name.
The Velvet Underground (1963) was originally the name of a book by Michael Leigh on the violent sexual subculture of U.S. youngsters in the 60s. The band’s choice was, however, motivated by the resonance of the title and its capacity to evoke underground cinema. Curiously enough, the Thomas Pynchon website embeds the quote ‘velveteen darkness’ (GR 3) under the section ‘film/cinema references’. My interpretation is that the first scene in Gravity’s Rainbow is a loose anticipation of the end of the novel, and this not only when speaking about the firing/explosion of the rocket; Pynchon’s attempt at circularity goes beyond the mere object of the scene, on to include the surroundings. The book famously ends in a cinema full of people watching a movie; the opening, part of Prentice’s slightly absurd, or at best unclear, dream—as are all dreams—, hints at the existence of a dark room, also populated, as an evacuation is taking place to avoid an explosion.
Pirate is dreaming that ‘it’s all theatre’, and is expecting ‘a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace’, sitting in ‘velveteen darkness’ (GR 3)—either an epithet for the silence and reduced visibility of a cinema hall, or the tactile feeling of the common velvet chairs surrounding the spectator at the movies. It is obvious that Pynchon has deliberately blurred his opening pages with a layer of uncertainty, lauded as one of those rare and memorable beginnings of ground-breaking works. Whether it indeed be a cinema theatre or not is of less importance: the reference is clearly there and is more than enough to support my point on the various ways the Velvets can be present in Pynchon’s novel.
The band, as does the writer, drew inspiration from the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and his seminal novel Venus in Furs (1870). Sacher-Masoch’s book became so well known, partly due to its scandalous nature, that psychoanalyst Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term ‘masochism’ from the author’s name to designate a sexual practice that involves one’s enjoyment of pain being inflicted onto them. The allusion is more explicit in the Velvets’ song off the above-mentioned album, as the listener has access to the title (although not repeated in the lyrics) and can hear Lou Reed tell the story of Severin’s abandonment in the hands of his cruel lover, Wanda (the latter also not mentioned). There is little need to begin lobbying for Gravity’s Rainbow’s sadomasochistic content, which, in spite of not referring directly to Venus in Furs, is revaluing the cultural heritage Sacher-Masoch has left the world. Take, for instance, the trio Katje-Blicero-Gottfried, who engage in shocking non-standard practices, or Pudding’s forced ingestion of excrement (GR 235) or Slothrop’s revenge-filled sex with Katje (GR 222). The twisted sexuality in Gravity’s Rainbow is, after all, one of the main reasons for which it has been denied the Pulitzer Prize.
Further possible intertextualities, this time with respect to the band’s lyrics, can be found in the following fragment towards the end of the novel: ‘[(] but what’s this just past the spasming cervix, past the Curve Into The Darkness The Stink The… The White… The Corner… Waiting… Waiting For—). But no, the ritual has its velvet grip on them all. So strong, so warm…’ (GR 757-58). The conglomeration of the telling word ‘velvet’ and the almost verbalized song title ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ might not be a simple paranoid association. The Velvet’s song tells the story of someone setting off to buy heroin in a New York neighbourhood from a drug dealer, also known as ‘the man’ in connoisseurs’ slang. In Gravity’s Rainbow, ‘The Man’ similarly embodies the idea of authority and control of others.
We can find this entity at points in the novel where the abstract ‘They’ are given this other identity, equally anonymous, but considerably narrowed down from the multitude. In one of the best known excerpts from the book, the reader learns that ‘[t]he Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world in Bad Shit’ (GR 712-13). The Man is just another disguise taken by the invisible control coming from superior sources. An interesting connection can be made with the discussion of S&M above: keeping such practices taboo is of great interest to Them, so that in the larger picture, higher than individual preferences, everybody shall accept the dominance of The Man. All through the novel, and seconded by the Velvet Undeground’s tie with Venus in Furs, sadomasochism is widely practiced at all levels of society, despite what The Man would want, meaning that symbolically this form of sex stands for rebellion. The Velvets did not receive as much praise in their short group existence as they do now, and especially not at the time of their debut. But considering the period of six years that gave Pynchon the opportunity to hear of Warhol’s protégés, the author must have been acquainted with the activity of the band. Furthermore, imagery and lyrics associated with them seem to fit many references in Gravity’s Rainbow.
The banana occupies an overarching place in representing both the music album, as well as Pynchon’s novel, through Weisenburger’s suggestion, the two art products featuring the fruit as artwork on the cover/sleeve. Its implications are explicitly sexual, and, in the case of the Velvets’ album it can be diachronically proven to stand for technology as well: let us consider the cover for the band’s fifth and final album, Squeeze (1973). The image of a hand gripping a vertical Empire State Building links very obviously to passages in Gravity’s Rainbow that consider the rocket, a product of modern technology, as pure steel erection (GR 324), thus turning the building into a masturbatory fetishized object. Since Pynchon’s novel and Squeeze were released at the same time, I do not intend to prove that the two are directly connected or have influenced each other. This rationale is only meant to demonstrate how, in the band’s history, pop culture can blend with sexuality and political commentary in the form of album art.
4. THE AVATARS OF THE BANANA
Having mentioned the significant relation between bananas and technology, it is suitable at this point of the paper to present a collection of criticism on the V-2 and Slothrop’s erections. Pynchon makes allusions over and over again in order to connect his material in the novel: the reader is instructed that the rocket’s outer shell remains intact like a peel. This connects back to Pirate thinking about the V-2 in the following terms: ‘he’s already stopped believing in the rocket he saw. God has plucked it for him, out of its airless sky, like a steel banana’ (GR 8).
Siegel advises the reader that Pirate’s bananas should be regarded as a mild version of “the brutal phallicism of the rocket” (Siegel26 81): ‘Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature ...’ (GR 324); ‘[a]scending, programmed in a ritual of love… at Brennschluss it is done—the Rocket’s purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. […] over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm’ (GR 223).
Alan J. Friedman and Manfred Puetz27 remark on the comical songs blending rocketry and sexual fantasies as being a frequent motif, the sexuality exhibited by the rocket (Friedman and Puetz 357): ‘There was a young fellow named Crockett,/ Who had an affair with a rocket./ If you saw them out there/ You’d be tempted to stare/ But if you ain’t tried it, don’t knock it!’ (GR 305). As Pirate Prentice makes people’s fantasies become true, and his Banana Breakfast can surely be ascribed under this label, critic Joseph Tabbi underlines the achievement that the V-2 stands for, embodying ‘the immortal dreams and aspirations of an entire generation of German technocrats, engineers and rocket scientists’ (Tabbi28 94). For Christopher Ames, Slothrop correctly recognizes in the Atomic Bomb’s mushroom cloud ‘a new icon of power’, according to the novel’s spirit of ‘intent association of the rocket with corrupt phallic sexuality’ (C. Ames ‘Power and the Obscene Word’ 201). Gravity’s Rainbow makes it explicit that Slothrop, in feeling ‘so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky’ must be ‘in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s death’ (GR 738). The trajectory of the V-2 corresponds to the natural cycle of a living being—‘You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life’ (GR 209). The rocket is supposed to rise until Brennschluss point, when the descent commences and no control is possible anymore; the only certainty one can count on is that the rocket will never fall on its target spot. ‘The fact that biological life takes the same path as the rocket is repeatedly illustrated in the novel by what could be called the compost garden image. At least seventeen times we are shown a collection of things (animal, mineral, and vegetable) that have begun the return to complete disorder and loss of differentiation-to maximum entropy’ (Friedman and Puetz 348). Consequently, the hothouse soil that Pirate has collected is a significant particularization of the end-point that all living matter is supposed to reach.
The rocket’s parabola (as does the banana’s curve) connects to the idea of a living body going through all the necessary transformations in nature—a transcendentalist view that von Braun’s motto also supports.
Deborah Madsen’s study on allegory underlines the peculiarity of Gravity’s Rainbow’s narrative world, delineated by two opposing pretexts: the first is a Newtonian perspective that characterizes Them, and the second an Einsteinian cosmology, closely linked to a pantheistic view of the world, more lax and relative. Thomas Moore, as already quoted before in chapter 1, explains von Braun’s motto precisely in the same terms of replacing Newtonianism with a new form of organicism in which everything is subject to transmutability (Moore 24). Madsen argues that the Rocket’s parabola encompasses both pretexts, given that its ascent is controlled, yet its descent uncontrollable (Madsen 78).
The connection between rockets and erections is rendered explicit by Pointman’s attempt to grasp Slothrop’s sexual conquests from a statistical point of view. The reader finds out later on it is due to Infant Tyrone’s exposure to Imipolex-G (‘the first plastic that is actually erectile’ – GR 699) that the character develops a Pavlovian reflex, therefore uncontrolled, towards the V-2: ‘[t]he automatic penis is such an appalling symbol of man’s unfreedom, of course, because sex would seem to be man’s most intimate contact with nature, and the surest route to his freedom from social control. But this natural freedom has to be won back from society’s various pornographies, imitations of nature’ (Earl29 230).
Slothrop’s life itself can be interpreted in mise-en-abyme in relation to the parabola of the rocket and that of the rainbow. His personal descent occurs when his identity starts to dissipate, just as he has escaped Their control and is left free to fall to the ground and disintegrate (Hite ‘Ideas of Order’ 117). Herbert Marcuse identifies Slothrop’s fragmentation with the embodiment of the pluridimensional man, freed of all control and impossible to be apprehended (Hite ‘Ideas of Order’ 118). Last time we see Slothrop, he engages in sexual hallucinations: ‘Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural’ (GR 626). It seems that this serene clear-headed disposition is the fruit of a relaxed rapport between Slothrop and the world—as the pantheistic theme returns. Pynchon shows once more in what way ignorance is bliss and how the mindlessness of taking a moment’s break from paranoia (which other characters spend by eating bananas) can turn out to be the only solution to personal fulfillment.
Control is a topic that brings the most important symbols in Gravity’s Rainbow together: the rocket, Slothrop’s erections, and bananas. Pynchon’s parabola stands for totalitarian control as the human need to encompass and rationalize experience (Hite ‘Ideas of Order’ 98). However, there is hope to be gathered from the ending to the story of each of these three elements. The rockets begin to have a will of their own after Brennschluss, and therefore defy Their authority. As Slothrop meanders through the Zone, farther and farther away from London, his conditioning seems to be wearing off, so he is finally able to enjoy his sexual freedom. Ultimately, what could be more absurd than the idea of a clockwork banana? Pirate uses the banana figure to subvert the official system, therefore subscribing to a long list of cultural associations according to which this fruit symbolizes freedom, rebellion, and the sexual side of humans.
ANNEX
Chiquita Banana30
I’m Chiquita banana and I’ve come to say
bananas have to ripen in a certain way.
When they’re flecked with brown
and have a golden hue
bananas taste the best
and are the best for you.
You can put them in a salad.
Me? No, not yet, my dear. The greenish way you’re looking
means that you are ripe for cooking.
How about me? No, no. When you are fully ripe my dear,
those little flecks of brown appear.
Me? You’re most digestible my friend,
delicious, too, from end to end.
You can put them in a pie - aye.
Any way you want to eat them
It’s impossible to beat them.
But bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator.
So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator.
Bananas are a solid food
that doctors now include in baby’s diet.
And since they are so good for baby
I think we all
Notes:
1 Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff, George. Johnson, Mark. Chicago, Ill. University of Chicago Press
2 The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. Madsen, Deborah L. Leicester. Leicester University Press 1991.
3 ‘The Morning and the Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity’s Rainbow’. Henkle, Roger B. in Approaches to Gravity‘s Rainbow, Charles Clerc. Columbus. Ohio 1983.
4 The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon. Moore, Thomas. University of Missouri Press. Columbia 1987.
5 Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Hite, Molly. 1983
6 Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Elias, Amy. 2001
7 CRC handbook of fruit set and development. Monselise, Shaul P. CRC Press 1986.
8 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5605
9 The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction. Ames, Christopher. University of Georgia Press 2010.
10 ‘Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow from an Ecosophical Perspective’ Ramapriya, R. in Essays in Ecocriticism. Rayson K. Alex and Nirmal Selvamony. Sarup & Sons 2007.
11 ‘Management and Chaos: Masculinity and the Corporate World From Naturalism to Gravity’s Rainbow’. Den Tandt, Christopher in Pynchon Notes, ed. Luc Herman, 42-43, spring-fall 1998. Herman, Luc. Antwerp, 2008.
12 The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction. Ames, Christopher. University of Georgia Press 2010.
13 Nice and noir: contemporary American crime fiction. Schwartz, Richard B. University of Missouri Press 2002.
14 Music © 1945 Shawnee Press Inc. under license to Chiquita Brands International, Inc.
15 ‘Fast Food/ Quick Lunch: Crews, Burroughs and Pynchon’. Ames, Sanford in Literary Gastronomy. Bevan, David. Rodopi 1988.
16 The century in food: America’s fads and favorites. Bundy, Beverly. Collectors Press, Inc. 2002.
17 Bananas and business: the United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000. Bucheli, Marcelo. NYU Press 2005.
18 www.thefreedictionary.com
19 ‘Gravity’s Angels in America, or, Pynchon’s Angelology Revisited’. McHale, Brian in Pynchon Notes ed. Luc Herman, 42-43, spring-fall 1998. Antwerp 2008.
20 ‘Reading the Value System of Gravity’s Rainbow with Marcuse, Freud and the Yippies’. Hite, Molly in Approaches
to teaching Pynchon’s The crying of lot 49 and other works. Schaub, Thomas H. Modern Language Association of America 2008.
21 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the Watergate Affair, and Johns’s Crosshatch Paintings: Surveillance and Reality-Testing in the Mid-Seventies. Miller, Stephen Paul. Boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 84-115 Duke University Press.
22 The Second Time as Farce: Postmodernism without Consequences. Tölölyan, Khachig. American Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1990) Oxford University Press.
23 ‘What was Post-Modernism? The Arts in and after the Cold War’. Bradbury, Malcolm. International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 71, No. 4, Special RIIA 75th Anniversary Issue (Oct., 1995), pp. 763-774 Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
24 “Contra” Brecht: R. W. Fassbinder and Pop Culture in the Sixties. Shattuc, Jane. Cinema Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 35-54. University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies.
25 The Depth of the Surface, or, What Rolf Dieter Brinkmann Learned from Andy Warhol. Gemünden, Gerd. The German Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 235-250. Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German.
26 Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow. Siegel, Mark Richard. Kennikat Press, 1978.
27 ‘Science as Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and «Gravity>s Rainbow»’. Friedman, Alan J. and Manfred Puetz. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 345-359. University of Wisconsin Press.
28 Postmodern sublime: technology and American writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Tabbi, Joseph. Cornell University Press, 1996.
29 ‘Freedom and knowledge in the zone’. Earl, James W. in Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Clerq, Charles Columbus. Ohio 1983.
30 Music © 1945 Shawnee Press Inc. under license to Chiquita Brands International, Inc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Ames, Christopher. Power and the Obscene Word: Discourses of Extremity in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer, 1990). University of Wisconsin Press.
- The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction. University of Georgia Press 2010.
- Ames, Sanford. ‘Fast Food/ Quick Lunch: Crews, Burroughs and Pynchon’ in Literary Gastronomy, David Bevan. Rodopi 1988.
- Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘What was Post-Modernism? The Arts in and after the Cold War’. International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 71, No. 4, Special RIIA 75th Anniversary Issue (Oct., 1995), pp. 763-774 Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
- Bucheli, Marcelo. Bananas and business: the United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000. NYU Press 2005.
- Bundy, Beverly. The century in food: America’s fads and favorites. Collectors Press, Inc. 2002.
- Darwin, Charles and Francis Darwin. The Power of Movement in Plants http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5605
- Den Tandt, Christopher. ‘Management and Chaos: Masculinity and the Corporate World From Naturalism to Gravity’s Rainbow’ in Pynchon Notes, ed. Luc Herman, 42-43, spring-fall 1998. Antwerp, 2008.
- Earl, James W. ‘Freedom and knowledge in the zone’ in Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow, Charles Clerq. Columbus. Ohio 1983.
- Elias, Amy. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. 2001.
- Friedman, Alan J. and Manfred Puetz. ‘Science as Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and “Gravity’s Rainbow”’. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 345-359. University of Wisconsin Press.
- Gemünden, Gerd. The Depth of the Surface, or, What Rolf Dieter Brinkmann Learned from Andy Warhol. The German Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 235-250. Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German.
- Henkle, Roger B. ‘The Morning and the Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity’s Rainbow’ in Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow, Charles Clerc. Columbus. Ohio 1983.
- Hite, Molly ‘Reading the Value System of Gravity’s Rainbow with Marcuse, Freud and the Yippies’ in Approaches to teaching Pynchon’s The crying of lot 49 and other works, Thomas H. Schaub. Modern Language Association of America 2008.
- ---. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. 1983.
- Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, Ill. University of Chicago Press 2003.
- Madsen, Deborah L. The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. Leicester. Leicester University Press 1991.
- McHale, Brian. ‘Gravity’s Angels in America, or, Pynchon’s Angelology Revisited’ in Pynchon Notes, ed. Luc Herman, 42-43, spring-fall 1998. Antwerp 2008.
- Miller, Stephen Paul. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the Watergate Affair, and Johns’s Crosshatch Paintings: Surveillance and Reality-Testing in the Mid-Seventies. Boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 84-115 Duke University Press.
- Monselise, Shaul P. CRC handbook of fruit set and development. CRC Press 1986.
- Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon. University of Missouri Press. Columbia 1987.
- Ramapriya, R. ‘Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow from an Ecosophical Perspective’ in Essays in Ecocriticism. Rayson K. Alex and Nirmal Selvamony. Sarup & Sons 2007.
- Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and noir: contemporary American crime fiction. University of Missouri Press 2002
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