Relocation/Dislocation: Rocketman in Berlin‪.‬

One of the many attributes which make Pynchon's fiction so fascinating to the scholar, the book-lover and the novice is the enormous variety of subjects it touches and draws on--something for everyone. A life-long practicing astrologer, I sense that Pynchon has a deep affinity for astrology and that he uses astrological symbolism in the construction of character, plot and metaphor. He does not choose his astrological symbolism casually or at random. (Pynchon was born sometime in the morning of May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York--was born, that is, under a Sun-Uranus conjunction. This conjunction corresponds to the aspect of electricity, paranoia, genius/ madness, outer space/other worlds--the rocket.) Scholarly and amateur readers alike agree that well before the end of Gravity's Rainbow the character of Tyrone Slothrop is dispersed, dissolved, disintegrated, disassembled, disseminated, dissipated, or in some way or other disappears. How and when and, to a certain extent, where this dis- commences, evolves and is ultimately sealed--if it is sealed--remains open to discussion. Here I offer an astrological perspective on the matter of Slothrop's dis-location: not a physical dislocation such as a dislocated shoulder, but a psychic dislocation symbolized by his relocation to Berlin. That is, I offer a reading of Slothrop's relocation horoscope.