The Life We All Really Live: German References As Metaphors in Gravity's Rainbow‪.‬

Why would Pynchon, a North American author whose works are all, arguably, first and foremost about North America, use Western Europe (and Germany in particular) near and just after the end of the Second World War as the setting for a novel? To a considerable extent, Pynchon's project in general (not just Gravity's Rainbow) aims to ironically anatomize (or deconstruct) the Enlightenment idea that the world could be reduced to binary oppositions and dichotomies (such as elite vs. preterite) and thus adequately described. Pynchon seems to suggest that the pseudoscientific hope of total and unconditional rationalization brings about many problems humankind has been striving to resolve. In this framework, sociopolitical phenomena such as Nazism, Leninism-Stalinism, even religious hysteria and xenophobia under the auspices of Puritanism in colonial North America fall within one essential category: they were all created or pursued by those who, to quote Gravity's Rainbow, "believ[ed] in a State that would outlive them all" (338)--an immortal State. Thus the ironic difference between the two Tchitcherines, Pynchon's fictional colonel, Vaslav, and the historical diplomat, Georgi; thus also, perhaps, the difference between Pynchon and some of his Puritan ancestors.