The ends of the parabola

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The Ends of the Parable (English Gravity's Rainbow ) is a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon , which is now widely regarded as his magnum opus . The German translation by Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Piltz was published in 1981. The novel won the National Book Award in 1974 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1975 , which Pynchon rejected. In 1974 he was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize . However, since the award committee did not want to support the jury's decision because it considered the novel to be obscene and illegible, the prize was ultimately not awarded that year. Most of the endings of the parable are set in Europe shortly before and shortly after the end of World War II , but include numerous time leaps into earlier and later eras, as well as storylines in other locations such as Central Asia and the United States . The novel is notorious for its variety of characters, its difficult-to-understand plot lines and its encyclopedic variety of topics. Time magazine ranks the book among the top 100 English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

content

Structure and narrative style

Replica of the V2 (A4), scale 1: 1

The novel has four main chapters, which are further divided into a total of 73 sections. The division of these sections into the chapters (21-8-32-12) has led to interpretations that rely on number mysticism . The sections are each separated from one another by a series of seven squares. Each of the four chapters is preceded by a motto. The narration is mostly in the present tense . The narrative voice is not uniform, but adapts to situations and characters. In some places, for example, the reader is addressed directly, while in other places the story gets lost in the protagonists' thought processes. In many places it is not possible to differentiate between “real” action and dreams or hallucinations of the characters. Typical of Pynchon is the weaving of around a hundred poems or song texts into the novel, which mostly refer to real genres of literary history.

characters

Several hundred figures appear in The Ends of the Parable . The main character is the American GI Tyrone Slothrop, a descendant of one of the first settlers in New England , who was stationed in London towards the end of the Second World War . By Pavlovian conditioning Slothrop get erections when strikes German V2 imminent missiles in London. Much of the novel is devoted to his search for the origin of this connection. In his endeavor to decipher the secret, the “text” or the “lost message” of the rocket, he tries, like other characters in the novel, to combine the variety of facts he has perceived into a text that was only experienced as chaos Could give meaning and order to the world. His search for the secret of the rocket thus points to the search for the connections between events through which the story could gain meaning. At the same time, Slothrop moves the reader to gain a coherent or uniform meaning from the text of the novel. For the recipient, however, as for Slothrop and the other characters in the novel, such an attempt stands under the sign of the paranoia of all action, which already shaped Pynchon's earlier novels: The question of the true text becomes compulsive, since a clear definition is always impossible proves. Towards the end of the novel, the character Slothrop gradually "disappears" from the plot by dissolving, can no longer be seen by the other characters and finally no longer plays a role in the plot.

Other important characters are the SS Lieutenant Blicero, the Soviet officer Vaslav Tchitcherine, the Dutch agent Katje Borgesius, the Herero Enzian and the German filmmaker Gerhardt von Göll, also known as "The Springer". Several historical figures also appear in The Ends of the Parable , including Mickey Rooney , Hugo Stinnes, and August Kekulé .

action

Aerial view of test stand VII in Peenemünde

The plot begins with the description of a German missile attack on London and the subsequent evacuation. In retrospect, however, this scene turns out to be the dream of a minor character, the British soldier Private Prentice. A leitmotif of the novel is the German V2 rocket, with which practically all the figures are connected in one way or another, and its development on test stand VII in Peenemünde . Different characters are looking for the mysterious rocket model 00000 and the “black device” built into it, which only turns out to be a human at the end of the novel, for different reasons. Among these figures is Tyrone Slothrop, who in turn is hunted by various other figures and who suspects the secret of the black device to be the solution to a crucial question of his own identity.

Large parts of the novel follow Slothrop's journey through the "Zone", which was defeated and destroyed Germany shortly after the end of the Second World War. This “zone” represents an anarchic and lawless space in which all characters act only for their own benefit and no new order has yet been found. The ends of the parabola indicate connections between opposites, such as the V2 launch site and the potential victims in London. These connections are partially disavowed as paranoid and follow mathematical, spiritualistic , economic and sexual patterns. In his search for the components of the V2, the agent Slothrop comes across new and strange connections between perpetrators and victims, between companies involved in both warring parties, between victorious and defeated. The increasingly distressed Slothrop loses contact with reality more and more, with him the reader gets into adventures that can be drug hallucinations as well as the absurdity of the post-war zone.

Four more storylines can be identified: Herero captain Enzian, as a kind of Moses figure, wants to save his people from the “ civilization ” of the whites and from the collective suicide that some members of the tribe are planning. Statistician Roger Mexico is having an affair with Jessica Swanlake. After its end, he built a creative “we-system” with Private Prentice in order to use theatrical acts of resistance to sabotage the destructive “you system” that survived the war. As an engineer, Franz Pökler designs the V2 rockets while his wife and daughter are imprisoned in the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp . Once a year he can go on vacation with them - a biting satire on politically irresponsible scientists. Finally the sadomasochistic love story between Major Weissmann alias Blicero, who commands the V2 battery in Peenemünde, and Gottfried, one of his soldiers. In a bizarre ritual, Blicero lets him fly to his death in the 00000 rocket in the spring of 1945.

Increasingly, fantasy, reality, spiritualistic experiences, detailed sexual entanglements of perversion and violence mix. The novel offers a myriad of interpretations for these events. Both paranoid delusions and real intelligence conspiracies are within the realm of the possible. The international corporations linked to IG Farben and the military seem to be pursuing mysterious, non-transparent strategies of dominance.

A street in Berlin after the Second World War

In addition to Peenemünde, the bombed Berlin , the Harz Mountains and the Lüneburg Heath are also important locations . Towards the end of the novel, the plot increasingly dissolves; Instead of the countless interwoven strands, there are increasingly individual scenes that are more associatively related. The last scenes describe the start of 00000 by Blicero with his young lover Gottfried on board (and thus a kind of human sacrifice ) and the impact of a rocket in a cinema in Los Angeles clearly after the war. With this, the final scene of The Ends of the Parable follows on from the opening scene. At the same time, the reading of the novel is brought into play as a film, which comes to an end with this impact, on the screen or directly in the cinema.

Motifs

The ends of the parabola are peppered with countless more or less obscure cross-references. Some recurring motifs are the Kabbalah , astrology , tarot and other esoteric secret sciences, Germanic , Greek and Herero mythology, Puritan theology, the operas by Rossini and Wagner , the operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan , the poetry of Rilkes and d'Annunzios , the Trivial novels by Sax Rohmer , carbon derivatives in large numbers, statistics , stochastics and ballistics , Pavlovian conditioning , King Kong and the white woman , Dumbo and The Wizard of Oz , and last but not least pigs - Pynchon's favorite animals. These motifs are held together by the thought of death that pervades contemporary society: the deadly rocket technology of the Nazis, later used by NASA , the killing of human free will through Pavlovian conditioning , the connection of sex and death in sadomasochistic practices, which extensively are portrayed.

reception

The ends of the parable were received very differently by critics. While some reviews dubbed the novel as a classic when it was first published and placed it in a row with James Joyce's Ulysses or Herman Melville's Moby Dick , others judged it to be pretentious and illegible. A frequent point of criticism was Pynchon's handling of his characters, which some readers found flat and uninteresting. The novel was also accused of being fundamentally cold. A sadomasochistic sex scene in particular , in which the British brigadier Ernest Pudding eats feces, was also frequently the target of obscenity allegations .

Pynchon's advocates countered this criticism that the novel's special narrative style provokes such readings, but ultimately makes them inadequate. Pynchon's handling of his characters and the plot deviates from literary conventions to such an extent that the application of conventional standards is in no way helpful for understanding the novel and a more precise understanding can ultimately only result from the analysis of the novel itself.

The Ending of the Parable has been enormously influential since it was first published and, regardless of all controversies, is now not only considered the most important work of Pynchon, but also a milestone in the development of the postmodern novel . In the judgment of the renowned British literary scholar Tony Tanner, Gravity's Rainbow is "one of the greatest historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses" (Eng. "One of the greatest historical novels of our time and probably the most important literary text since Ulysses "). The growing number of book and magazine publications for this novel also reflects the great interest in the work; the majority of the critics follow Tanner's assessment. The novel is also considered an important work in postmodern slipstream literature. Pynchon's novel was a central influence for the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler . Kittler devoted himself to it in various texts and developed thoughts on the relationship between media and war technology.

The German translation

The German title Die Ende der Parabola is ambiguous: on the one hand, it denotes the ends of the parabolic trajectory of a projectile, i.e. the starting and impact point, on the other hand, it alludes to the parabola in the sense of a parable story. The title comes from Elfriede Jelinek, who did not deliver a literal translation, but a play on words in the style of the author. In contrast to the original title, it presents the reader with the trajectory of the rocket as the central element of the narrative. According to Jelinek's testimony, Pynchon agreed to the translation.

literature

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Charles Clerc (ed.): Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow . Ohio State University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-8142-0337-X .
  • Douglas Fowler: A Readers' Guide to Gravity's Rainbow . Ardis, 1980, ISBN 0-88233-405-0 .
  • Charles Hohmann: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow . Lang, 1986, ISBN 0-8204-0439-X .
  • Theodore D. Kharpertian: A Hand to Turn the Time . Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Pr. (Et al.), 1990, ISBN 0-8386-3361-7 .
  • Friedrich Kittler: Media and Drugs in Pynchons Second World War, in: Kamper, Dietmar / van Reijen, Willem (eds.): The unfinished reason: Modern versus Postmodern. Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 240-259.
  • Friedrich Kittler: Pynchon und die Elektromystik, in: Siegert, Bernhard / Krajewski, Markus (Ed.): Thomas Pynchon. Archive - Conspiracy - History. Weimar 2003, pp. 123-136.
  • Elisabeth Klein: Pynchons Germany . VDG, 1994, ISBN 3-929742-46-2 .
  • Douglas A. Mackey: The Rainbow Quest of Thomas Pynchon . Borgo Press, 1980, ISBN 0-89370-142-4 .
  • Andreas Selmeci: The black squad . Thomas Pynchon and the story of Herrero . Aisthesis, 1995, ISBN 3-89528-122-0 .
  • Steven Weisenburger: A Gravity's Rainbow Companion . University of Georgia Press, 1988, ISBN 0-8203-1026-3 .
  • Trainini, Marco. A silent extinction. Saggio su "L'arcobaleno della gravità" by Thomas Pynchon , prefazione di Fabio Vittorini , Arcipelago Edizioni, Milano 2010.

Movie

Test stand 7 (2002), film by Robert Bramkamp with motifs from The Ends of the Parable . For test stand 7 , Thomas Pynchon allowed extracts from his rocket novel to be filmed for the first time.

radio play

From 2017 to 2020, a 13-hour radio play version of the novel was produced under the direction of Klaus Buhlert . The project was produced by SWR and Deutschlandfunk , and over 40 speakers were used. Pynchon gave his personal approval for the production.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ theguardian: Thomas Pynchon (Tuesday 22 July 2008 15:39) .
  2. ↑ See Franz Link: Gravity's Rainbow, 1973 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 345-349, here p. 345 f.
  3. ^ Elisabeth Bronfen : Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow . In: Kindlers Literatur Lexikon , 3rd, completely revised edition, JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009 (accessed from Bücherhallen Hamburg on April 18, 2020).
  4. ↑ See Franz Link: Gravity's Rainbow, 1973 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 345-349, here p. 345. Tanner is cited from this source.
  5. ↑ A Working Canon of Slipstream Writings , compiled at Readercon July 18, 2007 (PDF), accessed on October 5, 2018.
  6. ^ Georg Gerber, Robert Leucht, Karl Wagner: Transatlantic Distortions - Transatlantic Condensations . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-2248-6 , pp. 227 .
  7. ↑ Test stand 7 with Inga Busch .
  8. ↑ Deutschlandfunk: Jenseits der Null , Feature about the production of the radio play version of Die End der Parabel , April 14, 2020, 46 minutes
  9. ↑ Klaus Buhlert (director): The ends of the parable (radio play) . Ed .: Production Südwestrundfunk and Deutschlandfunk. Audiobook Hamburg, Hamburg 2020, ISBN 978-3-95713-131-7 .