Gravity's Rainbow-Tarot: The Magician
Here is the card. Here's a brief bit from section 1.
All right let's get down to basics. As Gravity's Rainbow, or at least, this first section, are about the rise and fall of the V-2 rocket (quite literally), it is no wonder that the figure in the tarot card is both pointing up and down. Of course, we may think of the most famous picture of Plato and Aristotle, and that's part of it too, but on the most basic level, there's a rocket up in the air and it's coming down to Earth. In fact, in this first section of the book, Pirate Prentice can see the vapor train of an incoming rocket as its acceleration and lift are falling off, getting smaller, until it levels, reaches zero, and arcs downward, thereby going "Beyond the Zero." Everybody with me so far.
What's more impressive about this card is that it represents all things. The magician has all four suits of the lower arcana in front of him. He's wearing a belt made of a snake that's eating it's own tail, above his head is the infinity symbol. The flowers are lilies and roses. What we have here is a man standing in the midst of infinity--infinite cycles, and infinite power. Of course, there's a danger--his cande's burning at both ends after all. But let's dwell on the infinite for a moment.
First of all, this card is a culmination of the planes of existence, material, intellectual, and spiritual. And the scene represented by the card is centered on Pirate Prentice who is himself a culmination of the spiritual, physical, and material due to his ability to have other people's fantasies for them (Pirate has other people's day dreams so they don't have to), his role in British Intelligence (he knows more about the war effort than most others), his geographical role (he's a fence and peddles in the wares of other nations), his having just awoken (making him a conduit between the dream and "real" world), his position between past and future (Pirate's is the first flashback out of this section's time frame), and of course, to this other world which will finally emerge at the end of the novel when it is revealed that Gravity's Rainbow has been a movie, but the bomb constructed in the movie is actually going to fall on the audience watching the movie. Pirate has other people's fantasies, the way that the director of your favorite movie has your fantasies. He is a conduit between the culture's needs, your personal needs, and the world of the cinema where both these needs can be fulfilled.
Of course, Pirate is flirting with madness, but this is because the fantasists for which he is surrogate are schizophrenic--wanting the true grit of the war story without all the horror and moral ambiguity. Pirate means to deliver, but what the hell is that story supposed to look like. What is that day dream? For the most part, this represents the greatest tension in the novel Gravity's Rainbow. The reason for this tension, however, is not given until the last page of this gigantic work, and thus the last page, re-defines the first, and you are inclined to believe, just as with The Crying of Lot 49 (another of Pynchon's novels), that you must now read the novel again armed with your new frame of reference. Thus the cycle is repetitious, another likely meaning of the references to infinity inside the Magician's card.
All right let's get down to basics. As Gravity's Rainbow, or at least, this first section, are about the rise and fall of the V-2 rocket (quite literally), it is no wonder that the figure in the tarot card is both pointing up and down. Of course, we may think of the most famous picture of Plato and Aristotle, and that's part of it too, but on the most basic level, there's a rocket up in the air and it's coming down to Earth. In fact, in this first section of the book, Pirate Prentice can see the vapor train of an incoming rocket as its acceleration and lift are falling off, getting smaller, until it levels, reaches zero, and arcs downward, thereby going "Beyond the Zero." Everybody with me so far.
What's more impressive about this card is that it represents all things. The magician has all four suits of the lower arcana in front of him. He's wearing a belt made of a snake that's eating it's own tail, above his head is the infinity symbol. The flowers are lilies and roses. What we have here is a man standing in the midst of infinity--infinite cycles, and infinite power. Of course, there's a danger--his cande's burning at both ends after all. But let's dwell on the infinite for a moment.
First of all, this card is a culmination of the planes of existence, material, intellectual, and spiritual. And the scene represented by the card is centered on Pirate Prentice who is himself a culmination of the spiritual, physical, and material due to his ability to have other people's fantasies for them (Pirate has other people's day dreams so they don't have to), his role in British Intelligence (he knows more about the war effort than most others), his geographical role (he's a fence and peddles in the wares of other nations), his having just awoken (making him a conduit between the dream and "real" world), his position between past and future (Pirate's is the first flashback out of this section's time frame), and of course, to this other world which will finally emerge at the end of the novel when it is revealed that Gravity's Rainbow has been a movie, but the bomb constructed in the movie is actually going to fall on the audience watching the movie. Pirate has other people's fantasies, the way that the director of your favorite movie has your fantasies. He is a conduit between the culture's needs, your personal needs, and the world of the cinema where both these needs can be fulfilled.
Of course, Pirate is flirting with madness, but this is because the fantasists for which he is surrogate are schizophrenic--wanting the true grit of the war story without all the horror and moral ambiguity. Pirate means to deliver, but what the hell is that story supposed to look like. What is that day dream? For the most part, this represents the greatest tension in the novel Gravity's Rainbow. The reason for this tension, however, is not given until the last page of this gigantic work, and thus the last page, re-defines the first, and you are inclined to believe, just as with The Crying of Lot 49 (another of Pynchon's novels), that you must now read the novel again armed with your new frame of reference. Thus the cycle is repetitious, another likely meaning of the references to infinity inside the Magician's card.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
1:35 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home