Gravity is a prominent physical concept in Gravity's Rainbow , as already announced by the novel's title. If the second part of the title – the poetic image of the rainbow – is bound up with mathematical formulas and the parabolic path of the Rocket, so conversely, this paper argues, Pynchon's novel introduces a relation between gravity and fiction. The paper explores Gravity's Rainbow' s use of the changing historical understandings of gravitation from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries by examining the novel's illustration of Newton and Leibniz's opposed concepts as well as its references to gravity as understood in Einstein's theory of relativity. When tracing the notions of gravity as force, fictitious force, and frame of reference, a particular focus lies on the relation of physical imagery to ethical questions and on the way Gravity's Rainbow provides a physico-ethical explanation of Slothrop's disappearance from the novel.

Particularly drawing on the theory of Jacques Attali and Horkheimer and Adorno, this article considers popular music in Pynchon’s novels as more than simply a ‘soundtrack’ to the plot. Much attention has been paid to Pynchon’s original songs, but not to the manner of their dissemination; therefore, this article examines the role of the popular musician in the production of consumer culture, focusing on McClintic Sphere (V.), The Paranoids (Lot 49), and Billy Barf and the Vomitones (Vineland). Pynchon depicts a modern ‘culture industry’ in which recording artists, voluntarily or not, ape their forbears, but in which the idea that live performance is liberating whereas recording is constraining, is problematized. The article explores Sphere’s struggles to become successful in the face of live audiences that constantly compare him to Charlie Parker rather than assessing his music on its own merits, and the twin inspirational and coercive ‘moulding’ forces he experiences during the recording process that represents the only chance for musicians to disseminate their music widely and find a properly appreciative public. Similarly, the disjunction between the Paranoids’ deviant lyrics and behaviour, and their thoroughly generic sub-Beatles musical texture, which adheres to the tropes of recorded music (one song ‘fades out’ even when played live!) is discussed; they too are caught in an excluded middle between transgression and conformity, as are the Vomitones, who in one live performance suppress their rebellious ‘punk’ aesthetic when they gain employment performing Italian ballads at a Mafia wedding. Ultimately this article argues that popular music is equally moulded by live audiences and by recording bosses and that its absorption into networks of capital is inevitable, so musicians, given the chance, may as well ‘sell out’, and hope to balance commercial success with at least a modicum of creative control.

The Bleeding Edge excerpt provided in the Fall 2013 Penguin Press catalogue notes that “[u]nhoused people sleep in doorways,”but by the time the Advanced Reading Copy had reached reviewers, “unhoused” had been changed to “unsheltered” (2), an edit that remained in place, even after other changes to the text, a couple of months later when the book became available for general readers. . . . We might ask: what significance is there to the edit? And from whose perspective are we seeing Maxine’s neighborhood in the opening of the novel? . . . The edit actually distances the text from the only characters in the scene to whom we might attribute the perception of unsheltered people, Maxine and her children.