“Sons of Sorrow”

Sears, Christine E.

doi:10.1057/9781137295033_7

American Slaves and African Masters 2012

DOI: 10.1057/9781137295033_7

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“Sons of Sorrow”

Christine E. Sears¹

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2013

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“…Blicero's connection with the technological enterprise realizing destructive purposes of the corporate "System" places him in the role of "one of the novel's most apparent villains." 31 This article argues that Blicero's malevolent nature becomes highly ambivalent as he, guided by his growing fascination with Teutonic mythology, strays from the path of technological progress, culminating in Blicero's final project of firing the Rocket ultimately expressing his desire for freedom from cultural premises that curb his mythical vision of reality.…”

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confidence: 99%

“The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here”: The Significance of the Hansel and Gretel Fairy Tale in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Rouyan¹

2013

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon

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Thomas Pynchon's Gravity 's Rainbow (1973) is a novel informed by many diverse disciplines and cultural texts, among them the German folk tale Hansel and Gretel. This article argues that Pynchon's representation of the fairy tale explicitly refers to its psychoanalytical reading offered by Julius Heuscher in his influential study entitled A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales.1 It is in his most significant rendition of Hansel and Gretel, the Oven game, that Pynchon encapsulates the theme of bad parents and victimized children, a subject elaborated throughout Gravity's Rainbow. Tom LeClair notices that the themes of dominance and victimization, introduced through Pynchon's rendition of the fairy tale, "are some of the essential emotional and narrative coordinates in Gravity's Rainbow."2 The tale's involvement with this topic has been pointed to by other literary critics, who emphasize the Oven's sadomasochistic character as one of the many manifestations of violence in the novel.3 However, no considerable attention has been paid to the motivation behind Pynchon's take on the narrative of Hansel and Gretel. In his essay on the significance of the fairy tale in Gravity's Rainbow, Jean-Marie Léonet argues that Pynchon manipulates the plot of the story "in a way that emphasizes the fundamental change that has occurred in human history,"4 which he considers to have been powered by the introduction of quantum physics and relativity theory.5 My article attempts to explain Pynchon's rendition of the Hansel and Gretel tale in a radically different framework: Teutonic mythology. By locating the fairy tale in the context of the German pagan belief system, with numerous allusions to its heathen gods and goddesses, Pynchon demonstrates the workings of a dominant culture on elements incompatible with its ideology. In Gravity's Rainbow, the misrepresentations of Germanic heathen figures are a direct result of the interactions between Teutonic

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

“The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here”: The Significance of the Hansel and Gretel Fairy Tale in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Rouyan¹

2013

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon

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“Sons of Sorrow”

Cited by 1 publication

References 3 publications

“The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here”: The Significance of the Hansel and Gretel Fairy Tale in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

“The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here”: The Significance of the Hansel and Gretel Fairy Tale in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

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