Gravity in Gravity’s Rainbow – Force, Fictitious Force, and Frame of Reference; or: The Science and Poetry of Sloth

Abstract

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. This 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.