A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel by Weisenburger Steven C

Author:Weisenburger, Steven C. [Weisenburger, Steven C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia - A
Published: 2006-10-31T20:00:00+00:00

EPISODE 4

Internal references place the time of this episode as May 28, 1945. The location: Slothrop and Geli stand atop the Brocken, site of the Walpurgisnacht celebrations on the night of April 30. Slothrop makes a madcap escape to Berlin in a hot-air balloon.

V329.13-14, B383.4-6, P334.8-9 May Day Eve’s come and gone . . . nearly a month later May Day Eve (Walpurgisnacht) was April 30. See also V330.9-11n.

V329.15, B383.7, P334.10 Kriegsbier That is, “war beer.” During both World Wars German breweries faced shortages of barley, which was being diverted for bread, and so the brewers were forced by law to weaken their formulas. Some brands had alcohol levels as low as 1.5 to 2.0 percent.

V329.19, B383.11, P334.14 “the devil’s kiss” According to Grimm (Teutonic Mythology 1065, 1070, 1077), newly admitted witches were “marked by the prick of a needle, while they cursed their maker, and signified their faith and homage to the Evil one, as to worldly rulers, by a kiss.” This “blood mark,” which was often stained with inks, was thought to be without feeling ever afterward.

V329.23, B383.16, P334.18 the sus. per coll. crowd From the Latin “suspendatur per collum” (hanged by the neck), an entry common in legal registers next to the names of those convicted and executed for capital crimes. In his Introduction to Colonial Justice in Western Massachussetts , treating seventeenth-century Springfield, Massachusetts, Joseph H. Smith (24-25) notes that in June 1645 (exactly three centuries before these fictional events), William Pynchon sat on the General Court at which Margaret Jones, a Bay colonist, was indicted, found guilty, and executed—suspendatur per collum—in the first American case of capital punishment for witchcraft. In Springfield William Pynchon also tried and convicted the second such person, Mary Parsons, brought up on a witchcraft charge but found guilty of murdering her child (a charge she acknowledged to be true). Mary Parsons was also sentenced to hang but appears to have died in prison in 1657. These two cases preceded by forty years the more widely known witchcraft trials in Salem.

V329.25, B383.18-19, P334.20 Amy Sprue . . . turned Antinomian She is fictional. “Sprue” is an archaic medical term for a type of throat infection; now it figures in the name of a gluten-sensitive enteropathy called celiac sprue (also known as celiac disease), a chronic disease of the digestive tract caused by an intolerance to the gluten in, for example, bread or pasta. The name “Antinomian” was given to those radical, charismatic Puritans who held that faith alone was sufficient for the attainment of salvation.

V329.26-27, B383.20, P329.21-22 Crazy Sue Dunham In his 1964 short story “The Secret Integration” (Slow Learner 151), Pynchon identifies her as “that legendary and beautiful drifter who last century had roamed all this hilltop country [of western Massachusetts] exchanging babies and setting fires.” Pynchon’s source, Larsson notes (“From the Berkshires to the Brocken”), was The Berkshire Hills (256).

V329.28, B383.22, P329.23 Snodd’s Mountain Fictional locality named (one supposes) for an ancestor of Grover Snodd, a character in “The

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