Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Author:Thomas Pynchon [Pynchon, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novela, Ciencia ficción, Otros
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 1973-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

So, as the Gaucho sings, his story unfolds—a montage of his early life on the estancia. Then the army comes and conscripts him. Takes him out to the frontier to kill Indians. It is the period of General Roca’s campaign to open the pampas by exterminating the people who live there: turning the villages into labor camps, bringing more of the country under the control of Buenos Aires. Martín Fierro is soon sick of it. It’s against everything he knows is right. He deserts. They send out a posse, and he talks the sergeant in command over to his side. Together they flee across the frontier, to live in the wilderness, to live with the Indians.

That’s Part I. Seven years later, Hernández wrote a Return of Martín Fierro, in which the Gaucho sells out: assimilates back into Christian society, gives up his freedom for the kind of constitutional Gesellschaft being pushed in those days by Buenos Aires. A very moral ending, but completely opposite to the first.

“What should I do?” von Göll seems to want to know. “Both parts, or just Part I?”

“Well,” begins Squalidozzi.

“I know what you want. But I might get better mileage out of two movies, if the first does well at the box office. But will it?”

“Of course it will.”

“Something that anti-social?”

“But it’s everything we believe in,” Squalidozzi protests.

“But even the freest of Gauchos end up selling out, you know. That’s how things are.”

That’s how Gerhardt von Göll is, anyway. Graciela knows the man: there are lines of liaison, sinister connections of blood and of wintering at Punta del Este, through Anilinas Alemanas, the IG branch in Buenos Aires, on through Spottbilligfilm AG in Berlin (another IG outlet) from whom von Göll used to get cut rates on most of his film stock, especially on the peculiar and slow-moving “Emulsion J,” invented by Laszlo Jamf, which somehow was able, even under ordinary daylight, to render the human skin transparent to a depth of half a millimeter, revealing the face just beneath the surface. This emulsion was used extensively in von Göll’s immortal Alpdrücken, and may even come to figure in Martín Fierro. The only part of the epic that really has von Göll fascinated is a singing-duel between the white gaucho and the dark El Moreno. It seems like an interesting framing device. With Emulsion J he could dig beneath the skin colors of the contestants, dissolve back and forth between J and ordinary stock, like sliding in and out of focus, or wipe—how he loved wipes! from one to the other in any number of clever ways. Since discovering that Schwarzkommando are really in the Zone, leading real, paracinematic lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwarzkommando footage he shot last winter in England for Operation Black Wing, Springer has been zooming around in a controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film has somehow brought them into being. “It is my mission,” he announces to Squalidozzi, with the

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