a visual companion to Gravity's Rainbow
Despite all its 'unreadable' digressions, its great many technical terms in different languages, its historical documentary and reflections... reading Gravity's Rainbow is still one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. For me, coming to Pynchon's 1940s paranoid Europe at a stage when my own life involves looking at the cross-talk between countless neurones has made me appreciate (as well as dread) greatly the raw chaotic power of Pynchon's prose: its encyclopaedic reputation sure is impressive, but it also frequently scares readers away, persuading people that 'one should prepare for Gravity's Rainbow', when the best part of the reading experience might be to lose oneself in all the chaos, digression, and confusion.
That being said, external guidance did help me a great deal with reading this (at times) impenetrable novel. This site is my attempt to provide a visual reading companion to my second favourite book of all time. And I hope, just as I found great happiness in understanding the Brennschluss calculation after reading Niklas Riewald's 'The math behind Gravity's Rainbow', that other readers can do the same as they scroll through The Zone.
This site would not have existed without Christian Swinehart's Reddit post on Infinite Digest, whose visualisations of Infinite Jest showed me what a book's structure looks like from above.
For the reading of Gravity's Rainbow itself, I owe a great deal to the Pynchon Wiki, the wonderful community at r/ThomasPynchon, the Pynchon Pals podcast, Steven Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, John Semley's 'Proverbs for Paranoids: A Gravity's Rainbow Reading Guide', and Edward Mendelson's essays on Pynchon.
The site is set in Major Mono Display for display type, Faculty Glyphic for headings, Newsreader for ledes, Piazzolla for prose, and Mononoki for monospace.
Developing this analysis as an amateur in computational literary analysis has been a tremendously fun journey of learning and improving, but suffice it to say that the analysis can at places be immature, incomplete, or the interpretation overconfident or flat-out wrong. Therefore, I welcome questions, suggestions, or collaborations: dinghao.luo@outlook.com.