"-there ought to be a punch line, but there's not": Gravity's Rainbow and Flights of Digression

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 isolates the paradox that its protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is both inside the novel's semiotic structure, as part of its process of production, and outside, as a product of that process. Gravity's Rainbow ups the ante and increases the dilemma exponentially when binary distinctions are effectively flattened out by a rhizomatic growth of narrative lines. My approach to Gravity's Rainbow attempts to explore a social reading that functions in its excess or along its flights of digression. The introduction, through a reading of The Crying of Lot 49, explains the paradox. "Digression One" decenters the empty image of the rocket in order to unhinge the narrative structure of Gravity's Rainbow. "Digression Two" examines how the rhizome operates through a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of foundational images. "Digression Three" discusses politics along a number of intersecting interfaces that refuse absolute distinctions of inside and outside.