Is <i>Gravity</i> Jewish?

Abstract This article proposes that Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow be read not in terms of the entropic but the diasporic. Such a reading departs from a postmodernist reading of the novel and enable the following three claims: first, that the very form of the novel is diasporic and Jewish as is its vision of colonial modernity; second, that the violence of this modernity embodied in the Holocaust is metonymically continuous with the violence of colonialism; and third, that the novel permits a recasting of the Jewish question in terms of empire, migration, and violence as opposed to terms of nation and rights. Pynchon’s novel offers a counternarrative of Jewishness in the postwar era. In lieu of familiar narratives of assimilation, prosperity, and nationhood, Pynchon’s novel suggests Jewish belonging, or the Jewish question, remains as not just a vexing problem but a ubiquitous and universal one of the postwar order whose emergence it describes.