Failure to Launch: Not-So-Superheroes in Gravity's Rainbow and Superfolks

• Published in: Journal of popular culture Vol. 45; no. 6; pp. 1169 - 1188
• Main Author: Condis, Megan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.12.2012
• Subjects: American literature; Cartoons; Comics; Deconstruction; Heroes; Heroism & heroes; Literary criticism; Mayer, Robert; Mental disorders; Novels; Popular culture; Power; Psychology; Pynchon, Thomas; Rhetoric; Surveillance
• ISSN: 0022-3840; 1540-5931
• DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12003

Condis examines the not-so-superheroes in Robert Mayer's Superfolks (1977) and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973). These two novels explore how hierarchical structures of power and control, from the government to the tools of psychology and the diagnosis of mental illness to the military-industrial complex, constrain their subjects by pitting those structures against American superheroes. The super protagonists of these novels, ironically, are unable to escape control, despite their near-mythic personal caches of power. Furthermore, both novelists employ styles that mimic these structures by encasing their characters in encyclopedic arrays of language and countless allusions to popular culture. Their rhetoric creates the aesthetic equivalent of the bureaucratic surveillance that prevents their heroes from breaking free. Yet the most insidious forms of control that Pynchon and Mayer's supermen experience come from within. Their inability to face the responsibilities that accompany freedom causes them to cling to an illusion of powerlessness. Their willingness to submit to structures that bind them is a more efficient mechanism of control than a conspiracy involving a cast of thousands. In this way, Mayer and Pynchon reflect the mood of the American public of the 1970s.