The Zone: Space-Time Chronicles of the Uncanny in Gravity’s Rainbow

Before returning to Tyrone Slothrop’s extended journey in conti- nental Europe, the narrative line of Gravity’s Rainbow sees a paratextual suspension. The epigraph placed at the gates of the third part of the novel welcomes us to “the Zone” breaking into a new spatial and temporal dimension in the very moment in which it announces “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more...— Dorothy, arriving in Oz” (Pynchon 1995, 279). The disturbing, distressing, eerie, unsettling, threatening, or in a word uncanny feeling anticipates and conveys at the same time the “blurred badly” categories of the Zone’s physical geography, which are not reducible to already-known physical relations, established coordinate systems, and regular determinations. For the Zone is not a place. As a wry intersection of a geographical area—the faint region where “central rockets work is located” (240)—and a historical time—the period that goes from the day of the Allied victory in Europe to the day of the atomic bombing over Hiroshima—, the Zone rather shows qualities similar to Michel De Certeau’s ur-category of “space.”