I swear this wasn’t on purpose. Not the set up – obviously I arranged the bananas to form a little musaceous mountain around the book, but the number of bananas present has creeped up on me over the last few weeks, in no way inspired by Pirate’s Banana Breakfasts, but merely related to the Vegetable and Fruit Delivery Box from Riverford that kept including the nutritious and not anymore exotic fruit into my box.

From the first look at the first few pages of the first section of the book I know this is not going to be a one-nighter novel. I am really thankful for the slow-paced scheme of the bookclub I’m reading Pynchon with, and for the presence of the Weisenburger’s Companion to consult page by page. Not that the book cannot be read without paragraph-long explanations for every term, date, song etc. used. It doesn’t have a snobbish attitude that makes you feel excluded unless you get all the inside jokes. It’s just that lately I prefer the kind of reading that resembles studying.

I promised to write as I go – on a week-ish-ly basis, and this pilot post is about bananas. It’s a trope that came to my attention thanks to Veronica Bălă’s article – Beyond Naïve Criticism: The Banana Trope In ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ – which was published by The Caterpillar Chronicles, a magazine with delicious texts that are interdisciplinary, inspired by images, or experimental, and just when I thought to dig into the current issue with gusto, I was hit on the head with its ancient date of 2011.

Anyway. Why bananas? Well, the book opens with a scene of a lavish banana breakfast in the midst of a remote, but still plausible chance of being hit by a V2 rocket before you get a chance to peel one. Here I want to summarise Veronica’s article for my own future rereading benefit – and for yours if you don’t have time/patience for the real thing, although I do encourage you to read it (even though at times I have to say it felt stretched). But hey – protect your sources. Read it. 

In short, banana is a perfect phallic metaphor for the V2 rocket, its gravity-defying shape following the arc of the german retribution weapon 2 (more on those in future posts). Pirate Prentice grows his bananas in a hothouse on the roof of a London maisonette, and he feeds the soil with excrements and organic scraps utilising a system that zero-waste activists would be proud of. These bananas sponsor sumptuous (even more so in the context of WW2) breakfasts for his bunkmates, who could have written and successfully published a book “Cookery in Wartime: the Banana Special”, with such dishes as banana waffles, banana pancakes, banana frappes, broiled bananas, banana omelet, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, banana French toast, banana blancmange, banana mead, banana croissants, banana oatmeal, YESsssss! banana BREAD – I know you’ve been waiting! – banana jam, flamed brandy bananas, banana kreplach, believe me I’ve stopped before Pynchon did. 

I wonder if eating that many bananas would do anything to the shape of the faeces going full circle to enrich that soil, and to produce through this genetically-selective-yet-organic-gardening bananas that are even more banana-shaped than before , but hey – that’s me, silly, thinking about poo, when it’s clear I should be contemplating penises instead.

Because make no mistake Osbie Feel (a bunkmate) sticks the largest banana into his pants and strokes it in the rhythm of ‘triplets against 4/4’ which I guess means 3/4 which means waltz. A waltzing masturbation, how lovely.

However, Pirate’s produce is not the only one in town, and we are reminded of the famous Chiquita Banana, the company that taught the western world how to eat bananas (when they are yellow, not green) and not to store them in the refrigerator, through commercial songs such as this: 

“I’m Chiquita banana and I’ve come to say

Bananas have to ripen in a certain way

When they are fleck’d with brown and have a golden hue

Bananas Taste the best and are best for you”

which were played 376 (!) times daily on the radio in the U.S. 

As a result of such aggressive (oppressive?) marketing, bananas topped the US fruit charts by the turn of century, and banana market ripened and began to blacken with the exploitation and creation of Banana Republics – countries where economy depended heavily on the limited-source product, characterised by impoverished working class and plutocracy. Pirate’s home-made produce could be seen as a rebellion against the system of greed and monetisation, and Veronica argues that Chiquita may well be associated with the evil cartel surrounding the V2 rocket. Pynchon doesn’t hide his views of the war (remember the book was published at the times of the Vietnam War) and sees it as nothing personal, just business – ‘The true war is a celebration of markets’ (p105).

The article promises that the novel itself follows the curve of the banana and there is some unpeeled finality involving the fruit and Slothrop’s fridge somewhere in the final pages of the book. I guess it’s tempting to embed the curved fruit into the story arc like a perfectly fitting piece of puzzle. However, at this point of reading it feels a bit like someone’s trying to explain the same thing to me over and over, making sure my numb brain gets it: here is the parabola. Here is the arc. Here is the rainbow. Here is the banana. See?

Before I go bananas about the whole thing and start comparing bananas to people (for example, there’s an offensive term – yeah, banana – to call out an asian who pretends to be white – yellow on the outside, white on the inside; or how Panama Disease for the Cavendish banana (the one you ate your whole life) is same as coronavirus for us, or how tightly we’ve come to depend on each other), let’s mention the banana pop culture prevailing at the time when the book was written. In particular, the infamous pop art by Andy Warhol that he slapped on the cover of The Velvet Underground‘s record. Seductive original cover allowed owners to peel the erect banana revealing nude colour underneath. Believe it or not, this is now a coveted and collected item. 

Concluding the music theme (and this summary which will stop being one unless I do), Daniel Stone from National Geographic in his article about the history of the fruit said that ‘if fruits were pop stars, the banana would be Beyoncé’. Maybe. But it is Gwen Stefani who sang about it and who spells out my feelings about the first few chapters of Pynchon’s Gravity‘s Rainbow perfectly: This shit IS bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S!