Disclaimer 1) I am skeptical of disclaimers because I am a painfully aware of self-as-persona, authorial presence.
Disclaimer 2) I willingly admit that I have no idea what the hell I just read.
Disclaimer 3) I did not read this with a companion text, [if that's totally prerequisite for enjoyment then, really?] though I did find myself occasionally using the Pynchon Wiki, and googTranslate.
Disclaimer 4) This was my first read and a re-read has already been scheduled. Will probably Vineland and loop back before Mason & Dixon. Truth be told, I'm itching to get to Against the Day, but smart people have reminded me not to wish away time.

<<'We have to talk in some kind of code, naturally,' continues the Manager. 'We always have. But none of the codes is that hard to break. Opponents have accused us, for just that reason, of contempt for the people. But really we do it all in the spirit of fair play. We're not monsters. We know we have to give them some chance. We can't take hope away from them, can we?'>> (756)

So, my thing is that this feels Modernist because he's doing some things with form that fly in the face of conventional, well, reading. You understand each word, but often by the end of the sentence you have no idea what you just read. Or you read clear, lucid prose which progresses across originary syntax in such a way that you're doubting your previous dubeity of grasp. You're reading a book that "takes place" in and around WWII, but has little to do with the actual war. You're reading about the machinations of nation-states as organizational blueprints for power cabals, as necessary for civil society over against distributions entropic [wave-function-perceived-as-arbitrary-therefore-meaningless].

<<'I wonder if you people aren't a bit too--well, strong, on the virtues of analysis. I mean, once you've taken it all apart, fine, I'll be the first to applaud your industry. But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about, what have you said?'>> (88)

So there's the obvious objections: a) what the nuts? b) he's totally screwing with me? c) even working hard, this is inscrutable? d) I heard this was a Paul Bryant one-star?

Well, we can level those at most modern, post-modern and whatever-the-hell-we're-in-now, art. But it is neither productive nor interesting since R. Mutt. There's no way out of the argumentative loop because the opponents function with different aesthetic first premises. And within some people, the battle will be one of a Divided-Self, the anti-paranoid [he hu sez he like it und he get it] and the paranoid [he who, married to reason, thinks that he's being intellectually cockholded {sic}]. That being said, this book is not for everybody.

"If there is something comforting--religious, if you want--about paranoia, there is also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long...Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here." (434)

So here's my attempt to articulate the one thing that I either came away with, or fabricated as a natural coping mechanism as against my own inadequacy as an understander:

Using the conventional notion of paranoid, the reader thinks "I should be getting something from this, but I'm not getting what I think I should be, so I bet this is just one long pisstake on all those egg-head intellectuals: you put any piece of shit out there and they will not only swallow, they will savor it [here's lookin' atchu Pudding]." But Pynchon shows us that paranoia actually requires a network that's REALLY THERE, either physically or psychosomatically. Either you merely think They are out to get you, or They actually are out to get you. Both prongs of the disjunction elicit the same response, vis Pascal's wager, so there is no positive distinction to be made. The reader's disconnection notice, insofar as it engenders Pynchonian anti-paranoia, is turning the sock inside out: the very charge of illogicality requires a logical framework. Both a self-deconstruction and a self-destruction, both aware of themselves as such.

"What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of..." (257)

So where does this leave us? Strap on rocket 00000. Don't worry if Tyrone Slothrop is meant to be an anagram for Thomas Pynchon [not by a back-of-the-envelope calculation {B-but what if it is a partial, or suggestive of a partial, anagram?}] or that every-man-is-a-lazy [slothful=slothropian?!?] Fool. Just stop that [and I'll stop worrying about the faulty parallelism in the previous sentence]. Sit back in your brand new Imipolex robe and enjoy the ride. Leave the thinking for the 00001 and all subsequent rocket rides.

caotico... il re dei romanzi postmoderni, la vetta assoluta, l'alfa e l'omega, colui che fu che è e che sarà, nei secoli dei secoli Amen,

Pasqua, Natale, Ascensione, Pentecoste osanna nell'alto dei cieli, i razzi ascendono nei cieli e dopo cadono portando morte e distruzioni

A hose of prose -- relentless, uncompromising, uber-detailed, purposefully disorienting, godlike, puerile, silly, song-filled, wonky, wise, sexy, stupefying, audacious, ambitious to the point of OCD ADHD ickiness -- hooked to a thick rectangular pulp-based nozzle interface intended to excoriate at full-blast the reader's face off forever. "Central" thematic conflict is fate v. free will -- Pavlovian-type behaviorism v. something more than reaction to stimuli, in this case, arousal in advance of the rocket -- but there's also the conflict between the featureless blastulablob, ie, the semi-formless multi-tentacled octopus emitting streams of inky language, versus the perfect form of the arcing parabola of a rocket, of ejaculate, of one's life span, of life bursting out and transcending for a bit in a gorgeous arc while death's all around. At best, the thematic parabola pokes its gleaming porpoise curve out as it rides swift currents in a very unsettled Shark of Confusion–infested sea of A+ language. At worst, A+ language never freakin' stops screaming across the page, rarely slows, never settles, shifts in content but rarely in wholesale form -- leaving a reader to grasp for the life-raft of association among all the many apparently disconnected bits. So much sexiness sometimes comes off like it's studded throughout to string the reader along. Dozens of dog-earred pages (quotes to come) but no real LOLs. In general, I read 450+ pages carefully and then had to read more quickly after that since my time wasn't being rewarded as it had been especially after page 50 or so. That is, I wasn't into it / engaged / immersed / making many connections / appreciating the prose anymore. Once the rocket/orgasm conceit kicks in around pg 50, the book leaves its blast-off cloud of dust behind and ascends, then hangs in the Zone, then descends . . . I failed the descent section, essentially. Skimmed until I hit the end reading more or less as fast as I could. Sorry, T. Ruggles. I liked this one more than V. (which I quit on 200 pages in), less than Lot 49 (which I've read twice) . . . Worth it maybe to study it one day, but I don't have the patience or inclination these days. Some of the highest prosey peaks ever (philosophical expository jags and top-notch "keenly observed" descriptions of the natural world worth seven stars at least are maybe what make this the unfakeable canonical biggie that it is instead of just an artifact of late-'60s artistic self-indulgence/excess?), but its default flow seemed a bit too slow throughout, despite (because of?) top flight fanciful prose on every page. Goes to show that the towering literary artistry rainbow can't quite manage transcendence sustained over several hundreds of pages without a little more of the old fashioned flying buttress-like requirements of basic readerly orientation and sustained narrative interest (ie, sustained characters, something more of a sustained plot). For those wondering if it's worth the time it takes to read, I'd say, yes, sure, definitely, at least to be familiar with the first 200+ pages. It's more of an infinite book than Infinite Jest in that there's apparently so much more going on, so many asides, offshoots, wormholes, whatnot, plus I can always go back and more closely read the final 300 pages. Wholly unique. Reminded me of "Ulysses," "The Recognitions," and "Don Quixote" (might finish the second half of it this summer), especially when parodying film genres. Now to read a string of much shorter novels and story collections! Sakes alive! Bring on a Tobias Wolff father-son hunting story!

Now everybody -

How to start with Gravity's Rainbow? Well, it's tempting to start by calling it a comedy. It just might be the funniest book I've ever read (only Cat's Cradle can really challenge that claim), and it's also a gigantic, dark, uproariously funny joke at the expense of the entire literary institution. I mean, you thought Ulysses was irreverent? This is the step beyond Ulysses, this is Ulysses where seduction scenes are interrupted by octopus attacks, a man throws pies at a plane, soldiers who might actually be the paranoid delusions of our boy Slothrop sing limericks about Germans who have sex with rockets, orgies (which again might be Slothrop's delusions) break out of nowhere, mice who undergo Pavlovian condition talk like Cagney, sentient, revolutionary-minded lightbulbs are jerked around the cosmos, people sing songs about the joys of diving down the toilet, and various other strange events that you might associate more with surreal '90s cartoons than Great Works of Literature.

And yet Pynchon proves himself quite capable of that, too. In fact, a lot of the fun of this book is the way he bounces between emotionally involving passages of serious literary merit and the freewheeling, hilarious stupidity of the comic sections. One particularly memorable passage tells the story of a scientist who arguably lost his daughter while forced to work on the arguably reality-warping 00000 rocket that sets this novel's plot, such as it is, into motion; Pynchon also makes numerous insightful comments about the nature of Protestant predestination (specifically the pointlessness of it all... his logic seems to be that, since we're all doomed in the first place, any sort of spiritual belief won't help anyone any - the gleeful misanthropy on display here is yet more of the fun for me), conspiracy theories (I love how the government sends its opponents chasing small and completely unrealistic conspiracies here to cover up for their real plots), the horrors of war, love, the whole deal behind paranoia and how it's a completely unfeasible and impossible way to live your life because it only fragments your mind... yeah, Gravity's Rainbow's one of those big ol' doorstopper novels that just pitches everything at you and doesn't really care if you're up for catching it or not.

So you're going to have to be willing to check your expectations entirely at the door and roll with Pynchon and his ideas here, but if you are, you'll find yourself rewarded by what could very well be the most batshit novel ever written... hell, just the humor veers from scatalogical to self-referential to satirical, to say the least of the surreal horror, the graphic sex, the trips into hell, and all the other wackiness that go along with the thought-provoking meditations on the human condition Pynchon's fond of pitching in there almost completely at random. I went with it, and I came out with arguably my new favorite novel (yes, I'm aware I've cycled through three favorite novels in my time at Goodreads alone... this is sort of what happens when you're me) and a novel I don't imagine myself forgetting about anytime soon.

By the way, you're telling me that Frank Miller illustrated an edition of this book? Then this is, by far, the best thing Frank Miller's ever been involved with.

Help! I feel like I’ve been trapped in a Marx Brothers movie for three months, only one with a lot of gross scatology, arcane cosmology, sexual perversions, rocket science and engineering, chemistry, digressions about the lives of light bulbs, and every other sort of weird subplot one could think of. Somebody let me out of here! With all due respect to the people, many of them very smart, who love this book, I did not like this book. And I read every word. But if appreciating this book depends on understanding every obscure reference in it and, as so many have said, on re-reading it, well, that is never, ever going to happen.

On a sentence level, there were some impressive constructs, but that’s a given. I expected that (this is not my first, or even my fourth, Pynchon rodeo). The prose will twist and soar and vault and slither and lay on the page in such marvelous sentences, and often a paragraph would leave me feeling that there was a ghost of a deep and important concept that I could almost grasp. The promise of an idea was there, but usually would not crystallize in a way that I could really get hold of, which fits nicely with the themes of mysterious forces just beyond our ken, knowledge always just outside our vision. However . . . there wasn’t even enough coherence, comprehension or, yes, communication, for me to feel this use of the deliberately obtuse and obscure was justified. I don’t want to slander the man, but it might be that Mr. P was himself under the influence of a few (or quite a few) of the substances he’s so fond of writing about while penning this tome. My question is, where were the editors? Oh, wait, it was 1973. Never mind.

I enjoyed Vineland and Inherent Vice, and I dearly love The Crying Lot 49 (which I’ve read six or seven times) and Bleeding Edge, which I will certainly read again. But GR, despite probably hundreds of brilliant sentences, the fun stories and digressions, wacky characters, glimmers of thematic ideas that might be profound (but who the hell knows with so much bloat to slice through), seemed more like something spewed than crafted. It didn’t hold together or form a coherent whole in a way that warrants a work a “masterpiece,” or even “good.” Art needs discipline, structure, selectivity, and purpose.

And that leads me to a few words on a common response to this kind of “difficult” book, and to the argument about “Pynchon light” versus the “serious Pynchon.” I am not an adherent of the philosophy, “It’s incomprehensible; therefore, it must be genius.” It might be, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. It’s a writer’s job to communicate. That’s not to say everyone will “get” every book or that some books cannot be better understood on subsequent readings; most of the best ones have richness that expands on re-reading. But this one, I believe, was just one hot mess and a half. The all-over-the-placeness and incomprehensibility are minuses, not pluses. The Crying of Lot 49 is a better book, at less than one-fifth the word-count.

There are parts of this I appreciated. In addition to the prose, I know many people are charmed by the sheer iconoclastic wackiness, and that can be fun in certain judicious doses: nobody does slapstick better. But for me, the book as a whole felt beyond bloated, out of control, and purposeless, and even setting aside the parts I found offensive (priggish little me), I’m baffled by its reputation. (I did like the songs though.)

I will continue to read Pynchon: V and Mason Dixon are on my reading list for the next couple of years. And Against the Day . . . well, we’ll have to see how it goes.

~~

I don’t know why exactly you folks out there read, or why you feel compelled to then seek out a community in which you might share your thoughts, impressions, reactions etc. about the books you’ve read… But me myself, I read for many reasons - among them the opportunity to transcend the narrow window of my own point of view; the chance to learn by a leap, however minimally, over the subjective walls of my own stupid existence; also and especially to inhabit for a few moments the warm pulse of aesthetic bliss and recognition that waves over me whenever a certain sentence or passage hits just so…; at a basic level, to increase my appreciation and understanding of Life, and those artists and thinkers out there striving to contribute to the meaning of human experience, those attempting to bring some beauty or order into the entropic universe and make a little sense out of this mess of a reality we’re stuck in for the duration. And if they can’t find order or beauty, at least to make the muck sing out in some delightful way... There is also that moment where something unnameable (but now somehow named...) clicks into place while reading, and something akin to deja vu blooms inside - the This is the proper expression of the thing I’ve always had in mind but have never been able to express so rightly... The closest thing I get to what is typically described as a feeling of “spirituality” (I who sincerely believe I do not experience spirituality in any degree), are these moments when I come upon this expression of something intensely meaningful and resonant with me and my personal experiences outside of myself, encountering something that seems of me but not by me... these are elusive moments, rare, but when they occur I feel struck by something close to what Nabokov wrote about his experience of Love :

”When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”

Which is why, of course, I then tend to seek out a community with which to share my emotion, my experience, to know that others too might be aware that such experiences are not only possible, but are out there for us, somewhere, waiting to be found hidden among the vast mundane plowing of life… and the comforting idea that others have generously spent many of their precious hours alive in creating works of art that contain their own such revelations, because they understand the importance of keeping this type of transmission alive through history, that this type of uncovering and finding is an essential component of being human ...

CUE SONG ~~ Take a look! It’s in a book! A reading rainbow... ~~

So, here I am, putting it out there to this broad community of Good Readers, wanting to tell you, Gravity’s Rainbow, for me, was one such experience, one such “finding”, a book I’ve been waiting for all my reading life… And with it, and my readings of Mason & Dixon and Against The Day, I am more certain of my notion that Pynchon is the peak of American postmodernism, alongside the works of William Gaddis - that these two have set the goal for what the encyclopedic novel might accomplish on this side of the Atlantic, in this American English… I consider having the opportunity to read both Gravity’s Rainbow and Gaddis’ J R in the same year a great privilege...

But Pynchon’s book itself is practically impossible to review, impossible to summarize or condense, worthless to categorize or constrain by exegesis - because of all it contains, the enormity of what it holds within its pages, the hundreds of characters and mad proliferation of ideas and allusions, all those words! hundreds of thousands of words that somehow leave so much unsaid, but unsaid in perfect ways (left to drift into audience dreams) - because it projects countless tentacles wrapping its world and reaching out into space-time, some of which return full of Story and the Known to feed the octopus body center of narrative, and some which purposefully throw Story and the Known out into the careening forces of the expanding universe, to be forever unresolved and scattered to cosmic coldness and star-distances - because of the density of the fragmentation of the world it has created, (but which is no more fragmented than any human consciousness encountering existence on any given day)...

So allow me only to give you a small cenotaph or a monument - (an obelisk?)- to the impossible review of Gravity’s Rainbow ::

Like a great movie, all of its themes are present in each scene, and yet the individual occurrences and set pieces here seem infinitely varied and inexhaustible. It is the macro-microcosm unity of the mandala. I believe, at a certain level, it contains the elemental forces of existence, the things that make Time rotate, Jackson, but that are only allowed to be seen by Pynchon writing around them... he knows that naming would fix them and so render them invisible… These are parallax visions : The explosion/implosion, the ascent/descent, of a rocket or the archangels or a human destiny, the fatal arc of gravity’s pull on an accelerating object, as if it ever had a choice of the path it would take; the dialectic, the synthesis of opposites, the white and the black, the yin the yang, and the Tarot tower with a king in mid-fall; the parabola path of ejaculate soaring from penis head to trembling body or mouth, or the journey of the whip to flesh and a memory of feeling anything as clearly as we feel pain, or the need to inflict pain; (-the cuticle of the fingernail inscribed by its own half-moon- the body has its own parabolas-); Faust retold in tar-dark comedy; Rossini’s Tancredi performed in the deepest depths of an LSD trip; an orchestral kazoo piece titled “What Is The Nature of Control?”; and the freedom of the individual within the extrinsic objective needs of the Conspiracy; the wave that dips below the zero but is not extinguished and re-emerges over London mouthing a millionhuman scream; the manymirror worlds that were born alongside ours in the forge of the Big Bang but went into dimensional retreat, that can now only be accessed by occult practices; the scuttling amid the transportation networks of the necropoli, where ghosts take luxurious elevators through their ruined places; the poles of the Earth and the Heavens aligning, right there a Brocken Spectre fingering a destroyed city’s maw; the procession of the conjured and the vanished, and the parallel worlds and possible universes we rub up against each time we peel a banana… the voices of the dead in constant song (which is the Music of the Spheres, listen for them in the silence of the Shadow of the Sun, if it ever finds you) and all the bending light sent in Morse code to us by Them from the pinpoint stars, which Those In The Know know are powerful film projectors, enumerating to us the Lies We Must Believe So That We Play Out Our Part In Their Game, and all the chemical formulations of all Their hallucinogens and all their lost dogs and all Time unfolding at once Everybody now… in an encyclopedia of human culture accommodating all things lowbrow to high- a schizophrenic Moby-Dick of the nuclear age… Our Great Paranoid Epic: Slothrop’s Progress Through The Military-Industrial Raketen-Stadt subtitled The Kenosha Kid and The Dear Ol’ Death Drive… where we find Orpheus’s lyre unstrung and discarded, but still plucked by the dry wind… or a lost harmonica found years later in the cold flow of a distant river and the bluegreen water-notes it mournfully plays, the water through the individual soundholes making of the river a sound-rainbow… the Rainbow Promise, ages old, taken back by the one who swore it… I tell ya it makes one helluva good movie! (complete with a Looney Tunes short...)

A-and of course, that “the act of sex and the act of death are one”, yes, at first this might seem simple, but it is really a complicated notion, one which might require infinite time and depths for us poor humans to come to terms with, if we ever do… but luckily film reels run in circles!

(...next up, cutting room floor tidbits from the poet laureate of the Lüneburg Heath and his critically acclaimed Sonics to Orifice... relevant previews of poems to come...)

Tree arising! O pure ascendance!
Orpheus Sings! Towering tree within the ear!
Everywhere stillness, yet in this abeyance:
seeds of change and new beginnings near...

Hail the force sublime
uniting we who live in signs.
The clock's steps only mime
the ticking of a truer time.

Devoid of actual perception,
antenna to antenna we posit,
by main force of intuition,
what emptiness transmits. . .

Do you hear the future
adrone and athrob, Sir?
Extolling its power,
comes a messenger...

Look at the machine:
how it turns and destroys.
vengefully twisting us like toys...

And though you fade from earthly sight,
declare to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water say: I am.

GR fits into a sui generis genre of alternative history meets non-fiction meets musical comedy. The comical and unbelievable elements are all mixed up with very hard facts about 1945 and the beginning of the post-war world. I'm beginning to get a handle on it even if the many many characters and their interrelationships are still confusing to me. I still have my battered copy, bought in high school at the (long defunct) Upper West Side Shakespeare and Company and having accompanied me all these years:



Some basic themes are:

1. a conspiracy theory/ alternative history about the cartels like IG Farben and American corporations reaching ultimate synergy at the end of WWII, and bringing us the modern world and a certain Richard M. Schlubb a.k.a. Nixon.

2. Slothrop, l'homme moyen, as the ultimate test consumer, in fact an actual guinea pig, the Weberian Protestant and his God-driven ethos of chosen versus preterite, re-routinized by the rising bureaucracies/conspiracies. The worshipper becomes our ideal docile consumer-worker. My pet theory is that despite all of the correlating factors mentioned by Pynchon, sexual, chemical, mystical, ancestral, these are all red herrings and the rocket strikes and his erections are both random, but matching by chance, and Slothrop is thus revealed as our ideal future test subject, the totally average oversexed, paranoid American consumer, ready for exploitation like a sacrificial Jesus figure, which in some ways he becomes.

3. A European culture of sex-death and the inorganic deeply rooted in German romanticism, and coming to full flower in the mass extermination of WWII, but in 1945 becoming less and less mystical and more embodied, routinized in the spirit of technology and commerce, as a Weberian might put it,

4. OR maybe it's all a joke! "Beschissen, Freundchen!" April Fools Day fell on Easter Sunday in 1945. No conspiracy, no nothing, just a blind instinctual careening toward death, like the mindless Rocket after Brennschluss. It was 1973 after all and the world had gone to total shit. Not that things got any better in 1980 and 2000! The joke of Gravity's Rainbow has now become the reality we live inside, with protest and conspiracy-paranoia merely factored in as another controlled and conditioned response to total domination, body and soul. On the other hand Paranoia functions in Pynchon as a kind of sinister comfort against the possibility of true chaos, a la the tychism of Henry Adams. None of his conspiracies or the would-be conspirators themselves ever really comes off as that genuine center of control.

By the way, when I first read this I thought that Pynchon was a smart chap and mock-historian. But I now sense the use of language, even the poetry of some well crafted phrases, and the clever circular hopscotch patterning he uses in lieu of plot. There is also some halcyon writing here, as in the story of Franz Poekler. There are certain elements of 60's era "white guilt" and almost an ancestral sin Pynchon is trying to expiate (his family is quite prominent in New England history), elements which date the book and which I find jejeune, like some of the humor. But it's a classic, no doubt about it.

Someday I would like to write an essay about the similarities between GR and Melville's The Confidence Man. They are both April Fool's Jokes and parodies of the Christian calendar, and broadsides at American culture.

Next stop (perhaps): Levine and Leverenz Mindful Pleasures, a superb collection of essays on V and GR.

First off, a song: this was supposedly influenced by Gravity's Raibow. HA!

This one's for you Slothrop & Bodine (I had no idea that there actually were zoot suit riots! Everything I've learned, I've learned from reading books. Crappy public school education...)

Where to begin?!

Regarding the creation of this novel, it has been said, “ Pynchon sequestered himself in a room, writing the novel out by hand, filling sheet after sheet of graph paper with the precise script of an Engineer. Perched atop this stack of papers was his small offering to the Muse, a totem of invocative magic: a rocket formed from "a pencil type eraser (the kind from which you peel off the corkscrew wrapper) with a needle in its nose, and a re-formed paper clip serving as a launching pad." The working title of his draft was Mindless Pleasures…”

Mindless Pleasures. Well, that suits, doesn’t it? Despite the varied themes and fragmented plot lines, it all comes down to one thing: Slothrop’s magical penis. This man is so blessed that he is able to make women orgasm upon entry! Natürlich! Now that’s something. Who needs porn when you have Pynchon? However…

There comes a time when the ability to sincerely shock your reader reaches a threshold, after that, nothing you write will cause me to so much as raise an eyebrow. This point came for me about half-way through the novel (maybe a little further) with the whole incest bit. Pynchon threw in just about every taboo subject there is, and maybe even made up a few new ones. After awhile, it wasn’t so shocking or interesting anymore, it just became vulgar. Oh, Slothrop screwed another farm animal? Yawn… Okay, so I don’t think he actually screwed any farm animals, but he did just about everything else. Or did he? Hmmm… I think he must have a very vivid imagination. I mean, the guy is pretty tubby, and he’s traveling around Western Europe in pig suits and zoot suits and Rocketman suits. Where I come from, the ladies aren’t dying to drop trou for a guy like that. Yet women seem to be flocking to our friend Slothrop. But who am I to judge, there was a war going on! Oh yeah, there’s a war going on…

When sir Slothrop isn’t getting laid, some interesting ideas are presented. It’s easy to get caught up in all of the lascivious prose, but when you allow yourself to ignore all of that, what you are left with is brilliant BRILLIANT writing. Pynchon tackles the Big Issues without blinking an eye: the preterite vs. the elect, metaphysics, death,War; don’t forget about the war.

This was far and away THE FUNNIEST book I’ve ever read. I mean, come on, pie fights in hot air balloons, nasal erections, silly songs, a trained octopus, Byron the Bulb(?)... and hundreds of kazoos!

Pynchon likes to keep you on your toes. There’s no such thing as “casually reading” this book. You have to pay attention, otherwise you’ll end up in another country with a whole new cast of characters in another time period and have NO IDEA how you ended up there (he uses analepses early and often). Characters may change names without notice(as with von Goll/der Springer and Weissman/Capt. Blicero).

I will not make claims that this is a perfect novel. There were times when I felt like Pynchon was beating me over the head with a hammer, times when the vulgarity was too much to take, the slapstick humor way too over the top. But those moments paled in comparison to the joy I felt reading this novel.

But don’t take my word for it: the proof of the Pudding is in the eating. Uh, or something *wink.*

(I’m going to go now and drop some acid and read this thing again.)

***********************
Casting for the part of Slothrop:



Or:



Or finally:



**A note to those who wish to read this book: it should come with a warning label DO NOT READ WHILE EATING. Poor Major Marvy, I'm lookin' at you.

Prologue

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

Genesis

In the beginning was the earth, and above the earth was the sky.

The earth consisted of land and water. The sky consisted of air, the moon, the sun and the stars in the heavens.

The land consisted of rock. Water was everywhere, but still precious.

The sky was light by day and dark by night. By day, the light came from the sun and sometimes the moon. At night, a lesser light came from the stars and the moon.

On the land, things were still, but then they began to change.

The sun made rock hot by day and the night made it cold, and the rock became stone, and the stone soon became soil.

The Creation of Life

In time, the soil and the water came together with the air and the sunlight to form life.

The life was green and did cling to the soil.

The air and the heavens were the realm of gravity.

Everything on earth was made to fall and to disperse and to dissipate as time goes by.

To rise was to challenge the laws of nature. Nothing could rise, except one thing, invisibly, vapors.

Water mixed with the heat of the sun and became a vapor, and the vapor ascended to the sky and became clouds. At night and sometimes by day, the clouds became rain, and the rain fell and spilled water onto the earth.

Some water remained on the land in rivers and streams and lakes. Other water, sliding and falling and dropping across the land, found its way to the oceans.

The Life of Fruit

In time, life conspired to defy gravity little by little.

Life combined with the soil and the water and the air and the light to make trees and shrubs (some bearing bananas or mangoes or pawpaws), and these plants reached skyward to the sun.

But these plants could not be severed from the soil, because their roots sought nourishment there. Any plant severed from the soil would fall to the earth, obedient to gravity.

In time, many plants were severed from the earth and covered by soil and water and became hard and part of the rock. Beneath the surface of the earth, dead plants formed coal, and sometimes oil and gas.

The Origin of Man

After much time, other forms of life were born, including animals that did grow heads and arms and legs and tails and eat the plants.

Some animals became humans, some male, some female, all of whom wished to walk on two legs and become higher than other animals and plants.

Men were not always bigger and stronger than other animals and so sought refuge in holes in the ground and caves.

The caves were darker than night and men grew frightened of the dark, not knowing what was out there, until they discovered fire, which they used for light and heat.

Sometimes, men used fire to warm the flesh of other beasts and they grew stronger.

Life was good, and men tended to live within and surrounded by nature as one.

Man on the Move

Men began to move across the earth in search of food and learned how to construct homes of rock and stone and bricks made of soil and water.

Their homes grew taller than trees and animals and began to defy gravity.

Then men learned how to make machines that could move across the land and water at speeds faster than men or horses could walk or run.

And they consumed coal and oil and gas, so that they were not dependent on horse power.

Man Turns the Power Switch On

Men learned how to make electricity and switches that would turn the power on and off.

Men made glass bulbs that turned darkness into light.

Men had finally become enlightened.

Men looked at the sky for beauty and meaning and portents of the future.

They wondered what lived in the heavens and whether they had been created by gods.

They made drawings and pictures of what surrounded them. One day they would make photographs and moving pictures and shiny silver discs.

Men observed what occurred in nature and, over a great duration, started to learn about cause and effect.

Man Dominates Himself

Then men created gods in their own image.

They invented religions and superstitions and sometimes it was difficult to tell them apart, men and their gods, religions and superstitions.

Men used their religions to explain what they could and couldn’t do.

Then they created churches and holy men and scriptures to dictate to them what they must and must not do, and the holy men and their gods punished them if they did not do what they must do, or did what they must not do.

Man Discovers Matters of Life and Death

Men observed decay and destruction and death around them, and wondered whether they too would die one day.

Men didn’t like this prospect and decided that they alone amongst the plants and animals had a soul and, after death, would live in eternity.

Except that, if they disobeyed the commandments of their holy men and gods and scriptures, they would be punished by eternal damnation and made to live in hell. Which was not meant to be a good thing.

Some scientists conducted experiments and tests on dogs and other animals and learned how they were governed by stimulus and response.

Men wondered whether their souls and their capacity for reason elevated them above the animals.

They did not recognise that, even with their gods, men would do evil things to each other that animals would never do.

Man Engages in Some Empire State Building

Men built their homes in cities and formed nations. They conquered other cities and nations and established empires.

They established workforces and armies.

They organised men and their possessions into rows and columns, and they made men and women wear uniforms, so that they might look and think and do alike.

They developed systems to punish those who would dissent and they used force to hold their empires together.

They looked down upon any man or woman who would not conform or wear a uniform.

Those that they did not incarcerate or hang or inject with life-sapping solutions or electricity, they cast off into the wilderness, where they would disperse or die of thirst.

We Men are Scientists

So men acquired knowledge and wisdom, and accumulated science and technology beyond the wildest dreams of their predecessors.

They converted their knowledge and wisdom into zeroes and ones, so that they might store them on silver discs.

Some men wondered whether there was more to life than zeroes and ones, and was there anything beyond zero or between zero and one, and they were scorned.

Man Defies Gravity

Slowly, man’s dreams became more ambitious.

Some men dreamed about how they might fly like a bird, and one day men learned how to make flying machines.

Men did not always live happily with other men, and they made tools and machines that would maim and kill their enemies.

Men used their aeroplanes to drop bombs on other men, and the planes and the bombs grew bigger, and the maiming and the killing grew more widespread and efficient.

At the same time, men learned how to make bigger and taller buildings that reached higher and appeared to touch the sky.

Many men lived and worked in these skyscrapers.

In Case of War

Then there were two wars between many nations of the world.

In the first war, many men died in trenches dug into the soil of their farms.

In the second war, it was not necessary to get into a trench to die. Many people died in their homes and their buildings. It was easier to kill more quickly in the cities that housed large numbers of people.

Men made new bombs that were meant to end the wars, but when they continued, men invented rockets that could maim and kill even greater numbers of people.

Some rockets made a sound that warned people that they were coming.

If you heard the sound, you might be able to escape to safety.

When they did not end the war, scientists invented more and better ways to kill more and better people. They built rockets that made no noise and could kill you before you heard them coming.

They were the perfect machinery of death, because nowhere was safe and you could not escape them.

These rockets defied both gravity and the imagination.

While nobody had been looking or thinking about it, man’s buildings and vehicles and aeroplanes and rockets and bombs had made the earth dark again.

A Voice in the Wilderness

Well, maybe not nobody. A man called Slothrop had been watching.

Every time a rocket was launched, Slothrop was blessed with a hard-on, an erection.

He would look at the rockets and he would be turned off.

At the same time, he would look at the rockets and he would be turned on.

Slothrop’s hard on was a hard one for the scientists to explain.

What the Fuck?

Somewhere in Europe, scientists were erecting buildings, platforms, rockets that could bring death to people like Slothrop.

Slothrop suspected that the best use of an erection was not to build an edifice, but to fill an orifice.

Slothrop wondered, why had men become obsessed by Death, when they should have been preoccupied with Life?

Surely, there is no life without sex, no progress without congress, no creation without procreation?

“Make love, fuck the war.”

“Fuck war, fuck each other.”

How do you convince everybody else that this is the solution?

“Fucked if I know,” sez Slothrop.

The Prophet Debunked

Slothrop is cast out of the mainstream and sets out across Europe in pursuit of love, sex, and rockets (and those who would launch any one or more of them at him).

Still, even equipped with his hard on, Slothrop prefers bananas to buildings and rockets, he is bent but never straight.

He is the ultimate non-conformist, hedonist and sybarite, who gives pleasure to himself and to many women, Katje, Margherita, Bianca, three of the foremost amongst them.

Slothrop’s skepticism and excess threaten the System, Religion and Culture. He is an anarchist Counter-Force to Binary Code, Mono-theism, Uniformity and Over-the-Counter Culture.

He is the unwitting counter-cultural Prophet who threatens the methodical, ordered and conformist backbone of Mainstream Society.

He is a spanner in the works. He is a virus that must be eliminated. Like Trotsky, he is a Prophet that must be netted.

They, the powers that be, with their uniforms and their weapons and their switches, chase Slothrop through Europe, but he remains free.

Misanslothropy

In time, people came to doubt whether Slothrop ever actually existed at all.

Some would ask, “Slothrop? What kind of name for a prophet is that?”

Still They did not stop their pursuit, even when They were certain that he must be dead. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

If you can’t see him or hear him, deprive him of oxygen. Wipe out his disciples. Stifle his message. Prevent it from reaching any children. If the medium is the message, remove his medium. That way the prophet and his prophecy will cease to exist.

Revelations? What Revelations?

Was Slothrop a fabrication? A ghost in the machine? A shadow in the light of day? A figment of someone’s imagination? A fiction? Just a character in a novel? Just a story in a holy book?

As Slothrop would say, “I’m fucked if I know.”

Outside the novel, the world continues as before, only more so. Buildings reach higher. Rockets and aeroplanes fly further. Wars drone on. Civilians die. Men line up in rows and columns and uniforms. Power perpetuates itself eternally. Evil perpetrates itself on people via people. Darkness masquerades as light.

The sky is silent. We can no longer hear the screaming. It’s all theatre, even within our homes.





Group Read

I re-read this as part of a group read started by Stephen M:

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/6...

Reading Notes

I kept my reading notes in My Writings:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...



A Letter from Vlad the Impaler of Butterflies Dated April, 1973

Dear Tom,

Vera and I very much appreciated your gift of a signed first edition of your novel.

It actually caused a little friction in the Nabokov household.

I don't mean to be ungrateful or vulgar, but we both wished you had given us one copy each. (I guess we could purchase one, but we were too keen to read it.)

Naturally, I started it first, immediately it arrived, but quickly found I couldn't put it down.

The reason being that, every time I did, Vera picked it up and commenced reading.

Initially, our respective lepidopteran bookmarks were quite far apart, but when she passed my place, she asserted her right to be the dominant reader, and I had to wait until she had devoured the entire offering, which she did by the time of Maundy Thursday.

Fortunately, this left me Easter to finish it, so we were able to compare notes by Easter Monday, appropriately with a sense of renewed faith in literature.

I am convinced "Gravity's Rainbow" is one of the finest works of modern fiction.

It is very much an artistic and logical extension of "V.", which as you know we also enjoyed greatly.

If your first novel was a pursuit of "V", then "Gravity's Rainbow" is a pursuit of V, too.

In fact, it is a pursuit of both V1 and V2.

Vera was bold enough to suggest that V1 and V2 might connote Vlad and Vera, though we were unable to reach consensus on who might be noisy and who might be silent.

We did, however, hypothesise that Slothrop could be a reversal of Humbert.

To put it bluntly (these are Vera's words, not mine), Humbert, European in origin, fucks his way around the New World, more or less.

Slothrop, on the other hand, American to his bootstraps, fucks his way around the Old World.

I admire the way you, even more so than Slothrop, carried off Bianca.

It is some of the most delicious erotic writing I have read.

Bianca echoes Dolores nicely.

Even the sound of her name...Bi-an-ca.

The way it rolls off your tongue, it reminds me of, forgive me for citing myself, "Lo-lee-ta".

It's also close enough to the German acronym B.N.K. (which even a faint-hearted German reader or patient would appreciate stands for the "Bundesverband Niedergelassener Kardiologen", cross my heart and hope not to die).

Vera was the first to detect how you reversed the reader's response to this relationship.

Humbert knew damned well how old Lolita was. It was crucial to his enterprise.

On the other hand, Slothrop "believed" Bianca was a minor of barely 11 or 12, but when you work through the arithmetic of your puzzle, you realise that in reality (and therefore fiction) she was 16 (or was it 17?) and consequently of age.

So, what Slothrop did was legitimate, but what the reader (who was as yet unaware of this detail) did was not.

In "Lolita", I allowed readers to believe they were jurors with a legitimate interest in the proceedings, whereas in "Gravity's Rainbow" they are complicit in a crime that the protagonist did not actually commit.

The reader's voyeurism comes at a cost, at least metaphorically.

Only time will tell whether America and the world is ready to be confronted with their culpability.

Even if they are not, I hope your novel receives the acclaim it deserves.

So, well done, Tom, Richard would have been proud.

I would have been proud to call you my pupil, too (Pupil 2?), if only you had enrolled in one of my classes.

Perhaps you learned more and better from my example?

In the hope that you might continue to do so, I have asked my Publisher to send you a copy of my "Strong Opinions".

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed expressing them.

Yours, with all my admiration,

V.




Slothropod De-Feets Cephalopod, Dutch Girl Almost Pops Her Clogs

Slothrop, octopus
And Katje Borgesius
We were meant to meet.



The Thoughts of An Erotic Clausewitz

Fuck Death, Fuck Rockets,
Says Erotic Clausewitz,
Make Love, Fuck the War.



Jim Carroll Watches the Earth Recede

How can I propel
My missile 'gainst the pull of
Wicked Gravity?



Slothrop's Dewy Glans

Slothrop's cock, un-cropped
Slots into sweet spot, then, spent,
Flops soft in wet spot.



Summit Meeting

Who knows what worldly wisdom I might find
When I discover myself at the peak,
Gravity-defiant, all nickels spent,
Trying to work out what it could have meant,
And you're already there, reposed, asleep,
Your trousers down and crimson phallus bent,
And scattered on the snow are streaks
Of your rocket-powered ejaculate
That have fallen moist, arc-like to the earth,
Still rainbow-coloured and immaculate.

So I read 200 sullen words worth
Of the dry wit and onanistic mirth
That appeal so much to the daisy chain
Of acolytes standing at your rear.
As one who's usually come before,
They call you a poet and a seer.
It's sad we only see your back side,
Though we're the ones forever left behind
By all your avant garde sorcery and
The flaccid disquisitions of your mind.



Soundtrack:

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Babe You Turn Me On

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=153eVr...

This is the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly – perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time’s assembly – and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn’t.

There! I’ve made it easy for you! Reduced this monumental, paranoid journey into the nightmare territory of Europe at the end of World War II to a single, simple paragraph for easy consumption by the lazy reader who doesn’t feel ready to embark on such a strenuous voyage. I did it because I feel the need to justify my own struggle with the text and pretend I came out wiser at destination. But I lied!
There are no easy shortcuts, and there may not be a punch line because there are dozens of the damn things, cropping up at random in the most peculiar places, heard from the most grotesque voices.
So take a deep breath and jump into the fray! Draw your own conclusions! Praise or condemn the guide/author for the way the tour develops according to your heart’s content. He is probably smoking a joint somewhere, laughing and crying in equal measure for the fate of modern man.

“You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow ...”
There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds against the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after?

>>><<<>>><<<
here be spoilers! thread carefully from this point forward
>>><<<>>><<<

Death descends silently out of Heaven. Dante’s journey in the ‘Divine Comedy’ is turned upside down, the message from Heaven is sending Lt. Tyrone Slothrop on a wild chase through London in the winter of 1944, mapping the sites of V-2 strikes through the power of his ‘dowsing member’ . Various spy agencies in the city plot to use Slothrop’s peculiar talent as a method to predict where the next strike will land. It’s either a case of Pavlovian conditioning in Tyrone’s childhood, according to venal researcher Pointsman, or a statistical coincidence based on Poisson Distribution, according to Roger Mexico.

After V-day and a brief interlude on the French Riviera, where Slothrop is tasked with the study of V-2 engineering papers and where the surveillance by the spy agencies induce a rising feeling of paranoia, Slothrop decides to go AWOL and departs for the Zone : the territory of Germany immediately after surrender and before its division among Allies coagulates. There he hopes to find out the reason so many agents consider him a pivotal figure by investigating the sites where the Rocket was assembled, tested and launched.
This zone is the modern equivalent of Renaissance Hell, closer to the imagery of Hieronymus Bosch than Dante, and Slothrop lacks a wise guide to illuminate his path and keep him safe from the various demons he encounters. This waking nightmare is alternatively encyclopedic (technical, historical) , lyrical, pornographic, humorous in a slapstick and vulgar manner, metaphysical. In the Zone we will come across a high-class vivisectionist, a gigantic, horror-movie devilfish name of Gregory, candies that taste like horrible alkaloid desolation, sarcastic buffaloes, a Welshman with an accordion, hallucinogenic Hollandaise sauce, a stolen Nazi submarine filled with Argentinian anarchists, a rogue platoon of suicidal Namibian tribesmen, a ballooning enthusiast named Schnorp, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha, fake Molotov cocktails filled with vodka, peculiar polymers with erectile properties, an undetectable synthetic drug that induces revelations of divinity  Oneirine theophosphate , ringworm relish and crotch custard served at a formal dinner, Looney Tunes characters and famous jazzmen in underground toilets.
Slothrop’s loneliness and his increasing alienation reflect the journey of self-discovery and the birth of the modern world that Pynchon hints at in my opening quote.

>>><<<>>><<<

So much for my attempt at a synopsis. Onward to style of presentation!

s’posed to be a hardboiled private eye here, gonna go out all alone and beat the odds, avenge my friend that They killed, get my ID back and find that piece of mystery hardware...

The basic noir/private detective plot is a useful simplification for the plot, one that is familiar from the other two Pynchon novels I’ve read: ‘Inherent Vice’ and ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ . Similarly, a simple investigation by a lone wolf character descends into paranoia as the quest morphs into a complex conspiracy with global ramifications. The search is more important than the actual mystery, as proven by the fluid nature of the target. From a map of the V-2 strikes in London to the mystery of Slothrop’s conditioning in childhood we proceed to look for Imipolex-G , a wonder polymer, then for a secret Rocket equipped with a doom device (S-Gerat) until, finally, we try to uncover a secret global organization that controls world affairs, referred in the text as ‘They’ .

“Listen,” Slothrop talking into his highball glass, bouncing words off of ice cubes so they’ll have a proper chill, “either I’m coming down with a little psychosis here, or something funny is going on, right?”

At the most basic level, this is the mythical story of the hero of a thousand faces, who goes on a quest and brings back wisdom to his home village. The Schwarzgerat is just another name for the Holy Grail (one of the images featured in the text) or the Fountain of Youth or a falcon statue made of gold. The hardboiled quest structure is one that Pynchon has developed and used throughout his opus. ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, being his crown achievement, is probably the best field of study on how and why he does it.

The basic theory is, that when given an unstructured stimulus, some shapeless ‘blob’ of experience, the subject will seek to impose structure on it. How he goes about structuring this blob will reflect his needs, his hopes – will provide us with clues to his dreams, fantasies, the deepest regions of his mind.”

The quote comes from the behaviour researcher Pointsman, the one who graduates from testing Pavlovian reaction in dogs to a study of Slothrop’s psychology. The analogy he offers is that of a setting [situation, story, novel] that acts like a Rorschach test, challenging the patient / the reader to find meaning in chaos.

A more interesting theory, supported by the appearance of Charlie Parker improvising on the song ‘Cherokee’ in 1939, as seen in a wild dream of Slothrop while interned at ‘The White Visitation’, presents the novel as a revolutionary improvisation, postmodernism as trying to reach directly into the reader’s subconscious by altering the expected progression of plot and characterization.

He realized that the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale can lead melodically to any key, breaking some of the confines of simpler jazz soloing. [from wikipedia]

suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory? when the V-2 hits, you see, first the blast, then the sound of its falling ... the normal order of the stimuli reversed that way ... so we might turn a particular corner, enter a certain street, and for no clear reason feel suddenly ...

Revelation is the name of the game, and this illumination is searched sometime in seances with the departed, Tarot cards, engineering plans or the smoking of joints. The presence of drugs in the Zone, the endless bacchanalia that goes on, is an integral part of the quest, of the attempt of enforcing a structure on the chaos left behind by the War. Time itself is a victim of the conflagration, illustrated by the insistence of cause before effect, as the Rocket hits before it is heard and by the repeated apparition in the text of the word ‘preterite’ , as in flotsam, discards, storm-tossed passengers thrown overboard from the ship of death ‘Anubis’, used to describe the survivors drifting among Zone ruins.

an adept at the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers – the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper.

Saure, Seaman Bodine, Roger Mexico, Pirate Prentice and other occasional allies of Slothrop may lack his paranoia-driven insistence on finding answers, but they hold parts of the solution, like component bits of the ultimate Rocket about to be assembled. Together, they will come to be known as the Counterforce later in the novel. ( “They’re the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements. Don’t we ... Mexico?” )

Survival seems, after all, only a matter of blind fortune groping through the heavy marbling of skies one Titanic-night at a time.

“The greatest breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle.”

“There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here.”
“Not produce,” she tried, “not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different systems...”

That’s about it in terms of narrative structure

>>><<<>>><<<

Stay in the Zone long enough and you’ll start getting ideas about destiny yourself.

Preterite theory, the idea that Apocalypse already happened and we live in the world shaped by It, is one of the signs and symptoms used to map the journey of Slothrop. ( The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image.) The further he progresses into the Zone, the more the novel explores mystical, religious interpretations of the Rocket. The parabola of the rocket’s ascension beyond the pull of Earth’s gravity, into the Void, the Zero or the Aether of the unknown, only to fall down back in flames mirrors the flight of Icarus, or the distance between two lovers as they come together only to drift apart (Katja and Slothrop):

... it’s a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice – guessed and refused to believe – that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children ...

Sex, usually with a deviant flavour, is ubiquitous in the text, a tool for control or a path to liberation, depending on the progress towards revelation by the players. Its vulgarity is not simply a way to shock the audience out of complacency, but another symbol, another metaphor for the Quest.

Katja understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her – over its peak and down, plunging, burning, towards a terminal orgasm ...

On the opposite side of the spectrum, rigid morality and public outcry against sinners are tools used by Them to keep us under control [see also modern political games that focus on ‘dirt’ instead of policy]. The same Katja is tasked to bring a recalcitrant British general into submission. This is the theory of Sado-anarchism, as offered by a fallen Tanatz:

“Ludwig, a little S and M never hurt anybody.”
“Why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behaviour but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power.”

One final image of a world built on Pavlovian principles is a description late in the book of Hund-Stadt, one of the new structures arisen in the Zone, where dogs who lost their owners create their own dystopian society, a xenophobia shaped by their earlier conditioning through propaganda:

They may be living entirely in the light of the one man-installed reflex: Kill the Stranger. There may be no way of distinguishing it from the other given quantities of their lives – from hunger or thirst or sex. For all they know, kill-the-stranger was born in them.

If trains are the image of Pavlovian predestination, vice and joy are the keys needed to unlock freedom:

Let them cry like cheated lovers,
Let their cries find only wind.
Trains are meant for night and ruin.
We are meant for song, and sin.

Which brings me to the numerous instances of song and dance numbers and the importance of their presence here. I’ve always considered Pynchon to be the modern Dante or Milton, using free verse instead of rhyme, but still benefiting from the highly polished word structure and evocative imagery, symbolism of poetry. Being modern and more than a touch subversive in his core belief, the reader can often find delight in the author’s grotesque sex play, the Looney Tunes anarchism and slapstick irreverence of the text.

There was a young man from Decatur,
Who slept with a LOX* generator.
His balls and prick
Froze solid real quick,
And his asshole a little bit later.

* liquid oxygen

>>><<<>>><<<

Parabola parable and the mandala of technology



The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity – most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process.

>>><<<>>><<<

Damn, I run out of space ...
This was never going to fit within the wordcount allowed by Goodreads for a review. It is probably the longest review I ever tried, but I’m not trying to impress anyone with my erudition, I just want to put to rest the buzzing in my head produced by this wild novel, to justify somehow the slog of reading page after page of madcap adventure, the avalanche of metaphors and portents, to make it easier at a later time to remember what it was all about. Because I really don’t see myself re-reading this, no matter how rewarding and clarifying such a project would be. I have no problem calling it a masterpiece, but honestly, it is a flawed, self-indulgent and deliberately difficult ride.
So, the full review is still on Goodreads

full review

at 902 pages, this sprawling piece of literature has every sick idea known to human, some hallucinatory, some real, some both. Though this was a pain in the ass at times, I hoped it'd never end, but again, ironically i paced through this. This is probably where you start Pynchon, though Lot 49 is shorter, and Inherent Vice is accessible, I feel like I was duped with my premonition of Pynchon being hip and rad and everything along those lines. Moving from Germany to Kazakhstan to London only in a span of a page, GR keeps moving all the time along with dead men taking up narratives here and there. There's Pavlovian psychology, Nazi stuff, coprophagia, degenerate sex, sadism, war, rockets, Inflammable plastics, conspiracies, history, along with the god's gorgeous creation Slothorp's paranoia! If this pissed people in 1973 there's no way Pynchon could get published as a new author in 2020. If at all he puts out another book before fading away, I'd probably have one last chance to be relevant to Pynchon-era. I've been wanting to talk to people about GR, but internet has given me enough material to be satisfied. And the best part, unlike the case of DFW, I've got 5 more Pynchon books to read. So that's a first-tier pursuit worth pursuing.

“Tienes la oportunidad de salir corriendo. Pero estas cosas estallan primero y después las oyes llegar. A no ser que estés muerto, entonces sí que no las oyes.
-Lo mismo que en la infantería. Nunca oyes el estallido de la que te toca.
-Sí, pero…
-Intenta pensar que se trata de una enorme bala, Slothrop. Con aletas.
-¡Dios mío! – Sus dientes entrechocan. ¡Vaya modo de tranquilizarme!”

Thomas Pynchon es uno de esos bichos raros de la literatura, tal vez equiparable a sus compatriotas John Kennedy Toole o J. D. Salinger. Tipos extraños, esquivos, huraños; que escriben su literatura todo lo ocultan y se esconden para siempre.
Apenas se tienen unas pocas referencias acerca de él. Inclusive muy pocas fotos, casi ninguna. Y todas viejas, de cuando era joven y era conscripto en el ejército norteamericano. Y nada más…
Ecléctico, errático, caleidoscópico, desconcertante y obsceno, la historia de “El arco iris de gravedad” se desarrolla entre el virtuosismo narrativo del autor y la profundidad de temas y situaciones que se tratan en él.
La acción transcurre entre 1944 y 1945, a finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, entre las ruinas de la devastada Berlín o en Londres y también en otras ciudades de Europa, todo esto sin una ilación muy ajustada que digamos, sino más bien con saltos de una ciudad en otra, dependiendo de donde se encuentre nuestro héroe Slothrop.
El argumento es aún más absurdo y estrambótico: el teniente Tyrone Slothrop tiene la habilidad y percepción de saber cuándo caerán las famosas bombas V1 y V2 creadas por Von Braun para los nazis ya que estas están recubiertas de un componente aislante llamado Imipolex G, inventado por un científico llamado Laszlo Jamf de quien no se conoce paradero y a su vez, las partes pudendas de Slothrop han sido acondicionadas con el mismo material, lo que hace que cada vez que se dispara una de estas bombas, Slothrop tiene una erección.
Todo es extraño en la novela, como por ejemplo los nombres, en donde la invención de Pynchon no tiene límites: Tyrone Slothrop, Blodgett Waxwing, Edwin Treacle, Rollo Groast, Géza Rózsavölgyi o Aaron Throwster. Solo por nombrar a algunos.
Un detalle muy importante es que realmente no me esperaba que en semejante novela ambientada en los fines de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y en Europa es que aparezca un personaje argentino y además que Pynchon tenga tantos conocimientos de nuestro país. Supongo que porque leyó (tal vez mucho) a Jorge Luis Borges.
El increíble encuentro de Slothrop con un argentino llamado Francisco Squalidozzi en donde, utilizando pocos párrafos y diálogos, Pynchon avizora el desastre que Perón iniciaría a partir de la década del '40 en la Argentina vuelve a aparecer nuevamente en el tercer capítulo con otros personajes argentinos que han capturado un submarino alemán en las costas del Uruguay.
Me sorprenden notablemente los conocimientos que Pynchon tiene de Argentina, de nuestro vocabulario, incluso el lunfardo, provincias y costumbres.
Si hasta escribe sobre el Martin Fierro...
A lo largo del tercer capítulo llamado "En la zona" que es el más extenso del libro (508 páginas en mi edición de las 1.148 que tiene el libro), Slothrop va cruzándose con los personajes más extraños, locos y oníricos, como en una mezcla la de "Alicia en el país de las maravillas" con los personajes más absurdos de las novelas de Kafka.
No he leído nada parecido a "El arco iris de gravedad" que me haya desconcertado, desesperado y agobiado tanto con la excepción del "Finnegans Wake" de James Joyce.
Por momentos me sentí completamente perdido en la intención que el autor quiso darle a la novela y además parece que la narración no va hacia ningún lado sino que cae en un laberinto enloquecedor creado por Pynchon y en el que él mismo junto con Slothrop también cae.
La incoherencia parece ser el hilo conductor del argumento y el libro es demasiado denso para lectores desprevenidos.
En conclusión “El arco iris de gravedad” es un auténtico delirio de cabo a rabo y cuesta encontrarle una cohesión.
Dicen que el libro posee dos guías de lectura que ayudan a su entendimiento. Me hubiera encantado encontrarlas para ordenar un poco mejor mis ideas en semejante cantidad de páginas.
Lo disparatado, hilarante y absurdo le ganan a cualquier trama o argumento que el autor quiera darle, lo cual, sumado a la lectura de las 1.148 páginas que trae el volumen, dejan al lector realmente agotado y por momentos con ganas de revolear al libro por la ventana.
Esto no significa que los lectores que quieran abordar “El arco iris de gravedad” no lo intenten.
Sólo quiero advertirles que Thomas Pynchon no se los hará para nada fácil. Suerte…