"Pillar of Priapus" Award, 1975 for
Gratuitously Vile Scenes of Highly Perverted Sex

Priapus sculpture, Boston Museum of Fine Art

Am I unenlightened to find a Nat'l Book Award winner so repulsive?

The 1973 National Book Award winner was voted to win the 1974 Pulitzer, but the committee decided it was too offensive to win the award, or something like that. Before reading this, I thought that the Pulitzer committee must have been making a statement about moral decline and "free love” or was otherwise being a collective prude.

Now, I think WTF? The story was all over the place, but mostly repugnant by any set of morals of which I know. I have never considered myself simple, prudish or on a moral high horse, but if I earn any such description in being offended by gratuitous and repeated references to brutal rape of children by multiple men simultaneously, father-daughter incest on multiple occasions over several years beginning when the girl was 11, and by something that made me actually heave, which, to make my point I must describe, but will say this as nicely as possible: an S&M sequence in which a man was tied up and the woman defecated into his mouth and made him swallow, a scene so gross even the author acknowledged that the man had to have shots for the e coli bacteria after each such occasion.

And yet, I don't think I'm simple or a prude. I've appreciated the literary quality of books revolving around statutory rape (Lolita) and sibling incest (Ada, or Ardor). I can handle a lot. But I cannot get past the abominations listed, to appreciate, enjoy or find literary redemption in this novel. This does not mean that I ignore the reality that such things occur in this evil world. What I mean is, where do we draw the line? For me, it is at acts (albeit fictional) that make me physically sick and that civilized societies of this world—who draw criminal lines all over the map on other moral wrongs—are pretty much united in condemning and outlawing with severe and stringent punitive measures, such as sex with pre-pubescent children (and visual depictions of sex with children), and sex between parents and their children.

1 star for readers who require things like "plot" and "accessibility" in their books — silly readers!

2 stars for readers who just don't "get it".

3 stars for readers who probably also don't get it, but would rather not infuriate 1-star and 5-star readers by rating too low or too high.

4 stars for readers who value writing over narrative, plus more erections (both literal and figurative) than you can shake a stick at.

5 stars for TRUE masochists and/or readers who may just wish to appear hipper/smarter than they actually are.

I get all the criticisms this book receives, I really do, but I'm glad that it was written and I'm glad I got the chance to read it (thanks, Jenn). If writing is the ultimate act of self-pleasure, then this one certainly qualifies as masturbatory, but that's not necessarily such a bad thing and it's not as if I'd have room to talk anyway.

Still, if you gave me a box of pens and a box of tissues, and then locked me in a room with nothing else but skin mags and blank notebooks, I’d be lying if I told you that I’d run out of pens before tissues! The nice thing about writing is that you actually get to share it with other people when you’re done, which usually doesn’t go over so well with spent bodily fluids, but ideally you don’t want readers walking away from your book with the sneaking suspicion that they've just spent untold hours of their lives watching you masturbate.

Which I'm not sayin' Pynchon does; I'm just sayin'.

I've always been told that Gravity's Rainbow is one of most unfilmable books ever, but, seeing as others have somehow ended up on the big screen to my surprise, I just thought - this is before reading it mind you - that I bet it isn't as complex as people say, and could yet still end up being made.

Nope. It's completely unfilmable. I'd put my life on it. I know its been thought about in the past, but even if it did have a straightforward narrative - which it absolutely doesn't - there is just no way.

Firstly, by the end of this doorstopper of a novel, I had a pretty good idea - or at least my own interpretation of - just what the hell it all adds up to. But, I'd be lying if I said everything made sense and all the dots were joined. There came a moment where certain pieces of the multi-complex plotline started to come together, but of course, to get there, I had to get through a really tough first third or so. It was tough I can tell you, but, unlike V, it didn't infuriate the bejesus out of me, as I always had a feeling that if I stuck with it the rewards will come.

Secondly, I'd say for the writing alone, it's the best of the five Pynchon novels I've read. And whilst I did find it very funny in places - for me, Vineland is still the most fun, and the most character driven of the five - it is the darkest, most dense, most paranoid, most unsettling, most dazzling, most tragic, and most poetic. A journey into a fearful twilight zone of semi consciousness is how I'd put it. It literally felt like I was neither awake nor asleep for most of it's 900 pages. Can't think of any other book that has taken me out of my comfort space in the way this did. Some of the scenes where breathtakingly spectacular, outrageous, utterly revolting, and completely off the chart - that would be the chart of insanity - and I'm no doubt taking them to the grave. But, although I did find the whole experience great, it is problematic in terms of not being able to take everything in - I even thought about back tracking, and reading say, the last 20 to 30 pages again each time I picked it up, but in the end dismissed this idea.

For one thing, people who aren't even in the novel get more of a story than some of the actual characters that are. And that brings me on to the places. One minute we're here, then we're there, then we're .... where are we? .... er .... how on earth did we end up here? .... hang on .... wait .... where is here? .... What! .... who on earth are you? .... but we're in the Zone right? .... aren't we?
And how does an international light-bulb cartel that are having trouble in the amazon jungle trying to locate a missing light bulb from a military outpost, tie in with a polish undertaker trying to get struck by lightning in the Baltic sea? It is either very very clever or it's just plain quackers! But then again, from what I can put together, is it not both? The plot, in fact, is so clever, that I now have to label Pynchon an all out genius as well as a mad man. I bet on second reading even more of the narrative will click into place too. And that brings me to the point, like others have said, It probably needs two, maybe even three reads, to fully grasp this monumental beast. But that doesn't mean to say you can't enjoy it the first time, because I know I did.

A record breaking post-modern orgy of references, flashbacks, cultural historical facts; and fictions, scientific terminology, philosophical musings, sperm induced blather, disguises - got to love um! - ha! ha!, insulating plastic, technicians, phallic mania, African expatriates, drug dealers - Ah, so that's what Pig Bodine (V) got up to in the war, pet lemmings, heroic uprisings, daring escapes, leather clad piss and shit perversions, sado-masochistic orgasms, double triple agents, Rilke's poetry, Nazi propaganda films, rituals, schemers, espionage, narcotic fantasies, mephistophelian research, seduction - femme fatale style, pop songs, chorus girls, black market dealers, chimpanzees, streams of consciousness - brilliantly done, light bulbs - still can't quite believe that!, a fetish for death & annihilation - if one had to some up the novel in a few words then it's probably that, and one of the funniest dinner party scenes I've ever come across, amongst so much more.

Oh, and buried in there somewhere is World War II Europe, a V-2 rocket, and a guy who definitely does NOT have erectile dysfunctional issues.

It's difficult to believe that a novel this strange, complicated, and subversive was ever penned, or published, or devoured by a large (cult) audience, but thankfully, for the sake of sheer literary chutzpah, all of this is so. 'Crazy,' 'exhilarating,' 'disgusting,' 'chilling' and a thousand other adjectives would be necessary in order to fully describe it, and there is a tremendous amount of intelligence on display in the intricacies of its storytelling, its thematic layerings, and its range of knowledge spanning God only knows how many different subjects and fields. For 700-odd pages Pynchon's prose darts teasingly between the comic and the tragic, the lucid and the abstruse, the surreal and the mundane, the sacred and the profane, offering a stratospheric view of a war-ravaged, phallocentric, disorienting world wherein the human race, spurred on by its burgeoning technology and insatiable bloodlust, is launching itself perilously closer to extinction. Paranoia, suffering and death abound.

Oh, and I should probably mention that the book can be really silly and wacky, too. And that you won't be able to look at a missile, a vapor trail, a toilet, an octopus, or a light bulb the same way ever again after reading it.

Edit, 14 Sep. 2012: So. I've been thinking and talking about this book literally all year now while my Pynchonian love has been growing exponentially. Four stars it is for this maddening, wonderful, frustrating and surprising masterpiece of American literature because it has done nothing but endear itself to me the more I dwell on it. I'm leaving my review as I wrote it in January because I'm fucking lazy, okay? the vast majority of it is still true.

□ □ □ □ □

Holy crap, y'all. This book. This book! Thomas Pynchon's brain is a national treasure (albeit a kooky one), as it takes some mad skill to combine a smorgasbord of seemingly unrelated components -- among them: a giant adenoid, a metric butt-ton of intersecting conspiracies, applied physics (complete with equations that made me feel like a dimwit!), cannibalism, World War II, entropy, Plasticman, the occult, Pavlovian experiments, Mickey Rooney, light-bulb legacies, obscure '40s cultural references, disgusting English candies (is that redundant?), characters breaking into goofy songs with a frequency befitting musical theatre -- and throw them all together with a staggeringly cohesive and coherent result that's also a language-lover's dream.

My previous encounters with Pynchon are limited to one of his shortest works ("The Crying of Lot 49"), his newest offering ("Inherent Vice"), and a handful of short stories from a long-ago college lit class. I'll admit, while I've always enjoyed hanging out with the brainchildren of literature's most enigmatic figure, I was motivated to conquer "Gravity's Rainbow" for purely egotistical reasons: Many tackle the daunting tome but few reach the finish line, and I wanted to rank among the few who can count this post-modern insanity among their bookish conquests. I owe the Pynchon Wiki a great many thanks for deciphering some of the more arcane allusions tossed into the mix, otherwise I wouldn't've known what the hell was going on in more than a few instances and would have most likely abandoned the effort.

The two months I spent wading through "Gravity's Rainbow" were, indeed, punctuated by bouts of confusion and frustration. I can't remember the last time I did this much research on a book that wasn't required reading for a class. Nor can I recall a time when a work of fiction had me rereading passages and pages two or three times to make sure I knew which way was up. If not for perusing reviews by veteran Pynchon enthusiasts who offered assurances that one is not supposed to understand every nuance of this book the first time around, I probably would have thrown the novel across many rooms at various points. I came into this adventure thinking that it couldn't be that difficult and was thoroughly humbled within 20 pages.

But damn if this didn't return every drop of my hard work with a truly rewarding reading experience. Sure, I was consulting a dictionary or some kind of wikipedia every couple pages, and the breakneck discursiveness of the narrative did have me running in circles every so often. But! The inherent difficulty of this reading experience forced me to pay attention to every single word in the almost-800-page book. Demanding that kind of effort and focus absolutely made it easier for me to appreciate the kind of unusual talent that birthed this terrible and unconventional beauty. And you know what? I felt brilliant every time I understood an off-the-cuff historical reference (why, yes, I DO know why Prince Edward abdicated!) or genuinely laughed hysterically over one of the countless clever turns of phrase that made every "Just what the hell is going on here!?" moment worth the headdesking.

Pynchon's wordsmithing prowess is on full-force here (and is why I feel a little dirty giving this a paltry three stars), which is what kept me hurdling headfirst through the more-than-sometimes murky depths of his magnum opus. His penchant for veering completely off the topic did mean that I've forgotten more details than I've retained, but Pynchon's ability to polish a sentence to the point of making it seem effortlessly constructed more than compensated for that. Besides, I don't feel too badly about my inability to retain every excruciatingly minute detail because, from what I understand, half the joy of this book comes from the reread, which is partly why I couldn't justify slapping four stars on it after our first tango, especially when so much escaped my notice. Anyway. Any book that can be chock-full of made-up songs, hidden poetry and some of the most laboriously set up puns ever written appeases my inner language nerd enough to forgive any (fleetingly, in this case) less-than-enthusiastic feelings that cropped up during our long-term acquaintance. The exhaustive scope of the vocabulary Pynchon has at his command is on par with that of both his general knowledge and this book's terrain. Hell, even the nature of my readerly reactions -- outright laughter, near tears, gagging fits -- ran the gamut of physical responses.

While the stream-of-consciousness approach definitely got a little burdensome at points, it really did add so much to the story. Watching where some of these characters' minds wandered to made them seem so human and believable, which kept me caring about what was going on even when I didn't know what was going on. Pynchon does tell the story from lots of vantage points, often allowing one character to draw conclusions about another, but he also lets the reader in on what's really happening with the hundreds of people populating the story. The way that the choir of voices weaves dozens of individual plot threads into a rich tapestry of intersecting madness justifies every instance of wandering narrative.

Finally (because I'm getting tired of writing and want to go back to reading), the humor with which Pynchon writes is an absolute treat. I've never seen a writer get so much comical mileage from a well-placed "Really?" There are some flat-out ridiculous directions that the plot takes but it's really the writing itself that tickled my deranged sense of humor the hardest. I did get a serious kick out of Pynchon's preoccupation with kazoos, harmonicas and bananas, too. It made me want to start a marching kazoo band of my own, mostly because I've got a soft spot for making my own magically obscure allusions. (I'll settle for an adequate photo of the MST3K cereal novel, though.)

While all of Pynchon's novels are a mystification of the aftermath of SF/Berkeley in the late 1960s, 'the Man' of late hippie culture inflated to mythic proportions (and demystified in Inherent Vice), GR is perhaps the clearest version of this dramatic conflict in Pynchon's work, where the psychodrama of 'individual freedom' versus 'They' / 'the Man' is presented in an especially epic sort of Wagnerian / Mahlerian / Marx Brothers orchestration.

The problem with GR is simple; plotting as such is like 4/10, characterization is 0/10, but the prose is 9/10 and the symbolic-thematic structure (which reaches an almost scriptural hermeneutic depth) is 10/10. So your reaction to the novel will depend on how much you value each of these elements; I’m fine with plot-less books and even character-less books as long as the ideas/prose are impressive enough, with some exceptions, so for this reader it’s worth the stretch. (As always, I agree with Lee Klein's perspective, but I personally rate the symbolic/thematic density and prose high enough that it pushes the entire book into 4.5-star-ish territory.)

While there are many other connections that could be made with twentieth-century literature, GR is perhaps most similar to Joyce's FW in that it is (1) pitilessly, mercilessly opaque and dense, and (2) there are not anything even resembling characters or character development. I spent 760 pages reading a book that is largely about a single man, Tyrone Slothrop, and if you were to ask me, "so what did Slothrop learn?" or "How did his character develop over the course of the story?," it's like you're asking me to explain what the color green smells like. The question is absurd, meaningless, impossible; similar to HCE or Shem (in Joyce), I never once, for a single moment, thought of Tyrone Slothrop as a human being.

Supposedly the humorous bits are meant to serve as oases that enable the reader to trudge through the austere desert of Pynchon's beautiful prose, but just as Joyce's puns in FW become tedious by roughly page 7 or 8 (as Ezra Pound and all of Joyce's friends gently pointed out), Pynchon's tediously manic slapstick humor is often deeply unfunny. To be sure, it works sometimes; there are some truly amusing scenes here and there (the opening few sections of Part 2, with the casino/octopus, some of the Rocketman set pieces, various over-the-top fanciful nonsense in the final stretch of Part 4) but more often than not I would just squint at the book, bemused rather than amused, vaguely disgusted and bored by Pynchon's scatological humor. I kept thinking of Beckett's line about Proust (and kept writing it in the margins of GR): "It is a tiring style, but it does not tire the mind. One's fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor." (Crest and break of dick jokes and slapstick comedy, in this case.)

And then also, to use a Pynchonian word, the vibes of GR are just . . . bad, seriously bad vibes. It's the end of the 1960s dream, the post-1968 Nixonian hangover (the bulk of the novel was written after 1968); one long, bad acid trip, spiraling into depression and paranoia. GR has a very particular early 1970s black-pilled dystopian queasiness that you can only find in novels written at that time; it's the apotheosis of what William Gibson called the "pre-punk 70s doldrums" (see also Dhalgren and Ballard's work in this period).

In GR, the paranoia is directed at 'Them' / 'The Firm' / 'The Man' / 'The War' in an on-the-nose and mostly historically accurate critique of the industrial cartels during WW2, where IG Farben and Standard Oil, et al., formed the nucleus and precursor of what Eisenhower would, a decade later, describe as the military-industrial complex. (WW2 itself did not interrupt these partnerships; just as we see today, the Blob / the Cathedral does not care about nation-states.) The villain of GR, Blicero, not only metaphorically represents Nixon, but (as described obliquely at the end of the novel) quite literally escapes Germany and goes into the world of "presidential advisors, token intellectuals, successful academics" (p. 749) in the United States, i.e., Blicero personally ends up crushing the dreams of Pynchon and his Berkeley friends in 1968. While the thematic depth of GR is seriously impressive, this is, unfortunately, the narrow and limited moral vision of the book; Pynchon exiting his late twenties, a bleary-eyed and bitter ex-hippie, shaking his fist at the Man . . . an adolescent romanticism, vaguely embarrassing, imperious, preachy.

The Adenoid and Rilke's Harmonica

So okay -- then why am I recommending this novel, if it's so tedious and difficult? As briefly noted above, the answer is simple: (1) ridiculously good prose and (2) some of the most impressive lexical / semantic / associative / symbolic / thematic richness and depth that I have ever seen in a work of fiction.

I've never quite bought into the idea of a clear succession of 'big modernist-postmodernist novels' that critics invented in later decades, where you can supposedly find a clear through-line from Moby Dick to Ulysses to Recognitions to GR to Underworld or Infinite Jest or whichever. This is always post-hoc and never works precisely -- e.g., Gaddis never read Ulysses, as we learn from his letters, and I doubt that Pynchon had read Gaddis, though he does make sure to name-check Joyce, Borges, and Proust in GR (pp. 262, 264, 675) -- but in this case I really did find myself thinking, at least once per chapter, that GR is the clear successor to Ulysses and Recognitions purely in the sense of the seriousness and denseness of the prose/themes/symbolism. (Ulysses, as always, outstrips all of its later imitators in advance; Joyce has the symbolic depth of GR along with characters/plot -- and why not!)

As with Infinite Jest, where its greatness maybe isn't clear at first, the key rhetorical step to understand the impressiveness of GR is to compare it to its peers. What work by an American author is better than GR in the 1970s? To ask the question is just hilarious. Coover? Roth? Barth? Mailer? Barthelme? Are you ****ing kidding me lol. GR has its problems, but even the idea that some sort of navel-gazing masturbatory lit-professor bullshit like Barth's Letters or Coover's Public Burning are comparable to GR is an insult not only to Pynchon but to literature itself. Don't get me wrong, GR isn't as good as Recognitions or Ulysses, but he's the only one in the 1960s or 1970s who is even in the conversation.

Throughout GR you can clearly see that Pynchon was trying his absolute hardest, pouring his heart and mind and soul into the book, you can see the strain (and his occasional buckling under the strain); the prose is the most unabashedly poetic of his career, the themes and seriousness (despite the dark comedy) represent his most self-consciously 'high art'-ish attempt at literature, he risks pretentiousness constantly, and accordingly GR is a massive step beyond V / Lot 49, but not nearly as apparently effortless as M&D or ATD.

(Incidentally, for anyone who likes Pynchon but couldn't get through GR, Against the Day is the non-bad-acid trip version of GR -- buoyant, subtle, fun, with characters that are charmingly archetypal rather than GR's cardboard non-characters -- that combines all the best qualities of all Pynchon's other books, written by a laid-back old man in full command of his powers, rather than the intensely uneven and volatile genius of GR, though the latter is more appealing in some ways.)

* * *

So okay, what do I mean by symbolism and thematic richness? What precisely comprises the poetic interweaving of themes and prose and concepts in GR? Let's start with the massive slime monster (the Adenoid) described on pp. 14-16, the first digressive hallucinatory passage in the book; the Adenoid is destroying London, absorbing people and vehicles into its impressive gelatinous mass, and over the course of three pages Pynchon mentions (randomly, offhand) various buildings that the monster is crashing through. It's a funny scene! But when you get out a map of London in 1945 and trace the slime monster's path, it turns out that the Adenoid is moving in a perfect circle; a mandala. Why a mandala?

As Weisenberger points out, the Adenoid introduces the key motif of the novel, which isn’t mentioned explicitly for another few hundred pages; the mandala, the four quadrants of which have dozens of associative symbols throughout the book (the colors of white / black / purple / yellow, the mandala shape of the rocket fins surrounded by the circle of Rocket 00000 / 00001, etc.). The most subtle use of the mandala is the novel's unfolding according to a circular design across the novel's four parts, where historical events intersect precisely with the Christian liturgical calendar (none of which is ever mentioned by Pynchon), e.g.:

— The firing of Rocket 00000, the sacrifice of Gottfried ('God's peace') takes place at noon on Easter Sunday in 1945, which -- as occurs only a couple times per century -- also happens to be April Fool's Day that year (as we will see below, Slothrop is 'the Fool' of the Tarot deck, and thus metaphysically associated with Rocket 00000)

— Similarly, the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in our historical reality, as well as in GR, took place on the Feast of the Transfiguration (Sunday, August 6, 1945), which is similarly equivocal in its being both redemptive and destructive (Christ's transfiguration = a blaze of illumination followed by a white cloud; the bomb at Hiroshima = a blaze of illumination followed by a white cloud)

— Enzian's firing of Rocket 00001 (a repetition and counterpart to Rocket 00000, as one to zero, autumn to spring, black to white), takes place on September 14, 1945, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which itself aligns with a whole network of symbolism and language having to do with the Hereros, etc.

The convergence and ironic interconnection between the cult of the Rocket (European paganism / death cults / etc., with Blicero and Katje et al.) and the Christian liturgical calendar, comedically incarnated by Slothrop, create a hidden mandala. The fact that Pynchon has hidden this thematically aligns, in a meta sense, with the nature of the mandala itself; in the novel we only see the arch/rainbow symbolism, which he places everywhere. (Similarly, rainbows themselves are actually circles, where their circular nature is typically hidden from our earthly perspective.) This also aligns with the constantly reinforced theme of the arch/bow shape as degeneration, versus the mandala as completion and perfection; the rocket (the arc of which is gravity's rainbow) is destruction, the mandala is life. The tension of pagan and Christian symbolism is also found in all the references to Slothrop as a holy fool, both in the Christian sense and as the eighth incarnation of Vishnu (the trickster, Krishna); Weissman is the sacrificial Lamb (dying in his Imoplex-G shroud in Rocket 00000, on Easter Sunday), but is also symbolically associated with Kalki, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, a final transformation of material being back into its divine potentiality, pure light (Weissman = white man), and similar Kabbalistic themes. We see this as well with Frau Erdmann as avatar of the White Goddess and also the Shekinah of Kabbalistic myth, Katje as the angel of death and Rilke's tenth-elegy angel, etc. etc.

Speaking of Rilke, we read in Locke's NYT review:

Totally adrift in the mountains of Europe, strung out too far on his paranoid quest for the secret rocket ever to reassemble an identity, Slothrop reaches down into a purling mountain stream to find the same harmonica [from hundreds of pages earlier], the water flowing freshly through its mouth holes, bending blue notes of water, and he thinks -- or rather Pynchon inserts -- the last peaceful pastoral lines of Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus." Then Slothrop sees the Rainbow linking earth and sky and stands crying, at peace, with nothing in his head, "just feeling natural." He has completely dropped out. This use of Rilke and the Rainbow is deliberately opposed to the Rilke and Rainbow of Blicero's rocket. Such symmetry is dazzling.

This is indeed dazzling! But the depth of symbolism in this throwaway passage goes even deeper. See Weisenberger:

The narrative here recalls his miraculous recovery of the long-lost blues harp, which fell down the toilet (in a vision) at Boston's Roseland Ballroom in 1939. Slothrop's harmonica must be a Hohner because the company holds a virtual lock on the market . . . Slothrop's blues harp, like any other, would have been manufactured at the company's Black Forest factory in Trossingen, north of Zurich. (Indeed, this must be the "harmonica factory" where Squalidozzi and Gerhardt von Goll plan the filming of Martin Fierro on p. 384). In addition, Slothrop's Hohner is a sign of his identity with Orpheus, the mythic harp player and dismembered holy fool. . . . yet another of the novel's etymological puns: the German verb Hohnen means "to deride or ridicule"; thus we have a Hohner, one who sneers or derides, a figure in satire. The Hohner blues harp thus emerges as an instrument of Slothrop's satirically transformed preterition. . . . Finally, the Hohner sound holes, numbered ten through one, high through low, recall the significance of ten in Kabbalistic myths and of the rocket with its countdown from ten. With its rainbow of notes, the Hohner blues harp may thus be read as a narrative counterpart to the rocket.

How precisely does Slothrop symbolically represent the holy fool, the 'null' of the tarot deck? It turns out that Pynchon has worked out the astrology very carefully; on p. 624, in a random tangent, Pynchon writes: "Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them . . ." If you do the math; that day was August 6, 1945, and thus Slothrop's birthday would fall on March 21, 1918. Weisbenberger explains:

Slothrop will have been born on 'the great cusp', the 'green equinox’. The young ram of Aries is characterized by the assertion of individual being, the 'I am.' This would correspond with the great care Pynchon has taken over the Pisces/Aries cusp and explain why he also highlighted the birthdays of Wernher von Braun and Stanley Livingstone (p. 588). . . . For Slothrop's natal horoscope, we can use noon and the coordinates of Lennox, Massachusetts, as a basis for computing his sidereal time of birth. The sun entered Aries at exactly 12:03 p.m., or noon, on March 21, 1918. This means that the Medium Coelum or midheaven of Slothrop's chart would be a perfect zero degrees of Aries; the celestial equator would be directly overhead at birth, the sun's declination at zero. . . . in sum, Slothrop's horoscope would demonstrate the motif of opposites held in equipoise that readers have noted in others of the novel's mandala images. Like the Fool, the null card in the Tarot deck, Slothrop is astrologically zeroed out.

This underscores Slothrop's symbolic association with Rocket 00000 (the launch of which counts down to zero, and was fired at noon, in alignment with his horoscope), etc., etc.

* * *

I could go on, but at this point I want to emphasize to the reader that these brief passages about a massive slime monster, or Slothrop picking up a harmonica in a stream, or the facetious passage about ten thousand Slothrops, are random throwaway lines in a 338,390-word novel, where Pynchon gives zero indication in the text of the depth of their symbolic significance. Without poring over a map of London in 1945 you would not know that the slime monster moved in a mandala shape; without a calendar of Catholic feast days in 1945 you would not know how the novel's key events align thematically with these feast days; without knowing the history of harmonica production in Western Europe (and the precise ten-note structure of the harmonica itself, which is never mentioned by Pynchon) you would not know the full significance of the Hohner; without literally carrying out an astrological reading of Tyrone Slothrop's birth chart (?!?) you would never know that he was astrologically zeroed out . . . and this is not even to mention the overt beauty/symbolism/poetry that is clear from a superficial reading of GR, all of which is equally impressive. This handful of examples that I've mentioned are just scratching the surface of the hidden symbolism/depth in GR, which, again, can be found in just a few random lines of text, roughly 0.01% of the novel.

The historical research involved in the novel is equally mind-boggling. Similar to Ulysses, where you can track the passage of a particular cloud across Dublin in different chapters to see precisely what time it is (as Kenner points out, Joyce carefully tracked this based on the actual wind patterns in Dublin on June 16, 1904), in GR every random detail about the moon, the weather, songs playing on the radio, movies playing in theaters, etc., are all completely historically accurate and enable us to pinpoint the action down to the hour or occasionally the minute (Pynchon's main source was the Times of London). Similarly, you can't really give Pynchon credit for this precisely, but the surreal historical coincidences in terms of Pynchon's own biography are kind of bananas; e.g., Pynchon’s direct ancestor, William Pynchon, not only founded the Roxbury suburb in the famous ghetto scene (on p. 62), but was also assigned the task of supervising the initial purchasing of weapons for the American colonists in 1629, which was the beginning, in its most rudimentary form, of the American military-industrial complex -- i.e., the villain of GR.

[REVIEW IS COMPLETED AS FIRST COMMENT! SORRY LOL]

From the vault of James O. Incandenza.

Plangent Cries of Unemployed Tragedian and the Autoerotic Asphyxiation of Necky Undulates. Year of the Dunning-Kreugar Personal Test Kit. Rotoscoped hands superimposed on complex interpretive sulcus skating on alternating images of wartime London & Germany, subliminally laced with third image which reads; Are you in the Zone? w/ narration by Machine Learning Reconstructed Mitch Hedberg; 35mm; interminably looping; ultraviolet w/ 4D pornographical substrate embedded with oscillophotography of lower dimensional genitalia; silent w/narration. Limited release contingent upon eating six peach seeds and surviving under intense supervision; By Distributed Idea Suppression Complex Ltd.

“Pynchon’s (Steve Buscemi) drug addled demiurge coalesces in deep grooves of cerebral tissue as disembodied phalanges. Text appears; ‘Insurgency of Fingers’. Animatronic, phallo-centric, bratwurst susurrus in background like meaty palm fronds. Digits worm through the seat of consciousness like an enormous wad of chewing gum birthing maggots. Kneading gobs thought-matter into various shapes of zoological interest. Pointsman, (Mike Tyson) at the sound of a bell, allows a pigeon to take flight from his gnarled hands. Picks up unidentified substance (actual hog brains) and carefully sculpts a giraffe of slimy sulcus (actual hog brains) and gangling ganglia (actual hog brains) from undifferentiated lump of actual hog brains. Narrator (Machine Learning Reconstructed Mitch Hedberg) nonchalantly expresses the following, with trademark idiosyncrasies of cadence and timing:

“Symbolizing the need to rise above the low hanging fruits of naked entertainment to reach, with glistening purple tongue, irregularly shaped vessels with vibrant skins stretched to bursting by non-Euclidean carbohydrates. Sweet flesh slowly accrued around a central irritant, like a pearl, a cloud, or peach stone. The story’s juicy chromosomal tartness, through digressive selection, codified in codons. Sequences of salivary delights now perfected in the pulpy exoskeleton worn by its true Art, its homunculus, an Enchiridion of Erections, an Obelisk of Obscenity, a Paean of Peckers.

Cut to papier-mâché heart, resting atop a podium of gilded pubic hair, rhythmically piping Nitrous oxide onto the set through bong aorta.

—First level of magnification reveals the macro-pulp of excised text from Gravity’s Rainbow, consisting of approximately twenty seven pages of worty-dirds, chewed up by Slothrop (Garry Busey) with granola bars and toilet paper and spat into the waiting palms of Lyle Bland of Boston (Anthony Hopkins) reinforced with textiles, and bound by adhesives of black tar heroin, and spider silk. Ventricles evince shredded bits of memetic carriers: tits, clits, fuck, fucking, masturbate, buttocks, breasts, sperm, erect erections, cock, cunt, thigh, semen, and so on.

—Second level of magnification reveals network of plant fibers forming mosaic of Mitch Hedberg (Johnny Depp) channeling narrator (Machine Learning Reconstructed Mitch Hedberg) and his dulcet tones being carried aloft by continued bratwurst susurrus, in a violent physical analog: fighting the abstract force of manufactured jingoism with a rattan bo-staff (Emaciated Hulk Hogan) alongside stalwart ally; horror-movie devilfish name of Grigori (tentacles, starting from the top and proceeding clockwise: Shia LeBeouf, Keanu Reeves, a kneeling Dolph Lundgren, the ghost of Richard Pryor (Dave Chappell), Chow Yun-Fat, Jean Reno, and Captain Blicero disguised as Mads Mikkelsen (Mads Mikkelsen).

—Third level of magnification reveals images of charred cities sashaying through the hot refracted air of recently bombed environs with the serpentine manner of mirages. Pustules of molten skin belch their distended contents into stygian updrafts. Onomatopoeias of laughter dangle from wires and invite the viewers contemplation.

“Are you the giraffe or the Hyperboloid Honeydew? It is a matter of great symbolic (and scatalogical) interest that the consumer’s role in this symbiotic relationship is to find the sugars so irresistible that they can’t help but carry the seeds, to later defecate the beginnings of new growth. And you will choke on corrugated pit and want to violently wretch. But it will take exactly six of them to kill you.”

—Fourth level of magnification reveals Katje Borgesius having escaped the thrall of the evil Blicero, and exfiltrated to Goodreads to provide this review, against the almost uniform, but thankfully irregularity studded, cosmic microwave background radiation. She begins before she ends:

Have you ever, while colloquially (and irrevocably) ‘blown in the creek’ by fermented fruit sequestered in a prison toilet for an undisclosed amount of time, tried to erase your lexical framework and think thoughts without utilizing the conceptual prosthetics of language? I can personally assure you that penitentiary hooch is not sufficient, comrade. Try DMZ. Or, better yet, do not forsake the precious gift of abstraction. Instead, saturate your synapses with images of rockets and Uncle Reamus, juxtaposed with such brilliance that you’ll find yourself fully erect while wheezing. I’m not trying to be cocky here. Just pulsating the facts. You may shafta flog yourself until you’re satisfied you’ve shot it. Keep at it, you don’t have to be a Blue-Veined Aristocrat to understand it. It’s normal to feel like you’re not getting it, and you’ll peer at the remaining pages and think; “Boy, I’ve got a schlong way to go.” Is it a HARD book? Skin-flutely! It’s a bit of a Belly-Ruffian. But, as numerous people shaft said, the first Womb Broom is the most difficult. This one is massively front loaded. Thrust me. Don’t spindle too much time agonizing over the length, or how much is really penetrating. Try to prick up this book glans expectations and just enjoy the Membrum Virile. The spasms of psychological insight which can be teased out. The messy explosions of knowledge which can be cleaned from every page. If I ham-bone what I ham-bone now, I’d give myself this Clam Hammer as swell, again and again and again. But don’t chafe yourself, get on top of it and take control. No more autopilot. There are many resources you can use as lubricant. You may have to look up some German. Don’t approach it like The Bone Ranger. Get into it! Don’t just lay there all passive! Connect with others who have bred it. This is a unique piece of Jurassic Pork. It vacillates rapidly between passages that are easy to swallow and ones that rebuff your comprehension like scrambled images of cream filled doughnuts, but if you stay focused, eventually the disparate pieces will resolve into a Bull Dog Eating Mayonaise, and that, my friend, makes all the difference. Cum back to it. It’s worth it. Take ‘ol One Eye to the Optometrist. No matter how much you’ve gotta pound the punnani pavement to get there. Avoid, at all costs, crashing the custard truck prematurely. Let him get some stankie on the hang down. If he gets rowdy you might have to test the suspension right then and there. Open the gates of Mordor on the myopic bastard, and if he takes that as a sign to go knuckle deep in tuna town, smack the salmon, and tell him: “I’m not here to stir up skirt yogurt! It’s time to Smash Pissers and burp the worm in the mole hole!” That’ll get him fired up for some Chesterfield Rugby, by God. He’ll be doing squat thrusts in the cucumber patch.

“Kebulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, ‘“ The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally re-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. The System may or may not understand it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when it’s addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide…”

By far this was the most unique reading experience. There were moments of absolute brilliance (that paragraph above remains to be a favorite for me) sandwiched between a bunch of tedious moments. I found The Zone the hardest area personally. I also HATE all the over-sexualization of women in this book. Absolutely detestable and not needed like some people claim, in my opinion.

Edit:
I finished this book this Summer. Every once in a blue moon I’ll go back to a book to re-rate. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

I’m moving this up one star as I do continually think about it. As much pain as it was to read much of the book there we’re seriously some intensely wonderful bits I’ve been chewing on. Pynchon is truly wonderful. Dare I say I’m actually looking forward to reading this in the future?

Quando ero piccolo giocavo spesso con le biglie, non ne avevo molte, ma una quindicina circa sì e la mia biglia preferita era quella che troviamo qui in copertina in primo piano. Ricordo che la guardavo così da vicino che quasi quasi mi girava la testa e avevo un senso di disorientamento, ecco questa sensazione l'ho avuta per tutta la durata di questo romanzone, un libro davvero fuori di testa.
Ora immaginiamo di essere davanti al calderone di Panoramix, quello dove il druido preparava la mitica pozione magica per Asterix e i suoi amici. Ecco ora prepariamo la pozione magica di questo libro: partiamo con una bella mestolata di Storia, poi seguita da una cucchiaiata di Matematica ed una di Fisica e Chimica e mescoliamo un po', ora è il momento di una dose generosa di surrealità, grottesco e ironia nera e riprendiamo a mescolare, quando il tutto sta per bollire, ci aggiungiamo dell'erotismo flambè (quanto basta, molto direi) ed infine una vagonata di scrittura stupefacente. Eccoci qui il capolavoro è servito, bevetene tutti!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouhYm...

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”
-WERNHER VON BRAUN
The novel begins with this quote from von Braun, the father of the V-2 rocket. If you believe in a soul, knowing that energy cannot be created or destroyed and that the entropy of the universe increases over time, at death the soul will be released into the universe as energy, albeit more disorganized. Near the end of the novel there is this description of breaking free of the earth’s orbit and finding freedom.
“This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape….”

The V-2 rocket streaks across the sky and by the time you are aware of it, it is simply too late. The rocket has stuck its target already, the decoupling of cause and effect. This fear brings on a paranoia of being targeted and a distrust in those in charge.
“Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”

I found Gravity’s Rainbow quite a difficult read, even with additional aids. This novel also forced me to reconsider the scientific principles I learned earlier as a student.
“…a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond….That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life….Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities…how he came to love that clarity….”
Hilarious. Needless to say, this book was easily one of my favorite reads of the year.



From The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher-
“Gravity’s Rainbow was almost titled Mindless Pleasures.”


From Vanishing Point by David Markson-
“I. G. Farben. To Commandant, Auschwitz:
In contemplation of experiments with a new soporific drug, we would appreciate your procuring for us a number of women.”

3.5/5

What the hell sure

GR is a cult rite of passage. You have literary aspirations? Want a literary badge of honour? Voila. Expire Perspire aspire on this. So the bon ton do. And having circumnavigated this literary Everest, victorious, but a little delirious and oxygen deprived, the finish liners now take positions for a whole new battle. The Battle of the Bulge, PoMo style. The trenches are drawn, and to the left of the house we have the Disbelievers, the Lost, the ones who just ‘don’t get it’. To the right: the righteous Chosen who have seen the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow. And both sides have something to say: never have I see such ferment over a book on the web as this: people in binary arms, blogging to an impervious Ethernet, sometimes with a following but mostly alone in their blog code, pontificating, explaining, justifying, redeeming, reliving, applying, parsing.....shaking a fist at the heavens and reliving this monumental journey. Why do they do it? These hundreds of blog voices out there, with no one to hear.....But the pitch has fervored me: mob rule and all that. (funny that: mob rule where the mob online is millions of silos. But memetic ones. Go figure. Astral projection?). Well, they we do it because of entitlement rights. You know, first you sow (which is never easy), then you reap. Its reaping time. Anyone who has made this journey deserves a voice. Even if that bloomin’ tree falls where no one can hear it.

So now I have something to say as well. Which is: my crop failed. I’m going hungry this winter. In like I planted poppy seeds but I realise I needed wheat after all. Cause I’ve been having poppy seed bonanzas for a long time now and I’m peaking: I’m dead hungry and Gravitys Rainbow is just a’ ghost in the machine’.

To begin somewhere, I call my 13 year old niece to the stand. I thought to introduce her to classic films a year ago, in order that she builds a ‘repertoire’ of cultural significa as she goes along. So, Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ it was. Deemed an 18 certificate, but hey: how about I take on the role of ‘risque’ aunt? This girl laughed. ‘But, its where it all started’, I protested, still coiled with the unbound tension of a twenty year hiatus in horror. ‘For you’, she replied, and instantaneously I was a fossil. Not a daredevil of cultural insights.

Same here. If you are an experimental 70s virgin, and you chance on this: it might work.

I say 70s, because here is an era which stamped and oeuvre, which defined a movement (no prunes involved), which parralleloparametered an expressiveness which earned a trademark and it is then: give or take a few years. This stretch of mid sixties to mid eighties: it has its own musk. I’ve read enough now to recognise its distinct quaff a mile away. Frenetic stylistic posturing, sometimes levied by precise historical qualia, fragmented and proud, discombobulated and victorious about it, linguistic conundrums and stylistics perforations postulating as streams of supercalifragilisticexpialidousnesness, give me a text I’ll give you a time line!

Have I not read Hod Broun, Steve Katz, John Brunner, David Ohle, Virgil Pinera, Mano, Topor, Enard, John Hawkes, Vonegutt, Hellerman and Jaroslav Hasek, the latter two not 70s but feeders into Pynchon just the same, Kavan, Delany, etc ad nauseam. Hell, even the Good Soldier Sveik is one step too far.

After all of this, how is one to ’discover’ Gravity’s Rainbow? My ‘Psycho’ of PoMo. Faugh! I’ve been robbed! Too late to the ball for a good time.