Gravity's Rainbow often tops lists of challenging books, but it was a lot more accessible than I expected. Sure it's long and there are sections that are hard to pull meaning from (if they have any meaning at all), but it has a narrative, it's often hilarious, and the ideas are just so interesting. I think Pynchon wants you to get what he's doing; he's on your side. If he hides anything, he's hiding it for you, not from you. But there are just so many layers to this book. It's seemingly impossible to get it all on the first read and without some kind of supplemental material. Even then, people are still talking about what Gravity's Rainbow means, so I guess you never fully get it.

Paranoia is a central theme. There are systems of power and secret societies controlling everything. Even when you think something is revolutionary or countercultural, in the end, you'll find it's in the pocket of these shadowy systems. If someone starts out against the powers behind everything, they'll eventually be corrupted by those powers and end up in their service. After all, "everyone you least suspect is in on it." Or maybe that's not the way things work. Maybe you're just paranoid. But if things really do work that way, you have to be paranoid to see it. And if you're paranoid, maybe you're seeing things that aren't really there.

Gravity's Rainbow takes place during the last few months of World War 2. But it really seems to be about the 1960's. Pynchon is exploring the established culture and the emerging counterculture's reaction to it. Is this movement really a liberating one? What happens if you take its ideas to their extremes? Is it an essential change or just a change of degrees; are they building something new or just drawing the lines in different places?

Those are things I picked up on, but there's so much more to Gravity's Rainbow. Even if I don't know much I know enough to know how much I missed.

One interesting fact about the book: In 1974, Gravity's Rainbow was up for the Pulitzer Prize. The jury for fiction voted for it unanimously. But the Pulitzer Advisory Board overruled them, and instead of forcing them to choose another book, they decided not to award the prize for fiction that year! Gravity's Rainbow was so controversial that the Pulitzer Prize board decided that not awarding a prize in 1974 was better than awarding it to Gravity's Rainbow. And I mean, I kinda get it. It's dark, it's vulgar, it's offensive, and unrelenting in those aspects. But it also couldn't be a better reaction to Gravity's Rainbow. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the kind of reception Pynchon would have hoped for if it wasn't such an unreasonable hope.

At 902 pages, Gravity’s Rainbow is certainly no walk in the park. However when you plug in headphones and listen to the ambient soundscapes of Robert Rich’s Trances/Drones album, you’ll likely be reading one hundred pages a day. Shit, that’s what reading is all about isn’t it? In this case, it’s getting stuck into a sprawling, dense, comical, self-aware, psychedelic, terrifying, mind-numbing novel of precognition, phallic rocketry, parabola and paranoia. This is why there is literature: to read novels like this. Gravity’s Rainbow is quite simply an experience.

n  “A screaming comes across the sky…”n Set in the phantasmagoric landscape of Europe during the final stages of World War II, amidst a huge cast of characters and subplots, we follow the adventures of Tyrone Slothrop, an American soldier who seems to have a hidden talent that involves erections and rockets. Part of the novel’s difficulty stems from the constant digressions, distractions and subplots dominating the story. These subplots share interconnecting themes consistent with the Slothropian satire. There’s a Russian intelligence officer, whose mission might involve more than what the KGB is interested in, Roger Mexico’s investigations into the rocket bombings in London, a Dutch spy, stoners, a psychotic Major, a killer octopus, an experimental parapsychological facility named ‘The White Visitation’, Pavlovian conditioning, a German officer who manages the A4 rocket project… This list could go on for pages… seriously, it’s that vast.

n  “I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in The World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever- though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power… We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests...”n

Gravity’s Rainbow seems to express an anti-authoritarian, seemingly anarchistic stance, in a paranoid world of distractions, false identities, conspiracy theories, espionage and comic action. Shadow government, the Syndicate, the Elite, the Establishment or whatever you want to call it are ominously portrayed as They, Them or Those in scenes. Nobody feels in total control of themselves throughout the novel, whether philosophically, politically or sexually. They seem predestined to be slaves of the System. It’s a lifelong Masonic plot undertaken since the days of the Founding Fathers. While the novel is a satire and a farce in many moments, this is as dark and terrifying as it gets. This can happen in the middle of a sentence and you feel it. It’s a powerful feeling, which almost makes you feel the need to look over your shoulder from time to time. It’s quite overwhelming.

So Gravity’s Rainbow seems to be speaking of a world devoid of individuality and free-will. Pynchon’s Slothrop seems to be a man vaguely aware of his own futility, amidst his comical adventures. This unknown force or control is over his shoulders throughout the novel. In a conversation with Katje, Enzian states:

n  “You are meant to survive… You’re free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be… I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to know. That’s why your story is the saddest of them all.”n

After all, who is in real control of himself? Other characters laugh off the possibility of their free-will, shades of Schopenhauer, due to their consciousness of other things and their experiences in space, time and causality. Political control seems to be an illusion to Pynchon, or perhaps Pynchon, straight outta the counterculture, is jumping on the bandwagon of philosophical anarchism. There seem to be characters plucked right out of the late sixties and dropped into Pynchon’s Zone: Hippies, stoners, dopers and counterculture anarchists pop in and out of the novel and distract the reader with drug-induced conversations, senseless chatter on classical music, drugs and paranoia. A deliberate anachronism on behalf of the author? World War II might be Pynchon’s Vietnam War, a war he reportedly was against from an American standpoint. Or perhaps he is satirising the whole counterculture movement that this novel seems so much a part of. The Byron the Bulb story, as bizarre and surreal as it is, is far from a distraction however, as it is a powerful parable on our individual nature and release from political power.

And so what is the ultimate high? The Rocket of course. The Rocket is a call to God, a rise from the crumbling Earth to the heights of the heavenly kingdom. With the help of Impolex G, a fictional plastic that can become scientifically erect, there is a secret Rocket project that may or may not be a parable for escaping the Samsāra of our modern day existence. It’s the Rocket project that can take you to the places where the white stars hang. Go ahead, achieve that n  "pure, informationless state of signal zero."n However, Gravity is always present and the Rocket will be under the influence of Gravity. Life is a parabola…

n  "We don't have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It's the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart."n

друге перечитування+редагування+коментування+написання післямови - докладніше про роман буде в ній - цілих 55 тисяч знаків :)
вдруге вже читаєш ніби геть інший текст, коли знаєш персонажів і головні теми всієї прози Пінчона. наскільки він майстерно об'єднав у своєрідний гіпертекст усю свою творчість - фрази, образи, люди, теми вільно мандрують у його романах/оповіданнях/есеях/передмовах - ось приклад генія, який може втримати багатошарову конструкцію-айсберг з міфологічними, реліг��йними, історіософськими, науковими, філософськими, літературними контекстами+божевільна гра слів (цілі епізоди будуються заради однієї кумедної фрази)+купа кіно- і телеалюзій+специфічний гумор=можна все життя читати тільки його й не втомлюватися щоразу знаходити щось нове.
мрію, що колись він увесь буде українською - оце зараз готується третя книга (усього їх поки 9)

I needed to read this a third time (a new and "clean" text, without my wife's and my own histrionic marginalia, BUT alongside my clipboarded notes/extracts/charts from the first and second readings AND the companion) to make certain I wasn't incorrectly remembering that it is without question the greatest novel. I wasn't, it is. There is inexhaustible depth here, slapstick fun and political prophecy, an apex in the arc(h[e])-function of language and bone-shatteringly cold insight into the limitless propensity for self-destruction, despite the clearest warnings and the easiest opportunities to simply not do it. Beyond the hallucinatory shenanigans, technical specs, and sundry mindless pleasures, there lies a realm of poetics so compelling and frightening, it is (in unison with DeLillo's stunned silence at the end of Falling Man) "like nothing in this world," or as Pynchon puts it at a precise moment of Erwartung so gravid only your asshole shields you from spontaneous inside-outedness, "the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple." Gravity's Rainbow is thus a realistic historical document--ala ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Three times in 17 years, everyone should be so lucky. I've worked-through it under Bushit, Obummer, and Tramp. Could I ever--do I need to?!--lucidly articulate that the tropes of paranoia, homecoming, and mastery are herein presented as veritable horizons of existence? In form that leaves one speechless, awestruck, and traumatized? There's plenty of that, y'know. From the purview of the Rocket, I have simply been passed over. I have heard its shrill call time and again, I have no reason to expect 17 more years for anybody. We don't call it War anymore, not over here, but somehow a Weird Death will devised for Us. You never hear the one that gets you. A ripe old age is the luxuriant privilege of those who've most profitably plundered the Earth and imagine themselves protected. Boomers, zoomers, preterite, finally united in death, the tragically predictable solidarity of "too late." Whatever crumpled joys you can pry from the stingy fist of post-post-post-contemporaneity, count the cold comfort in the last breath of Gravity's Rainbow--"The Elect will not survive, either"--as One, Beyond the Zeros, somewhere over the--