Discussion - Week Eight - Gravity's Rainbow - Part Four, pp. 816 - 902 (688 - 776)

[Jim]

This discussion covers Part Four, pp. 816 – 902 (688 – 776)


An orangutan and a blonde transvestite walk into a bar. The orangutan taps Slothrop on the ass and hands him a bomb – stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

…And so we’re in the final pages of the rocket’s parabola. Two coulda-been kamikazes watch Kenosho’s thrashing seizure. Slothrop sees a phallic vision on a scrap of newspaper. The toilets are under Their control. Ichizo almost gives Takeshi the Hotchkiss of Death. Imipolex G gets a stiffy. Tchitcherine’s haunting is nothing more than a history lesson. Roger and Bodine have a gross-out party Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling. Geli searches for her man while Gottfried and Blicero talk of the moon. Enzian leads his people (and 00001) along the interface of East and West. Bodine sings a song of blood. Kazoos and dopers kavort am Der Platz. Weissmann lays his cards on the table. Zhlubb cruises the Santa Monica freeway. Gottfriend ascends. The Rocket falls.

[Ellen]

Well, thanks all. I did it. I finished GR. I am thrilled (except for the nagging feeling I should begin re-reading immediately). The first sentence of the book was an omen-there are so many passages of such poetic beauty, such first-rate (meaning, I suppose, agreeing with me) political satire/analysis, that contrast the incomprehensible, scientific (as well as the occasionally outright gross & disgusting)-what a roller coaster of a read! A fun house full of mirrors (of self & country). A book full of characters (& yet oddly without people).

A worthy follow read to Recognitions.

I think I have to read some garbage (well, nordic noir) to shake out my brain muscles.

Also, I'm headed off to Santa Fe for 5 days (a dream come true) followed by (a nightmare come true) a return to work. Talk about roller coaster! So I think I will see you again in Infinite Jest after I finish The Instructions (I'm half-thru & as I recall it's hilarious but not terribly difficult).

Although Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is sitting here by the desk looking up at me sadly. I may have to give in.

But first, I better pack!

[Jim]

Ellie wrote: "Well, thanks all. I did it. I finished GR. I am thrilled (except for the nagging feeling I should begin re-reading immediately). The first sentence of the book was an omen-there are so many passage..."

It was quite a roller coaster ride, wasn't it? Glad you finished the ride!

This is going to sound blasphemous, but now that it's finished, was Gravity's Rainbow a great book, or just a good book? If we hadn't read it, would it have mattered?

What I've been wrestling with since we finished is whether or not GR is famous for the creativity and marvelous prose of Pynchon, or if it is famous for what(ever) it is trying to communicate? Did I learn anything? Or did I just attend a well-written freak show? Is Pynchon commenting on the ultimate corruption of ultimate power or is he just pointing a finger?

I haven't got any answers yet. Maybe I'll have to re-read next year and see if my perceptions change.

[Ellen]

I don't know if reading GR "mattered" but it really worked my brain muscles, even developed some new ones, I think. Any book that forces me to learn new ways of reading is, to me, an important book for me to have read.

Also, I'm not sure GR is a "good" book-if it's not great, then I'm not sure what to "grade" it as. I think it is great, like Dickens-sprawling, enormous, big themes, big range, some things done brilliantly, some...not so well. And politically very dead-on.

[Jim]

Ellie wrote: "I don't know if reading GR "mattered" but it really worked my brain muscles, even developed some new ones, I think. Any book that forces me to learn new ways of reading is, to me, an important book..."

Yes, all of what you say is true. I suppose what I'm ruminating about is whether or not there is, for lack of a better term, redemption in this book. Or maybe hope. And maybe there isn't any hope. Maybe what GR communicates is that human life is suffering and struggle and then you die, which we all know to be true based on empirical observation of human life. And maybe what I couldn't find yet in GR is does Pynchon leave any space for us to want to continue to struggle or is he just pointing and saying "Look at what a downer all of this is." Maybe what I wanted was something that makes me want to continue on despite the struggles. Woolf, Joyce, Gaddis, Cortazar, - they left space for hope - but I haven't located that space in GR.

BTW, I liked the book and will re-read it, but there's this uneasiness sitting in my mind about GR. Does any of this make sense?

[Mosca]

Listening to your conversation, I am so grateful that you both are expressing the unease I've always felt about this book. You both have clarified, for me, the in-articulate questions that have stuck with me for a long time. But an observation has shaken itself loose from the mental cobwebs that clutter the recesses of my raggedy old mind.

The book compels us to ask: "Well, what's the point? It's all so FUCKING corrupt! They have us in a bind. The rocket is pointed at ME! And it's coming down."

But Pynchon's last two words are really as powerful as his first six. "Now everybody--" We are now expected to sing along (Follow the bouncing ball:) with yet another of his ridiculous "poetic" ditties. In spite of the horrific truth, we shall all now sing together in celebration of the ridiculous, indestructible, consciousness of the present moment!

The book, throughout, leads the reader through some of the most extraordinary prose descriptions I have ever read. These are interwoven through some of the most obscene descriptions and situations, also I have ever read. This book poses some frightening questions, while presenting the solutions in the most spectacularly prosaic and obviously in-your-face manner. The problems are right now on top of us--and eternal. The solution is RIGHT NOW--and eternal. Oh my God!! Will you look at that sunset!!

There are passages in Waiting for Godot that are impossible to describe their power to anyone who has not experienced the overwhelmingly tedious experience of the play's uncompromising cynicism. But while the two lost fools, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot in a maniacal endless circle, they entertain themselves (and the audience)in a series of hilarious and ridiculous ploys not unlike Laurel and Hardey. And as they await hopelessly, the precious insanity of the present moment slips by them--eternally.

The same is true for Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon crushes us with the awful truth, while he entertains us with the momentous madness of RIGHT NOW.

Oh God, this might actually make sense.

Yuk Yuk I think somebody just farted!!!

Oh my God, Will you look at that sunset!!!!

Now everybody--

[Ellen]

I agree that GR feels pretty hopeless-for me, I put a lot of that feeling back into how I felt in 1973-a time when, what with Nixon & Vietnam & all I remember feeling very hopeless. It's odd, since I wouldn't say that things have gotten better, but I must have changed-I no longer feel so hopeless.

The world which Pynchon describes is pretty hopeless, I think. Not only do you live & then die but there is very little joy in the moment. That is where I disagree with the gestalt (if you will) of the book: I find whatever joy we have in life is in the moment & there are many more of those moments, at least in my life, than in Pynchon's world.

The Recognitions also presented a fairly desolate world view. The difference, for me anyway, is that Gaddis created characters who were interesting and alive and Pynchon is not so much interested in characterization. His people are like Punch & Judy puppets, given some general distinguishing traits and then put out on the stage. Without the feeling of individual lived human life, the world becomes to me much darker. It may just be the distractions of individuals and their self-created worlds, but without that there is only the broad outlines of life and society & lots of theory & comment.

I hope I made some sense-I shouldn't really try to think while I'm working. My job today makes me feel like Pynchon's universe is a bunch of laughs. Hardly anything is as painful as ordinary life.

Or, I suppose, as joyful.

[Mosca]

Ellie said:

"Hardly anything is as painful as ordinary life.

Or, I suppose, as joyful. "


YES!!!

[Martin]

Experiencing Pynchon’s GR is luxurious. The flow of Slothrop’s West to East Odyssey achieves a certain middle path that is neither serious, nor comical; neither narrative, nor chaotic; neither this nor that.

It is a wunnerful tale that presages the post WW II world (that’s us), with all its uncertainties, in spite of attempts to dispel them with advances such as IT analytics, psychology, intelligence, on and on and on.

Yet, phenomena, whether missiles or Islamic State, seem regularly to be preceded by impact before the explanatory data arrives. It’s the nature of the rocket and other phenomena, especially those rooted in technology and its associated thinking, of the modern world. Narrative no longer anticipates the present and future. On the contrary, an argument can be made that the future, in the form of the impact of phenomena, arrives before the present, or re-cognizing the phenomena.

It’s the way the mind works, you know.

Case in point; dreams presage events, not unlike Jung’s work. (Favorite was a client of Jung’s who was high up in a European country’s government plagued by a nightmare that he was rushing to catch a train that ended in a sense of foreboding. Do I have to tell you the guy died in a train wreck after barely making the train?)

For all of this, though, the quality that stands out in my mind is the compassion the author of this tale has for his characters, all of them. Even the rocket.

The student in literature in me greatly appreciates the way GR also informs and speaks across works, especially to Against the Day; and the reply AtD has for GR.