Discussion - Week Nine - Gravity's Rainbow - Conclusions/Book as a whole

[Jim]

This discussion covers our Conclusions and the Book as a whole



What a long strange trip it’s been. London under attack. A vacation at Cap d’Antibes. A slow slithering slipping and sliding slough through the Zone with Slothrop. A mad Russian chasing his shadow. His shadow pursuing its own agenda. Every flavor, size, and shape of fringe creature gettin’ their buzz on. All for a glimpse, a clue, or if lucky, contact with the mystery of the Schwarzgerät.

Und so was haben wir? A meditation on war and business? A tale of life struggling to live? A 60’s acid trip trans-located to the 40’s? A dream of escaping our mortal husk?

What do you make of this trip along the Rocket’s arc?

[Matthew]

Too Long Didn't Read
(AKA, some not so concluding thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow)

Well,more than a week ago I actually finished Gravity's Rainbow. It's just a shame I had to drop it off at the library since I checked it out the maximum number of weeks. I watched as the Frank Miller- covered digest sized paperback slid back into that bulky metal opening and into the book night-drop. A shame since the book is so circular, I wouldn't really mind spending a little more time with it. It's a good thing though I did set some time aside to just write some (not very) concluding thoughts on GR as a whole.

I kept having this feeling that the first section of the book, the section before the drugs kick in, that although a very nice portrait of wartime London (in fact, having just come off some Graham Greene, it reminded me of the film The Third Man), I couldn't help that very little seemed to be going on except hard ons and measurements. I mean, there is a lot of important developement that does happen, but measurement of the world, the postwar, infant phallus, its all there in great detail. In fact, it almost seems like measuring reality by whatever means necessary is just as important as taking it over.

And this I think is very much central to GR. I kept thinking how weird it was geometry resonated with me, and ancient Greece. But I kept being reminded when Pynchon would swing quixotic about when he'd wax lyrical about the line and the parabola, and the arc of the rocket. But the man hand wrote the thing on graph paper, I can still see those vertices as I'm reading.

I just kept getting reminded of those damn Gnostics, those early Christians that kept getting thrown back to the Apocrypha. All that stuff pops up in GR because the text of GR is just as much a Gnostic quest as Slothrop's. And the Greeks in general, particularly the ones who developed geometry and such. The people back then weren't just making rules to see the world by, they were discovering it, and that discovery was just as sacred to them as Gottfried's sacred yearning for knowledge from his Blicero.

Pynchon jokes with a quote from the Gospel of Thomas preceding's Pointman's vision of an underworld because he can ascribe any quote to something labeled Apocrypha, it isn't going to be taken seriously anyways and perhaps that's the joke. In the end we make our own Heaven and Hell. The universe they create merely doubles over our own.

(And you Jim, wanting to read Hopscotch next, how appropriate, anybody else notice the Hopscotch reference in the book?).

One night, I pictured the image of the universe GR creates, and the Rocket path, that sacred parabolic path that creates their moral vacuum. The ability of the rocket to break free from gravity, its almost as if they want it to break free and into Death itself, to define Death in their way (selfishly) just as much as we define boundries to countries. But we don't break free of this universe into a traditional underworld in GR.

Since this false universe doubles the real, the dead co-mingle with the living in GR. It's a sad joke that of all the conquests into the psychic universe that characters make in GR isn't enough to escape the immediate consequences to their actions: a world filled with death to get to the convenient plastic 60s/nuclear family part of life. We try to forget about the simple facts of exploitation in the everyday, maybe just to get through the day. And certainly the falseness of that was visible during the 70s in which GR was first published. Maybe to forget that WW2 was only 20 years out when this was published, that the wars we fight are maybe a continuum of War in all its absurdity.

It is interesting to note though that amid all the murders, hard ons, and other transgressions that play out here that when Love is portrayed here it is shocking in its intimacy: particularly with Slothrop, Pokler and their respective daughters. It stays with you a lot longer in this book as you flip among
the measurements and rocket diagrams and songs.

The ending of GR, on a song, is lonely,beautiful, and appropriate. It leaves the figure of a sacrificial figure being sacrificed to not war, but to something else...to the systems that they project and create
their zone, their states, (projected through a film projector in a British cinema). I'm reminded of the calling of a Muse at the beginning of an
epic poem for inspiration. And yet, I'm also reminded of Orpheus being torn by the Bacchanal when I think of Gottfried.

And while death rains down in GR, life reigns on its own in its own way in the Zone and Text. The struggle for life is just as important for a squirrel (or a light bulb) as it is for anybody here. And that struggle, and love, is life, that's what
Pynchon is trying to show us.

I think that GR, at least for me today, is about the things we let control us, the things we are indifferent to, that we let become hard rules and burdens that hold us down. Like science, which is merely theory, and technology, which is created by the application of those theories. And Pynchon knows that very well. But more then that. It's about the realization that those rules are being looked after by people who want to control us, and make it appear like some freedom. Or, to quote the boys from Akron again:

"Freedom of choice
is what you got!

Freedom from choice
is what you want!"

-Devo
"Freedom of Choice"

To repeat, this isn't my last time with GR. Those Ellipses in GR are just as much beginnings as they are endings. Until we meet again.

[Ian]

Matthew, you should put these thoughts up as your review, so we can like them.

[Ellen]

Very moving, Matthew, and helpful as well. Thank you.

[Matthew]

Ian, you are absolutely right.

Now I just need to do it.

Unfortunately,there is so much more I would add that isn't there...I would need to pick up the book again. I can buy one book and I'm not sure if GR is the next one I buy or Infinite Jest, our next read.

of course, that sounds like a cop out when I read it to myself. I should literally do as you suggest and just put my postings up as a review...then I can be done with it. It doesn't help that it takes a lot to post things online so publicly these days for me. and the current climate doesn't help either....if you know what I mean.

But I probably will do it. Just giving myself a little time. Real life intercedes again.

[Ellen]

I'm actually closing in on the end-I thank everyone here. I first picked up this book 35 years ago (I guess not so long after it was written) & tried really hard a few times to read but could not do it alone. Now, I''d be surprised if I didn't finish it (not gonna happen).

It's a little discouraging to know that a book really can not be read once since I have no idea when or if I'll ever re-read GR. But it was ultimately a fun park ride-slow, murky, horror houses, soft gentle patches followed by breathtaking ones. I've come to adore the experience of this read even if there's so much I didn't get.