Classic Abandoned. When this novel was released in 1973, the buzz it created was so loud and the cover so amazing that I, a dewy teenager, tried reading it. I got that it was about the absurdity of war, a hot topic during the Vietnam era. But I had to set it down, queasily unable to get past the part where Slothrop is fetching his harmonica which has fallen into a toilet. In the early Eighties, I took another plunge and got that is was about the obscenity of war. Only to set it down again after the coprophagia scene.
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
"All great literature," said Leo Tolstoy, "is one of two stories: a stranger comes to town or a man goes on a journey.” This massive novel presents both. Our hero Tyrone Slothrop is an American in Europe and he goes on a quest to find a key.
What key? Pynchon, in a rare lenient moment of lucidity, has a character speculate, “Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our Freedom.” I think the writer is referring to a root of suffering, the craving that believes in the existence of pure universal truth and the re-establishment of the original state in which human beings lived in accordance with nature. In the weak moments when we’ve forgotten everything that we’ve read, we kid ourselves with the nostalgia for a past in which ordinary human beings were brave, wise, and temperate and their leaders fatherly, just, and benevolent. Long ago, back in the garden, times were stable, peaceful, prosperous. This illusion is a needless cause of distress and suffering that had better be rooted out.
On a quest our hero Tyrone Slothrop is trying to find keys to unlock the pure truth concerning two big questions, one personal and one scientific and technical. His search in France and Germany near the end of WWII and the early days of the 1945 peace contradicts the notion of a quest having a destination. Slothrop covers many miles but doesn’t seem to get anywhere. The search is not straight to the center of the labyrinth, because the author adopts - not explicitly, but we realize it only as we read on and on, compelled by our fascination with the writer’s strange use of words - the technique of deliberate misdirection that defies the reader to analyze. He zig-zags the quest under an endless accumulation of content, extracted from the most disparate cultural veins - from Hollywood musicals to research in organizational behavior; from slapstick to comics; from pornography to sheer Sixties doping and sexing and yelling “War! What is it good for? Absolutely. Nothing.”
Our hero Tyrone Slothrop is not the only one on the quest to find a key to big questions. Various paranoid followers of conspiracy theories think that through their own research they will find the key that explains the convoluted operations hatched by evil-doing multi-national corporations. Titans, managers and minions are motivated exclusively by capital’s thirst for hegemonic power and ecstatic experiences fueled by exotic drugs and weird sex, neither of which, one suspicions, are salutary with prolonged use or particularly useful in finding the key.
Paranoid explanations must explain everything. They begin with the assumption that everything – everything in Creation! - is connected. Though young in the early 1970s, I remember some people being plugged into the idea that something could always stand for something else – an LSD-laced notion, that – and that the whole system is One – whatever that implies - could be explained because everything is interwoven and everything changes with everything.
Great! How does knowing everything merges from one into another help me to cajole the dog out of her snit when she realizes she’s not going a trip with me this time?
When I was a kid, a puzzle I worked on was a 1000-piece merging of Jackson Pollock’s Convergence. I remember looking at the pieces so closely that I felt dizzy and had a sense of disorientation. This is the feeling I had for about two-thirds of this novel, a really crazy mixture of history, systems and game theory, behaviorist psychology, ethnography, natural sciences, applied mathematics and a little engineering with generous doses of the surreal, the grotesque, the ironic and the erotic.
The one-third that I readily understood was his masterly descriptions of things that he makes the reader see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Pynchon must have travelled in Northern Germany to get Baltic water, light, sand, rock and pine so right. His depiction of disorder and squalor is right up there with Dickens in Bleak House. The scene of Slothrop eating the vile English candies is as funny as it is disgusting (go to an Asian food market and get a selection of candy to learn there are lots of different ways to approach “sweet,” some of them wildly implausible to a palate that grew up eating Hershey’s).
To my dismay, Pynchon uses lots of schoolboy humor relative to woman’s body as sextoy, which was very much of a time I remember, the raunchy early Seventies, the era of porn chic, lots of casual tossing around of the c-word. Feminists of the time pointed out Pynchon’s female characters were usually mere objects of male fantasy or bit players in men’s theatricals. I daresay this novel isn’t much read in our more enlightened era due to its misogyny. Just by the way, the tender narration of Roger Mexico and Jessica’s love affair - it really is beautiful - doesn’t make easier to take the pedophilia scene and the antagonism to same-sex sexuality either.
Now that I’ve experienced both I can say with confidence, like the Seventies itself, Pynchon’s technique has with long and short stretches where nearly nothing makes any sense. Lots of readers will find the unintelligibility off-putting. Me, I used to provide grammatical make-overs to technical articles in English written by non-native speakers of English so I'm used to not getting meaning out of texts. And I lived through the Seventies, such a nutty time that Americans decided to sleepwalk through the Eighties.
The novel, therefore, is not really something where I’m going to read it and note down my analytical observations and even venture to detail the footprints on my soul Pynchon has left, as if you would understand or even be interested. This novel is a unique reading experience, like The Sound and the Fury or Manhattan Transfer. What will stick to a reader’s imagination and memory and intellect is decidedly subjective, impossible to predict. The reader just has to dive in, focus, engage the little grey cells, and let herself take her own personal mental tour, coming across passages shining like stars or smelling like turds from a dog on cheap chow.
At the least I know, after abandoning this classic twice,
older now, with the literal scars to prove it, I’m tough enough to finish it. Nothing good comes easy.
Click on the title to go to the review.
Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner
Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams
Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara
Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry
Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos
Passos
Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite
– Anthony Trollope
Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell
Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry
Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout
Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil
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