I never
expected Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to be an easy read, but I
greatly underestimated exactly how challenging it would be. Not since William Gaddis’s The
Recognitions have I had to move so slowly and consult my notes so often
just to keep track of who was who and what was happening. At no point could I read on autopilot,
letting my mind take a brief sojourn to consider tasks still to be done with
any hope of knowing where I was when I returned at the end of the paragraph.
To give you
a sense of how demanding the novel is, I will show you two pictures. Because I started this reading list reading
library books, I took to taking notes on notecards instead of writing on the pages
themselves. I use 4x6 notecards to keep
track of any named character as well as pivotal plot points or neat passages
that I think I might want to refer back to down the line. For a typical novel, I will fill in one or
two notecards, both sides. Here, for
example, are my notes for Lord of the Flies:
Two
notecards, complete with characters, quotes, and even a few sketches. For The Recognitions, I used eight
notecards to keep track of everyone, everything, and every theme. Here’s a picture of my notecards from Gravity’s
Rainbow:
Yeah, that’s
eighteen notecards, and that’s not counting the two notecards I created to brainstorm
about recurring themes and issues or the character chart I created to keep
track of how various characters were related to each other. That’s a huge number of characters, story
arcs, plot points, and thematic concerns to keep sorted while reading the 776
pages of this phenomenal 1973 novel .
The novel is
about . . . wow, that in and of itself is a challenging sentence to finish. How about this: At the heart of the novel is the V2 bomb,
built by the Germans and used repeatedly to strike London. The bombs traveled faster than the speed of
sound, so their victims didn’t hear them approaching until after they already
struck. The whole of the novel orbits
around these rockets, their creation, their workings, the recovery of their
parts, the mathematics and physics that govern their flight. One of Pynchon’s abilities is to see the
connections between disparate things, and in his discussions of these rockets
he pulls together an incredible number of historical and cultural strands. Gravity’s Rainbow pulls into the gravity of
its own narration chemistry, the science of polymers and plastics, behavioral
psychology, Pavlovian concepts of responses to stimuli, colonialism, the
politics of race, the limits of state power, the history of the Hereros from
Africa, psychological warfare, chess, the poet Rilke, the science of parabolas,
mysticism and the readings of signs and omens, sadomasochism, submission and
dominance, transvestitism, the meeting of opposites, international lighbulb
cartels, the ethics of experimentation, the afterlife, conspiracies, paranoia, and
the distance between the preterite and God’s chosen elite. The sheer scope of Pynchon’s interests in
this novel is mind-boggling, and in the hands of anyone less skilled or less
intelligent, the novel would be little more than a gigantic mess. But Pynchon is always in control of his
material, and the poetry of both his thought and language are stunning.
It is not in
the least surprising that Pynchon has paranoiacs at the center of his novels,
because what is paranoia but the ability to see patterns and connections in the
behaviors of the surrounding physical world?
Pynchon’s great big brain is able to assimilate all these different
areas of life and draw out their connections to one another (noting how a
haircut is merely a type of wavelength, for example!), so it is no wonder that
his characters would be able to do the same.
As he notes in one of his discussions about Oneirine, a synthetic drug
invented by the always-behind-the-scenes Dr. Jamf, “About the paranoia often
noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing
less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in
the Creation.”
The
narrative style of Gravity’s Rainbow itself underscores this notion that
everything in the novel is connected.
The narrator often will jump from one character to another, or from one
time to another, in mid-sentence, riding a subordinate clause into a whole new
focus for the paragraph and section.
This narrative slipperiness is one of the things that make the book so
challenging. If you start to tune out in
the middle of a long sentence you can easily miss the point of transition and
find yourself in unfamiliar waters.
In fact, the
connections between all these different topics are themselves the
actual focus of the novel. Just as he
did in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon creates a gripping narrative of a
paranoid's search for meaning, leading his reader on with tantalizing clues and
tasty conspiracies that point to some great mystery that we want solved as
much as the protagonist does. But as we
learn, that search and the insight we gain along the way is the true focus of
the narrative. Pynchon gives us
something of an answer for the larger mysteries when we learn about the SG-1’s
one and only flight and its special cargo, but there are still more questions
than answers. And Slothrop’s presence in
the final section could be a great disappointment if you are unwilling to shift
your focus to the implications of his fate.
Hovering
over my eighteen notecards, I feel like Slothrop searching for the imipolex
payload or Enzian sifting through the rubble for evidence of the 00000
rocket. There are so many delicious
connections to make and so many depths to plumb. It is a remarkable journey to read, and as a
reader it is a remarkable journey to go on.
Be a good traveler and don’t rush down the road just because it is
long. Take your time and absorb all you
can. The more time you spend with this
novel, the more rewarding it is.
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