A Word on Pynchon, courtesy of leems @ wordpress
“I found a book of critical essays on Thomas Pynchon, but I’d bought too much already and so I had to leave it. I almost cried with joy skimming the first few pages of one about “trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow.” It was brilliant, stating basically what I’ve suspected and hoped all along: The reason you don’t get it is because you’re not supposed to. There is no coherence, no point, no nothing. And fuck you, by the way, for feeling entitled to one and getting caught up in the whole stupid game. I’m kind of pissed I don’t remember the author’s name, because I’m in love, I’m in love.”
Like Leems, these comments confirm for me also that the unsettling and frustrating narrative is intentional and purposeful and that there is really no “point”. I mean that’s obvious surely? Pynchon beats you round the face with it every step, every sentance of the way through GR.
Reading GR is like squinting through a fog. Eventually shapes and people appear, mere glimpses through the random narrative metropolis. Their behaviour, however, is such that it leaves me terrified to turn around and retreat from the page to the order and normality of my living room. “Fuck you” the anonymous critic condescends to we lowly followers who get the feeling we’re not getting it, “for getting caught up in the whole stupid game”. I am reading “game” as metaphor for the notion of normality in every day life. You know, the expectation for sequential episodes in our lives that reassure us that ultimately there is a purpose, a conclusion, a result. Like a balm to sooth our anxiety about existing and the need to have relevance in society.
GR offers no such balm. It’s like parasitic lice – dirty, repulsive, infuriating and frustrating. You have to stop trying to make sense of it, stop scratching at it, to get some reprieve, to live with it.
That’s what pisses me off about it. It’s easier to close it up hastily and go back to making dinner ready from when honey comes home… than to leave it open and look up out the window for a second and try to see everything else through the Pynchon lense. Besides, it’s a pretty fucking lengthy conquest if all we’re going to get out of it by the end is “there is no point”. That, in itself is a goal anyway. So there is, ultimately, a point after all. To rattle your cage.
My progress through GR is actually not happening right now. I put it down. Which means, I gave up. I will go back though, because there is much more than the above to find from it. I enjoy the humour, the irony and the farce a lot in Pynchon. I enjoyed the cynicism of “Lot 49″. I don’t want to get bogged down in it though. I don’t think, like Leems, you are meant to “love” this about Pynchon. If you’re going to read GR as if it’s telling you to “fuck off” and love it for that then you come accross a bit masochistic. I don’t even think love-hate is really appropriate for reading Pynchon either. It’s more like, you have to try and accept it for what it is and for the opinion of it. You have to be willing to accept the scary perspective that we are not in control, that this is it and that the world is pretty fucked up and perverse. But that’s just Pynchon. I like my own perspective, I like reacting against what appears at first to be an extremely negative opinion of the general perseption of things.
There is, though, a celebratory almost carnival quality to Pynchon as well. If you can roll with the punches and come out laughing reading it isn’t so bad.
Edit 13:37: Catharsis. Isn’t it? That’s what I am going at. What am I on about GR being a masochistic condescending self punishment? Read it and we will all be liberated from the shackles of normality, The Man… it’s therapy, really.
Hey Not,
Firstly, thanks for the quote.
I didn’t quite mean that anyone was “meant” to love anything about Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow was put out there for people to make whatever sense they can (can manage to, can bear to, etc.) out of it. This is just the sense that I’m making, what I love about it: I didn’t feel like I understood his “point” until I stopped searching for one.
I also didn’t so much feel like the “fuck you” is aimed at life, but more the reader whose expectations are shaped by a publishing industry that, on the whole, produces titillating yet inoffensive, unchallenging work with neat little beginnings, middles, ends. (For example – You can’t have one of the main characters from the beginning disappear for 500 pages with no explanation and then just drop him into the action again whenever you feel like it! But, actually, you can.)
Also, don’t give up on it! Don’t know if this’ll help you, but after the first 200 or so pages I actually took to reading it section by section, going over each section twice before moving on.
Oh and secondly, thanks for launching one of the few truly intelligent, practical discussions of the book I’ve found so far.
- J
Hi Leems! Thanks for commenting on my ramble
I definately agree with you about the criticism being aimed at readers who have had certain expectations shaped by publishing industry and such like.
For me I experience GR on such polar levels. On the one hand it infuriates the hell out of me, and that makes me even angrier because then I know the novel has succeeded in identifying that very same type of reader in me. I don’t necessarily want to be the reader who expects coherence and a sense of order.
Alternatively, when you read it and start to tune in to the humour and wit of it, it’s really uplifting in a way that makes you want to open a window and share the joke with a stranger.
We are studying this alongside Melville’s Moby Dick next year but I really wanted to get a head start. It’s not something you can start the night, or even weekend, before class so I will definately try your method of reading it.