So yes I have begun reading Orientalism. I will have to re-read and re-read and also read much more material but I know that the reading list for my detective fiction module and also the global city module will provide this.

“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.

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