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Sitaram
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02-21-2005 02:39 PM
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Thomas Pynchon - "Gravity's
Rainbow"
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/
The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a
cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to
destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch
from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.
It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith
that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world
with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of
characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer,
and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns
only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's
cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's
brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's
blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of
jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé
von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its
tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same
novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.
Kierkegaard said that being a Christian should not be an easy task. The same
is true, I think, in literature. For, the safer literature gets, the more it
comes to resemble TV. Yes, on the surface this book is difficult, even
pretentious. But if you work at it, that is, actually make an effort to
understand Pynchon's somewhat obscure references
and his abstruse vocabulary, the results are most rewarding. Simply put, he's
not going to spoonfeed literature to his audience.
Nor, as a reader, should you want to be spoonfed.
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_gr.html
The graphics on this next link are worth the wait:
http://www.themodernword.com/gr/
http://www.themodernword.com/pyncho...hon_quotes.html
He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only
existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific
moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more
mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single
observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to
seeing the world in only three. Hense the success
of failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of
rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near
obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him
Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front
of a chorus line.
But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it.The
only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed
to explain it.
--V., Chapter Seven, Part VII
number of frail girls . . . prisoners in the top room of a circular tower,
embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a
void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and
creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in
this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.
--The Crying of Lot 49, Chapter 1
It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at
the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home.
A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you
there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments .
. . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
--Gravity's Rainbow, V148
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own
tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the
meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that
announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant,
eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is
to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that
"productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with
time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of
energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only
most of humanity -- most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is
laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's
only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to being with, of
no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later
crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the
rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the
chain of life.
--Gravity's Rainbow, V412
What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing
needles of our terror and longing?
--Gravity's Rainbow, V699
http://www.majorweather.com/pandm/index.htm
Reading Thomas Pynchon together with Herman
Melville may at first
seem a strange enterprise; but for some obvious connections — both
major American authors of big American novels — they seem too
disparate to be studied side by side. But at least one major critic has
argued that Gravity’s Rainbow is in large part a rewriting of Moby-Dick.
Our close readings of these two often difficult writers, and our
complication of those readings with contemporary theories of
intertextuality and contemporary writing
technologies, will lead us to
rethink issues of literary periods and styles, of historical frameworks,
and of the politics of representation.
http://www.readin.com/books/rainbow/thebook.html
I have read Gravity's Rainbow many times; and yet I still do not fully
understand it. Currently (since the middle of 1999) I am participating in a
group read (GRGR) over the internet, via the Thomas Pynchon
mailing list server. If you're interested in joining the list, browse over to
W.A.S.T.E. for info. And look in the list archive for GRGR messages; you will
find much of interest.
Something I want to say about GR: the first several times I read it, I would
sometimes be reading along and realize that I had lost track of what was
going on. In such situations I would just continue reading, intoxicated by
the beauty of the language, and generally within a page or two I would get
back on track. This time through I have finally learned to go back when I
realize I am lost, and pick up from terra cognita.
This strategy is serving me well in terms of understanding the thing.
I must admit, though, that in my most recent reading of it (the only time I
got through to the end), I spent almost the entire last 200 pages in that
intoxicated non-understanding state, and never did pick back up the thread. I
can only hope this time will be different... The GRGR should help a lot; I am
hoping we do not lose steam.
How I read the book
It took me 10 years and at least 5 attempts to read GR in full. Every couple
of years I would pick the book up from my "to read" shelf and
plunge into it; each time I would get about 100 to 200 pages further along
than I had previously. The book gets difficult very quickly, because you are
expected when reading it to keep juggling in your mind many different plots
and subplots -- when the book is at its simplest there are about 5 separate
plots, each involving its own characters; interplot
relationships are revealed very sparingly where they exist, and mostly left
up to the reader's imagination.
The solution that worked for me is to just put the book down when it gets too
confusing; wait a year and start over from the beginning. Through repetition
you begin to know by heart the first chapters of the book -- this makes it
much easier to get the permutations and interconnections later on, plus you
start getting the jokes (which are really the heart of Gravity's Rainbow).
So this time through I'm hoping I'll finally start understanding some of the bizarrery that makes up Part 4, "The
Counterforce". (Right now I only have an inadvertent hint to go on.)
http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/pynchon-2.html
Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
Roger sings to a girl in Cuxhaven who still carries
Jessica's name:
I dream that I have found us both again,
With spring so many stranger's lives away,
And we, so free,
Out walking by the sea,
With someone else's paper words to say....
They took us at the gates of green return,
Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why --
Do children meet again?
Does any trace remain,
Along the superhighways of July?
Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope and field that
he nearly forgets to steer around the banked curve....
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