Detail
Title: Gravity's Rainbow ISBN: 9780143039945Published October 31st 2006 by Penguin Books (first published February 28th 1973) · Paperback 776 pages
Genre: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Science Fiction, Historical, Historical Fiction, Novels, American, War, Literary Fiction, Unfinished
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User Reviews
Bill
Advice for a first time reader of Gravity's Rainbow:
Gravity's Rainbow is a book you either love or hate, and if you hate it it's probably because you couldn't finish the damn thing. Though by no means impenetrable, the novel is daunting enough to merit a list of tips for those wishing to tackle it for the first time. Below is my advice on how new readers can get over the hump. Trust me, it's a small hump, and the masterpiece that lies on the other side is worth the effort.
1. Read V first ... Pynchon's V is shorter and more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow, but addresses the same themes in a similar style. If you enjoyed V, you will have built up a reserve of goodwill for Pynchon that will carry you through the initial rough patches of Gravity's Rainbow. This advice was given to me years ago, and I'm glad I took it.
2. Accept that you won't understand everything...Don't be concerned if you can't follow the many digressions or keep track of every minor character that pops up. As with other famously difficult novels, Gravity's Rainbow's real payoff comes in the rereading, so you shouldn't feel obliged to linger over each passage until it makes sense. Pynchon isn't trying to lord it over you by writing a book this dense; it's just his way of giving you your money's worth. Just follow what you can the first time through, which fortunately is a lot.
3. Accentuate the accessible...Gravity's Rainbow's unreadability is over-hyped. Yes, there are many jarring digressions, but threading through them is a fairly conventional detective story. Sure there are lyrical passages that take off for the stratosphere, but they are grace notes in a melody of otherwise breezy narrative prose. So on your first time through, it's enough to follow the main plot (will Slothrop find the mysterious Rocket 00000?) and enjoy Pynchon's jokes, which are laugh-out-loud funny.
4. Don't give up too early...I don't want to say that Gravity's Rainbow gets off to a slow start, but it has a lot of scene-setting to do, and the engine that really drives the book along only gets revved up in part 2. Part 1 is a well-executed minor key portrait of wartime London, but part 2 is where the drugs kick in, so stick with the novel at least that far.
s.penkevich
‘What is the real nature of control?’
From the first sentence of Pynchon’s National Book Award winning novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, the Reader is transplanted into a threatening world where death strikes first, the cause second. It is a world of frightening realism and comic absurdity, all fueled through drug induced hallucinations, paranoid ramblings, and psychological investigations that is not all that unlike our own reality once you remove yourself to view it from afar as if it were some painting in a gallery. This is the Zone, and Pynchon is your field guide through the wasteland of paranoids, preterits and pornographers. The novel is stylistically staggering and so carefully researched that the line between fact and fiction blurs and is not always easy to deduce. It is carefully plotted out with extreme precision, aligning the events with actual weather detail from the days played out and in keeping with a metaphoric representation of the zodiac signs through the passing months. While this novel can be demanding, it is also extremely rewarding for those who make it through this wild rocket ride of literature.
A first time Reader should be cautioned that Part 1 of this mammoth text is exceedingly difficult. Pynchon seemingly takes great joy in pummeling the Reader with a labyrinthine structure of characters and plot lines, each accruing through dramatic left turns in the narrative. The effect is pure disorientation, obfuscation and outright frustration. It feels just like spinning plates. It is, in a sense, Pynchon’s boot camp for the real war awaiting across minefields of prose; it is where he must break you down and reconstruct you as he sees fit. While the Reader must keep their head down and gut through, soaking up as much of the swirling stories as they can, Pynchon lays out the groundwork for the larger themes to come. Many of the ideas expressed early on won’t seem particularly meaningful, but by the end of the novel the Reader will realize it was all right there in their faces from the start. As characters will come and go like ghosts, with only minimal dimension and reference to them, the Reader will begin to realize that the coming tribulations are not there for the growth of the characters, but for the Reader themselves. The Reader must come out the other side changed in order for the novel to be a success. They must let go of their notions of story and plot, for Pynchon views even the smallest plot structure as comfort, they must let go, give in, and submit to Pynchon. He demands it, and he will fire off heady diatribes against your intellect with philosophy, theology, conspiracies and actual rocket science.
The novel takes off running once the gun sounds the start of Part 2 when, dropped from foggy London town, the Reader finds themselves in the Zone. Early on is a discussion of Pointsman and Mexico, Pointsman being crafted as the ultimate embodiment of Pavlov’s cause-and-effect conditioning and Mexico being considered as ‘the Antipointsman’.
’The young statistician is devoted to number and method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something. Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between…. to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one – the middle Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion – the probabilities.’
Much of this novel deals with these two major perspectives. Pynchon often establishes structure, the Pointsman method, merely to deconstruct it and show the faults that lie within. By showing two specific points, in this instance excluding those inbetween points, Pynchon is able to demonstrate moments of symmetry, which he will then reverse. Normally a rocket would be heard before it explodes in a ball of death, but with the V2, now we have the death before sound (reversals also play a large key to the novel, from the countdown before a launch, to hypnotic imagery of English explorers sailing backwards to home).
These two specific points are also expressed as binary differences, such as black and white, life and death, good and evil, preterition and the chosen few. These binaries are clear-cut sides, direct opposites of forces in keeping with the theory of entropy which rules the novel, sides that we clamor to reach in order to have a firm ground to stand on and a cut-and-dry vision of who is friend and who is foe. But Mexico, and Pynchon, rejects these binaries. Mexico acknowledges the space between zero and one, which is a wild, lawless no-man’s land (recall the McCarthy-esk western vision of Slothrops where there is one of everything – a endlessly compounding ‘one’ that creates an asymptote never actually reaching 1) where everything and anything is possible. It is a place more dream than reality, and the hallucinogenic nature of Pynchon’s spiraling prose and plots do well to express the ambiguities inherent in such a Zone. However, the novel never fully subscribes to one theory and can be interpreted as a cautionary tale for those who wander into this territory. Plot, laws and binaries are structures that keep our minds at ease and provide comfort and safety, so when we enter into the infinite freedom of the decimal we open ourselves to forces that may scatter us, kill us, and rub us out into oblivion.
Pynchon himself will try to scatter and thwart the Reader in consequence of stepping into his Zone. He acknowledges you are in his territory, and will speak as he chooses, often with what seems an intention of belittling your own intelligence. He only occasionally makes concessions to the reader when he realizes at least a slight bridge must be made in setting a scene such as saying ‘you will want cause and effect. All right’, which, considering the rejection of such an idea in this novel, serves to mock the reader for scrambling to grasp the reassuring ledge of the pool in this deep end he has thrown us. To swallow this novel on a first read, a reader must attack it somewhat like middle school mathematical story problems – find the important information in the bloated paragraph, divide and conquer. There is a plethora of information to choose from as he will offer a vast variety of the same symbols and metaphors (the S, for example, shows up as the SS, the shape of the bomb factory tunnels, people spooning, the symbol for entropy, etc. There is a death/life metaphor on practically every page) Yet, Pynchon seems hell-bent on keeping you on your toes and disoriented. He will allow the Reader to slide into a groove of strong forward velocity, and then deliver a scene so grotesquely funny or vilely disgusting to shock the readers mind and scatter their thoughts and perceptions from decoding this vast network of ideas and then tries to evade us in a web of looping plots, obtuse anecdotes and countless characters (some of which come and go with hundreds of pages between mention). The maze of a plot that must be navigated is acknowledged as being similar to the course of events Slothrop encounters on the way, which he compares to the MBTA: ‘by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he’s headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom.’ There must be a sense of trust that eventually, if you keep gutting through, there will be a conclusion to satisfy a journey of such magnitude.
There is a constant paranoia overwhelming each printed word, a paranoia that the Reader must assimilate by proxy in order to fully appreciate the madness at hand. Yet paranoia itself must be a sort of comfort as well. While there is a fear of the Invisible Hand at play, pushing us through psychological nods in the right way, it is still a comfort that we are part of Their greater plan. For the preterits, this They is the only sense of God they will ever feel, as they are looked over by God himself. This whole novel is the interaction of such Preterits, from the fetishists to the colony of escaped concentration camp members, and the Reader must become a member of these second sheep as they must lose their selves along with Slothrop. The Reader is dragged through the mud and muck of a smattering of various theories, and to keep their sanity, they attempt to assign meaning to these elusive threads flashing about them in order to keep going. But perhaps this is just what Pynchon wants us to do, assigning Him the role of the They, and the Reader will begin to feel paranoid that this is all in jest, that Pynchon is simply pulling the world over their eyes and will begin to question even their own powers of deduction. We have learned that all that is comforting must be released (not yet knowing at these points in the novel that there is only a void awaiting with total freedom), and even the paranoid ponderings are only a comfort for us in Pynchon’s world.
If there is something comforting – religious, if you want, about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now, Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky’
First, note the reversals in this, then swoon at the powerful prose in the second half. Now, assign meaning to this quote – but Slap, no! – Pynchon says there is no meaning. But then feel yourself become transparent and weightless, fading into oblivion with no reference to the world around you. This is the ultimate dilemma we are faced with in the Zone.
It is no surprise the Reader is made to feel so paranoid in a novel rife with corporate conspiracy, much of which is highly researched and forms an impressive historical fiction aspect to this novel. If those rambling through the Zone are the preterits moved by the They, than these corporations are one of the highest tangible link to They we can see. They decide who lives and dies, who is rich and who is denied wealth, what we want to consume and how (‘consumers need to feel a sense of sin’) and exist in a realm where the War is simply a shuffling of power. ‘This war was never political at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology….by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques’. Throughout the course of Gravity’s Rainbow, we have endless looks into mans thirst for technology, which in itself is a thirst for death based on the nature of the technology, even when it is also a life-giving force such as is the case of Pokler who had no life until the Rocket, and how this goes beyond the War itself. Even the White Visitation simply uses the War as a reason for more funding. Mans role in technology is at the heart of every idea in this book. Entropy is a measuring stick which this novel employs (in a book that sets out to dissolve all rules, having a rule that is upheld highlights its importance), and all events and ideas serve to counterbalance each other in keeping with the conservation of energy with the preterits being the heat burned off. As a quick aside, if I may, many of these preterits, Mexico and Jessica’s romance or the concentration camp members (‘their liberation was a banishment’) for example, are directly tied to the war and a become casualty of peace – the budding romance (there are some tearjerker lines, Pynchon really shows his soft side with them) being the ‘waste heat’ in a chemical reaction. They Rockets, being the focal point of the book, are both life and death images as well as phallic metaphors while many of the phalluses are rocket metaphors. Film plays another large role, with much of the book containing constant allusion to pop culture similar to a Quentin Tarantino film, and Der Springer believes he can reshape reality through film.
This struggle of life and death is something that must be embraced as two parts of a whole in this novel, much like man and machine become one with Gottfried and the 00000 Rocket. Life and death are found strung together all throughout the novel, yet, as critic Harold Bloom points out in his essays on Rainbow, in Pynchon's book so focused on the idea of Death, the Reader never actually experiences or witnesses one - not one in all of the 800 pages. Many deaths are spoken of, some ambiguous like Tantivity’s, and others referred to plainly such as Pudding’s (note that ‘shit’ is spoken of as a metaphor for death, ‘shit is the presence of death’, and he is made to ingest it during – for him, not us – a sexual peak as another way life and death bind together in the novel), but the camera of the prose, if you will, always cuts right before the Reader must be an active participant in the death. Like Gottfried again, we know he dies, but because the com-link is only one way, we never can know the precise moment. Even Peter’s clubbing to the head cuts before the club can land. In this way, the novel is shown actually as a celebration of life, all the moments moving from 1:life to 0:death but never getting to the zero. We are forever in the Zone, for better or for worse. But with the final words of the novel, nay, the final two words, he pulls us from oblivion back to the whole. We escape death by existing in the moments between 1 and 0, and, ironically, in a book bent on annihilating structure and group alignment, he calls us all back into one large group: humanity.
Gravity’s Rainbow is a massive novel that takes quite a bit of decoding and deboning in order to devour. But this is precisely what Pynchon wants and requires of us. This is a book that more or less requires a second reading just to grasp all that it has to say, the first is just a test of survival. The agglomeration of ideas are too much to chew and savor on one trip, and there is so much ambiguity present that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, he intends to scholars to dissect and analyze this novel for years and years to come. In the novel, the Zone members gather to become Kabbalists of the Rocket, ‘to be scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop’. This book is Pynchon’s Rocket, ‘our Torah…our darkness’, which he cast forth into the 1970’s literary scene as a harbinger of destruction to all preconceived notions of literature. Pynchon in this way is not all that unlike the Rocket launchers, hidden far away out of sight in his reclusiveness, avoiding photographic surveillance, sending his Rocket into a brave new world. We, the Readers, are Gottfried strapped inside with ‘fire beneath our feet’ as Pynchon, as Blicero, hurls us forth into the irreversible future.
Now everybody-
00001/00001
'Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone'
roll credits
I would also HIGHLY recommend the A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel to any readers of this novel. It was a huge help, especially with the pop culture allusions. Just be wary that it does occasionally give away plot elements and devices, sometimes long before they appear in the novel, and will practically double your time reading the actual book because there is so much information.
Also, I have to thank Stephen M's wonderful group read for inspiring me to read the book, while doubling as a support group to get us all through this tome! The discussions and links there are extremely helpful and insightful.
Last, but certainly not least, I'd like to direct you to the amazing reviews of my reading buddies on this strange ride, Steve, Ian, Jenn, Mark,Shan, Sean, Paquita, and many more to come!
Michael Finocchiaro
[August 2020] Rereading this now in my Pulitzer quest. Wow, as amazingly confusing as the first time around!
This is of course the Pynchon pinnacle, the summit of his fame, the cornerstone of his work. So much so that he fell silent for about 14 years after writing it (leading me to wonder if DeLillo was spoofing him in Mao II). It is an amazing book and the first Pynchon I ever read. It is a rude introduction to his style though as it is thoroughly post-modern in narration, in the manipulation of time and reality, and the proliferation of characters. There are moments of pure genius, but also of repulsion (leading him to lose the Pulitzer the year it was published), but even those moments are perfectly in harmony with the characters they are associated with, the massive condemnation of anti-Semitism and Nazism (I have to believe that despite his silence, Pynchon has to be anti-Trump) and all forms of repression and censorship. It is the story of a journey across a no-mans land (like many of Cormac McCarthy's books) full of violence and anarchy as the war is over but boundaries and frontiers (between countries, reality, and non-reality, good and evil, acceptable and reprehensible) are blurred and the hero must make this journey with or without a conclusion. I will stick to my no spoilers policy and avoid discussing the plot, but highly recommend this masterpiece, but perhaps one should start with an "easier" Pynchon like Inherent Vice or The Crying of Lot 49 to get their feet wet first, because I would hate to see you missing out of this from feeling out of your depth if you can't find your pace in it.
The political message of the book is still relevant: war is fucking hell and the aftermath is just as bad. History as written by the winners obfuscates the suffering of the losers. And not the losers as actors on the scene of history who are typically unscrupulous leaders who in large part escape responsibility and aftereffects of the ensuing disasters, but rather the “rank and file” who are treated as no more than pawns on history’s chessboard.
Pynchon is a complex writer who pulls no punches: GR has a non-linear plot with an elliptical writing style and a myriad of complex characters, sometimes finely described in vividly lit detail like in a painting of Ingres but sometimes barely evoked out of the darkness like a self-portrait of Rembrandt. Reading GR is a voyage through chaos itself - the chaos of a destroyed Germany and the chaos of human depravity more often than not unpersuaded by a dream of redemption, a terrifying voyage into the darkest depths of the human soul.
In a nutshell, Slothrop (!), our protagonist, seems to attract falling bombs at each location where he has sex in London and goes off on a quixotian quest across Europe for the secret to his birth. Meanwhile, the war ends and Europe is in chaos. Against this background, we meet insane Germans, freaky peasants, abandoned aristocrats in seaside resorts, spies, murderers, holocaust survivors and holocaust perpetrators...it is a symphony of entropy.
It is also a book that you can re-read and discover things you may have missed the first time around - in particular the elliptical structure which explains the word "rainbow" in the title. It is grotesque and raw and superbly written. I have been told in the comments that the Companion by Weisenburger is excellent - I'll use it when I reread GR! The site Gravity's Rainbow on the Pynchon Wiki is an excellent and practical guide as well.
Vit Babenco
Gravity's Rainbow is a rocket launched into the zenith of the literary sky…
Gravity's Rainbow is picaresque, enigmatic, obscene and labyrinthine. It is all things postmodern tumbled in the huge motley heap.
They say that amongst the more than four hundred of characters in the novel there is no protagonist. Well, there is a protagonist: it is the ominous SG-00000 rocket – an epicenter of evil, a mysterious artifact Tyrone Slothrop is looking for, but it hides from us until the end of the book.
…after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…
In this cosmic way, the Earth gets fertilized to be pregnant with the future…
Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences.
History is a canvas painted by lunatics…
M.
I know history is rarely kind to harsh criticisms about super nebulous or "difficult" authors , but dig this --
This book is horrible. After reading The Crying of Lot 49, Slow Learner and now this, I'm convinced that Thomas Pynchon is a hack, and the reason we don't hear from him is because he has nothing to say and knows that if we gave him a microphone and fifteen minutes he'd be found out.
90% of the people who pick up this novel won't finish it, and 90% of those who do won't like it. But 100% of them will pretend they do because Pynchon has the rare reputation of being one of those authors you "have to read". We're all convinced Pynchon is the possessor of some private, hidden genius -- that buried somewhere between the rambling nonsensical plot and the long winded, super cerebral, jargon riddled diatribes on "the Rocket" and the sexual implications of its trajectory and its relation to the symphonic form is a message of some import.
But for all the hype, someone please point to a passage in this novel that overreaches or couldn't be approximated by the efforts of anyone else who lived a super reclusive, hermetic lifestyle, owned a library card, and was given nearly a decade (the length of time between the publication of this novel and the author's previous one), and around 900 pages to do it in.
Seriously though, don't read this book. Aside from the small flutter of accomplishment I feel at actually finishing it, I've found it to be little more than a super frustrating and ultimately hateful reading experience.
Manny
ITS ABOUT A SECRET ROCKET PROJECT IN WW II BUT I THINK SOME OF IT IS A DREAM BECAUSE IT DOESNT MAKE SENSE. THE AUTHOR IS VERY CLEVER.
Geoff
~~
I don’t know why exactly you folks out there read, or why you feel compelled to then seek out a community in which you might share your thoughts, impressions, reactions etc. about the books you’ve read… But me myself, I read for many reasons - among them the opportunity to transcend the narrow window of my own point of view; the chance to learn by a leap, however minimally, over the subjective walls of my own stupid existence; also and especially to inhabit for a few moments the warm pulse of aesthetic bliss and recognition that waves over me whenever a certain sentence or passage hits just so…; at a basic level, to increase my appreciation and understanding of Life, and those artists and thinkers out there striving to contribute to the meaning of human experience, those attempting to bring some beauty or order into the entropic universe and make a little sense out of this mess of a reality we’re stuck in for the duration. And if they can’t find order or beauty, at least to make the muck sing out in some delightful way... There is also that moment where something unnameable (but now somehow named...) clicks into place while reading, and something akin to deja vu blooms inside - the This is the proper expression of the thing I’ve always had in mind but have never been able to express so rightly... The closest thing I get to what is typically described as a feeling of “spirituality” (I who sincerely believe I do not experience spirituality in any degree), are these moments when I come upon this expression of something intensely meaningful and resonant with me and my personal experiences outside of myself, encountering something that seems of me but not by me... these are elusive moments, rare, but when they occur I feel struck by something close to what Nabokov wrote about his experience of Love :
”When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”
Which is why, of course, I then tend to seek out a community with which to share my emotion, my experience, to know that others too might be aware that such experiences are not only possible, but are out there for us, somewhere, waiting to be found hidden among the vast mundane plowing of life… and the comforting idea that others have generously spent many of their precious hours alive in creating works of art that contain their own such revelations, because they understand the importance of keeping this type of transmission alive through history, that this type of uncovering and finding is an essential component of being human ...
CUE SONG ~~ Take a look! It’s in a book! A reading rainbow... ~~
So, here I am, putting it out there to this broad community of Good Readers, wanting to tell you, Gravity’s Rainbow, for me, was one such experience, one such “finding”, a book I’ve been waiting for all my reading life… And with it, and my readings of Mason & Dixon and Against The Day, I am more certain of my notion that Pynchon is the peak of American postmodernism, alongside the works of William Gaddis - that these two have set the goal for what the encyclopedic novel might accomplish on this side of the Atlantic, in this American English… I consider having the opportunity to read both Gravity’s Rainbow and Gaddis’ J R in the same year a great privilege...
But Pynchon’s book itself is practically impossible to review, impossible to summarize or condense, worthless to categorize or constrain by exegesis - because of all it contains, the enormity of what it holds within its pages, the hundreds of characters and mad proliferation of ideas and allusions, all those words! hundreds of thousands of words that somehow leave so much unsaid, but unsaid in perfect ways (left to drift into audience dreams) - because it projects countless tentacles wrapping its world and reaching out into space-time, some of which return full of Story and the Known to feed the octopus body center of narrative, and some which purposefully throw Story and the Known out into the careening forces of the expanding universe, to be forever unresolved and scattered to cosmic coldness and star-distances - because of the density of the fragmentation of the world it has created, (but which is no more fragmented than any human consciousness encountering existence on any given day)...
So allow me only to give you a small cenotaph or a monument - (an obelisk?)- to the impossible review of Gravity’s Rainbow ::
Like a great movie, all of its themes are present in each scene, and yet the individual occurrences and set pieces here seem infinitely varied and inexhaustible. It is the macro-microcosm unity of the mandala. I believe, at a certain level, it contains the elemental forces of existence, the things that make Time rotate, Jackson, but that are only allowed to be seen by Pynchon writing around them... he knows that naming would fix them and so render them invisible… These are parallax visions : The explosion/implosion, the ascent/descent, of a rocket or the archangels or a human destiny, the fatal arc of gravity’s pull on an accelerating object, as if it ever had a choice of the path it would take; the dialectic, the synthesis of opposites, the white and the black, the yin the yang, and the Tarot tower with a king in mid-fall; the parabola path of ejaculate soaring from penis head to trembling body or mouth, or the journey of the whip to flesh and a memory of feeling anything as clearly as we feel pain, or the need to inflict pain; (-the cuticle of the fingernail inscribed by its own half-moon- the body has its own parabolas-); Faust retold in tar-dark comedy; Rossini’s Tancredi performed in the deepest depths of an LSD trip; an orchestral kazoo piece titled “What Is The Nature of Control?”; and the freedom of the individual within the extrinsic objective needs of the Conspiracy; the wave that dips below the zero but is not extinguished and re-emerges over London mouthing a millionhuman scream; the manymirror worlds that were born alongside ours in the forge of the Big Bang but went into dimensional retreat, that can now only be accessed by occult practices; the scuttling amid the transportation networks of the necropoli, where ghosts take luxurious elevators through their ruined places; the poles of the Earth and the Heavens aligning, right there a Brocken Spectre fingering a destroyed city’s maw; the procession of the conjured and the vanished, and the parallel worlds and possible universes we rub up against each time we peel a banana… the voices of the dead in constant song (which is the Music of the Spheres, listen for them in the silence of the Shadow of the Sun, if it ever finds you) and all the bending light sent in Morse code to us by Them from the pinpoint stars, which Those In The Know know are powerful film projectors, enumerating to us the Lies We Must Believe So That We Play Out Our Part In Their Game, and all the chemical formulations of all Their hallucinogens and all their lost dogs and all Time unfolding at once Everybody now… in an encyclopedia of human culture accommodating all things lowbrow to high- a schizophrenic Moby-Dick of the nuclear age… Our Great Paranoid Epic: Slothrop’s Progress Through The Military-Industrial Raketen-Stadt subtitled The Kenosha Kid and The Dear Ol’ Death Drive… where we find Orpheus’s lyre unstrung and discarded, but still plucked by the dry wind… or a lost harmonica found years later in the cold flow of a distant river and the bluegreen water-notes it mournfully plays, the water through the individual soundholes making of the river a sound-rainbow… the Rainbow Promise, ages old, taken back by the one who swore it… I tell ya it makes one helluva good movie! (complete with a Looney Tunes short...)
A-and of course, that “the act of sex and the act of death are one”, yes, at first this might seem simple, but it is really a complicated notion, one which might require infinite time and depths for us poor humans to come to terms with, if we ever do… but luckily film reels run in circles!
(...next up, cutting room floor tidbits from the poet laureate of the Lüneburg Heath and his critically acclaimed Sonics to Orifice... relevant previews of poems to come...)
Tree arising! O pure ascendance!
Orpheus Sings! Towering tree within the ear!
Everywhere stillness, yet in this abeyance:
seeds of change and new beginnings near...
Hail the force sublime
uniting we who live in signs.
The clock's steps only mime
the ticking of a truer time.
Devoid of actual perception,
antenna to antenna we posit,
by main force of intuition,
what emptiness transmits. . .
Do you hear the future
adrone and athrob, Sir?
Extolling its power,
comes a messenger...
Look at the machine:
how it turns and destroys.
vengefully twisting us like toys...
And though you fade from earthly sight,
declare to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water say: I am.
Barry Pierce
You know that very brief moment after you wake up in the morning? That moment when you're not sleeping but you're not yet awake. You kind of know what's going but you're not fully aware. You're in conciousness limbo. When you read Gravity's Rainbow you fall into this conciousness limbo. You read the words on the page but they don't all make sense. You're confused, you don't know what's going on but... you love it. You're floating through this syntactical Pandora's Box fully unaware of your surroundings, not wanting to stop reading so you just read and read this 900-page page tome never wanting to stop. And then it ends. And you want to start again. Because you know that this is the greatest novel ever written. And you'll never read anything like it ever again.
Chris Via
Video review: https://youtu.be/8sERtP1W4kY
Ian "Marvin" Graye
Prologue
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."
Genesis
In the beginning was the earth, and above the earth was the sky.
The earth consisted of land and water. The sky consisted of air, the moon, the sun and the stars in the heavens.
The land consisted of rock. Water was everywhere, but still precious.
The sky was light by day and dark by night. By day, the light came from the sun and sometimes the moon. At night, a lesser light came from the stars and the moon.
On the land, things were still, but then they began to change.
The sun made rock hot by day and the night made it cold, and the rock became stone, and the stone soon became soil.
The Creation of Life
In time, the soil and the water came together with the air and the sunlight to form life.
The life was green and did cling to the soil.
The air and the heavens were the realm of gravity.
Everything on earth was made to fall and to disperse and to dissipate as time goes by.
To rise was to challenge the laws of nature. Nothing could rise, except one thing, invisibly, vapors.
Water mixed with the heat of the sun and became a vapor, and the vapor ascended to the sky and became clouds. At night and sometimes by day, the clouds became rain, and the rain fell and spilled water onto the earth.
Some water remained on the land in rivers and streams and lakes. Other water, sliding and falling and dropping across the land, found its way to the oceans.
The Life of Fruit
In time, life conspired to defy gravity little by little.
Life combined with the soil and the water and the air and the light to make trees and shrubs (some bearing bananas or mangoes or pawpaws), and these plants reached skyward to the sun.
But these plants could not be severed from the soil, because their roots sought nourishment there. Any plant severed from the soil would fall to the earth, obedient to gravity.
In time, many plants were severed from the earth and covered by soil and water and became hard and part of the rock. Beneath the surface of the earth, dead plants formed coal, and sometimes oil and gas.
The Origin of Man
After much time, other forms of life were born, including animals that did grow heads and arms and legs and tails and eat the plants.
Some animals became humans, some male, some female, all of whom wished to walk on two legs and become higher than other animals and plants.
Men were not always bigger and stronger than other animals and so sought refuge in holes in the ground and caves.
The caves were darker than night and men grew frightened of the dark, not knowing what was out there, until they discovered fire, which they used for light and heat.
Sometimes, men used fire to warm the flesh of other beasts and they grew stronger.
Life was good, and men tended to live within and surrounded by nature as one.
Man on the Move
Men began to move across the earth in search of food and learned how to construct homes of rock and stone and bricks made of soil and water.
Their homes grew taller than trees and animals and began to defy gravity.
Then men learned how to make machines that could move across the land and water at speeds faster than men or horses could walk or run.
And they consumed coal and oil and gas, so that they were not dependent on horse power.
Man Turns the Power Switch On
Men learned how to make electricity and switches that would turn the power on and off.
Men made glass bulbs that turned darkness into light.
Men had finally become enlightened.
Men looked at the sky for beauty and meaning and portents of the future.
They wondered what lived in the heavens and whether they had been created by gods.
They made drawings and pictures of what surrounded them. One day they would make photographs and moving pictures and shiny silver discs.
Men observed what occurred in nature and, over a great duration, started to learn about cause and effect.
Man Dominates Himself
Then men created gods in their own image.
They invented religions and superstitions and sometimes it was difficult to tell them apart, men and their gods, religions and superstitions.
Men used their religions to explain what they could and couldn’t do.
Then they created churches and holy men and scriptures to dictate to them what they must and must not do, and the holy men and their gods punished them if they did not do what they must do, or did what they must not do.
Man Discovers Matters of Life and Death
Men observed decay and destruction and death around them, and wondered whether they too would die one day.
Men didn’t like this prospect and decided that they alone amongst the plants and animals had a soul and, after death, would live in eternity.
Except that, if they disobeyed the commandments of their holy men and gods and scriptures, they would be punished by eternal damnation and made to live in hell. Which was not meant to be a good thing.
Some scientists conducted experiments and tests on dogs and other animals and learned how they were governed by stimulus and response.
Men wondered whether their souls and their capacity for reason elevated them above the animals.
They did not recognise that, even with their gods, men would do evil things to each other that animals would never do.
Man Engages in Some Empire State Building
Men built their homes in cities and formed nations. They conquered other cities and nations and established empires.
They established workforces and armies.
They organised men and their possessions into rows and columns, and they made men and women wear uniforms, so that they might look and think and do alike.
They developed systems to punish those who would dissent and they used force to hold their empires together.
They looked down upon any man or woman who would not conform or wear a uniform.
Those that they did not incarcerate or hang or inject with life-sapping solutions or electricity, they cast off into the wilderness, where they would disperse or die of thirst.
We Men are Scientists
So men acquired knowledge and wisdom, and accumulated science and technology beyond the wildest dreams of their predecessors.
They converted their knowledge and wisdom into zeroes and ones, so that they might store them on silver discs.
Some men wondered whether there was more to life than zeroes and ones, and was there anything beyond zero or between zero and one, and they were scorned.
Man Defies Gravity
Slowly, man’s dreams became more ambitious.
Some men dreamed about how they might fly like a bird, and one day men learned how to make flying machines.
Men did not always live happily with other men, and they made tools and machines that would maim and kill their enemies.
Men used their aeroplanes to drop bombs on other men, and the planes and the bombs grew bigger, and the maiming and the killing grew more widespread and efficient.
At the same time, men learned how to make bigger and taller buildings that reached higher and appeared to touch the sky.
Many men lived and worked in these skyscrapers.
In Case of War
Then there were two wars between many nations of the world.
In the first war, many men died in trenches dug into the soil of their farms.
In the second war, it was not necessary to get into a trench to die. Many people died in their homes and their buildings. It was easier to kill more quickly in the cities that housed large numbers of people.
Men made new bombs that were meant to end the wars, but when they continued, men invented rockets that could maim and kill even greater numbers of people.
Some rockets made a sound that warned people that they were coming.
If you heard the sound, you might be able to escape to safety.
When they did not end the war, scientists invented more and better ways to kill more and better people. They built rockets that made no noise and could kill you before you heard them coming.
They were the perfect machinery of death, because nowhere was safe and you could not escape them.
These rockets defied both gravity and the imagination.
While nobody had been looking or thinking about it, man’s buildings and vehicles and aeroplanes and rockets and bombs had made the earth dark again.
A Voice in the Wilderness
Well, maybe not nobody. A man called Slothrop had been watching.
Every time a rocket was launched, Slothrop was blessed with a hard-on, an erection.
He would look at the rockets and he would be turned off.
At the same time, he would look at the rockets and he would be turned on.
Slothrop’s hard on was a hard one for the scientists to explain.
What the Fuck?
Somewhere in Europe, scientists were erecting buildings, platforms, rockets that could bring death to people like Slothrop.
Slothrop suspected that the best use of an erection was not to build an edifice, but to fill an orifice.
Slothrop wondered, why had men become obsessed by Death, when they should have been preoccupied with Life?
Surely, there is no life without sex, no progress without congress, no creation without procreation?
“Make love, fuck the war.”
“Fuck war, fuck each other.”
How do you convince everybody else that this is the solution?
“Fucked if I know,” sez Slothrop.
The Prophet Debunked
Slothrop is cast out of the mainstream and sets out across Europe in pursuit of love, sex, and rockets (and those who would launch any one or more of them at him).
Still, even equipped with his hard on, Slothrop prefers bananas to buildings and rockets, he is bent but never straight.
He is the ultimate non-conformist, hedonist and sybarite, who gives pleasure to himself and to many women, Katje, Margherita, Bianca, three of the foremost amongst them.
Slothrop’s skepticism and excess threaten the System, Religion and Culture. He is an anarchist Counter-Force to Binary Code, Mono-theism, Uniformity and Over-the-Counter Culture.
He is the unwitting counter-cultural Prophet who threatens the methodical, ordered and conformist backbone of Mainstream Society.
He is a spanner in the works. He is a virus that must be eliminated. Like Trotsky, he is a Prophet that must be netted.
They, the powers that be, with their uniforms and their weapons and their switches, chase Slothrop through Europe, but he remains free.
Misanslothropy
In time, people came to doubt whether Slothrop ever actually existed at all.
Some would ask, “Slothrop? What kind of name for a prophet is that?”
Still They did not stop their pursuit, even when They were certain that he must be dead. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
If you can’t see him or hear him, deprive him of oxygen. Wipe out his disciples. Stifle his message. Prevent it from reaching any children. If the medium is the message, remove his medium. That way the prophet and his prophecy will cease to exist.
Revelations? What Revelations?
Was Slothrop a fabrication? A ghost in the machine? A shadow in the light of day? A figment of someone’s imagination? A fiction? Just a character in a novel? Just a story in a holy book?
As Slothrop would say, “I’m fucked if I know.”
Outside the novel, the world continues as before, only more so. Buildings reach higher. Rockets and aeroplanes fly further. Wars drone on. Civilians die. Men line up in rows and columns and uniforms. Power perpetuates itself eternally. Evil perpetrates itself on people via people. Darkness masquerades as light.
The sky is silent. We can no longer hear the screaming. It’s all theatre, even within our homes.
Group Read
I re-read this as part of a group read started by Stephen M:
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/6...
Reading Notes
I kept my reading notes in My Writings:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...
A Letter from Vlad the Impaler of Butterflies Dated April, 1973
Dear Tom,
Vera and I very much appreciated your gift of a signed first edition of your novel.
It actually caused a little friction in the Nabokov household.
I don't mean to be ungrateful or vulgar, but we both wished you had given us one copy each. (I guess we could purchase one, but we were too keen to read it.)
Naturally, I started it first, immediately it arrived, but quickly found I couldn't put it down.
The reason being that, every time I did, Vera picked it up and commenced reading.
Initially, our respective lepidopteran bookmarks were quite far apart, but when she passed my place, she asserted her right to be the dominant reader, and I had to wait until she had devoured the entire offering, which she did by the time of Maundy Thursday.
Fortunately, this left me Easter to finish it, so we were able to compare notes by Easter Monday, appropriately with a sense of renewed faith in literature.
I am convinced "Gravity's Rainbow" is one of the finest works of modern fiction.
It is very much an artistic and logical extension of "V.", which as you know we also enjoyed greatly.
If your first novel was a pursuit of "V", then "Gravity's Rainbow" is a pursuit of V, too.
In fact, it is a pursuit of both V1 and V2.
Vera was bold enough to suggest that V1 and V2 might connote Vlad and Vera, though we were unable to reach consensus on who might be noisy and who might be silent.
We did, however, hypothesise that Slothrop could be a reversal of Humbert.
To put it bluntly (these are Vera's words, not mine), Humbert, European in origin, fucks his way around the New World, more or less.
Slothrop, on the other hand, American to his bootstraps, fucks his way around the Old World.
I admire the way you, even more so than Slothrop, carried off Bianca.
It is some of the most delicious erotic writing I have read.
Bianca echoes Dolores nicely.
Even the sound of her name...Bi-an-ca.
The way it rolls off your tongue, it reminds me of, forgive me for citing myself, "Lo-lee-ta".
It's also close enough to the German acronym B.N.K. (which even a faint-hearted German reader or patient would appreciate stands for the "Bundesverband Niedergelassener Kardiologen", cross my heart and hope not to die).
Vera was the first to detect how you reversed the reader's response to this relationship.
Humbert knew damned well how old Lolita was. It was crucial to his enterprise.
On the other hand, Slothrop "believed" Bianca was a minor of barely 11 or 12, but when you work through the arithmetic of your puzzle, you realise that in reality (and therefore fiction) she was 16 (or was it 17?) and consequently of age.
So, what Slothrop did was legitimate, but what the reader (who was as yet unaware of this detail) did was not.
In "Lolita", I allowed readers to believe they were jurors with a legitimate interest in the proceedings, whereas in "Gravity's Rainbow" they are complicit in a crime that the protagonist did not actually commit.
The reader's voyeurism comes at a cost, at least metaphorically.
Only time will tell whether America and the world is ready to be confronted with their culpability.
Even if they are not, I hope your novel receives the acclaim it deserves.
So, well done, Tom, Richard would have been proud.
I would have been proud to call you my pupil, too (Pupil 2?), if only you had enrolled in one of my classes.
Perhaps you learned more and better from my example?
In the hope that you might continue to do so, I have asked my Publisher to send you a copy of my "Strong Opinions".
I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed expressing them.
Yours, with all my admiration,
V.
Slothropod De-Feets Cephalopod, Dutch Girl Almost Pops Her Clogs
Slothrop, octopus
And Katje Borgesius
We were meant to meet.
The Thoughts of An Erotic Clausewitz
Fuck Death, Fuck Rockets,
Says Erotic Clausewitz,
Make Love, Fuck the War.
Jim Carroll Watches the Earth Recede
How can I propel
My missile 'gainst the pull of
Wicked Gravity?
Slothrop's Dewy Glans
Slothrop's cock, un-cropped
Slots into sweet spot, then, spent,
Flops soft in wet spot.
Summit Meeting
Who knows what worldly wisdom I might find
When I discover myself at the peak,
Gravity-defiant, all nickels spent,
Trying to work out what it could have meant,
And you're already there, reposed, asleep,
Your trousers down and crimson phallus bent,
And scattered on the snow are streaks
Of your rocket-powered ejaculate
That have fallen moist, arc-like to the earth,
Still rainbow-coloured and immaculate.
So I read 200 sullen words worth
Of the dry wit and onanistic mirth
That appeal so much to the daisy chain
Of acolytes standing at your rear.
As one who's usually come before,
They call you a poet and a seer.
It's sad we only see your back side,
Though we're the ones forever left behind
By all your avant garde sorcery and
The flaccid disquisitions of your mind.
Soundtrack:
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Babe You Turn Me On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=153eVr...
Bradley
I dallied with the idea of writing a very short review, saying pithy things like:
"I'm glad that's over."
or:
"Fuck."
OR should I go more eloquent: "I'm going to set this day as an anniversary to commemorate why I'll never read this book again."
But I think I'll just state that I think I just got post-moderned in the ass.
Or I could say some wonderful things about the novel, too, of which there are many, many wonderful things, such a great and funny commentary on WAR, Operant Conditioning, Drug Fiends, Erections, Scatophagy, Porn, Dirty Limericks, Porn, the Physics of rocketry and drug making, Porn, Orgasmo, Porn, and a great scene near the beginning that brought to mind Pink Floyd's The Wall movie with the buttcheeks over London mixed with a sampling of the BLOB and Bananas.
Do you think this was an easy book to read? You might think so with all the Porn. But no. It's a drug-trip with funny scenes that's very smart and it goes way beyond my tolerance level for being smug. Maybe all this 60's and 70's thing about making sure every penis and vagina is getting it on to shock the straights just isn't for me. I'd like a little story with my porn. Fortunately, there's a lot of story hidden right beneath the surface, here. It might be hiding right beneath all the SS or a few more Nazis or just behind that other Nazi, or is it behind this one?
Golly, it's kinda hard to find it. I know it's there. But at least there's yet another erection and girls everywhere are flocking to this inexplicable sex symbol... but wait! Yeah... I have to admit the nasal erection bit was funny as hell.
*sigh*
I've read better bricks. I've even had better bricks slam across my head.
Alas, this one was not a solid gold brick with a slice of lemon wrapped around it, but it *might* be just as crazy. (Thank you, Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster. I need you so bad right now.)
Steven
I've always been told that Gravity's Rainbow is one of most unfilmable books ever, but, seeing as others have somehow ended up on the big screen to my surprise, I just thought - this is before reading it mind you - that I bet it isn't as complex as people say, and could yet still end up being made.
Nope. It's completely unfilmable. I'd put my life on it. I know its been thought about in the past, but even if it did have a straightforward narrative - which it absolutely doesn't - there is just no way.
Firstly, by the end of this doorstopper of a novel, I had a pretty good idea - or at least my own interpretation of - just what the hell it all adds up to. But, I'd be lying if I said everything made sense and all the dots were joined. There came a moment where certain pieces of the multi-complex plotline started to come together, but of course, to get there, I had to get through a really tough first third or so. It was tough I can tell you, but, unlike V, it didn't infuriate the bejesus out of me, as I always had a feeling that if I stuck with it the rewards will come.
Secondly, I'd say for the writing alone, it's the best of the five Pynchon novels I've read. And whilst I did find it very funny in places - for me, Vineland is still the most fun, and the most character driven of the five - it is the darkest, most dense, most paranoid, most unsettling, most dazzling, most tragic, and most poetic. A journey into a fearful twilight zone of semi consciousness is how I'd put it. It literally felt like I was neither awake nor asleep for most of it's 900 pages. Can't think of any other book that has taken me out of my comfort space in the way this did. Some of the scenes where breathtakingly spectacular, outrageous, utterly revolting, and completely off the chart - that would be the chart of insanity - and I'm no doubt taking them to the grave. But, although I did find the whole experience great, it is problematic in terms of not being able to take everything in - I even thought about back tracking, and reading say, the last 20 to 30 pages again each time I picked it up, but in the end dismissed this idea.
For one thing, people who aren't even in the novel get more of a story than some of the actual characters that are. And that brings me on to the places. One minute we're here, then we're there, then we're .... where are we? .... er .... how on earth did we end up here? .... hang on .... wait .... where is here? .... What! .... who on earth are you? .... but we're in the Zone right? .... aren't we?
And how does an international light-bulb cartel that are having trouble in the amazon jungle trying to locate a missing light bulb from a military outpost, tie in with a polish undertaker trying to get struck by lightning in the Baltic sea? It is either very very clever or it's just plain quackers! But then again, from what I can put together, is it not both? The plot, in fact, is so clever, that I now have to label Pynchon an all out genius as well as a mad man. I bet on second reading even more of the narrative will click into place too. And that brings me to the point, like others have said, It probably needs two, maybe even three reads, to fully grasp this monumental beast. But that doesn't mean to say you can't enjoy it the first time, because I know I did.
A record breaking post-modern orgy of references, flashbacks, cultural historical facts; and fictions, scientific terminology, philosophical musings, sperm induced blather, disguises - got to love um! - ha! ha!, insulating plastic, technicians, phallic mania, African expatriates, drug dealers - Ah, so that's what Pig Bodine (V) got up to in the war, pet lemmings, heroic uprisings, daring escapes, leather clad piss and shit perversions, sado-masochistic orgasms,
Oh, and buried in there somewhere is World War II Europe, a V-2 rocket, and a guy who definitely does NOT have erectile dysfunctional issues.
Aubrey
Gather ‘round, everyone, and hear the tale of why the reasoning (not the rejection itself, mind you) behind the rejection of this novel for the Pulitzer Prize of ’74 fucking pisses me off.
Their reason? Obscenity. I would hope that they at least wrote an essay justifying their decision that went beyond an insipid mix of morally outraged blatherings and oblique mentions of coprophilia (he ate what? Poop? Oh, we cannot stand for this we simply must not accept this and god forbid we even think for a moment on the context or, you know, try to understand).
Because right before, right before this event that in my particular edition takes up a mere two pages out of seven hundred and sixty, yes, 760, count ’em, of wonder and glory that I will expand upon later once I have clearly demonstrated the idiocy of the rejection, yes, right before the passage that describes the horrific act in all its gory detail, we have:
They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet…not it’s not guilt here, not so much as amazement—that he could have listened to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from her communiqués of vertigo, nausea, and pain….Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth…I have never been in a war. I do not claim to understand the agony that those who participate go through, neither the soldier nor the civilian. But this I can recognize, this horrid disconnection from reality that results from society blocking you off from the realities of life with words, words, worthless words that rise like so much smoke and fall like so much ash when you realize it is all lies and there is nothing, nothing to prepare you for the truth of life and you become exquisitely aware of what They have conditioned you to be. And the question arises of whether life in this sleazed and sycophantic lubricant is worth it, and reality dims to a faint question of hunger and thirst, and your thoughts clamor at you to the edge of the precipice and all you can think about is how a permanent vacation from all this banality of evil would be nice. Very nice indeed. And the only thing that can draw you back is some confirmation that through all the living muck you are indeed alive. What is an easier answer to that eternal question than pain? Better yet, what is a more conscientious answer than pain, willingly inflicted upon the self in a controlled and safe environment, rather than going out and inflicting oneself on others in the forms of murder, rape, and physical destruction? With that in mind, who dares claim that they, an untouched outsider, have the right to condemn such a thing?
What is even worse than this flimsy excuse is what was lost when the baby, with so much joyous potential and wondrous insight, was flung out with the merest trickle of slightly smelly bathwater, flung to die on the streets for showing itself as being human.
Do you know what was lost? Knowledge, and better yet, a love of knowledge, sheer ecstasy at the mere sight of knowledge, adoration of subjects ranging from geography to organic chemistry to folk lore of cultures other than European to religions other than European to philosophical meanderings upon death and life and lust and shit and piss and the War, the War in none of its popular culture trappings of honor and glory and instead in its vulgar horror of wasted lives and idiotic bashings and the eternal chance of being blown to smitherings no matter if you were suffering in the worst of concentration camps or if you had found some small and precious moment of laughter in these bleak and desperate times, run by Them. Always by Them. They, who know the rules and run the show and will catch you by the genitals and nail you to the rate race and leave you to run or hang, silently screaming in pleasure all the way in an invisible construct too devious for words.
Why? Because it is the very foundations of what Homo Sapien is built upon, that instinctive organism that found itself growing a shell of thought, of conscience, enough to persuade itself that it was beyond all those biological trappings, those helpless desires, those inane fears, those shameful pleasures. Because when faced with death, the natural response is life, and the natural precursor is procreation, and the natural instigator is, what? Some call it love. Others call it lust. And perhaps it would be that clean if you ignored all that social indoctrination, all those millennia of cultural bonds and civilized underpinnings, the conformation of the animal to a world of new materials, new ideas, new awareness of pain and terror in the face of an overall useless existence. If you force a creature to like something and live with it from day one, and then keep to the beat their descendants forever on, you better be ready for a blending of the biological instinct and the cultural indoctrination. You better be ready for the fetish, those inexplicable psychological bonds between a whole range of objects and ideologies, all linked up to the evolutionary instinct, the need to fuck.
And when you put these individuals, who have adapted to strictly controlled world in ways that would put Casanova to shame, into a pressure cooker of death and destruction and technology specifically calibrated to rend bodies in a grotesquely unbelievable artistry, a World War that made the previous paltry and has not yet been surpassed? Furthermore, when you get Them, who sense all of this, in addition to sensing how society readily acquiesces to stories of violent rape and yet frowns on the consensual sexual relations that happen to deviate from the norm? That calls the former an inevitability brought upon by the victims themselves, and the latter a perversion, a deviation, a thing of disgust and shame? Then, dear Reader, you have the conspiracy of the millennia, where War drives sex drives shame drives settling under the thumb of Them who caters to your secret erotic delight. Who drives the War. For what? Money, of course. Ah ha, you say, of course. That excuses everything.
Regardless, seems a bit wonky, no? Seems a bit, well, conducive to discussion of how civilization chooses to harness the biological drive, how it silently condones rape and loudly condemns the erratic spillover of voluntary intercourse, no matter how privately or safely it is conducted, no?
Finally, going back to the knowledge. Right now, the liberal arts and the hard sciences hate each other. Loathe each other entirely. I’ve been on both sides, and I’ve heard the same story riddled in pride and ignorant contempt and secret fear from both. I’ve even experienced both, back before I got a handle on things and started to understand the gorgeous beauty inherent in both, which exists in both the masterfully derived equations from which we control the heavens, to the powerfully themed piece of literature that speaks to the souls centuries after conception. And you know which book combines that all in a singular, sexy package? Do you know which book not only breaks the rules of what the general populace deems is the proper way to write a novel, but blurs and cracks and subsumes the boundaries between the knowledge deemed ‘nerdy’ and the knowledge deemed ‘useless’ and wraps them all in a glory that only wishes to expand the appreciation for worlds both mathematical and geographical, both emotional and quantifiable, where a sunset is appreciated for its blend of colors as well as the wondrous calculations of the atmosphere that generate such a sight? All the while skipping over emotional raptures and objective information, capturing the tragically beautiful persistence of the human spirit in nine pages recounting the tale of soldiers caroling one winter’s night; the horrific capabilities of the human spirit in thirty-six pages that range from the fervent desire to breach the horizons and surpass stagnant conceptions of possibility, to the helpless lust in the face of overwhelming obliteration of body and soul, finally ending with complete disconnection except for one last push, one last tiny effort of goodwill.
Simply, this is not an issue with the book, which chooses not to follow the path of literature referencing literature referencing literature ad infinitum, hardening the bubble to an insoluble force field of fear and close-minded intolerance. Which, by the way, makes it perfect for teaching, small excerpts taken out of a context that still retains enormous amounts of contextual information, spanning scopes of knowledge and lines of reasoning with simple skips of words and sentences. No, this is an issue with education itself, the handling of separate subjects in separate ways that result in the same lesson. We learn to hate learning, whether it be by the mindless cramming of scientific gobbledygook or the training to view books as a sponge to be soaked dry of every pointless and emotionally draining detail. We are taught by those who have found refuge in the ideological constraints, concentrated themselves in high enough amounts of personal pride and vicious disdain for anything that lies outsides the traditions of their specific field. We are trained to hate neutrality and loathe those who refuse to subsume their selves under a single formula, see them as traitors to the cause.
As if the human mind, ever metamorphosing in endless streams of fickle time and violent happenstance, constantly shifting in reaction to similar seething cauldrons of fate and fortune, is a block that once fitted can never go back. As if empathy is equivalent to proposal, as if understanding the viewpoints of others without being able to ignore their faults is a secret sign of defending said faults. As if any other reaction to capture bonding (born and bred and colonized and commercialized) beyond stoic subservience (be grateful you have been passed over) is not a screaming across the sky for survival, is not only heresy. It is evil.
Where is the joy? Where is that feeling of acquiring something and loving it so much that one wishes to show it to others, help them understand that this thing they may have feared has so much beauty and really is not so frightening or impossible to comprehend? Where is the recognition of that conspiracy of the ‘Other’, subconsciously mandated as a survival technique (incomprehension leads to fear leads to anger leads to prejudice leads to incomprehension) and now subconsciously harnessed by ‘Them’, a recognition that does not stop and gaze wistfully over to the Zone of action? Ignorance is bliss is the true evil of neutrality, and those loaded words are used to good measure of their full range of context.
---
I’m not going to lie to you. This book is hard. The only reason I got what I did out of it is due to the following personal characteristics that were acquired by pure chance:
-Love for the German Language
-Formulaic Education in Engineering (specializing in Polymers) Greatly Exceeding that of FE in English
-Penchant for Iconoclasm (sociocultural, sexual, linguistic, you name it, I will break it and make it bleed for the purpose of my own understanding and comfort)
-Reverential Devotion to Literature
-Experience (for every rule I break, I break my own brain over books like these)
That’s my side of the equation. This is how I cheat. I can’t cheat for you, but trust me, the test is worth everything.
---
Epilogue
Anonymous: YOU CONDONE COPROPHILIA?
Aubrey: I’m sorry?
Anonymous: I just finished your review of Gravity’s Rainbow, and YOU CONDONE COPROPHILIA? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Aubrey: Déjà vu.
Anonymous: What?
Aubrey: Irony.
Anonymous: YOU’RE SICK IF YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY.
Aubrey: Okay. You know what. Closure. I get it. Here, all nicely formatted and quotable.
“Looking back on things, it seems to me that whatever the fuck is wrong with me is in some way related to whatever the fuck is wrong with Pynchon. And if that is indeed the case, well. I can live with that.”
-Aubrey (June 16, 2013)
Steve
An Approach for Simulating Text Consistent With Gravity’s Rainbow
Technical Report issued 6 July 2012 by the Simulation Lab Originating Text-based Handiwork (SLOTH)
While the exact algorithm used by Pynchon (1973) to produce Gravity’s Rainbow (henceforth GR) was never documented, we contend that the method proposed in this paper is, on average, in a repeated sampling context, observationally equivalent. As is true of any simulation, there is a deterministic component and a random component. Simulated paths will vary, but the statistical distributions from which the stochastic terms are sampled match those of GR. Our approach, as applied to text generation, is novel¹. It is, however, closely related to the methods employed by computer scientists in the so-called Markovian Mozart initiative². We begin by describing the basic structure, we then discuss our vision of the text generation process as it applies to GR, and conclude with final thoughts on how text simulation may be used going forward.
Simulation Structuring
Interest in random text generation appears to have begun with the famous, though untested, proposition that an infinite number of monkeys with infinite time at their keyboards would ultimately reproduce Shakespeare. Of course, pure randomness without some kind of structure is a highly inefficient path toward literary art. Plus, the process is just as likely to produce piggy porn as it is to emulate Pynchon (granting, for our purposes, that there is a distinction to be made).
The opposite side of the spectrum would be a well-defined set of sentences featuring blanks to fill in using a pre-chosen set of options. This was a style popularized by Mad Magazine³. Such an approach differs from ours in that their structure is more narrowly defined, allowing insufficient latitude to characterize the chaotic and disorienting nature of GR.
The input parameters to our simulation will, by default, result in 4 sections, 73 chapters, over 400 characters (mostly minor, wordplayfully named), and 776 pages, just as the original did. However, one of the advantages of a simulator is that the resulting length is configurable. We are also careful to specify stylistic breakdowns that may enter in a probabilistically identical way. The sampling ranges extend from ridiculous to sublime in one dimension and vulgar to sublime in another. By applying noise terms to the narrative, comprehension will vary throughout.
Text Generating Process
The backbone of our simulation structure is established in the initial step. We specify a superset of core influences which are drawn upon by the random text extractor in accordance with user-supplied probability weights. This superset, A, is defined by
A ⊂ (WWII Historical Almanac, V-2 Rocket Technical Manual, Pavlovian Psychology [loaded in backwards], German-English Dictionary, Freud’s Comprehensive List of Phallic Symbols, phrasebooks for various romance languages, Anthology of Daft ‘n’ Bawdy Poetry, Urban Thesaurus [1945 edition], Guidebook to Pharmacology, Introduction to Tarot Symbolism, Applications in Multivariate Calculus and Differential Equations, a short book of surprisingly tender love stories, a longer book of genuinely raunchy lust stories, and an assortment of engineering textbooks)
Text drawn probabilistically from A serves as our starting point, S1. The next step is to intersperse small elements of plot into S1 with insertion points determined by a Poisson distribution. Specify
f(k, λ) = λ^k ⋅ exp(-λ) / k!
where k is the number of insertion points for each sub-block of S1, ! denotes factorial, and λ is the mean inclusion rate (λ > 0, but not by much)
The storyline to be parsed and inserted as indicated above is presented (by us and by Pynchon) in skeletal form. The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature sums it up well⁴.
The sprawling narrative comprises numerous threads having to do either directly or tangentially with the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop is an American working for Allied Intelligence in London. Agents of the Firm, a clandestine military organization, are investigating an apparent connection between Slothrop's erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. As a child, Slothrop was the subject of experiments conducted by a Harvard professor who is now a Nazi rocket scientist. Slothrop's quest for the truth behind these implications leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his own and the reader's interpretation.
As a work in the postmodernist tradition, nonlinearity must be actuated. At no point may the plot as a function of time (P[t]) be twice differentiable, and only rarely may it be first-order differentiable. Flashbacks, digressions, and various other discontinuities must be introduced as P[t] is inserted into S1. In a related way, causal orderings must be distorted for a more authentic Pynchonian narrative. Specify
Cause ⇔ Effect +/- δt
where δt = α + β⋅δJ + σ⋅δz with J being a jump parameter; δz being Gaussian (not DeLillovian) white noise; and α, β ‘n’ σ being user-defined constants.
Once the plot convolutions specified above are inserted, resulting in S2, various themes may be brought to bear. Seminal reviews by Penkevich (2012), Jenn(ifer) (2012), and Graye (2012) discuss a wide variety of these themes and should serve as the basis for the next stage of textual input. The motifs identified form a set B ⊂ (Nature of Control, Paranoia, Preterite vs. Elite, Us vs. Them, etc.). Sampling from B proceeds in the same manner described above for A, i.e., according to the probability weights defined by the user. We denote the result of this as S3.
Authorial insights into human nature are treated in a similar way. However, lists constructed using the aforementioned reviews feature insights of the reviewers themselves. This, in essence, removes layers of obfuscation so that transformations are necessary to reconstruct the more muddled original set. This is achieved by adding random perturbations and mapping the results into Hilbert space. Draws from this set of transformed and re-adumbrated insights inserted into S3 give us S4.
Stylistic modifications to S4 are important when attempting to simulate the GR experience. For one, the narration should vary depending on the POV character. Allow average words per sentence in certain randomly chosen sections to be fully three times greater than the overall average. A smaller but consistently applied transformation is to take a common four-letter word and substitute in a three-letter alternative that, for what it’s worth, is phonetically more correct. For Pynchon, this meant “says” → “sez”. The result of these modifications is denoted S5.
A GR simulation would not be complete without one further stylistic “enhancement”. Any vanilla sex scenes within S5 may be replaced with random draws from Y. Denote:
U := incidence of urolagnia
C := incidence of coprophagia
K := incidence of kinkiness of any other form
We can then specify
Y=U⋅C⋅K!
Finally, the result of this last modification, S₆, should be submitted to voice recognition software and compared with Pynchon’s own voice. Any wavelets that differ by more than 2 σ should then be truncated within S₆ to create S7. It is our contention that S7 will be a lexically similar rendition of the original when the default values of the parameter inputs are chosen. Alternatively, our framework also allows customization such that GR may be generated with a twist. Options along these lines are discussed in the final section below.
Prospects Going Forward
Pynchon’s well-known penchant for formulaic detail coupled with random noise makes GR a natural vehicle for demonstrating our methods. As stated above, by choosing the relevant inputs and their GR-consistent probability values, a book very much like GR may be generated. By repeating the process, multiple instances may be constructed. With sufficient computing power, these multiple instances can be fed into a genetic algorithm to determine an “optimal” GR (where optimality is defined in terms of individual tastes). For instance, by dialing down the weight assigned to silly poems in the initial stage, one could generate a new GR of even greater ponderousness and density. Similarly, length settings may be varied. A GR sampler could be generated that is only a fraction of the original length. Or for the show-off readers out there looking for even greater challenges, a simulated version that doubles the length and halves the signal-to-noise ratio could be produced.
Of course, our methodology may be applied to simulate any piece of writing⁵. Hybridization is also possible. For instance, if the inputs for David Morrell’s First Blood were combined with those for GR, setting it in Vietnam, and substituting in violence for half the sex scenes, something like Gravity’s Rambo would result. Hybrids that do not involve GR are also possible. Inputs from classic works by Margaret Mitchell and Haruki Murakami could be combined to create Gone with the Wind-up Bird Chronicles. The key to performing these simulations well is to draw on the astute observations of reviewers for synopses, insights ‘n’ context. We encourage readers to generate these important inputs to spectrally enrich and parabolically ground all further text simulation exercises.
The code used to generate simulated versions of GR is available upon request: SLOTH, Simplatz 00001, The Zone.
Endnotes
¹As a further demonstration of our techniques, we invoked a random pun generator in the construction of this paper.
²Their simulation involves inputting all published works of a composer such as Mozart, codifying tones, tempos, and dynamics to be used in pattern recognition software that then assigns probabilities used to generate subsequent notes. For example, if the previous measure consisted of four quarter notes with the pattern E E F G, the algorithm would scan the entire sample of the composer’s works for similar patterns as well as the notes that had followed. It may then be determined that there is a 31% probability that a quarter note G will be next, a 14% probability that it will be a quarter note E, and so on. This is then fed into the simulator to randomly determine the next note consistent with the probabilities. The newly generated note pattern would then be windowed and used in an iterative fashion to determine all subsequent notes.
³An example might be to choose words or phrases to construct a political speech: My opponent is a (Republican, Democrat, cretin) and is therefore given to (flip-flopping, demagoguery, pleasuring male goats). In contrast to him, I vow to support (education, the environment, the people, bridges to nowhere only when the quid is sufficiently pro quo).
⁴While it is only right to recognize Greg (2010) for the brevity and pith of his plot summary, it did not allow us to specify a P[t] function to highlight the nonlinearity w.r.t. time.
⁵This write-up itself was generated through simulation – a kind of meta-feature of what amounts to postmodernistic content formulation.
References
Graye, Ian, 2012, Goodreads Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Greg, 2010, Goodreads Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Jenn(ifer), 2012, Goodreads Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Morrell, David, 1972, First Blood, Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY.
Penkevich, S., 2012, Goodreads Review of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Pynchon, Thomas, 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Books, New York, NY.
Appendix A
Our rating of the original GR instance, as published by Pynchon, was derived by integrating across a uniformly distributed utility function, U(x,y). The limits of integration in the x dimension range from boring to funny; in the y dimension they range from obscure to profound.
∫ ∫ U(x,y) dx dy = ★★★
Appendix B
The following poem was generated using the simulation techniques described above. The primary input was a single page of a rhyming dictionary. A secondary input was utilized as well: The Low-Brow’s Guide to Self-Indulgence. It was meant to convey a reader’s reaction at the midway point of the GR endeavor.
I had hoped to attain
Or at the very least feign
A good stretch of the brain
With this GR campaign.
But it’s awfully arcane
And though I hate to complain
It's become a real strain.
I’m not sure I’ll stay sane.
Yet I cannot abstain
Despite genuine pain.
Besides,
Can it be the worst bane?
A skull full of Chow mein?
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