A carnival of technology

Gravity’s Rainbow is novel by Thomas Pynchon that is widely held to be completely unreadable. Chris Lumens first introduced me to the idea of this novel, though this was not my first introduction to Pynchon. I’ll go more into that later. If I recall correctly, the Borders near Cumberland Mall didn’t even put Gravity’s Rainbow in the fiction section, instead banishing it to the dense mires of Philosophy. We joked about it sometimes, and sometimes expressed an interest in taking a shot at it, and when Chris moved to the frozen wastelands of New England, one of the parting gifts we gave him was a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. We also included a cookbook with a Confederate flag on the cover, and I hope that he got more use out of that.

Chris has again brought forth the novel’s ugly head, this time in the form of a pact to try to read the thing. Like a sucker, I joined in.

Pynchon is considered part of the postmodern movement in literature. Postmodernism as a philosophy is a rejection of both rational and empirical knowledge in favor of a celebration of the banality of form as the expression of human existence. In other words, it’s complete bullshit. The pantheon of postmodern authors includes bullshit artists such as Joyce and Beckett, yet Pynchon stands apart from even these in the magnitude of his impenetrability. Chris posted a blogger’s review of Gravity’s Rainbow that seems to capture the attitude of anyone trying to read Pynchon’s works, and, though I’m too lazy to search for other reviews of this novel, for the sake of showing the parallels in attitude even among the literarily minded, I’m going to repeat a segment of a review of Pynchon’s last novel that I read in an actual newspaper (The Christian Science Monitor) while sitting on the crapper:

[Thomas Pynchon's] new novel, Against the Day, represents one of the few cases in which I’d recommend judging a book by its cover. A casual examination will reveal that (a) it’s massive (1,085 pages) and (b) if you stare at the blurry title for more than a second, it makes you feel dizzy and your head starts to hurt.

From the little I know of Pynchon’s works, that quote sums up the experience neatly. Gravity’s Rainbow is supposed to be his masterpiece of intertwined symbolism and confusing prose, and I can hardly wait for the start of this reading adventure. I’m going to pick up a copy tomorrow.

I’ve read V, Pynchon’s first novel, so I feel like I’ve had some training. I picked up a copy of V on the recommendation of Seth, one of dcantrell’s friends, after he asked me to use my university resources (which I didn’t need; I found it with Google) to retrieve a review of the novel written by George Plimpton for the New York Times Review of Books. The review was itself a beautiful creative work, describing a turbulent novel that, though perhaps flawed in its form of a series of seemingly disjoint stories, was reminiscent of the works of Kerouac and Heller and delightful in its encyclopedic volume of interconnected details and seemingly random bits of knowledge. I read the book itself fairly recently, and it was a pretty rough experience. Beyond the obvious obstacle of not having the requisite knowledge to fully appreciate the occasional passages written in French, German or Maltese, the disjoint nature of the novel made for a pretty confusing read. Overall, I’d say that V wasn’t bad and ultimately not very confusing—by the end of the novel, the most obvious of the symbols (everything that started with a “V”) were clearly explained into the plot (which became evident about halfway through) of the search for the mystery woman (though I’m not sure what she meant),—but what I’ll call the secondary symbols—the jeweled dentures, the jazz musician, the sexualized torture and death in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, the various attitudes of all of the other members of the Whole Sick Crew which the schlemiel, the ostensibly main character, became involved in—came and went rapidly, and the meaning of anything was always nearly opaque. V was basically a series of stories presented as a single piece that dared you to make sense of it in either context. I don’t know that I enjoyed it—the fact that I have to wonder suggests that I want to enjoy it more than I actually did—but it was in all a unique, and perhaps enlightening, experience.

From what I understand, V is Pynchon for beginners. Chris made it 60 pages into Gravity’s Rainbow, and I lack no faith in his persistence or tenacity in the face of something weird to be understood. This is going to be a hell of ride.