// War Literature

I think Simona really nails it in her post regarding the illogical, disconnected flow of the text.  Forget one given paragraph, I found myself rereading single sentences over and over again in an attempt to piece together the so many different clauses and fragments of ideas together.  Frustratingly, I usually leave the sentences without the full satisfaction of being able to dissect and understand its parts.  So, then I reconsidered Pynchon’s true efforts in his myriad of fragmented ideas and the whole fragmented structure of the book in general.  Perhaps it is to emphasize the vagueness and uncertainty that paralyzes a wartime setting. When externally examining the text, there is common and standard order – there is the use of punctuation, literary devices, and pretty coherent usage of grammar.  But when one dives into it and tries to extract meaning from the whole, nothing really makes sense. Similarly, for our characters, their lives seem to be in order with nothing truly falling apart – unlike in Junger in which bodies drop dead on a time interval of every other sentence. Nothing jeopardizes the lives of the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow. But the introduction of war for most civilians is a confusing and nonsensical experience – no one really knows what is going on or what the future entails, no one really gets the larger picture either.  It may not be a struggle over life and death for our characters.  But there is an overwhelming burden of internal fragmentation – which is perhaps, why Pynchon unapologetically jumps from one either idea to another and leaves no closure of thought in between.  Like other bloggers, I feel that trying to make sense out of the text thus far is like trying to pull teeth. Except, it’s the readers that experience the anticipation to get the procedure over with. How stubborn is the text is resisting our efforts to see it clearer?!  But then again, maybe it’s only to mirror the realistic impact war has on society.

Now, another speculation I have of the text is regarding the title – exactly what does Gravity’s Rainbow mean?  As I was reading, a particularly “colorful” part of the text grabbed my attention.  It is when the narrator described the appearance of ACHTUNG, which marveled me in the many different colors Pynchon mentioned.  The light is “electric yellow,” the typewriters black and grave, the fiber wood walls are cream colored, there are rubbing eraser remains of “red and brown curls,” and the scattered jig saw puzzles in the room are painted with “green velvet folds of a gown, sleight blue veining of a distant cloud, [and] the orange nimbus of an explosion.”  What does ACHTUNG represent in this novel?  Does the introduction of this mysterious bomb in the beginning of the story and the vivid mental capture of ACHTUNG mark the beginning of the rainbow? Perhaps this scene is symbolic of the tail or rather “tale” of the journey this secret bomb will make. To end this particular hunch on the text, I must say that it was awfully difficult to translate the mechanics and possible goals of Pynchon’s writing into the paragraph I just wrote.  Indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the toughest, hardest to digest pieces I have ever read.