Latest News // Tips

Gravity’s Rainbow: Grin and Bear it

by kenny.wong ~ October 13th, 2010

First off, I don’t want to make it sound like this is an easy text to read.  It isn’t.

That being said, I’ve read other “stream of consciousness” prose, Faulkner comes to mind (As I Lay Dying), and a tip I have, other than being frustrated, is this:

Sit back and enjoy.  Don’t read too much into what is going on where and by whom.  There is robust imagery and subtext being told within the lines.  If you gloss over what the hell is going on, you’re going to miss out on what is being said.  Try and find themes or images being repeated, subtext over context.

Also, on a very different approach, look at the text in a humanistic way.  Since a part (or majority) of the text revolves around stream of consciousness, imagine that the narrator, whoever it might be at the time, is thinking out loud.  Now try to imagine yourself thinking (not out loud, just thinking).  Do you actively filter what you’re thinking about? Or does your mind just race off into different ideas, thoughts, images, words, etc.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but at times, if I’m really being active about regarding what I think about at times, I am completely, off the wall, insane.  Synesthesia comes to mind.  Well, a lot comes to mind, but I’m filtering what I’m thinking in this post.

I think that is a part of what Pynchon is trying to do, create that “experience”, take us out of the spectator (objective) viewpoint, and put us directly into the mind, animate or inanimate, of war.

As far as what I got out of As I Lay Dying, I can honestly say it is something far different from the actual story being presented.  Perhaps Gravity’s Rainbow is just as vague, and probably not a “Truth” about some ideal, with a capital T.  Maybe just truths, a lot of different little truths to be said.

Gravity’s Rainbow On Canvas

by Sabrina ~ October 11th, 2010

Fred Tomaselli, Gravity’s Rainbow (Large), 1999. Leaves, pills, flowers, photocollage, synthetic polymer, and resin on five wood panels, 96 × 240 in. (243.5 × 609.6 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art

According to Wikipedia, “Tomaselli sees his paintings and their compendium of data as windows into a surreal, hallucinatory universe.” He once said of his work, “It is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer in to space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.”

Gravity’s Rainbow — more fun stuff

by Dr. Sorin ~ October 10th, 2010

When Pynchon didn’t show up to pick up his National Book Award in 1973:

This is a useful, yet not always accurate summary of the book – episode by episode:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_grsumm.html

Best visual illustration of the novel:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/title.htm

BOOKFORUM — 2006 issue on Gravity’s Rainbow

by Dr. Sorin ~ October 7th, 2010

Please read and comment. These texts will give us a sense of Pynchon’s influence — not only in terms of its literary achievement. For many people (and future writers) in the 1970s, this was a personal book, a sublime-mad book, a road to escape from Cold War’s every day madness.

Does this book resonate, in any way, to the dreams and nightmares of our culture? Does satire still speak to us, in the Pynchonian tone?

Bookforum_Pynchon.issue

Wernher von Braun

by Dr. Sorin ~ October 7th, 2010

Gravity’s Rainbow WIKI

by Dr. Sorin ~ October 7th, 2010

http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pynchon_Newbies

The Dodo Bird

by maggiewong ~ October 6th, 2010

I’m going to come right out and say it- after reading over a hundred pages of Gravity’s Rainbow, I’m still just as lost as those who blogged before me. I found myself in utter frustration trying to understand how each part is related. In the back of my head, I assumed that if I keep reading all the pieces will fall together and I will finally see the bigger picture Pynchon is trying to convey…but sadly this never happened. As I was reading this book, I felt like I was watching some horrible movie with tons of irrelevant and incoherent scenes.

So instead of attempting to explain the story as a whole, I will simply look into a brief segment that caught my attention. At one point in the text, when Pirate is talking to Katje, he tells her of ancestor Frans Von der Groov and how he dedicated thirteen years of his life in Mauritius killing dodo birds. On one hand, Groov hates these birds “for reasons he could not explain,” but on the other hand, when he is staring at the dodo’s egg, he sees “how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world’s light” (109). Here, Groov presents the first kind of connection between man and dodo bird; the connection created by his hookgun.

Groov then goes on to talk about the “Conversion of the Dodos” and describes the scene when all the dodos gathered to be sanctified and says that “For as much as they are the creatures of God, and have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in his Word is eternal life to be found…” (111). After this, he talks about a new connection between man and the dodo bird; the connection created upon the fact that they are all now brothers in Christ.

So why does Pynchon present these two connections to us? What does the dodo bird represent? And finally, how is this relevant to the plot of Gravity’s Rainbow?

The Colors of this “Rainbow”

by wcheung ~ October 5th, 2010

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.

Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow

by hkhoury ~ October 5th, 2010

“He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name on it-if they’re really set on getting him (“They” embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi Germany) that’s the surest way, doesn’t cost them a thing to paint his name on every one, right?”

Amidst the confusion that Simona has already pointed out, the quote was the only thing I could really relate to anything else throughout the opening section of the novel. It is about Tyrone Slothrop, who is an investigator of “V-bomb ‘incidents,’” hangs a mysterious map in his office, and thinks that he is overdue for death. He expresses his fear to his friend Tantivy, and in his explanation exposes that he does not particularly fear death as a danger of war, but he is paranoid that he is being particularly targeted, “taken for a sucker.” He thinks he will be hit with a rocket dubbed with his name, but I almost feel like the V-bomb is just a product of his obsession. He clearly expresses that you cannot hear it approaching, and in his very appropriate position at ACHTUNG, has the duty of studying the remains of the rocket, which are never anything of substance.

In rereading the pages dedicated to Slothrop (pg. 20-30), this quote stood out: “…signs laid to satisfy the many sorts of police, military and civilian, whatever ‘civilian’ means nowadays.” I think this really ties in to the emphasis of Slothrop’s fear. Well, I think what it does is eliminate the boundaries between soldier and non-soldier, to show that everyone has some sort of connection to the war, that everyone’s daily life is affected by it, and, of course that there is an overwhelming fear rooted in it. Take, for example, the simple but continuous mention of the banana. A fruit normally taken for granted, though in this text and in this world defined by war, it has become a symbol of the luxury of normalcy.

Gravity’s Rainbow

by Simona ~ October 4th, 2010

First and foremost, I have to admit that I am unsure as to how one is supposed to read Gravity’s Rainbow – do I try to break everything down and understand it piece by piece? That seems ridiculous, because there’s simply way too much going on in any given paragraph. And honestly, most of the time, I’m not even sure what’s going on. That being said, I am going to focus on themes and motifs in the first 90 pages because really, it’s all I’ve got at this point.

I have to mention the bananas – and seriously,  what’s with all the bananas? There’s the scene with Pirate preparing the Banana Breakfast, during which Teddy Bloat staggers in covered with Pirate’s blanket, slips on a banana peel and falls, muttering, “Kill myself” (which is pretty funny). There’s a banana song on the next page, and then Pirate is contemplating a lengthy list of uses for bananas. Other than finding it mildly amusing, I have no other feelings toward this constant mention of bananas but at the same time, I feel like trying to find meaning in them would be stupid. Maybe they’re not meant to signify or symbolize anything. Maybe Pynchon just had a fondness for bananas, or knew some other guy who did. The bananas might be irrelevant.

What isn’t irrelevant, however (or at least I don’t think it is), is the mention of the V-bomb and the emphasis on the fact that you hear it before you see it, that it soars up into the air before it comes back down for impact. Its seemingly parabolic path, the return to “Absolute Zero,” all this imagery about roads getting narrower when they should be getting broader, it feels like there’s a connection somehow or somewhere, but I’m just not quite sure what it is. Clearly this novel is about weaponry, particularly about this new bomb. But that’s about as far as I’m getting with this train of thought.

There’s also quite a lot in this first section about Roger and Jessica’s love affair. Again, I feel like I have no idea what’s really going on, because the picture that I’m getting as I read shifts so rapidly as Pinchon jumps from scene to scene, but I think it can be summed up with, “They are in love. Fuck the war.” So perhaps this is an attempt to capture the reckless, ordinary, human side of war, as well as the incredibly technical, detail-oriented, militaristic side of the war.

Seeing as I can’t make much sense of what I’ve been able to get through thus far, I am instead going to appreciate what I can – and for me, that’s the very first line of the entire novel: “A screaming comes across the sky.” Now I don’t know much about bombs or the experience of war. I haven’t been near a battlefield or a war zone. Our war today seems so remote, you don’t have to try too hard to pretend it doesn’t exist. But I know the meaning of words and a well-crafted sentence when I read one, and I think this is one of the best I’ve ever heard.

I’ve read that Gravity’s Rainbow has been considered one of the greatest American novels of all-time, so while I may not understand it just yet, I would love to eventually see the truth in this statement.