Whereas Pynchon's early novels are accessible, or at least crystalline enough to permitreaders to follow them to their ambiguous conclusions, Gravity's Rainbow confoundsreaderly expectations utterly. The surrealism -- the eruptions of odd, unforeseeable eventsand voices; the doublings, triplings, halvings, and quarterings of characters; the chance procedures -- that occasionally colors prior novels emerges in GR as the dominantstrategy. Pynchon's controlled third-person-limited point of view in Lot 49 becomes thefractal omniscience of GR. Primarily the narrative of Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in Londonduring the Second World War who has the ability to predict imminent German bombingtrajectories by erection, GR deals tangentially with hundreds of other importantcharacters, with Russians, Germans, Africans, and Central Asians, and with settings suchas Colonial America, turn-of-the-century Africa, and the United States of the earlyseventies before it dispatches Slothrop entirely, casting his fragmentary consciousnessaround the remainder of the book. (He fails to appear recognizably in the last fifty pages.)What accounts for the perpetual hold Gravity's Rainbow has on the consciousness of American writers and critics? What accounts for the myth that has sprung up around it --a myth that seems to have ensnared even the facts of the author's life, or, at least, our ideaof those facts? What makes GR so crucial to the voyage of younger American writers? I'dcontend that it's Pynchon's style, not his subject. Whereas the prose in V., Lot 49, and theearly stories is occasionally inventive and arrestingly lyrical ("For it was now likewalking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above,hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind thehieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth"), inGR it is more than dazzling -- it's uncanny. It discards the usual limits on English andAmerican prose. In fact, the writing -- notwithstanding the physics and hard science in anovel often fascinated with the intricacies of ordnance technologies -- seems to me the point of GR, its motivating force, especially as this language elucidates Pynchon's febrileimagination. Take, for example, the stunning opening page, with its nightmarishevocation of the London Blitz.
They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown,and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, thisis not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into -- they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass... and it is poorer the deeper they go ... ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose nameshe has never heard.
American research libraries swell with monographs interpreting Gravity's Rainbow, andmany of these monographs are taken up with the arcana of the novel -- the physics, thestatistics, the theory, the citations (of Max Weber, of Gioacchino Rossini, of Pavlov). Butif GR were merely literature of ideas (in the limited sense that Nabokov so often decried),we would think no more of this work than we do of Philip K. Dick's engaging sciencefictions. Pynchon's accomplishment is that he has found the perfect marriage of form andlanguage for his rendering of Western consciousness.
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