27 April, 2002: Gravity's Rainbow
The fact that Gravity's Rainbow is so famously difficult may obscure how funny it is. I had picked GR up and started it several times, but the opening -- and in a 760-page book, that's a hundred pages or so -- is slow, overstuffed with characters, and not particuarly amusing. The hardest part of the entire book for me to read comes early (it features Blicero, also known as Weissman, the brutal, death-fixated S&M afficionado from the Africa sequence of V.; not coincidentally, I found the Africa chapter of V. the hardest to read in that book). But pressing through, the book opens up; the funny parts are as good as those in The Crying of Lot 49, and the serious parts are much richer.
Gravity's Rainbow is the story of Tyrone Slothrop, an American soldier in England at the end of World War II, and the story of his curious, carnal connection to German V-2 attacks during the Blitz. It's also the story of Weissman, who took his his codename, "Blicero", from a nickname for the Grim Reaper, whose bleached skull smiles down. It's also the story of Enzian, his half-African former lover, and Tchitcherin, Enzian's half-brother, who seeks to find and eradicate him. It's the story of Katje Borgesius, a Dutchwoman who has stared into the Void and let it swallow her. It's the story of control -- mechanical, sexual, emotional -- and its loss. It's the story of movies (King Kong, Metropolis, various spoofed German films of the Weimar Republic) and light, the Kirghiz Light of Tchitcherin's mystical revelation and the electric light of Byron the Bulb, an immortal lightbulb who seeks to liberate his brethren oppressed by the Grid.
Consider that for a moment. It is hard to take a book seriously when, five-sixths of the way through, it breaks off for pages of digression about the life and interesting times of a sentient lightbulb, but Pynchon plays little games like that throughout the book and they usually work. Put Tyrone into a weird superhero outfit and proclaim him to be Raketmensch, greatest hero in the Zone? Sure! Put Tyrone into a pig suit and send him to a brothel? Sure! Have Tyrone engage in a mid-air pie fight, for God's sake, with German aviators? Sure! Much of this is funny, and most of it works; Pynchon is playing with themes big enough and a cast of characters large enough for him to wedge almost anything into his plot and have it resonate, so he does.
Once the book gets cranking, it picks up momentum I wouldn't have expected from a book this large. The story of Slothrop's fool's errand, the search for the supposedly nonexistant SG-00000 rocket, introduces us to dozens of characters, and Pynchon tells their stories, usually variations, one way or another, on the theme of control. To choose just one, we learn how Pökler, a German rocket engineer, was separated from his daughter during the war and permitted to see her (or someone identified as her) once a year at a children's amusement park. His story is heartbreaking and his reaction disturbing; fuels the themes of paranoia and control, draws a parallel between Weissman and Pointsman, a British Pavlovian, and lets Pynchon write some disturbing incestuous fantasy sequences, all at once.
And so it goes throughout the book; funny things turn out to have deeper resonances, the meaningful and realist turns out to be a straight line for an atrocious pun or a pratfall. I wish I had caved and bought a reader's companion, and if (when) I read GR again I'll get one. There's just too much that I can recognize as allusive but not quite pick up on: too much Rilke, too much Kaballah (I looked up the qlippoth, but what's with the Tree of Life?). I followed most of the references to German film of the '20s, some of the references to Pavlov, and very few of the references to rocket science. Pynchon likes playing with jargon and feels no need to explain himself, but I would have appreciated a reference for when I didn't understand what the hell he was talking about; at least my minimally remembered high school German helped me through some of the untranslated passages.
Gravity's Rainbow was not light reading. I didn't breeze through it. It was a project that I first started (and almost immediately dropped) more than five years ago. And it was work, work I'm not used to doing when I read novels any more. I feel both a sense of completion and the satisfaction of having read a very good book, as well as having really and truly earned my enjoyment. The Literary Year finishes on a high note. Thus endeth my quest.