It is extremely hard for me to understand Pynchon if I read him too slowly. I find that you have to take in sentences without understanding them at first, and this is counterintuitive. But, these sentences brought together into paragraphs, pages, episodes, do make more sense with more familiarity. Nonetheless, I feel that in literary fiction it is often the maintenance of a certain level of ambiguity that gives multiplicity of application and interpretation to a text, and, to a degree, power and affect.
With Pynchon's style, I notice the capitalization of certain words for emphasis, like “Evacuation,” and “Most Secret.” Where do you think this comes from? What do you think he is trying to accomplish or imply with it?
I also notice he often cuts himself off mid-sentence, "This well scrubbed day ought to be no worse than any—" I don't have other examples right now but I know there are other instances where it is used to split the meaning of a sentence so that it can go two separate ways, often humorously. Of course there is the novel ending with the sentence cut off as well, though that's hardly a joke.
I don't follow when it comes to the bananas. For me they are not a parallel to any kind of numbing consumption, like the purchase of unnecessary pleasures. They are unnecessary, they are a luxury, but they are not really purchased. Pirate grows them, they are fruit borne of his effort and attention. To me, the rooftop garden is most obviously Pirate's created Eden in the middle of a swamp of death and decay. “These windows that open into another season, however falsely preserved.”
“All these horizontal here, these comrades in arms, look just as rosy as a bunch of dutch peasants dreaming of their certain resurrection in the next few minutes.”
I like this part. This idea of the way people think of war, or think of their place in the war. Like pilgrims, they are on their way to a promised paradise. A Rapture, an Apocalypse of the biblical category, is very like a war, no? The hope of the Chosen, the belief that they are justified, the end of everything, the way life changes completely, the paradise you believe will follow after, how quickly the past shrinks before the importance of the present.
Another characteristic of Pynchon I am intrigued by, he mingles the ugly and the beautiful together, or in some kind of way, things that are sacred and things that are profane. Bodily functions we’d rather not hear described, defecation, the clinical and odious descriptions of sexual functions, erection, ejaculation, etc., details of humanity that we prefer not to have waxed poetic about, our facial pores, bodily odors, etc.. Here, it is the beauty/terror of Pirate Prentice seeing the sunlight hitting the vapor trail of the rocket, juxtaposed against the feeling that he really has to poop. Something to pay attention to while reading maybe. I am reminded of the Robert Penn Warren poem about Theodore Dreiser, “He knew that the filth of self, in order to be loved, must be clad in glory.”
His humor, as well, intrigues me, because I think it is used differently than other comic novelists. I am not able to articulate it very well, but there is a kind of pathos that is only possible when it’s juxtaposed against humorous, ridiculous, silly, juvenile things. And then, against horrors that go beyond what can even be described or imagined. The scenes of Roger and Jessica later in the novel become that much more powerful because of the silliness and the pain that they stand juxtaposed against. Life can become ridiculous and make us laugh, even in the midst of our pain.
“Half-silvered images in a viewfinder,” With the various comparisons and allusions to cinema and filmmaking in the novel, and the lines of squares that separate episodes like the sprocket holes in film stock, I have thought a bit about what a good cinematic version of GR would look like. Bowie’s song goes great with this episode. Have you ever seen Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould? 98 minutes of short, basically independent scenes that coalesce into a whole. I don’t believe a film of GR would ever be made unless cinema evolves into a very different kind of art, but I think 73 short films of Gravity’s Rainbow would be the way to do it, each in some way separate in tone and approach, all fitting into a whole. It would probably be 8 hours long but I’d watch it.
One of the few things I learned in my English undergrad that I take with me when reading is to always think of themes as being two-sided. Looking for the ways that a theme is contrasted by its direct opposite often helps me better understand a work. In this chapter, I see elect/preterite, certainty/uncertainty, sacred/profane, and paradise/annihilation. The ultimate though, I think, for the whole novel, more to come later rather than directly portrayed here, is the basic cause/effect and its reversal in the rocket which you can only hear coming after you’re already dead.
Agreed. My first two reads were just straight read-throughs. No annotating, no notes - nothing except my initial thoughts and interpretations. But with a third read, I feel like it's time to fully attempt to comprehend this work, that way on another read through I can go back to a straight read-through, but I'll have more of a grasp on the minutiae.
The capitalization, to me, signifies that these things are literally just proper nouns. They exist as events/organizations/agencies/ideas etc. that have, do, or will exist, in the sense that is a not just one instance of an evacuation, but it is The Evacuation.
In the next installment I'll go more into why I believe the banana represents consumption. Though I do agree with you completely that Pirate's growth of them is different than the typical purchasing, so I may have to edit my essay a bit to reflect that idea, but it still is a derivative of it.
I think his treatment of otherwise unspoken of topics reflects the idea of the world we have built. "Disgusting" topics such as those were not once so disgusting, but we have crafted a world in which our humanity has been removed. We cannot speak of certain natural processes because they are said to be improper. But who made those rules?
I'll discuss one aspect of his humor's use in the second half of Chapter 2, but I completely agree with your analysis of it.
I would loooove if someone made a film of this novel. So many people say it's an impossible feat, but I feel like if it were done by the right director(s), it could be beautiful. I have been saying for a while that I wish 4 directors would each take one part of the novel and make a 2+ hour section of a film. Lynch, PTA, Verhoeven, and Cronenberg, or something like that.
I agree with you both. This novel is a pleasure to Re-Read slowly, but the first couple passes should be big-gulp binges. The problem is that there is a certain type of anxious reader who doesn't like to do that, who feels like they're not "getting it" or enough of it. For them, this type of exercise that Andrew's doing is supportive and maybe the only way they'll get through their first read. Someone on /r/pynchon said she just finished it and she's 14 -- that's great because she'll be able to reread it in college and it'll blow her mind, as it did mine.
One thing that strikes me about the bananas this time around is their tropicality. Pirate has a little island of the tropics in his hothouse that seems to be entropically disconnected from the rest of London. It is like he has a colony on his roof. He is the biggest English protagonist, and so there is room for a colonial critique in this scene (and I generally think that anti-colonialism is an overlooked major theme of the novel). Since every scene of the novel simultaneously exists in 1940s Europe and 1960s America, the choice of the banana resonates with postwar American colonialism (chaquita and the banana republics and whatnot).
But also, Pynchon loves a good frat, a chummy scene with lots of playful homosocial energy. We must never lose touch with the pure libidinal pleasure he takes in scenes like the Banana Breakfast, or else we'll miss that pleasure ourselves.
Yes please join me! It'll be very slow so won't take much time and I'd love to have other opinions or people to call out what I miss. Will be doing the first half of chapter 2 next week.
Correct! Sometimes I'll break those section breaks into more than one part though. So for "Chapter 2," I'll be breaking that into two parts. This will only happen with longer chapters or chapters that I have way more to say about. They'll always be labeled accordingly (Chapter 2.1 and Chapter 2.2, for instance).
May I propose a group read? Who is committing to reading/rereading along with?
I hope that all those people who haven't "had time" to read Gravity's Rainbow, take this as your moment to do it -- it appears as if you have a capable guide here. That is indeed how the book begins.
Edit: I would recommend that anyone who needs to buy it to find a 760-page edition. I was reading the new splatterpaint edition recently -- they re-keyed in the entire manuscript to make it into a digital file. And I know they made mistakes: I've found at least one, an omission of one of the dependent clauses in a long pynchonesque sentence. I can document this claim later. HOWEVER, the E-book was made from the old edition, the blue Viking one, and so the e-book should work for everyone. I am sure that I am just talking to myself in an empty room, here... sorry to show the pedantry early. You must promise to tell me if I am being annoying.
Thank you friend! Agreed on the edition. It is very worth getting one that follows the original pagination. And I've heard of those errors within the Penguin Deluxe. I don't think they all have the same errors, but it's not worth risking.
The first chapter has some of the best writing in the novel. Sumptuous.
The idea of the rocket landing in darkness..."coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing."
"Naptha winters" and "Sundays when no traffic came through" and the tired, early morning jumbled thought process of Pirate: "Plug in American blending machine won from some Yank last summer, some poker game, table stakes, B.O.Q. somewhere in the north, never remember now." Plus where the hell did the line "I would coat all the booze corroded stomachs of England" come from? It's very poetic prose in this chapter. And I love how Pynchon starts his magnum opus with a character waking up, something writers are told to NEVER do by writing workshops and classes. He does the same thing, far less successfully, in Vineland when Zoyd wakes up at the beginnning.
The banana breakfast is just delicious. When Pynchon writes about the smell of coffee, "it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off," I think that is a criminally underrated line.
It is extremely hard for me to understand Pynchon if I read him too slowly. I find that you have to take in sentences without understanding them at first, and this is counterintuitive. But, these sentences brought together into paragraphs, pages, episodes, do make more sense with more familiarity. Nonetheless, I feel that in literary fiction it is often the maintenance of a certain level of ambiguity that gives multiplicity of application and interpretation to a text, and, to a degree, power and affect.
With Pynchon's style, I notice the capitalization of certain words for emphasis, like “Evacuation,” and “Most Secret.” Where do you think this comes from? What do you think he is trying to accomplish or imply with it?
I also notice he often cuts himself off mid-sentence, "This well scrubbed day ought to be no worse than any—" I don't have other examples right now but I know there are other instances where it is used to split the meaning of a sentence so that it can go two separate ways, often humorously. Of course there is the novel ending with the sentence cut off as well, though that's hardly a joke.
I don't follow when it comes to the bananas. For me they are not a parallel to any kind of numbing consumption, like the purchase of unnecessary pleasures. They are unnecessary, they are a luxury, but they are not really purchased. Pirate grows them, they are fruit borne of his effort and attention. To me, the rooftop garden is most obviously Pirate's created Eden in the middle of a swamp of death and decay. “These windows that open into another season, however falsely preserved.”
“All these horizontal here, these comrades in arms, look just as rosy as a bunch of dutch peasants dreaming of their certain resurrection in the next few minutes.”
I like this part. This idea of the way people think of war, or think of their place in the war. Like pilgrims, they are on their way to a promised paradise. A Rapture, an Apocalypse of the biblical category, is very like a war, no? The hope of the Chosen, the belief that they are justified, the end of everything, the way life changes completely, the paradise you believe will follow after, how quickly the past shrinks before the importance of the present.
Another characteristic of Pynchon I am intrigued by, he mingles the ugly and the beautiful together, or in some kind of way, things that are sacred and things that are profane. Bodily functions we’d rather not hear described, defecation, the clinical and odious descriptions of sexual functions, erection, ejaculation, etc., details of humanity that we prefer not to have waxed poetic about, our facial pores, bodily odors, etc.. Here, it is the beauty/terror of Pirate Prentice seeing the sunlight hitting the vapor trail of the rocket, juxtaposed against the feeling that he really has to poop. Something to pay attention to while reading maybe. I am reminded of the Robert Penn Warren poem about Theodore Dreiser, “He knew that the filth of self, in order to be loved, must be clad in glory.”
His humor, as well, intrigues me, because I think it is used differently than other comic novelists. I am not able to articulate it very well, but there is a kind of pathos that is only possible when it’s juxtaposed against humorous, ridiculous, silly, juvenile things. And then, against horrors that go beyond what can even be described or imagined. The scenes of Roger and Jessica later in the novel become that much more powerful because of the silliness and the pain that they stand juxtaposed against. Life can become ridiculous and make us laugh, even in the midst of our pain.
“Half-silvered images in a viewfinder,” With the various comparisons and allusions to cinema and filmmaking in the novel, and the lines of squares that separate episodes like the sprocket holes in film stock, I have thought a bit about what a good cinematic version of GR would look like. Bowie’s song goes great with this episode. Have you ever seen Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould? 98 minutes of short, basically independent scenes that coalesce into a whole. I don’t believe a film of GR would ever be made unless cinema evolves into a very different kind of art, but I think 73 short films of Gravity’s Rainbow would be the way to do it, each in some way separate in tone and approach, all fitting into a whole. It would probably be 8 hours long but I’d watch it.
One of the few things I learned in my English undergrad that I take with me when reading is to always think of themes as being two-sided. Looking for the ways that a theme is contrasted by its direct opposite often helps me better understand a work. In this chapter, I see elect/preterite, certainty/uncertainty, sacred/profane, and paradise/annihilation. The ultimate though, I think, for the whole novel, more to come later rather than directly portrayed here, is the basic cause/effect and its reversal in the rocket which you can only hear coming after you’re already dead.
Agreed. My first two reads were just straight read-throughs. No annotating, no notes - nothing except my initial thoughts and interpretations. But with a third read, I feel like it's time to fully attempt to comprehend this work, that way on another read through I can go back to a straight read-through, but I'll have more of a grasp on the minutiae.
The capitalization, to me, signifies that these things are literally just proper nouns. They exist as events/organizations/agencies/ideas etc. that have, do, or will exist, in the sense that is a not just one instance of an evacuation, but it is The Evacuation.
In the next installment I'll go more into why I believe the banana represents consumption. Though I do agree with you completely that Pirate's growth of them is different than the typical purchasing, so I may have to edit my essay a bit to reflect that idea, but it still is a derivative of it.
I think his treatment of otherwise unspoken of topics reflects the idea of the world we have built. "Disgusting" topics such as those were not once so disgusting, but we have crafted a world in which our humanity has been removed. We cannot speak of certain natural processes because they are said to be improper. But who made those rules?
I'll discuss one aspect of his humor's use in the second half of Chapter 2, but I completely agree with your analysis of it.
I would loooove if someone made a film of this novel. So many people say it's an impossible feat, but I feel like if it were done by the right director(s), it could be beautiful. I have been saying for a while that I wish 4 directors would each take one part of the novel and make a 2+ hour section of a film. Lynch, PTA, Verhoeven, and Cronenberg, or something like that.
I agree with you both. This novel is a pleasure to Re-Read slowly, but the first couple passes should be big-gulp binges. The problem is that there is a certain type of anxious reader who doesn't like to do that, who feels like they're not "getting it" or enough of it. For them, this type of exercise that Andrew's doing is supportive and maybe the only way they'll get through their first read. Someone on /r/pynchon said she just finished it and she's 14 -- that's great because she'll be able to reread it in college and it'll blow her mind, as it did mine.
One thing that strikes me about the bananas this time around is their tropicality. Pirate has a little island of the tropics in his hothouse that seems to be entropically disconnected from the rest of London. It is like he has a colony on his roof. He is the biggest English protagonist, and so there is room for a colonial critique in this scene (and I generally think that anti-colonialism is an overlooked major theme of the novel). Since every scene of the novel simultaneously exists in 1940s Europe and 1960s America, the choice of the banana resonates with postwar American colonialism (chaquita and the banana republics and whatnot).
But also, Pynchon loves a good frat, a chummy scene with lots of playful homosocial energy. We must never lose touch with the pure libidinal pleasure he takes in scenes like the Banana Breakfast, or else we'll miss that pleasure ourselves.
Really nice intro. Would love to do a group read.
Yes please join me! It'll be very slow so won't take much time and I'd love to have other opinions or people to call out what I miss. Will be doing the first half of chapter 2 next week.
terrific. great writing. b-b-but one small thing you may want to fix.. or not (wabi-sabi?)...
while both the Preterite and Elect make there way out
should be
while both the Preterite and Elect make their way out
Appreciate that lol. You'd think an English teacher wouldn't fall for those mistakes.
good stuff, though. Been a fan of GR since my CHIEF CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS class in 1975. It was brand new then.
Much thanks! That's incredible that you got to take a class on it so shortly after it was released. Must have been a revelatory time.
You're counting each section break (with the seven squares) as its own chapter, right?
Correct! Sometimes I'll break those section breaks into more than one part though. So for "Chapter 2," I'll be breaking that into two parts. This will only happen with longer chapters or chapters that I have way more to say about. They'll always be labeled accordingly (Chapter 2.1 and Chapter 2.2, for instance).
brava. Nailed it.
May I propose a group read? Who is committing to reading/rereading along with?
I hope that all those people who haven't "had time" to read Gravity's Rainbow, take this as your moment to do it -- it appears as if you have a capable guide here. That is indeed how the book begins.
Edit: I would recommend that anyone who needs to buy it to find a 760-page edition. I was reading the new splatterpaint edition recently -- they re-keyed in the entire manuscript to make it into a digital file. And I know they made mistakes: I've found at least one, an omission of one of the dependent clauses in a long pynchonesque sentence. I can document this claim later. HOWEVER, the E-book was made from the old edition, the blue Viking one, and so the e-book should work for everyone. I am sure that I am just talking to myself in an empty room, here... sorry to show the pedantry early. You must promise to tell me if I am being annoying.
Thank you friend! Agreed on the edition. It is very worth getting one that follows the original pagination. And I've heard of those errors within the Penguin Deluxe. I don't think they all have the same errors, but it's not worth risking.
The first chapter has some of the best writing in the novel. Sumptuous.
The idea of the rocket landing in darkness..."coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing."
"Naptha winters" and "Sundays when no traffic came through" and the tired, early morning jumbled thought process of Pirate: "Plug in American blending machine won from some Yank last summer, some poker game, table stakes, B.O.Q. somewhere in the north, never remember now." Plus where the hell did the line "I would coat all the booze corroded stomachs of England" come from? It's very poetic prose in this chapter. And I love how Pynchon starts his magnum opus with a character waking up, something writers are told to NEVER do by writing workshops and classes. He does the same thing, far less successfully, in Vineland when Zoyd wakes up at the beginnning.
The banana breakfast is just delicious. When Pynchon writes about the smell of coffee, "it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off," I think that is a criminally underrated line.