Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later
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It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
This is excellent advice, especially for Gravity's Rainbow - I'm certain that a lot of the novel went over my head, but I think even if I'd understood all the references and concepts explored, this is a book that I still wouldn't fully grasp. It actively resists being understood.
I still loved it and got a ton of value out of reading it. There are brilliant sections of prose, amazing imagery, hilarious jokes, and concepts that I think back on all the time.
It took me several aborted attempts to finally finish the thing, because I kept losing the thread, and the logical part of my brain wanted to understand everything. Once I gave up on that and accepted that sometimes I just couldn't understand what was happening or what the relevance of a section was, the book became easier to read, and much more enjoyable.
despite the fact that by reading a text you are actually rewriting it (i.e., borges: "All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare"), maybe reading should be like listening to music: to let it flow through you, at least for the first few readings or so, and then, if you wish, read with a more critical eye
e.g., from finnegan's wake: "The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the sowftzing at the stir of the ver grossO arundo of a long one to midias reeds; and shaes began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing,duusk unto duusk, and it was sas glooming as gloaming could be in the wst of all peacable worlds."
Massumi's introduction to his translation of A Thousand Plateaus (selected paragraphs by me, it's a lot longer than just this of course):
> This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would listen to a record?
> Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
> The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that happens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a record.
(Not a criticism, just a refinement of what you said)
Basically how I read Gravity's Rainbow and I honestly don't feel like I missed out on too much.
Would you be so kind as to elucidate the very particular spelling of your handle?
Yours, conehead
There was a young fellow named Hector...
Beyond that, I’d encourage you to look up the definition of “puerile”, which is as much about being juvenile or silly as it is about sexual or scatological - say what you will about those letters or Joyce (or Nora’s!) particular fetishes, there’s nothing that suggests that they weren’t in earnest.
As a sibling comment at least alludes to, it’s much fairer to point out that Ulysses has plenty of its own sexual or scatological humour, and that someone might easily describe it as puerile. And fair enough; as to why it doesn’t personally strike me that way compared to Pynchon, all I’ll do is rest on the de gustibus defense.
To be entirely clear: it's weird as hell.
Allow me to recommend the audiobook version. It helps keep you moving forward during portions that are disgusting, boring, or jibberish.
I read the first few chapters of the book then skimmed and read some more. Pretty grim stuff in there...
This book is my white whale. I read "V" straight to the end in a few sittings and love it and think about it a lot when I'm in NYC or the eastern seaboard or Malta or Florence. I read "The Crying of Lot 49" straight through in one go and loved its paranoid charm.
But despite having lived in London and thought a lot about what it was like for people there during the war I just can't finish Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.
This is what it took for me - having a few other people agreeing to a schedule and meeting to talk about what we had read. I ultimately very much enjoyed GR but it is really difficult to read alone for the first time. Both the social pressure to keep at it and the ability to have "what the hell was that" conversations with other people really helped.
(My father's favorite author is Pynchon, so while he slightly prefers Mason & Dixon to GR, it's been in my awareness for a very long time; I think my first attempt was in my teens and I didn't succeed at finishing until my mid twenties)
Gave up on GR after about 200 or so pages realizing I couldn’t ultimately describe a single thing I had read.
I really want to finish it at some point but I also want to enjoy it. Maybe at a different point in life.
I can say I easily devoured (and enjoyed) "The Crying of Lot 49". That might be a compromise.
I must have missed this in my reading. Who parallels Stephen or Leo or Molly? Tyrone didn't seem to be to be in search of a father figure or a father figure in search of a son. I enjoyed both books but must have missed the ways in which GR is a post-modern retelling of Ulysses (I saw the post-modern part). It sounds like you've spent a lot more time with it so I'm curious how you saw it.
It's funny though, James Bond books don't illicit the same ire that Pynchon does and I'd argue the two are very similar - reading between the lines, that is. As another reader mentioned GR was just "yet another scene ending in kinky sex or the characters getting inebriated".
I've noticed most modern classics that people describe as being about a bunch of themes are usually absurdly overrated.
Most of the really great books, people describe, "It's about this character who..."
Not, "It's a commentary on..."
The first type of book is good, the second type of book usually just panders to an audience and MFAs...
How would you describe works of Douglas Adams, Pratchett, Gaiman? The question you refer to discloses more the disposition of a person, but not really the quality of the book.
I find this sentence preposterous, not only is it not true about great books, but people don't say that.
I've read the first third of the book, at some point I'll make another attempt. Pynchon's writing style is rather interesting in that reading it, for me at least, requires dedicated concentration for multiple pages until the point when I get 'sucked into' the book and then it flows. The only person I know that has read through it did so on a road trip and just plowed through without trying to make sense of entire chapters.
Gravity's Rainbow is also more challenging because it spans a lot of different characters and subplots. The Crying of Lot 49 is much easier, and Vineland is an aberration. I know one person who thinks that Pynchon hired a ghost writer for Vineland because the writing style is so different.
Yeah, my problem was that I'd get into the flow when there was action and things happening, and then zone out during the more descriptive/sensationalist passages, but not zone back in until I'd missed a bunch more action.
I tried just reading it without worrying if I was zoning in and out but I found that I was missing so much that it wasn't holding my interest.
I loved the book when I was able to really sit and focus hard on what I was reading but at the moment most of my reading happens in bed as I'm falling asleep and it's just not the kind of book that works for me for that kind of reading. Hopefully some day.
Quite a few years later I tried "Mason & Dixon" in English and gave up after maybe 20 pages. I bought the german translation and gave up after maybe 50 pages.
And this suggests an interesting thought experiment in human comprehensibility. Does there exist some media where a totally ignorant analysis becomes more compelling once you have actually experienced the media being analyzed versus before you have experienced the media.
On the other hand, I do think it's likely to be high on the list of books most admired by people that read about it instead of reading it...
(Atlas Shrugged is another. In certain business and political circles, the book about the business leaders going on strike to prove how much value they really create sounds like the one you want to cite as your inspiration, but whenever you open it, it just seems like 1000 pages of weirdness about trains, philosopher pirates and genius scions of self-made conquistadors peddling stock scams as an unlikely act of heroism, with drive-by digs at Christianity, marital fidelity and nuclear weapons and an 80 page speech in which the world is inoculated against socialism by the revelation that 'A is A'.
Bet there's lots of high fantasy lovers that loved works influenced by LOTR but never quite got past Tom Bombadil in the actual book too, but then there's others that will know the appendices off by heart!)
Knowing the general plot from the movie makes reading everything that happens in between the major story beats much more interesting since I have a sense of where in the story we are. It’s also fun to notice the differences when they adapted the story for the screen.
I’ve also told my son the general plot several times beforehand (when he wanted me to tell him a story and I couldn’t think of any other) and I think he’s much more into it because of that as well. He knows where we are overall and what generally comes next.
It then boggled my mind when I learned that people take this seriously. And it means something. Rather than it just being a work of fiction.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment. But if you haven't read The Fountainhead and you can mentally distance yourself from the political side of everything around it, it's worth a read.
(Saying that as someone who read The Lord Of The Rings and thought it was okay but couldn't get through The Simarillion because it was just a bit too odd)
One of my professors in grad school was extremely liberal but loved Fountainhead and would defend it on the rare occasions that it came up.
Oh yes, that describes it perfectly! Thanks for mentioning it, for some reason that makes me feel much better about the whole thing.
In the end I often compare her to Marx. Both were great critics but their work breaks down when you get to the “and then what” part. And then… magic happens and utopia! You just need the enough unicorns.
Followers of these two tend to criticize a lot. Marxists can pen deep critiques of capitalism and Randians of socialism. But they start sounding magical when it comes to solutions.
I’ve come to be skeptical of criticism and its value. Doing things is way harder than criticizing them.
tolkien, on the other hand, i found so boring as to never have been able to finish even a fraction of any of his books.
I can appreciate the Lotr film trilogy as a fun war epic. And the cavalry charge was filled to the brim, with a kind of grace.
Opened Atlas Shrugged and a couple pages in, instantly knew I would intensely 'unenjoy' that book. There is a sharp, weaponized dryness to her style of writing. I watched a documentary about her life later on and her troubled love life made an equal amount of sense.
The Fountainhead made a good film though. The emphasis on excellence and images of skeletal verticality were fun. I am guessing cutting down her books to fit a film length helped to make a more friendly viewing experience.
(I think it's probably less disconcerting to people whose introduction to Tolkein was the tweeness of the Hobbit rather than Peter Jackson's films and high fantasy in general)
Now I can appreciate it a bit more, knowing something about Tolkein's 'faith' and the connections he was making. The cheesy, soppy-and-sternness is not so bad with a deeper understanding.
I should probably go finish it.
It’s a horribly written book that also I didn’t finish, but at least it’s ideology also goes a bit against the people that think it’s about them not getting enough.
Also, the sheer myth making of Thomas Pynchon as a literary hermit (rarely photographed or interviewed) proved influential on how I have chosen to live, albeit at a very different level of fame.
The book is a mosaic, or collage, of a many short pieces ranging from just a few, to several, or many, pages each. They vary from funny and silly to deliberately revolting or horrifying. This mix is very unsettling but I found it effective. Instead of a clear plot or narrative line, all these fragments have a cumulative effect -- this makes the book impossible to summarize.
Scattered amongst the fragments are some with significant mathematical and engineering content. For example there is an explanation of how the onboard V-2 guidance circuits use capacitors to accumulate charge, performing a double integration to calculate distance travelled from acceleration, to determine when to turn off the engine. I found this quite surprising and unusual at the time. I think it still would be today.
A key theme in the book is the relationship between power and technology. Pynchon explores the idea that those who control technology also wield immense power, and that this power can be both destructive and corrupting.
Super befitting to the current discussion around AI.
That's how I felt after reading the "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". Wikipedia says it's also postmodern so maybe that's why.
I loved it, but it's kind of astonishing that only a few things have stuck with me
* Posters signed "The MGT"
* The charming Rand satire
* The idea of the word "fnord"
* The feeling of the counterculture -- a kind of sheer weird paranoia where magic can be real.
I have a paper copy I still leaf through but what stuck with me is that there was a time and place where it made perfect sense to go out and levitate the Pentagon. This book explains, or purports to explain, a certain kind of weirdness that underlies a lot of the stories about the 60s and 70s.
> Pynchon has become an infinite play space for academics, just as all his books are still in print and read by ordinary people, but somehow the arbiters of literary taste on both sides of the Atlantic decided long ago that Pynchon was Not Serious and so Not of Interest.
The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste. So a book cannot be both “an infinite play space” for an audience while being simultaneously “Not of Interest” to that audience. It can be one, or it can be the other, but it can’t be both.
Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so. Professors of literature are a fairly new thing (say one hundred years) while literary taste has been a thing for many hundreds of years. I'd suggest that other/former arbiters of literary taste would include intellectuals, literary salons, the aristocracy, the clergy, other writers, and always too a populist element (books without any appeal to the populace rarely survive to be elevated to the canon).
I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.
I believe Pynchon is the grand master of telling Shaggy dog stories. Norm MacDonald was a huge fan of Pynchon, it feels like they had/have very similar humor.
I didn't find The Crying of Lot 49 that difficult. However I am still annoyed after 4 decades I notice post horns too easily.
Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.
It says that a lot of uneeded assumptions and other baggage regarding "wanting to like something" as it relates to social pressuse was hurled at the grandparent, based on an simple suggestion for which work to get if you want to ease yourself in to a writer's body of work.
The intention of the grantparent was simply to suggest some accessible work a new reader of said author might better appreciate.
Regardless of that, wanting to "get" an artist and dig deeper into their work should be lauded, not scolded. "Social pressure made me read Shakespeare or listen to Miles Davis" would probably count as one of the best uses of social pressure.
We could use more of that, and less of "I only consume whatever I feel like at the moment based on myself alone, I will never consider artists and writers well-liked by others, praised by critics, or part of a canon, and try to get into them". Which is solipsistic, besides being impossible in general.
Not just in that the individual gains status, but also in seeing status-seeking as a motivation for improvement, better social cohesion, and so on?
Perhaps not all kinds of status-seeking are good (e.g. seeking status as mafia mob), but your dismissal throws the baby with the bathwater.
It's a knee jerk reaction to dismiss status-games as bad. Evolutionary and socially they certainly serve a purpose.
No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...
That's totally normal for the first couple hundred pages. Just keep reading. Infinite Jest was sort of similar in this regard. But eventually you and the book come together and it really begins to flow. There's some really good stories and ideas in there, even after all these years.
It's worth it.
Trust me, GR really starts to flow and becomes really funny. It’s literature crafted at a super high level of skill.
I guess my point is you start to follow certain characters, certain other ones pop up again and again, and some come and go. It isn’t unusual to page back and reread a bit to refresh. But it really becomes a page turner eventually.
Infinite Jest is much more approachable in my estimation than V, which I understand is itself more approachable than Gravity's Rainbow.
Aside the foot note gimmick, Infinite Jest is pretty easy to follow. The difficulty as such is mostly just the length.
I like DFW quite a bit, but I think Pynchon is the better author. So far I just haven't managed to start Gravity's Rainbow, I was scared off by the hype.
What?! GR is very clearly an acid inspired book. Lots of wild ideas and very visual scenes, but I found it tedious to read.
As for being influenced by psychedelics, it seems plausible. Lots of scenes are portrayed in a way where you can't distinguish what is reality and what is a dream/hallucination/whatever else it might be that Pynchon has in mind. The shifting perspectives across characters within a scene and the continuous struggle to figure out what's happening, what's really happening, and what's a dream can make for a challenging read. Overall I found it an enjoyable read but I can understand it's not for everyone (but that's Pynchon in general - you either love him or his books are an unpleasant slog).
Clearly Pynchon is not an author I should be reading right before bed.
http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/links/culture/rainbow.be...
it is very re-readable.
i don't remember a thing about it.
Benoit Blanc : Harlan's detectives, they dig, they rifle and root. Truffle pigs. I anticipate the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow.
Marta Cabrera : Gravity's Rainbow.
Benoit Blanc : It's a novel.
Marta Cabrera : Yeah, I know. I haven't read it though.
Benoit Blanc : Neither have I. Nobody has. But I like the title.That might not be the intention.
Given the chaos of life, and especially the chaos of WW2, isn't it a little ridiculous to tell stories about it that are neat and clean and have a coherent logical flow? If humanity was like that there never would have been a WW2 to write about.
I wouldn't want to only read Pynchon, but given how often we dream it makes sense to read a book that follows dream logic sometimes.
It captures a very real part of the human experience that more plot or message focused literature leaves out.
There are whole genres of music that are often characterized as "just noise" or "boring" or whatever by people who haven't put in the work to learn how to appreciate them. Some genres seem to be much easier to learn to appreciate than others. Some are famously difficult.
Books work the same way.
So, in the first sense, I don't think it is "bad" because I believe this is exactly what the author was setting out to do in writing it. In the second sense, yes, it is a bad book in that I don't like it.
With Gravity's Rainbow, when yet another scene is resolved with kinky sex and the overriding narrative arc turns out to be an elaborate dick joke, you get the feeling this might literally be true!
(Really, GR frequently reverting to the trying-too-hard to shock or the scene resolving by the protagonist getting laid or inebriated is much more annoying than the stream of consciousness style narratives, flowery language, inability to suspend disbelief or general mystery about what's supposed to be going on, which are more widely used literary devices...)
Also: for those who like Pynchon, and would like another author whose work requires chewing, give William Gaddis a go.
I wrote about a personal connection to this book - also touching on the idea of the preterite and paranoia - here: https://rooneymcnibnug.github.io/writing/2022/05/19/The-Watc...
https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gra...
I was staying in Far Rockaway and working on East 52nd Street in New York so the overall daily commute time was about 5 hours with numerous changes. I finished the book in the three months I was in America. When I came home, most people I spoke to about the book assumed that I'd lost my mind. I've never yet met anyone that has read it. I should add that a lot of it went over my head. I also managed to crack Rubik's Cube that summer. Heady days. That's over 40 years ago.
OTOH I re-read V and The Crying of Lot 49 every decade or so and always have good time. But I liked Infinite Jest and have never made it cover-to-cover on anything by Joyce or Beckett.
Joshua Cohen's "Book of Numbers" feels sometimes pynchonesque.
It's easier to read and set in the 90s.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numb...
Another thing not mentioned is the rather casual sex with children, though I think there is some argument on Bianca’s age.
There’s probably a million other themes, odd occurances, extremely long joke setups, and disgusting or offensive passages that haven’t been mentioned.
But my advice is read it with a guide, a reading group, or a podcast (Pynchon in public is one such podcast). And don’t fret over following it closely, or sometimes, at all. You can always read it again. I’m not exactly a Pynchon superfan, I love many of his quirks others hate (the songs, the names) but the long novels are just a bit too much for me. I do think it’s worth a try. You can always quit, it’s a 50 year old novel, not many people are really all that attached to it anymore. Its cultural influence is waning.
The book in question is magical, hilarious, scatological, horrifying. There are scenes and themes from it burned into my consciousness as ineradicably as the slow stab from Saving Private Ryan.
Like the turd-swallowing one!
It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.
Power is pathological and is a systemic thing. There are not conspiracies - it gains function from itself and the incentives it brings along with it, which go back into the system of power and make it even more powerful. Everyone just sort of goes along with it because it's just the way things are. Pavlov's dog is brought up often to sort of illustrate this.
Of course like many post modern works of fiction and philosophy it blames just about everything on capitalism, which I don't agree with for a number of reasons, #1 being we haven't really had capitalism since the 1930s. We've had something far worse which is this managed economy and governance - a system of managerial elite that we call capitalism, but it ins't. But, the type of system doesn't matter in this book. The point is wars and things as crazy as an ICBM (the book really made me think of how insane it is to have designed a missile that destroys random people 100's of miles away) exist not for political reasons so much as money and acquiring power/money. Politics hardly matters and is a distraction to get people to buy into the stupidity of it all. In essence, a condemnation of consumerist culture which has taken the world by storm since this was published.
It's actually a prescient book today with AI as it's also a critique of technology and how it doesn't free us, quite the opposite, and will probably end up in the destruction of man. Either with nukes as the book is obsessed with or climate, or naughty AI.
Now the best part of the book and saddest is that all this is happening. It's the natural state of mankind. But there's no way to avoid it. It's inevitable. You can't change the world. Because anything you do that you believe is changing it will just be co-opd. We see this in everything today. Any kind "Revolutionary Change" is immediately used up by corporations that see to march in lockstep as if it's a conspiracy. But it's not - it's a numbers game based on incentives.
The advice granted in the book is to fly under the radar, it is all you can do. Do not participate in society at large. Do not try and change it as anything good you make will just be used for evil eventually. (like the rockets in the book. invented initially by hobbyists who wanted to go to space; co-opted by politics to make bombs) Simply avoid it and find love and friends and happiness apart from the hideous system that strangles us.
Most advice I read insisted that I shouldn't get hung up on the details. Indeed, this and V. both kind of read like a dream to me, where I could subconsciously tune in and out and focus on certain details, but not all of them.
That probably was the best tact for me, though I got to the end, frustrated at how many loose threads I was holding.
Oh I also really didn't enjoy the constant song inventions- there probably were 50 of them and I had a hard time appreciating them
When Pynchon writes about Slothrop naked in a barn getting attacked by a witch's owl you can just laugh at it, you can just be disgusted by Captain Blicero, etc. No mystery solving required.
I think its status as "serious literature" does it a disservice in this regard. School teaches us that literature must be carefully scrutinized in order to not miss the obscured meaning packed into each and every passage. But treating Gravity's Rainbow with this level of scrutiny leads only to madness.
Funny enough GR does have a bunch of secret messages (Tyrone Slothrop -> Sloth Or Entropy), but they aren't why the book is good (closer to why the book is bad) and aren't necessary to enjoy it.
We aren't taught (in American schools, anyway) a lot of how to ingest these genres of media. Hence the refrains (about abstract art, e.g.) "my 5 year old could paint that!"
...
"Pynchon's intent was to expose the incorporation of the Nazi project into US militarism. Requires a specific kind of critical engagement."
https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc/status/701271529565384704...
Recently I read about Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher Rene Girard, and having in mind GR which I read this last year, and the whole thing about burnt offerings, about the illusion of two sides, etc.. Has me thinking there's also a whole thing about "cosmic" scapegoating, human sacrifice, etc.. all mashed up in there too.
I suppose I should at least, finally, finish Infinite Jest to prime myself.
if that style was actually writing it could support writing short stories. why are these incomprehensible train wrecks of words always thousands of pages long? what is the author hiding behind the verbal gush?
It certainly isn’t “thousands of pages” long. Novels are by definition long-form stories. If what you want is a short story, a novel is never going to be a good fit.
As a contrast, picture Neal Stephenson novels. Long! But I can read them ~5x faster than an equiv length of GR.
The author lays on a banquet of fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying episodes to astonish and entertain the reader, and maybe inform them about some things they might not know about. It's not a test, if this style doesn't appeal to you, you don't have to be anxious or defensive about it.
I can see how this text causes some to experience the opposite of joy.
Both experiences are valid. But like there's not some big conspiracy of people who claim to like this book or this writer as a facade. They say it's great because, for them, it's a wonderful and meaningful experience.
It goes absolutely no nowhere and I'm immensely glad I didn't waste my time.