 Gravity's
Rainbow Thomas Pynchon by Stacy Borah The nose plays a powerful role in evoking memories, acting as a repository of dreams, thoughts and scenes from the past brought rushing back without warning at the slightest detection of a random scent. In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop's olfactorious factory has a peculiar ability to sniff out exactly when and where the Nazis’ V2 rockets will strike in England -- a matter of great importance to British intelligence. But this sensory ability also prompts Pynchon's protagonist to seek out the how and why of his gift, a search that lands him in the middle of a deadly conspiracy disguised as a stream-of-consciousness black comedy. Encyclopedic novels can be best described as the red-headed stepchildren of great books. Often written in turgid, rambling prose and containing an unnecessary amount of information about a person, place, thing or history, very few tomes are ever remembered past the moment they are packed and transported into remainder oblivion. If they are read at all, more often than not, they are derided as unreadable, incoherent and, occasionally, obscene. A sidebar in obscure magazines. Gravity's Rainbow garnered those same reviews from critics, but still split the Pulitzer vote with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Crown Of Feathers And Other Stories. After it won the National Book Award, that is, all of which goes to show how seriously critics and academics alike took the book when it was first published. Pynchon’s style stands out at first glance. Like James Joyce's Ulysses, the streaming, jump-cut narrative deepens character history and personality, a texturing rarely seen in literature. But Pynchon also screws with convention by complicating his protagonist Slothrop, whose many disguises add a seriocomic effect to the affair.
Teeming with cinematic references, especially to action movies and B-films of the '30s and ‘40s -- pop-cultural entertainment Joyce's fertile mind had no opportunity to sift through -- Gravity's Rainbow is one of the first examples of highbrow narrative's inevitable sampling of sci-fi, a maligned genre fiction only beginning to gain substantial respect in the ‘60s. Pynchon’s erudition also extended to fields as diverse as (meta)physics, religion, historiography -- witness chapter four's story of Byron the Light Bulb for more on that score -- philosophy and much more. Its density simply overshadowed and overwhelmed any other book of its kind. Of which there currently are very few, fewer at the time it was written. The biggest differences between Gravity's Rainbow and other encyclopedic novels? The presence of the occult, one that intertwines with the minutiae supporting the narrative's very framework. The unfolding conspiracy that threatens to engulf the entire planet in its dark grasp. Indeed, Pynchon positioned his occult references precisely and thoroughly enough to transmit to the clever reader Tyrone Slothrop’s astrological profile. Let's talk business. The fact is that the densely packed, infinitely rewarding Gravity's Rainbow has sold consistently throughout its decades-plus history, despite its impregnability. It has birthed both enormous academic and mainstream followings, along the way cementing its place in a widening literary pantheon. Pynchon’s oeuvre has almost entirely put forth the proposition that someone, somewhere, is pulling our strings. Gravity’s Rainbow stands as the ultimate literary indication that he may be entirely right. |
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Ben
Watts
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