GR ain't no GUT!

[WKLJAZZ at aol.com]

On October 14th, Peter Trachtenberg wrote:

"It's as though Pynchon were expanding the 
search for a Grand Unified Theory into the human realm, with history as 
its "fifth force." And while I know that post-Einsteinian physics is 
supposed to have inspired the whole postmodern condition, I also believe 
that the search for a GUT or GUTS is a modernist endeavor."

It kinda scares me to hear GRAVITY'S RAINBOW written about as a search for a
"Grand Unifiying Theory" and therefore "modrenist" rather than "post-modern."
 I fear this misses one of Pynchon's most important points.

It seems to me that one of the key thrusts of GR is that GUTs, the search for
GUTs and the people who start to believe in these singular "system" solutions
to everybody else's problems are scary and destructive.  Whether it's
behavioral science, organic chemistry and plastics, rocketry, Beethoven,
Rossini, corporate profits, alphabets or language systems, . . . whatever,
the scariest act (and the one that humans can't seem to resist) is to apply
some single analysis to the world -- a "final solution," if you will -- and
insist that it encompass all.  All the characters who represent unified and
imposed processes in GR are seeking to dominate, to exclude and to kill -- to
define an "elect" (and thus a "preterite") based on their system's point of
view.

The novel itself, though, won't comply.  It rejects a single strategy, single
point of view or single mode of any kind (and rejects dualistic, binary or
reactionary ones too) and embraces the very un-"modernist" idea that fixed
standards are suspect.  By trying to call GR "Mindless Pleasures," TRP was,
of course, asking us not to put the book up on a pedastal as some "modernist"
monument.  And -- titled as intended or not -- he populates the books with
"heroes" of the decidedly UNUNIFIED kind -- a man who, in order to find
peace, disintegrates and ceases his search for the truth as a single
explanation, for example.  When the GR narrator holds up "Hansel and Gretel,"
"The Wizard of OZ," Porky Pig cartoons and Mickey Rooney as key literary
references alongside Rilke and Emily Dickinson and so on, he's telling you
the same thing -- don't trust those who would have you see the world one
(their) way and impose stiff definitions of worth; they're only going to wind
up shoving you inside a rocket (or worse -- shoving a rocket inside your
movie theater).

Since I'm not sure I know what "post-modern" means, I won't argue that GR is
PM.  But I really can't bear the thought that, TS Eliot-like, it aspires to a
kind of classicism or that it is (or "wants") some Grand Unifying Theory.
 Those bad boys are Blicero's territory.  I think Pynchon would prefer that
you searched for your harmonica in the streams of the Zone and learned how to
bend a few notes before you faded away.

-- Will Layman