GR ain't no GUT!

[jporter]

Will sez,

>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


Very well said, I think. And if I may "harmonize" a little with your
position, GR appreciates both TS Eliot and Porky Pig, Rilke and Mickey
Rooney. Unifying everything would mean just that, but GR seems to indicate
an antipathy toward reducing the world into classical mathematical
symmetries which might be summed or cancelled out, or otherwise manipulated
for the convenience of (their) Order.

GR illuminates many similarities between objects, people, trends, ideas,
music, art, etc, but does not "impose stiff definitions of worth." It seems
to warn against the need to unify what already is...and provides many entry
points into the huge jumble of interconnectedness where all nodes, by
virtue of being, are valuable, if only for their diversity, while
recognizing the "death worshipping" tendecies of some (Blicero, et. al.).

jp