Changed my life . . . hmmm

[WillL at fieldschool.com]

Changed my life . . . hmmm
To pynchon-l at sfu.ca


I am a bit embarrassed to be responding to Paul Mackin's
request to share with the list how reading GR "changed my
life."  That assertion is so big -- and, I guess, so full of
implicit self-importance (I mean, EVERYTHING you experience
changes your life, so what's the big deal with this?) --
that it invites some well-placed ridicule.  Nevertheless, I
have taken the bait.

Because I first read it in college, GR's most immediate
impact on me was that of confirming an idea I was just then
considering:  that great works of art were still being
produced, and that those works could be crass and silly and
contemporary and still completely brilliant.  Having been
fed a diet of culturally embraced "greatness" for all of my
years of schooling (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Rembrant, "the
classics"), I finally believed that literature and art was a
walking around, breathing thing.  This was a revelation that
better schools or teachers might have helped me with at an
earlier age, but they didn't, and I feel I owe GR and TRP
for that one.

More importantly, each reading I've done of GR (in the
sixteen years I've known about it) has further confirmed my
sense that it is somehow "about" what WE (the flip side of
the book's THEY) "do" to our children.  In that sense, it
has "changed my life" by informing how I treat and raise my
kids.

I've been reading these children's stories to my kids over
the last six years, and (of course) so many of them are
treated or alluded to in GR.  Pynchon and GR first awakened
me to the fact these children's tales are so often about
abandonment, about kids lost and tired and hungry, trying to
find their way home.  The parts of GR that land their fist
most deeply in my gut are the parables about kids --
Pokler's daughter, most blatantly, but inevitably Baby
Tyrone himself, sold out (explicitly) by parents either
malevolent or, at best, misguided -- take yer pick.

Of course, I know that GR is about "systems" and
transnational corporate linkage as well as big-ass literary
stuff (signifiers, language, all that stuff), but -- as
smart and interesting as that stuff is (and despite how much
I wish I understood it all) -- it's the collection of simple
stories about the children of the Zone that won't go away
for me.  That's why, when the topic of whether GR is a moral
(or immoral/amoral) book is raised, I can only respond that
-- for me -- it is profoundly moral.

I remember that there is a brief recounting somewhere in GR
of, I think, a folk tale, about a mother who is dying (even
starving), who is found in a field or on a roadside,
finished, dead.  But the infant she was carrying is still
alive and, indeed, still nursing from her.  I also recall
that our "narrator" asks us at one point whether we might
find a baby, lost amidst the rubble of things, and whether
that little guy might even be Him, Jesus (GR, as I recall
being structured around the calendar and Christian story to
a significant degree), and whether we would have the time or
inclination to pick Him up and comfort 'm.

I'm also about 1000% certain that Mr. Narrator undercuts
those moments with some sense of hopelessness, but that has
never mattered for me.  GRAVITY'S RAINBOW made me realize
that the stakes of caring for a little innocent person are
much greater than I ever realized.

-- Will Layman