"Difficult"?

[Jules Siegel]

At 01:17 PM 05/21/97 PDT, seandkle at sybase.com (Sean Klein) wrote:

>Semi-related to this: Truman Capote wrote "In Cold Blood" at a tenth-grade
level
>despite obvious ability to produce much superior prose.  He did this
>intentionally.

I disagree with "much superior prose."

In my set of literary definitions, clarity is one of the chief qualities of
superior prose, Number One, in fact.

Convoluted sentences, to me, are evidence of a lack of discipline. They are
often a writer's first attempts at getting an idea down on paper. It's quite
a bit of work to untangle them and sort out the various thoughts and put
them in simple declarative sentences. Doing this while maintaining pleasing
rhythm and tone is especially difficult.

It requires even more discipline to slow your mind down and see your
meanings in full before inflicting them on your reader.

I think that Pynchon is at his most superior when he's writing clearly.
Someone said earlier that his writing is actually often quite clear, but his
plots are difficult. I think that's because he doesn't have plots in the
conventional sense. It's one of the more appealing qualities of his writing.
You don't have to begin Gravity's Rainbow at the beginning. There is no
beginning. It does open with a specific scene, but the book's organization
is topological rather than logical. It describes a space and its contents,
which relate to each other the way furniture and decorations in a room
relate to the room and to each other. There is some sense of chronological
time, but it is not very important in the novel's structure, which takes you
through an exploration of a multi-dimensional map.

The space described by this map is Gravity's Rainbow -- the parabola of the
rocket vs the arc of the rainbow, but also the whole range of life as seen
in the most primitive form -- just shit rearranging itself in new forms
through eternity. I think that's the reason for so much fecal imagery.

When I first started corresponding with Andrew Dinn, I wrote:

"I wonder if anyone has commented on what it means: we are Gravity's
Rainbow. You know-the spectrum is a manifestation of light energy. So
Gravity's Rainbow would be the spectrum of gravity -- all that has mass, I
guess. But I don't really think it applies, because gravity isn't energy;
it's an effect of the shape of space, supposedly. I think it's really just
another manifestation of what we call sexual attraction, love, that which
brings one to join with another."

Andrew replied: "Bravo Jules, but you should be writing this to the list.
Others have played with that idea but usually without communicating what
lies behind it so succinctly and cogently."

This is how I got involved in all this to begin with. Thanks a lot, Andrew.
But let us continue. I wrote that on the basis of skimming the book in 1974.
In the past few weeks I've been looking through it more carefully. I think
my initial reaction was correct.

Gravity's Rainbow is the Periodic Table of the Elements acted out by cartoon
puppets. Think of a school play with kids in colored costumes being the
different colors of the spectrum -- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue,
Indigo, Violet -- and acting out little skits with songs symbolizing the
nature of each color. Now extend the metaphor to the Elements, only use
weirdos to play them. They are kind of crawling around in the muck bopping
each other like the Three Stooges. They rise up in spirit and become
beautiful and glowing and then they sink back into the muck again -- or the
Rocket sinks them again. Or They contrive to keep them down.

These are preliminary thoughts. My main point is that the book is about the
leap from shit through flesh to spirit and that this process is Gravity's
Rainbow. The process is not described as a linear plot, but as eruptions
along a continuum. The continuum is not any place in particular but the
stuff of the book itself. If you look through the book, you'll find specific
references to gravity as a manifestation of the life force and the planet as
a living organism.

We can discuss these thoughts more if anyone is interested. Begin with the
question I asked in a previous message. Pynchon uses the term "The Zone"
frequently in Gravity's Rainbow. What does he mean by this?

While you are thinking about that, at the risk of being accused of
self-promotion, I would like to draw the list's attention again to an
example of my own writing at the tenth-grade level. "Family Secrets" is the
opening chapter of my work in progress, My Life, Our Times: A Personal
History of the 20th Century. It was published in New American Review #10 in
1970. You can read it at http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/secrets.htm

I offer this story as my credential as a writer, in the context of the many
attacks on my supposedly fragile claim to the role.

--
The Communication Company
Jules Siegel http://www.caribe.net.mx/siegel/jsiegel.htm
>From US: http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/jsiegel.htm
Apdo 1764 Cancun Q. Roo 77501 Tel 011-52-98 87-49-18 Fax 87-49-13