GRGR Re: What's it all about?

[Doug Millison]

Paul suggests, "if death is the theme of the novel then the DEFEAT
(somehow) of death, something analogous to resurrection of the body and
life everlasting in the Christian scheme of things, OUGHT to be the
meta-theme. So we must ask the question: Is the promise of Salvation at at
all visible in Gravity's Rainbow."

But, where is the death, the cessation of life and nothing more, in this or
any other TRP fiction? From the von Braun epigraph --- drip with irony
though it may -- forward GR doesn't fail to show us, at virtually every
opportunity, that death is not an ending but instead a beginning. Ditto for
Vineland and Mason & Dixon. People don't die in these novels, they just go
to the other side (TRP doesn't debunk the seances in GR, after all, no more
than he ridicules Charles Mason for his certainty of Rebekah's visits, or
Jeremiah Dixon for his hopes for bodily resurrection). Life eternal down
through a series of transformations -- the view that pops up again even
more strongly in Vineland and Mason & Dixon -- is one thing. "Salvation"
and all the denominational Christian baggage that such a term brings with
it would seem another -- in TRP's fiction at least. Salvation seems
irrelevant in his fictional universe. TRP, like Proust, also knows that art
can produce a certain sort of immortality, at least within a historical
framework -- does TRP say anything about what happens to art when the
artifacts finally disappear and memories of it finally fade?

Paul:
>A difference in Pynchon is that his book doesn't seem to be
>autobiographical.

Well, we keep hearing from a couple of ex-friends who beg to differ; TRP
just ripped off their lives and used other gimmicks and tricks to make his
books, if you believe them.
I guess it comes down to what "autobiographical" means. That TRP at one
level includes in GR and his other novels characters based on individuals
(or pieced together from many individuals) he has known, events based on
events he has experienced, seems undeniable. At another level, GR can't do
anything but reflect his own particular memories, thoughts, and emotions --
even if all he is doing is extra-clever and creative Baedeker collage --
since everything on the page first had to pass through his brain and to
some extent be transformed (if only in their juxtaposition) along the way.
Given the sketchy details we have of TRP's biography, GR doesn't appear to
be modeled on his life in the way that, say,  _Typee_ grows directly from
Melville's own adventures, or the way _Confessions of a Mask_ might grow
from Mishima's.  Vineland may be a different case altogether, but in the
absence of more biographical detail, who knows?

Paul:
>Because of this, do we have a harder time feeling
>directly his own hopes and fears? What his answers to the problem of
>death might be. We do know or think we know that he believes that Death
>(and by extension meta-death) is the only thing worth writing about. (not
>in so many words but something to that effect)

A question that goes to the heart of a complaint that has become
stereotypical among critics who don't get TRP's writing -- two-dimensional
characters; the whole distant and off-putting; hard to locate and empathize
with a feeling (suffering) artist in the work, etc. ad nauseum. But hopes
and fears -- and wonder and delight and all manner of human weirdness -- do
ring through loud and clear in GR and where can that come from but from
TRP's own sensibility, transformed in the alchemy of his heartfelt art?
Building, creating, producing, reproducing courageously in the face of
Death -- I don't know if that sort of existentialism still motivates
artists (and other overachievers) today, but it's an ethos that motivated
quite a few writers of TRP's era and especially of the preceeding
generation:  Hemingway; Norman Mailer & etc.


d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com