GRGR Re: What's it all about?

[Paul Mackin]

Oh, you mean it is NOT about Death. But about Life. That's OK. Just so
long as it's somethin' important.

				P.



On Sun, 11 Jul 1999, Doug Millison wrote:

> 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
>