GRGR23(1) - W-what happened? Anything at all?

[Seb Thirlway]

GRGR23

What happened?  Does this really happen?

This was the point for me where things got really difficult.  I
put down the book for three weeks at this point on first reading,
and finally struggled through to the end.  This Peenemunde
business is the reason why – I mean, it’s Peenemunde, it’s the
Holy Centre for the Rocket-faithful (and that includes just about
anyone who’s read GR up to this point), it’s a big deal!  And the
reader wanders about after this point, with the nagging feeling
that something’s wrong – what’s wrong is that Slothrop has made
it, he’s finally got to Peenemunde, and
 and, well, nothing.

How many of the events in GR really happen?  How much really
happens to the characters, and how much is Pynchon standing back,
fascinated, at the story he’s unravelled, spinning riffs for the
reader
well, perhaps this is what happened
you could look at it
like this
or like that
or this other riff is pretty entertaining
come to think of it.  There’s a voice that comes in again and
again in GR – not so much the voice of a narrator, an All-Seeing
Eye, more an Idle All-Speculating Novelist – because by this
point TRP gives the impression that even he’s not sure what
really happened, and is quite happy to sit back and think aloud:
your call, reader.

How about this, as a starting point:  Things really happen in GR
if they come back later, in a character’s thoughts or in their
dreams.  Slothrop’s encounters with Katje, Greta and Bianca
really happen in this sense – we read them happening, and we read
Slothrop remembering them.  Temporal bandwidth.  This idea is
introduced here, as an explanation for Slothrop’s absent
behaviour – he’s got no idea what he’s doing here in Peenemunde,
because his temporal bandwidth has shrunk so far that most of the
story so far is beyond his recall.  Tchitcherine can’t help
wondering in awe at Slothrop turning up again (it’s your
Schwarzphenomen), but Tyrone himself hardly understand what
Tchitchy’s on about.

Wasn’t too much temporal bandwidth Slothrop’s problem in the
first place?  (and Katje’s, and Enzian’s)  Or rather their
problem is that they’re acting in stories which they can’t make
sense of without more temporal bandwidth than they can possibly
deploy – they’re too ambitious, they’ve all been unravelling
lives that MAKE SENSE, but the sense rests on events far in the
past – Slothrop’s prop is What Was Done To Infant Tyrone By Them
(something so traumatic that he can’t quite remember it
 heh heh
caught on THAT Freud’s Fork), Enzian’s stretches back to the
Sudwest (and given the connection with Weissmann and Mondaugen,
perhaps you have to go beyond the covers of GR and out to V – so
you fancy yourself as some dude with intertextual bandwidth do
you Enzian?) and Katje’s back to her distant ancestor Groovy
Frans.

So maybe the riffs aren’t Pynchon’s – they’re the riffs Slothrop,
Katje, Enzian, Weissmann and Tchitchy make up to preserve their
temporal bandwidth.  At this point it all starts falling apart,
characters step out naked and confused (Slothrop here, Katje
soon, Enzian I’m not sure about, Tchitchy’s closet-burning is
much later, and Weissmann remains a mystery to the end), so the
questions arise – was all this really just a story about pretty
average, normal people really, sleeping, waking up, walking
about, talking, fucking, shitting?  And all the rest, Control,
Paranoia, the Rocket – just groovy and very enjoyable fabulations
weaved around them, projected onto their perfectly normal
functions by an over-talented writer having the time of his life?
How much did Pynchon do it to them, and how much did they do it
to themselves?   The System won away from Nature, beyond life and
death – perhaps this System is not something that only They
practice, that We Must Fight, it’s something that Katje,
Slothrop, every one of the characters does every time they wake
up in the morning and behave with a sense of purpose.  Or it’s
something that TRP does to make the bald, unadorned life of these
characters (which is becoming suspiciously obvious at this point)
into a great novel.  Or it’s something the characters do because
bald unadorned life isn’t enough.  So
if that’s his point, then
he should abandon temporal bandwidth, or have his main
character(s) abandon it, or leave us guessing whether it was the
character or he himself who indulged in excessive fantasies of
wide bandwidth in the first place
.. Ta-da!!!   you clever,
clever bastard Thomas Pynchon.



Seb Thirlway
seb at thirlway.demon.co.uk