Suggestions (Gale Online 4 - G.R.)

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Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

    The publication of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 secured Pynchon's
reputation. The controversy over the Pulitzer was widely publicized and
criticized, with many readers regarding the editorial board's decision
as comparable to acts of the repressive power structure that the novel
painstakingly documents. In addition Gravity's Rainbow won the National
Book Award (Pynchon refused it, sending "Professor" Irwin Corey, a
self-proclaimed master of double-talk, to the awards ceremony as his
surrogate) and the William Dean Howells Award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters for the best novel of the decade. Both the acclaim and
the hostility that this book engendered testify to its innovations. As
Tololyan observes in his New Orleans Review article, it surpasses many
traditional definitions "of what can be considered literary," upsetting
"narrow generic and modal categories" of criticism and refusing "to
fulfill a set of expectations nurtured by reading the great novels of
the nineteenth century, or the slighter fictions of our time."
    One index of the scope of Gravity's Rainbow is certainly the fact
that it has been reviewed in Scientific American and discussed at length
in Technology and Culture. In the latter journal Joseph Slade hails
Pynchon as "the first American novelist to accept the duty of which
[Aldous] Huxley speaks," the duty "to seek powerful means of expressing
the nature of technology and the crises it has generated." In a study
entitled Readings from the New Book of Nature: Physics and Metaphysics
in the Modern Novel, Robert Nadeau identifies these crises with the
collapse of "the Newtonian world view, which features along with the
Western mind itself either-or categorical thinking, simple causality,
immutable law, determinism, and discrete immutable substances"; but Alan
Friedman, writing in Charles Clerc's collection Approaches to "Gravity's
Rainbow," finds more recent scientific world views equally
unsatisfactory: "Unfortunately, the visions from science do not provide
more hopeful guides away from the horrors Gravity's Rainbow reveals in
life and death. Doctrinaire acceptance of any of these visions proves as
sterile as the non-science-related images that obsess characters."
Richard Poirier's review in Saturday Review of the Arts suggests that,
on the contrary, scientific data permeate the book not to provide
solutions to conceptual difficulties but to compound these difficulties
by offering yet another tradition to which the language can allude. The
central symbol of the novel, the V-2 rocket, is thus even more
overdetermined than central symbols tend to be; it is "Moby Dick and the
Pequod all in one, both the Virgin and the Dynamo of Pynchon's
magnificent book."
    Poirier goes on to comment, "More than any living writer, including
Norman Mailer, [Pynchon] has caught the inward movements of our time in
outward manifestations of art and technology so that in being historical
he must also be marvelously exorbitant," and the "exorbitant" quality of
Gravity's Rainbow may constitute its greatest threat to traditional
ideas of the "literary." In the Charles Clerc anthology, Joseph Slade
points to Pynchon's "faith in the unity of Creation"; but a number of
other critics see in Gravity's Rainbow a work constituted in opposition
to existing notions of unity, and especially in opposition to the unity
of the artistic work celebrated by the earlier masters of literary
modernism. For example, Brian McHale, writing in Poetics Today, calls
Gravity's Rainbow a "postmodern text" that subverts the emphasis on
coherence of the "modernist reading" it seems to elicit. Charles Russell
concurs that the novel pushes at conventional boundaries and notes in
his essay in the Clerc collection, "Indeed, Gravity's Rainbow is but one
manifestation of a widespread literary fascination with the nature and
limits of aesthetic and social language during the past two decades."
And John Muste, writing in Boundary 2, finds in the circular image of
the mandala (a preoccupation of the southwest African Herero characters
prominent in the novel) an emblem of the reader's situation. "Confronted
with a text which contains a veritable cornucopia of clues," he
observes, "we search diligently and sometimes desperately for ways of
arranging these clues in a meaningful pattern. Gravity's Rainbow
invites, even demands, such efforts, and steadfastly rebuffs them. It
gives nothing away. At the center of the mandala rests that infuriating
empty circle, that refusal to impose meaning or to confirm either our
fondest wishes or our direst fears."
    (continued)

Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.