A Historical Novel of a New Sort

[Dave Monroe]

Again from Inger H. Dalsgaard, "Gravity's Rainbow: A
Historical Novel of a New Sort," Pynchon Notes 50-51
(Spring-Fall 2002), pp. 34-50 ...

"The reader may know the canonical history texts
Pynchon writes from and against and expect some sort
of condemnation of or siding against the atrocities of
that delimited part of history.  Critical readers
suggest that Pynchon neglects his duty to depict the
Holocaust and the horror of moidern combat as
undeniable truths of the Second World War, as if his
fictional focus on rocketry has deselected the results
and denied the core of Germany's totalitarian regime. 
This is far from the case.  Yet Pynchon aims not just
at the core of some universal human truth about modern
history beyond immediate past events such as the
latest World War, but also at that deeper history and
the time-bound incidents which are its outward
manifestation, in ways which challenge reader
expectations of a hierarchy of importance ordering
historical according to their relative contemporary
moral importance.  By not appearing to place the
Holocaust above the rocket program, or descriptions of
the rocket's deadly impact above descriptions of teh
rocket's design itself, Pynchon confounds those
readers who have found his priorities inappropriate in
light of their own hierarchical expectations
(revealing that readers are not entirely free to
construct even from Gravity's Rainbow's vastness, but
read their own and common history texts into
literature).  Some have been offended that human
casualties, on the battlefields or at the Third
Reich's extermination camps, are barely (or only
briefly) mentioned, and with a lack of gravity.
   "However, Pynchon expresses gravity with a
loghtness of touch, either through passages of both
tragedy and levity, or by exposing the grotesqueness
of war in ways which make the  reader question facts
and established hiostorical information.... Pynchon
often employs historical events in microstrategies
that foster a fictional alienation from what the
reader may believe to be simple truth.... he turns ...
gruesome brutality ... inside out both to investigate
something deeper in the motives for the actions and to
interrogate unrecognized beliefes concerning who was
good and bad in the war....  In the process he thwarts
readers' automatic, possibly legitimizing explanation
of a historical even and rediects attentiontoward
understanding the event through less habitual channels
...." (p. 40)

Okay, back to, uh, work here ...




		
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