Hume: Perspectival Subtext in GR

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Another relevant excerpt from this extremely interesting close reading 
and discussion of GR by Kathryn Hume (pp. 636-7):

[...] Pynchon causes views from above and views from below to coalesce 
by rapidly changing the perspective. With Tchitcherine we look up at 
the finger, but as its whorls become streets of a city, we find 
ourselves looking down. Through Pavel's hallucinations, we look down on 
microscopic fungus pygmies, but we then see above him a hallucinated 
water-giant, "a mile-high visitor made all of flowing water who likes 
to dance, twisting from the waist, arms blowing loosely in the sky" (p. 
523). We look down on a city of bugs in the straw of the Bethlehem 
manger: "they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening red among a golden 
lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and 
downward--an edible tenement world." However, "the crying of the infant 
[Jesus] reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible 
distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored" (pp. 173-4). Like the bugs, 
Londoners celebrating Christmas (described just after this bug 
fantasia) can ignore the bursts of energy: "The last rocket bomb was an 
hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater" 
(p. 174).

Note the "you"--"the crying of the infant reached you"--Pynchon's 
frequently used invocation of the reader to make the reader accomplice 
to or participant in some of these perspectives. With that one word 
Pynchon causes levels of reality to intersect; "you" equates bugs and 
humans. Not only do we loom like monstrous angels over such bugs, but 
we are also the bugs themselves. He also collapses time frames: 
Bethlehem at the Nativity, and a London Christmas at the end of the 
war. We are fleetingly present at both events, and we identify 
ourselves, through perspective, with both those inflicting violence and 
with its victims. [...]

best

On 06/10/2005, at 9:10 AM, jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> Another interesting essay from one of the more prominent critics of 
> Pynchon's work:
>
> 'Views from Above, Views from Below: The Perspectival Subtext in 
> _Gravity's Rainbow_'
> by Kathryn Hume. _American Literature_ 60.4, Dec. 88, Vol. 60 Issue 4, 
> pp. 625-642.	
> Begins:
> With "a screaming comes across the sky," _GR_ wrenches us into the 
> world of The Rocket. Just so, the V-2 magnetically draws the novel's 
> characters into that same world, its fields of force generating the 
> major actions and informing the images. Time and again, the rocket 
> imposes its code on elements of the story: Tyrone Slothrop becomes 
> Rocketman; marriage turns into union with the rocket; orgasm 
> corresponds to launching; towers and chimneys are called stationary 
> rockets; a graffito-mandala proves to be a schematic of a rocket seen 
> from below; future urban life is invoked as Rocket-City ...
>
> Out of this nexus of the ballistic missile and everything associated 
> with it, especially the bombs, a rocket subtext crystallizes. Forty 
> times, or every nineteen pages in this mega-novel, Pynchon works 
> another variation on his basic elements, which consist of an aerial 
> force of destruction, the targeted city, and the cowering creature 
> awaiting annihilation. Significantly, the image-complex is not 
> rendered from the sidelines, from the distanced perspective of 
> bystander or artist. Rather, readers experience these views as if from 
> above and below, mostly directed down toward or up from within a city. 
> Not all the elements of the image-complex are present in each 
> manifestation of the subtext, but in the course of the novel, these 
> vertiginous vantages and labyrinthine cityscapes cumulatively cohere 
> into an icon outside of space or time. We ultimately experience the 
> viewpoints of rocket and victim through dual or simultaneous vision.
>
> This subtext is central to the organization of _GR_ in at least three 
> fashions. (1) In philosophical terms, it sheds light on the hotly 
> debated values of the novel. Intrinsic to these aerial views of the 
> city are answers to such questions as "what kind of action is open to 
> individuals?" or "why does humanity not change the behavior that 
> imperils its existence?" The individual's relationship to history, as 
> seen by Pynchon, emerges through these perspectival images. [...]
>
> Addresses Pynchon's "chief method of multiplying levels of reality", 
> and his use of ekphrasis and mise en abyme, within the context of 
> Michael Riffaterre's notion of the function of the literary subtext. 
> Pdf available