1973 Nervous Breakdown

[Dave Monroe]

Again from Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown:
Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties
America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), Ch. 8,
"Conspiracy Nation," pp. 227-60 ...

Learning to Love the Rocket

"Nineteen seventy-three's ultimate exercise in
conspiracy theory arrived with the year's major
publishing event: the appearance of Thomas Pynchon's
long-awaited third novel, Gravity's Rainbow...." (p.
254)

   "The novel itself plays tricks with many of the
reader's conditioned responses.  Gravity's Rianbow
poses quite formidable problems of interpretation. 
Its multiple plots and subplots and its overwritten
language provoke a tendency to overreading that
becomes analogized to the clinical condition of
paranois.  Yet even while it invites the possibility
of a paranoid reading, it also continually turns this
impulse back on the reader, repeatedly reminding him
or her of the false solace that lies in such a
reading.  The reader's absorption in the plot (in both
senses of the word) is depicted as the product of a
desire to find a master key to that plot, a master key
ultimately imagined to be in the author's
possession--precsiely what the novel, and Pynchon's
own silence, frustrates." (p. 255)

"... Slothrop undergopes a process of psychic
decomposition that ultimately renders him merely a
site for multiple forms of determinism operating on
teh self.  These include gravity itself, as well as
... the Calvinist doctrine of the elect and the
preterite ... and Pavlovian stimulus-response theory.
   "The novel ... constructs a plausible narrative of
twentieth-century history as global conspiracy; at teh
same time it also continually proposes an alternative
scenario in which conspiracy tehorizing represents
merely a compensatory effort to impose meaning on a
mass of events that have no inner connection.... the
reader's interpretive instincts are soon overwhelmed. 
In the end, the process of trying to find the crucial
connections that will help decipher the plot becomes
analogized to ... Pavlovian condtioning ....  Readerly
'paranoia'--reading for the plot--is a programmed
response, for which the book offers a form of
deprogramming." (p. 256)

"... gravity's Rainbow hints at an explanation for teh
dark state of mind to which the 1960s had delivered
Americans.  In a numebr of ways that go beyond teh
Left's contant comparison of Nixon with Hiter, the
novel maps postwar Germany onto post-Vietnam
America...." (p. 257)

   "One of teh possibilities that thus plagues many of
the novel's characters is teh end of hgistory, an
apocalyptic scenario that bears an obvious relation to
feras--or as kubrick would have it, love--of a rocket
or missile but at teh same time relates it to the
breakdown of historical cause and effect.  That this
breakdown may be a realitively recent one is teh
conclusion suggested by the novel's final pages.  Here
the reader is abruptly torn out of the alndscape of
postwar Germany and deposited in contmeporary America
...." (p. 258)

"Most disturbing about the death wish shared here is
the implication that emerges from the novel's
conclusion, as the rocket stands poised to crash down
on the moviegoer-reader, thst it is not Zhlubb's alone
but is shared by all.  The paranoid belief-system is
simply another variant on this death wish, insofar as
it is absed on a secret plaasure at one's own
persecution, real or imagined...." (p. 259)

   "The novel's concludion thus contains an implicit
commentary on the end or failure of the sixties.  What
Pynchon offers is an explanation for the seemingly
unfathomable paradox that lay behind Watergate: the
fact that institutions were toppling yet somehow
remained more firmly in place than ever....  What teh
final scene of the novel depicts is the possibility of
viewing death, including one's own, as a form of
entertainment.  This may take any number of different
forms: love of the bomb, in the Strangelovian sense;
the Stockholm syndrome; the efevrish excitemnt
attending fundamentalist end-time scenarios, Jong's
confession that 'every woman loves a fascist'; Nixon's
fanstasizing of his death ....  Each, in the end,
shares a similar logic of complicity." (p. 259)

"The sens e that behind what passesfor official
history is another kind of history, that official
history is a diversion, a mass enetrtainment, emerges
in the end as the novel's most basic form of
paranoia." (p. 260)

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