1973 Nervous Breakdown

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Wow, this is a great description of the novel -- specifically on the experience of reading GR.  It felt like a life-altering experience when I read it (maybe I don't get out enough).  There's a mis-citation on p. 259:  It was Sylvia Plath, not Erica Jong who wrote "every woman adores a fascist," in her (greatest) poem, "Daddy."

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
>Sent: May 24, 2006 12:51 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: 1973 Nervous Breakdown
>
>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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