Reading "Rainbow"

[Dave Monroe]

Timmy's House of Sprinkles
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Reading "Rainbow"


I was tempted to do a one-word review - "Wow" - and leave it at that.
I'm congenitally incapable of brevity, though.  One word may be the
proper response to 776 pages of incredibly dense and purple prose, but
I feel like I have to keep on digging.

So I finally finished the gauntlet, after several weeks of reading on
the train and some late nights at home.  I haven't read any glosses or
criticism yet, but I do want to hit up at least some of them to try
and get an answer to "what happened here?"  While writing my earlier
reaction, though, I did stumble across a guide to first-time readers
of Gravity's Rainbow that proved extremely helpful.  It is
spoiler-free, and I think it applies well to other dense, convoluted
works of literature as well.  One of the key pieces of advice is to
try and stay focused on the plot - enjoy the language, but if you feel
like it's dragging you down, don't feel like you need to surrender.  I
felt like that did free me to a great extent... I doubt anybody would
get everything on their first time through the book, so it's more
worthwhile to spend that time building up a structure within which to
understand the book, rather than shading in all the details.

And what exactly is that plot?  Again, I'm going out on a limb here
since I have yet to read any external glosses, but hopefully these
will qualify as

MINI SPOILERS

The main plot covers Tyrone Slothrop, an American liason to the Allied
powers during World War II.  He is based in London, which is under
attack from rockets.  It was bad enough early in the war, when you
would hear a horrible sound and know that, within a few seconds,
incredible death would be delivered upon people somewhere in the city.
 Maybe you, maybe someone else - there would not be enough time to
take action once you heard the sound.

The situation got worse when V2s began falling.  The most advanced
rockets ever created, they broke the sound barrier and moves faster
than their noise.  Therefore, by the time you heard the awful
screaming sound of the rocket, it had already delivered its payload.
Its sound was no longer a warning but a blessing: the mere fact that
your ears were still around to hear the screaming meant that you had
escaped.  And, by the same token, someone else had been chosen as a
victim.

Here's where it starts to get weird.  The pattern of attacks on London
seem more or less random - understandable, since merely hitting the
city at all from the continental mainland is a great engineering
success.  A colleague discovers, though, that there is a predictor:
wherever Tyrone Slothrop sleeps with a woman, a rocket will fall.

Let me divert from the plot here to point out that this will prove to
be the largest concern in a book filled to the bursting with themes:
sex and death.  Over and over Pynchon riffs on this idea of the
linkage between procreation and destruction; pleasure and pain;
beginning and ending; private and public.  The linkage becomes even
more explicit as the book goes on.  In the second half of the book, we
learn of a sinister cabal orchestrating the course of the human race,
and they are extremely concerned about establishing and maintaining a
system of morality built upon human emotions towards sex and death;
such a system will lead to energetic, pliant beings of maximum
effectiveness to the state.

At the same time (spoiler alert!) the REASON for the link between the
rockets and Slothrop is never really explained, at least not that I
caught.  So it goes throughout the book: amazing things happen (or
don't), and people react to them, but... it's all empiricism and not
deduction, you know?  Pynchon weaves together this really vivid vision
of the world that is incredibly rich and detailed that constantly
hints at an underlying rationale without ever offering one.

The narrative is incredibly dense, imaginative and creative, but
unlike, say, Catch-22, Pynchon at least does us the small courtesy of
telling the story in sequence.  Granted, it's nearly impossible to
tell whether any given scene "really" happens or not, but even if it's
hallucinated, at least the hallucination happens at a point in time,
after the previous scene and before the next.  The timeline of the
book roughly covers the period from before D-Day until shortly after
the bombing of Hiroshima.  Slothrop, a fairly passive figure at the
center of the action, is pulled along by events.  From London he moves
to liberated France, still under the nominal guidance of ACHTUNG, his
unit.  A series of comical events and misunderstandings cuts him loose
and he drifts through Europe; at first continuing his old mission
under an individual mandate, and then eventually moving because he has
no choice.  Along the way he is swept up in the plots and schemes of
an astonishing variety of forces, almost none of which you would think
of in the context of occupied Europe: the German film industry; the
black market (largely driven by corrupt American soldiers); a diaspora
of rocket scientists; institutional and rogue Russian agents; witches
and magicians; drug dealers; and, most intriguingly for me, the
Schwarzkommando, an incredible elite group of African nazi rocket
commandos that is opposed by seemingly every force but Slothrop.

The jacket flap of my book says that the book includes "over 400
characters", and I can easily believe it.  What's amazing to me is how
many of those characters are fully fleshed out.  Slothrop is the main
actor, but he disappears for fifty pages or more at a time, and in his
place come parades of players who will never meet Slothrop, but are
spiritually bound up with him... and with the Rocket.  Eventually, I
came to realize that while Slothrop might be the protagonist, the
Rocket is probably the real "main character" of the book.

Ah, the Rocket.  The S-Gerät.  Famous 00000.  This is another thing
that you can sort of piece together throughout the book, though an
essential mystery remains at its core.  Figuring out the story behind
the rocket is enough fun that it's probably worth calling this section
out as

MEGA SPOILERS

So: we all know about the V2 from history class.  V2 and A4 are the
same line.  Germany had an incredible science and engineering program,
albeit one that was as tied up in bureaucracy and red tape as anything
you might imagine out of "Brazil".  Towards the end of the war they
had all these great brains working for them, but diminishing
materials, so while they could design weapons of incredible
destruction, they could not produce them in mass.

Such a weapon was the 00000.  Only one was ever made, only one was
ever fired, and, incredibly, it doesn't seem to have ever fallen.
Which is impossible, of course.  Almost everyone in the novel is
directly or indirectly trying to pursue the rocket.  Some want to know
what it meant and what happened to it.  The Schwarzkommando, who were
integral in its creation, have gone rogue since the collapse of the
Nazi leadership, and are trying to build and launch a copy of the
rocket.  The Russians and others are trying to stop them.  The black
market has realized that people are interested in 00000 and its
attendant details, and are gathering information to sell.  The Rocket
has many unusual characteristics, such as being the only weapon
constructed with Imipolex G, a new plastic material; as such, it is of
interest to international business concerns.  But - and here's where
it gets even fuzzier to me - the actual concern is the other way
around.  General Electric, Philips, Siemens, IG Farben, and other
multinational corporations based in Axis and Allied countries,
collaborated before the war, made enormous profits and discoveries
during it, and are working to establish a permanent dominance after
its conclusion.  The construction of The Rocket is no accident; it is
the culmination of elaborate and long-laid plans.  Slothrop and the
others are merely ants, crawling along the surface of events that they
cannot hope to change or comprehend.

Just how long-laid are those plans?  It turns out that Slothrop's
paranoia - heck, the paranoia of the entire human race - are well
justified.  Even before he was born, Tyrone was marked by the
international cartel for some special purpose.  Late in the novel we
learn of the composition of an espionage unit.  It is divided into
four departments.  I don't have the book here right now, but I think
that department A is something like international relations, war, and
politics; department B covers commerce, research, and industry;
department C covers culture, archaeology, and media; and department D
covers Tyrone Slothrop.  Oh, and Imipolex G, too.  It isn't paranoia
if they really HAVE been spying on you since before you were born.

And again, the rub is that I cannot figure out WHY.  I get the
impression that even many of the conspirators aren't sure.  The
conspiracy combines the best aspects of the X-Files and Brazil; it is
an incredibly powerful organization that is torn by inter-departmental
warfare, attrition, confusion, delegation, mission drift, poor hiring
decisions.  It is an awesome thing, at once omnipotent and fragile,
and fundamentally unknowable.

We gather some hints throughout the book about 00000.  It requires
some special heat shielding that other rockets did not.  It is
carrying an unusual weight payload that requires a special guidance
system.  Its construction was intended to be so secret that an elite
team of engineers, all strangers to one another, was assembled merely
to create it, and then was dispersed.

I wasn't at all sure about what that payload was.  An atomic warhead?
Some sort of time machine?  This novel?  Or, like the suitcase in Pulp
Fiction, would we never learn what it was?  Pynchon does reveal the
secret in the final pages of the book, and the answer is both very
specific and strange: the payload is Gottfried, a young German lover
of Weissman and Blicero, two of the Nazi officers overseeing the
rocket program.  The prose quiets down near the end and we read the
account of Gottfried, willingly nestling into the plastic and metal
embrace of The Rocket, as he travels on the final journey out of the
Reich, out of the Zone, and into... what, exactly?  I still don't
know.  I don't think the Rocket ever falls.  I don't know why.

BEGIN BAD LANGUAGE

One fun game to play with any book, but especially with Literature, is
to find the one sentence in the book that "sums it up": the one
sentence that you can argue encapsulates everything important about
the book.  I laughed out loud when I found the sentence in this book,
which falls on page 512 of my edition:

"It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here."

I think that's the first time I've included an obscenity on my blog,
but really, that's too priceless to bleep.

END BAD LANGUAGE

END MEGA SPOILERS

A few random reactions:

The actual conspiracy comes into sharper focus as the book moves on.
Page 597 is where we finally read references to the Masons and the
Illuminati, including the by-now-familiar observations about the eye
in the pyramid on our currency.  Of course, this is of HUGE interest
to me, and converted my mood from pleased to positively giddy.  The
further I got into the book, the less I found myself thinking of
"Ulysses", and the more of "Illuminatus!", Robert Anton Wilson and
Robert Shea's sprawling mind-blast of a trilogy.  It seems perfectly
clear to me that their book is a rip-off/homage of this one.  If you
enjoyed reading Illuminatus! or the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, I
cannot recommend Gravity's Rainbow with enough vigor.  It's like
eating real butter cookies when you've only known margarine before.
It's like watching "The Lord of the Rings" after only having seen
"Willow".  I still really enjoy those books, but Gravity's Rainbow is
operating on a whole other level.  In fact, GR may make me enjoy those
books even more... it opens up an enormous space for others to play
around in.

Tangent: this transition is kind of interesting, because I had
previously made a similar connection with the other Pynchon novel I've
read, "The Crying of Lot 49".  In that book, the conspiracy is right
out front: you learn about the Tristero pretty early on, and the
entire novel is devoted to teasing out the meaning behind Tristero.
In GR, the conspiracy is just as vast and powerful, but it is more
subtle... I was thinking of paranoia very early on, but the conspiracy
as such didn't come into focus until I was already well invested in
the book for other reasons.  Anyways!  I don't have that much of a
point here, I guess, it's just kind of interesting.  CoL49 and I!
share more of an overt connection in plot and language (poppy and
readable), while GR and I! share more of a connection in structure and
concern (vast, sprawling, allusive).

The book is divided into four sections, with the third being by far
the longest.  Each is labeled with an intriguing quote.  And I'm not
sure, but I think that each section ends with a rare reveal from
inside the conspiracy.  Section 2 closes with Pointsman's mind
disintegrating (ha!) as he tries to spin the Slothrop angle.  Section
3 ends with similarly high-placed people in the conspiracy offering
some clue as to what is happening.  And 4, of course, ends with a
final look at the actual firing of The Rocket.  Just wish I could
remember how section 1 ends... In a way, this structure acts a bit
like a cliffhanger, rewarding you for your patience in making it so
far, and whetting your appetite with a hint that true comprehension
may lie around the bend.

More randomness!

This book would be on the short-list to Chris's Favorites regardless,
but what absolutely seals the deal is a truly astonishing scene (in a
book full of them!) that features - wait for it - drunken monkeys!  I
keep on talking about Pynchon's great sense of humor without really
explaining what I mean.  It's all over the map, I guess, kind of like
the Marx Brothers or, better analogy, Monty Python.  The drunken
monkeys bit is an example of the purely brilliant slapstick he does:
the monkeys are contraband cargo on board a pirate vessel steered by a
crazy German helmslady; the vessel is also carrying illegal liquor,
and several bands of musicians; the monkeys get drunk, get discovered,
cause a ruckus, tubas start playing, and the plot spins even further
out of control.  Other jokes are far more satirical.  Others are
purely literary in the Joyce style.  And a lot is just pure goofiness,
with the author giving you a broad and forgiving wink.

Slothrop is a really strange character.  I don't just mean that he
would seem strange if you met him in real life; he's strange to have
as a character.  I'm never quite sure how I feel about him.  He's kind
of lovable in a sympathetic way; he's so passive, and I feel bad about
the awful things that happen to him, so my natural appreciation for
the underdog kicks into play.  However, most of Slothrop's
interactions with other people, particularly women, leave me cold.
His passiveness also means that he regularly receives without giving.
He's helped by countless people, some kind and many horrible, along
his quest.  He rarely thanks his benefactors, or helps them except in
return for direct aid (the amount of quid-pro-quo in this book is
pretty remarkable).  And while he does eventually get a sort of
revenge on Major Marvy and the other purely evil characters in the
book, it's almost always by accident; he only acts when forced to do
so, cream pies notwithstanding.

And there's the name, of course.  "Slothrop."  So perfect, so
Dickensian.  The whole book is like that, and Pynchon's gleefulness
shines through in each of them: Pirate Prentice, Springer, Thanatz,
Tchitcherine.

I feel like I should say this one more time just to be sure everyone
is clear: this is an incredibly dirty book.  I can't think of anything
else I've read with this much filth in it.  I tend to equate "dirty
book" to "book with sex in it," and the level of dirtiness rises in
direct proportion to the quantity and vividness of sex depicted.
Well, after reading this, I'll have a hard time thinking of any other
book as being "dirty," even such previous mileposts as Illuminatus!
Sometimes, the book reads like a tour de force of fetish, with every
predilection anyone has had or could have making its way onto the
page.  There is an amazing attention to detail during such scenes,
with an unblinking stare at whatever aspect is currently being
eroticized, that it left me cold.  I tend to be a really robust
reader, plowing through just about anything, but some sections made me
feel physically ill or pained, and I would occasionally commit the
reader's cardinal skin of skimming ahead to find out when it would
stop.

So, yeah.  Consider yourself warned.  This book is NC-17 and would be
banned from every nation if it were ever turned into a movie.

There are two outlets that you can hold onto when it comes to these
sections.  The first is the familiar escape of fiction - the author is
depicting the actions of a character in a realistic manner, not
condoning them, but using them for dramatic purpose.  We shouldn't
blame Pynchon for writing this any more than we should blame
Renaissance painters for the martyrdom of saints.  The more unique
escape is that, thanks to the book's hallucinatory structure, only
some indeterminate fraction of these scenes "really" occur.  It often
becomes clear halfway through a particular encounter that the laws of
the physical universe no longer apply, something even weirder than
usual is happening, and whatever filth is occurring happens only in
the mind.  The dilemma there, though, is that that's almost worse.
We're seeing the darkest and most disturbing impulses imaginable, and
Pynchon is running a pipe into our brains, dripping the sewage
through.

Wow, what a down note to end on!

END MINI SPOILERS

The question of the moment is: "Is Gravity's Rainbow better than The
Crying of Lot 49"?  I'll need to re-read and gloss GR to make sure,
but at this point my tentative verdict is: GR is technically better
and more impressive, but far more demanding.  If, somehow, we could
get a ratio of the amount of pleasure derived from a book divided by
the number of hours spent reading it, then CoL49 would win.  They're
fundamentally different beasts, though.  GR is the sort of book that I
can only read once every few years or so, and the reverberations will
continue to shake me for a lifetime.  Sure would be nice if I knew
what happened there, but I know it was an amazing ride, and one I
won't forget.

http://seberin.blogspot.com/2008/12/reading-rainbow.html