Gravity's Rainbow in depth on Studio 360

[David Morris]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
> On 3/9/2012 12:12 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>
>> My thoughts are not facetious in the sense of any personal derision, I am trying to be intellectually feisty and to point out what I disagree with and why without intending any personal affront. I also hope for thoughtful rebuttal, because I want to look at the questions from different angles.  What I am trying to express with different formal approaches is a sincere problem with the logic of this line of thought that seems to me to be saying that Pynchon is using GR to challenge any  attempt  to understand comprehensive patterns in history, showing that all such attempts amount to paranoid delusions. Is that the gist of what you or Paul are saying or am I off?
>>
>
> Speaking for me, I don't think Pynchon is challenging more conventional interpretations of history at all--he's not some kind of nut.
>
> He's just being very imaginative in putting a huge amount of emphasis on certain aspects of reality--delusion, pornography, mercenary war profiteering.  It's his method. Don't know if the Greeks had a word for it--maybe it's part synecdoch, part hyperbole. I just say pynchonize.
>
> P

OK, to respond to this question (instead of your earlier rebuttal),
despite the myriad of accurate and often obscure historical facts in
GR, I think calling it an historical novel is to miss its real
intentions.  GR's main goal (amidst all of the beautiful everything
else) is to dissect from as many angles as possible the nature of
human consciousness.  In GR's world paranoia is not a pathology, or if
it is, it is one inherent with the advent of human consciousness.
Paranoia has its religious aspect: Is the "order" we see in the cosmos
the product of an hidden power (and if so, why is it hidden?)?
Paranoia also means the act of making connections between data points,
things seen into things perceived.  At the root of paranoia is the
question, "Is what I'm seeing really there, or is it the product of my
mind?"  This is a question common to a person tripping on acid, which
Pynchon clearly did plenty of in the 70's, reportedly while writing
GR.

Another one of the foundational problems Pynchon points out with human
consciousness (HC) is the knowledge of our impending, inevitable
death, and all that is done in reaction to that knowledge (see the
Busby Berkeley scene of the rats leaving their cages early on at the
White Visitation: If only men could forget that they're going to die).

And yet another foundational HC problem is the Freudian concept of
"the Return of the Repressed," epitomized by shit being transformed
into money, power, technology, etc.  Pynchon clearly read N.O.Brown's
"Life Against Death" and incorporated much of it into GR.  The biggest
question grappled with in that book is whether man is irredeemably
repressed/pathological, or redeemable/healable.

Anyway, that enough for now.

David Morris