Gravity's Rainbow in depth on Studio 360

[alice wellintown]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 10:33 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Could paranoia be considèred as the sensing that there is an order beyond
> the capability of our minds to understand, not as wonder, or awe, but as the
> sense of losing the connection to our usual perception of a self located in
> a particular time and space. A challenge to who or what we think we are.

see Seed's Review of Tanner's brilliant book:
http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk/tanner.htm

a handful of excerpts from the Review here.

How most of the West moved toward a monotheistic male cult is not down
to violence and greed and all that bad shit;  it is tanglesd in the
lines of integration and enlightened by Man's capacity to wonder and
wax nostalgically. Not to mention a truck load of other capacities and
remebrances.

"For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in
the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the
last time in history with something commensurate [with] his capacity
for wonder."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.

The recurring difficulty which Tanner finds in American writers could
be put like this. If they reject discredited European ways of
positioning the self according to hierarchies of class or rank, how do
they avoid the dangers of either a loss of identity or, as Tanner puts
it in relation to Melville’s The Confidence-Man, a ‘self-sealing
solitude’? Individuality becomes an elusive aim rather than a clearly
achievable state for the self. Social identity becomes problematised
in that masquerade extends through so many aspects of The
Confidence-Man that, as in The Blithedale Romance, nothing can be
authenticated. Once again, an avenue to
independence—self-parenting—confuses identity with a whole series of
guises.

These are the stylistic signs of Nick’s search for wonder and Tanner
once again brings out the typicality of his instances by proposing a
whole tradition from the Puritans up to contemporary writers like
Thomas Pynchon where writers are searching for some special dimension
to America. This almost visionary impulse is ironically reified in the
famous hoarding of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg whose commercial gaze
confronts Nick in the Valley of Ashes. The materiality of modern
American culture provides us with a strong link between The Great
Gatsby and DeLillo’s Underworld.

In his final essay Tanner considers how Mason and Dixon fits into
Pynchon’s and characteristically focuses in on how America is
conceptualized. It is at once a ‘symbol for boundlessness;
historically boundaried’. It is impossible to overestimate the
importance in this novel of surveying. As Tanner points out, it is a
far from innocent act but rather signals the appropriation of the
terrain for commercial and imperial purposes. To use Tanner’s own
phrases, surveying imposes the most dominant set of human signs on the
scene of Nature. He reflects on the associated symbolism of lines and
boundaries here, showing a continuity between Pynchon’s concerns and
those of Fenimore Cooper, among other American predecessors.
Boundaries imply oppositions between what lies on either side and also
open up the possibility of transgression in its most literal meaning
of going across. Tanner recognizes the special historical moment of
Mason and Dixon, the moment just before the Declaration of
Independence. Just as the term ‘preterite’ occupies a special position
in Gravity’s Rainbow denoting the human casualties of power groups, so
in Pynchon’s latest novel ‘subjunctive’ privileges the imagined or the
speculative over empirical fact. Thus as America shades into material
being away from dream and myth, it gradually ceases to be subjunctive.

Tony Tanner, The American Mystery. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000. Pp. xxiv, 242. £13.95. ISBN 0 521 78374 7.

Reviewed by David Seed, University of Liverpool