Abstract
Now everybody — we too, started reading Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. We haven’t spoken to hitch-hikers in Arizona, like Siegel,1 but we’ve met a few who never got past the first hundred pages, like Leverenz.2 A Sydney film critic and feminist friend thought it was pretentious to be seen with a tattered copy at an academic conference and was surprised to meet someone who had not only actually read it but was almost through a second time. We thought the novel merited at least two readings, being perhaps the most important work of fiction of the second half of the century. And yet most literary-critical responses we read failed to do justice to its importance. Certainly they sang its praises but this amounted finally to little more than a dry and repetitive litany. They failed, it seemed to us, to provide the analytic framework that might delineate the novel’s difference.
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Notes
M. Siegel, Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978), p. vii.
D. Leverenz, ‘On trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow’, in G. Levine and D. Leverenz (eds), Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), pp. 229–49.
Cf. M. Kaufman, ‘Brünnhilde and the chemists: women in Gravity’s Rainbow’, in Levine and Leverenz, pp. 197–227. A particularly egregious case of sexism among Pynchon enthusiasts occurs when Paul Fussell concludes that the Katje/Pudding scene is ‘disgusting, ennobling, and touching, all at once’ (our italics). Such an ennobling occurs simply by transferring the disgust on to Katje, ‘a literal filthy slut … and the incarnation of the spirit of military memory’. See ‘The ritual of military memory’ in H. Bloom (ed.), Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 21–8; this passage, p. 27.
Cf. G. Genette, Narrative Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
For example: J. W. Slade, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner Communications, 1974); P. L. Abernethy, ‘Entropy in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49’, Critique, 14, 2 (1972) pp. 18–33; W. M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 1–63; A. Mangel, ‘Maxwell’s demon, entropy, information: The Crying of Lot 49’, in Levine and Leverenz, pp. 87–100; R. O. Richardson, ‘The absurd animate in Thomas Pynchon’s V.’, Studies in the Twentieth Century, 9 (1972), pp. 35–58; D. Seed, ‘Order in Thomas Pynchon’s “Entropy”’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 11 (1981), pp. 135–53; D. Simberloff, ‘Entropy, information and life: biophysics in the novels of Thomas Pynchon’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 21 (1978), pp. 617–25.
Lakoff notes the linguistic oddities of Slothrop’s use of the demonstrative ‘that’. Beside the fact that other characters do use it, we would see some limitations in explaining this usage in terms of the ‘isolation’ of a unitary ‘character’. In view of the variety of linguistic licence in Gravity’s Rainbow, it is difficult to see by what criteria this usage is to be judged ‘extraordinary’. See R. Lakoff, ‘Remarks on this and that’, in M. W. Galy et al. (eds), Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1979), pp. 345–56.
B. McHale, ‘Modernist reading, postmodern text: the case of Gravity’s Rainbow’, Poetics Today, 1, 1/2 (1979), pp. 85–110.
D. Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 31–62; C. Clerc, ‘Film in Gravity’s Rainbow’, in C. Clerc (ed.), Approaches to ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 103–51; and S. Simmon, ‘Beyond the theatre of war: Gravity’s Rainbow as film’, in Pearce, pp. 124–39. Simmon’s view of ‘this novel-as-film’ (p. 138) is closer to ours than Cowart’s purely thematic approach. Clerc takes the analogy even further, such that Gravity’s Rainbow ‘illustrates … the workings of an “auteur” theory of fiction’ (p. 150). We doubt, however, whether that represents an advance for Pynchon criticism.
See E. Mendelson, ‘Introduction’, in E. Mendelson (ed.), Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978), p. 15. For similar information, see Siegel, Creative Paranoia, pp. 126, 127.
M. Foucault, ‘Orders of discourse’, Social Science Information, 10, 2 (1971), pp. 7–30.
See J. Derrida, ‘Signature event context’, Glyph, 1 (1977), pp. 172–97; J. Derrida, ‘Limited inc.: abc …’, Glyph, 2 (1978), pp. 162–254; J. R. Searle, ‘Re-iterating the differences: a reply to Derrida’, Glyph, 1 (1977), pp. 198–208.
F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Fontana, 1974).
See: A. Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy (=La Jalousie) (London: Calder, 1965); G. Genette, Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966). Some interesting parallels can be noted here. If La Jalousie marks the space of the postmodern more clearly than many a novel, Gravity’s Rainbow marks the space of the post-rhetorical equally clearly. Both novels have near, or at, their start, a description of a banana plantation — indeed Tanner sees the banana as Gravity’s Rainbow’s main symbol, and it surely is the most haunting theme of La Jalousie. Robbe-Grillet’s bananas are, however, laid out in a precise structuralist grid and induce paranoia in the narrator. Pynchon’s bananas, by contrast grow in a random collection of soils and composts. They are unpredictable and, while they have a certain commercial function (as Robbe-Grillet’s no doubt also do), they are more readily used for play and pun, even though they are as scarce as Robbe-Grillet’s are plentiful. We write this extended commentary suspecting ourselves to be the only Pynchon scholars with direct experience of cultivating bananas. See T. Tanner, Thomas Pynchon (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 89.
R. Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and poetics’, in his Selected Writings Vol. III (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), pp. 18–51.
D. Bennett, ‘Parody, postmodernism, and the politics of reading’, Critical Quarterly, 27, 4 (1985), pp. 27–43. This reference, p. 36.
R. Barthes, ‘Towards a structural analysis of narrative’, in S. Sontag (ed.), A Barthes Reader (London: Cape, 1982), pp. 251–95.
Bennett, ‘Parody’, pp. 40–1. Evidently he has in mind R. Poirier’s ‘The politics of self-parody’, Partisan Review, 35, 3 (1968), pp. 339–53 which he refers to more specifically on pp. 30–3.
R. Barthes, Elements of Semiology (London: Cape, 1967).
J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 141–57; Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61–171.
J. Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
G. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 114. At this level, the concept-object can be found in a number of postmodernist fictions. For example Don DeLillo’s, White Noise (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1984), p. 103: ‘I watched the coffee bubble up through the center tube and perforated basket into the small pale globe. A marvellous and sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world — water, metal, brown beans. I had never looked at coffee before.’
Cowart, Art of Allusion; Mendelson, ‘Introduction’; C. Clerc, ‘Introduction’, in Clerc, C. (ed.), Approaches to ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 3–30; T. Moore, ‘Introduction’, in his The Style of Connectedness: ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), pp. 1–29.
Respective examples of each would be: J. O. Stark, Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980); and Mangel, ‘Maxwell’s demon’.
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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills
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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). Gravity’s Rainbow and the post-rhetorical. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_2
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