Gravity's Rainbow: Interlude One

Six hundred pages into Gravity's Rainbow and I'm not entirely sure what it's about. But then I'm used to reading books that you technically haven't read until you read them a second time. Which is why I'm reading Gravity's Rainbow a second time as I read it the first time.

One of the reasons it's difficult to pin down what the book is about is that it's written in sketches. And you don't usually watch a sketch show and expect to find a thematic element running through every sketch.

Another reason is that Pynchon is obfuscating events because the characters don't know all the details either. Slothrop's quest to find out what Jampf did to him as a baby and what They're doing to him now as a result of it is a quest to discover what the fuck is going on in the novel. I mean aside from everybody trying to live their life in the shadow of the War.

So what are some of the themes in this thing? I suppose, being a postmodern novel, I could just list all of the problems of modern civilization and I'd nail most of the themes: technology, colonialism, corporatization, sexuality, religion, death. Some of the most powerful moments in this book are really just short stories about a character dealing with a modern problem. The section about the Hereros and how they've chosen genocidal suicide over the life imposed on them by missionaries and colonialists was fucking heartbreaking. And while aspects of what the Germans did to the Hereros are important for the motivations of key characters tied to Slothrop's quest for Jampf or Imipolex or the part with the serial number 000000 (the Schwarzgerat (sp, probably?) or Their plot to manipulate his entire life, it really is mostly just a short story within the larger work.

In many ways, Gravity's Rainbow was a way for Pynchon to write about a whole bunch of stuff that he wanted to write about, all in one place. I'm sure it'll all come together at some point but it can still definitely be read as a bunch of short stories. Because I'm fairly certain that Slothrop's encounter with the older mother of one of the women he's fucking where she feeds him all sorts of terrible candy won't ever be a significant plot point in the overall book. But it was funny as fuck and well worth reading by somebody out of context of the book. A hilarious short story.

Anyway, one of the themes I was thinking about that I thought I'd kick around a tiny bit here was the theme of death. The book begins with its titular aspect of death: the rocket screaming across the skies of London. A portent of doom that has lost the "portent" part of its message in that the doom happens before the portent. The book begins with the knowledge that our experience of death has been subverted. And it's the way that we, modern people, must now deal with and experience death that changes something fundamental in our relationship with people of the past.

When death came to people of the past, it was generally something slow, something they would experience. A mortal wound or a mortal sickness would not obliterate them in a moment's notice without any kind of reflection. They would be able to see death coming. They would have time to feel it on them. Rarely would they simply wink out of existence without some kind of terrible or righteous or holy knowledge that they were leaving this mortal coil. Even being mauled by bear or attacked by a maniac with a mace, they would have time to understand their life was over.

But modern weapons changed that. And changed it so vastly that not only can a person's ego be destroyed before they can even think, "I'm going to die!" but it can be obliterated while simply thinking about the next second of life that will never come. Death all too often can come as a complete surprise in the modern era. Which leads to one of the other major themes of this novel: paranoia.

Everybody is inundated with deeply paranoid thoughts in this book. Roger Mexico basically disappears during the entire five hundred pages of the second chapter but he's a good example of one of these paranoid people just trying to deal with modern life and death. Which is also, in a postmodern society, often dealing with the loss of religion, because how can anybody believe in God or an afterlife when they've witnessed the horrors of modern man in the 20th Century?

Anyway, Roger, being an unbeliever amongst believers (the people he works with in The White Visitation all believe in ghosts and the afterlife and a whole host of improbable mysteries of the unseen universe), must find his own way to live with the constant specter of death at any moment. One cannot live without paranoia when you're living in a space constantly filled with more-than-instant death from above. And how does he come to terms with this paranoia? Statistics. It gives him some sense of control even if the basic truth of his gathering of statistics is that the knowledge he gains cannot save him. He may be able to predict the probability of a rocket striking a certain area but he can never predict where the rockets will eventually fall. The probability of not dying is all he has. It's his only comfort. And, as we see in Jessica's remembrances of their conversations, it isn't fucking much. He's still terrified but he can't voice his terror. To do so would be to somehow invalidate the statistical charms with which he's outfitted himself.

So that's what I think this book is about right now. Paranoia, mostly. Paranoia is the search for meaning in a world where all faith in religion has been lost. If religion is about putting order to a random and chaotic universe then where do you find that order when you can't believe in religion anymore? You find it in conspiracies. You find it in corporations working with governments across the borders of battlefield disputes. You find it in the name of a man who experimented on you as an infant baby being the person who invented a kind of plastic that has been somehow tied to the rockets that give you a hardon days before they actually crash down upon the city. You give meaning to all coincidences because if life is simply a coincidence and not a story then death is also a coincidence and can happen at any time without a proper and fitting conclusion to your story.

I could be wrong about all of this. I'm not a Pynchon scholar. I'm just some dumb jerk reading one of the best books I've ever read.