The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon

318 Pages·1987·33.659 MB·English

by  Thomas Moore

AS MOORE
THE STYLE OF
CONNECTEDNESS
Gravity's Rainbow
and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Moore
University of Missouri Press
Columbia, 1987
Copyright © 1987 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Thomas, 1946-
The style of connectedness.
Bibliography: p.
1n c1 udes index.
1. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity'«3 rainbow. I. Title.
PS3566.Y55G736 1987 813'.54 86-16093
ISBN 0-8262-0625-5 (alk. paper)
To Lynn, Alexey, and
Andrew (speaking of
Connectedness; speaking
of love ... )
Contents
1. Introduction: Gravity's Rainbow
and Other Books, 1
2. Gravit.y. 's Rainbow as the
Incredible Moving Film, 30
3. Character Moires in
Gravity's Rainbo-lD, 63
4. Max Weber, the Spirit of Capitalism,
and Gravity's Rainbow, 116
5. The Culture of Science in
Gravity's Rainbow, 149
6. The Gods of Gravity's RDinbow, 219
Bibliography, 293
Index, 302
Permissions, 312
1
Introduction:
Gravity's Rainbow
and Other Books
Years of increasingly mysterious silence from the mysterious Thomas
Pynchon have elapsed since the publication in 1973 of Gravity's Rain
bow: the longest, most ambitious, and most vastly intimidating of his
three novels. A co-winner of a National Book Award in 1973, and hon
ored in 1975 with the William Dean Ho\vells Medal of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, 1 Gravity's Rainbou, is among the most
widely celebrated unread novels of the past thirty years. Favorable criti
cism suggested that it was one of the finest of all American novels, or
even that it was the twentieth centurys major novel after Ulysses. Such
responses do not seem decent to conservative critics, who yet may
expend equal vehemence on negative rulings. It is already a piece of
minor folklore that Gravitys Rainbcnl.' was unanimously recommended
by the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury for a prize in 1974 yet lost because an
advisory board of journalists thought that the book was "turgid, over
written, unreadable, obscene.":;! An obvious reminiscence is of the
debate in the 19205 over Ulysses-a promising parallel for Pynchons
cause, since despite the doubts of a great number of early readers, Ulys
ses has come to be felt almost universally as a successful essay in
"encyclopedic" fiction, to employ Edward Mendelsons useful term.
This is a kind of work, says Mendelson, that contrives to be about every
thing human, about everything: all human history, the courses of
1. Pynchon refused the medal. AUI/wrs Note: Because Pynchon uses so
although," he wrote in a letter. "being many ellipses in his writing, 1 have
II
gold, " it is " probably a good hedge deleted spaces in ellipses that appear in
against inflation . ., Pynchons text to distinguish Pynchons
2. Peter Kihss, "Pulitzer Jurors Dis use of ellipsis from my own. The nonnal
umes.
mayed on Pynchon ... New)Uri: May spacing of ellipses indicates that I have
8, 1974, p. 38. omitted material from the text.
1
The Style of Connectedness
culture that culminate in itself. and great ethical, mythic, epis
temological constants of human life. 3
Although it would seem that no such work, if successful in its vast
ambitions, could be described as purely either upbeat or downbeat,
such unfortunately has been the tendency of much criticism of Grttvity's
although the novel surely fits the encyclopedic prescription.
Rain~
My study thereby takes incidental issue with readers and critics who
have found Gravity's Rainbow to be essentially nihilistic, ultimately
downbeat in its view of the nature of human experience. An example is
Josephine Hendin, who finds the Gravitys Rainbow symbol simply to
be the sign of " Deaths hate, Deaths grimace, the tragic mask of the heav. .
ens pulled down forever in one inviolable affinnation of depression.
R4
But I would suggest that if books of this kind succeed to the point of
being worth discussing at all, they can never really be caught with such
fixed expressions freezing their faces: to argue over the "beat" of The
Divine Comedy, King Lem; TI,e Brothers KaramDZOV, or Faust is to feel inef
fectual.
Of course no one now can say whether novel will finally be
Pynchon~
found to belong in such exalted company, but at least Gravity's Rainbou'
clearly asks to belong to high literature-the scope of its thematic ambi
tions, its wide erudition, the uncompromising complexity of its
demands on readers, necessarily if unfortunately mean that a Pynchon
industry will mesh it gently with the machinery of the academy. This
study will abet the effort of academic co-option, by the novel sown stip. .
ulation one of bad faith, since I explore some of the sources that the book
itself co-opts from general cultural history. There are enormous ranges
of these invited guests, from mythological mother goddesses to quan
tum-physical theories; from early Christian apocalypticists to Shirley
Temple, Groucho Marx, Margaret Dumont; from Newton and Leibniz
to Plasticman and King Kong. These are not mere objects of token allu
sions but real presences, each exerting its own distinct sort of pressure
on the historical and contemporary realities that the book contem
plates. Pynchons famed erudition does not finally have the effect, as
some hostile critics have claimed, of a merely neurotic or undergraduate
belaboring of vaguely hip cultural commonplaces, such that the formal
critic appears as an earnest freshman and Pynchon as a graduate stu-
3. See MendeJsons introduction 10 his 4. Josephine Hendin, Vulrremble Peoplt:
edited Pytlcllon: A CoIl«1ion ,t{ Crihc:al t\ "LTo( Ammcan Fiction Since 1945 (New
J.:
ES5I!Ys (Englewood Cliffs, N. Prentice York: Oxford University Press, 1978),
Hall, 1978), pp. 1-15. p. 207.
2
Introduction
dent, both preparing for some apocalyptic final exam. The parody is
only mild, the hostile reviews having often been vehement. Rather, the
novel merges its invited guests organically, " much in the manner that,
U
in Pynchon's vision, communal/historical life merges deep psychic
archetypes, Jungian dreams, symbols, metaphors of connection, in and
as visible history.
Gravity's Rainbow asserts-with a creativity and synthetic power that
rescues the assertion from sounding hackneyed-that at this end of a
three-hundred-year Western cultural dispensation our understandings
of life, our sympathies for and in it, suffer too much from the habitual
reification of " either/or" contraries out of what is really a holistic cultural
field. Pynchon seeks to penetrate all interfaces that seem to separate, for
example, the high and low arts, the two cultures of art and science, the
elect and-in various senses-the passed over, or preterite, among
human beings. As I specify in detail in Chapter 2, and as the most
casual reader of Grarih(s Rainbow alread.y knows, the book imitates the
1
~
form and feel of a movie in a number of ways, with events in it con-
tinually felt to be happening on both sides of the moving film, the para
noid fabrications crossing the interface of the artist/director's
imagination and penetrating our own world, where we had thought
ourselves safe among real historical assemblages. Inside the movielike
frames that Pynchon imposes on history, we sometimes see recogniza
bly real events and images, sometimes imaginary and preposterous
ones, sometimes surreal combinations. The typical response to this film
of lifes self-imagination in history is a paranoia that in tum helps to
actualize more history, which, Pynchon implies, is so "made." And yet
the novel comes out feeling far gentler than do most products of fash
ionable playings with paranoid structures. Specifically, Pynchons work
is more psychologically valid, more culturally responsible, and more
compassionate than that of the writers of the Absurd tradition with
whom he is often confused. He cares for political, scientific, pop. . cul
tural, and mystical imaginations-for human imagination in its
essence, which, for him, is that desire, both admirable and pitiable, to
project ordering meanings onto the blank universal screen, only to lose
itself in the systems created by those meanings and by the act of projec
tion.
Pynchon sheepishly admits that his novel itself is just another syn
thetic, compulsive, slightly mad mediation of life, like the mythiC,
religious, artistic, social, scientific, and technological systems that it
s
exhibits-and Gravity Rainbow's parodies remind aU critics that they
3
The Style of Connectedness
too should feel sheepish about what they are doing. Among Pynchons
critics, the most credibly and commendably queasy in this way has been
Mendelson, who chastises Pynchon industrialists: liThe book itself has
already generated institutions that seem. entirely innocent of any sense
that the book they honor criticizes precisely the kind of honor they
offer. ... Collective enterprises have built themselves up around
Pynchons work ... and this book [Mendelsons edited Pynchon: A Collec
tion of Critical Essays] is one of them. But I hope this book is one which is
at least aware of its paradoxical dilemma in offering Pynchon an honor
which he implicitly condemns.
"5
This is a way of saying that Gravity's Rainbo-uls manner of being pres
ent in present culture is an unusually subversive one, especially in the
context of the authors notorious absence from cultural view. This sense
of absence percolates from outside the book to inside to bend its mean
ings, as through the flowing water, the holes of the old Hohner
II
Slothrop found are warped one by one, squares being bent like notes, a
visual blues being played by the clear stream" (622).6 One may sleuth
with some success after the personal Pynchon, but the fact is that he is
living, as Joyce never did to such an uncompromising degree. that spe
cies of silence, exile and cunning" that his work consistently recom
II
mends as a valid response to the world-not, after all, sheepishly, but
wolfishly, Pynchon maintains, outside as inside the moving film of his
work, his own absolute " invisibility. " Behind the invisibility we often
sense a hauntedness that expresses itself as a quiet jeering at readers
and critics-as, at Mintons jazz dub in New York in the 19405, such
brilliantly inward jazzmen as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and
others openly jeered front the stage at their audiences. These men are
among Pynchons heroes, as there is both internal and external evidence
to indicate;7 Rilke, for that matter, disdained to read any published
commentary on his own work.
5. Mendelson, ed., Critiall Essays, p. 9. mourns Charlie ("Yardbird"') Parker,
defining him as a charismatic, death-tend
6. All page citations from Gravity's Rain
ing victim of a Muzak culture (63); see
boU' throughout this book refer to the 1973
also the sympathetic treatment of the
Viking Press edition, hardback or paper
black jazz musician in the early story NThe
back. (These were published simultane
Secret Integration" (discussed in my
ously and their pagination is identical.) s
ChapleT 5). and of V. McClintic Sphere.
For quotations from The Crying of wi 491
-Extel naI evidence a Cornell professor
H
use the Bantam (Uppincott) 1966 paper :
who knew the undergraduate Pynchon
v.,
back; for quotations from the Bantam
testifies to the young mans fascination
(Lippincott) 1963 paperback.
with Thelonious Monk and his music.
7. Gravitys Rainbow celebrates and
4
Introduction
s
The presence, then, of Gravity Rainbow in our world is a mocking
activity of infiltration of, and escape from, any intellectual sheepfolds
that would exclude it cage-frames, as those of the academy, that
o~
would confine it. Highly germane to the nature of the imagination at
work in the book is its vigorous life in underground cults. One seems
apt to have appropriately odd experiences with these groups and their
organs, as I did with "Pynchon Notes"-a collection of bibliographical
data, happy notices of unearthed secrets about Pynchons life, and occa
sional worshipful essays, to which, when I heard of it, I subscribed, but
of which, since subscribing, I have never heard again.
Though an MLA conference on Pynchon has been held and dis
tinguished critics have hailed him as a greatly important writer, one
may also find, on the twilight interface between popular folklore and
formal studies, essays like Matthew Winston's liThe Quest For
Pynchon, " which, from its overground forum in TIoel1tieth Century Liter
ature, has shown how the tracks to the three novels' author have some
how been mysteriously covered. For example, dedicated souls in quest
for Pynchon will find that even in the Cornell register for his freshman
class there is a blank space where his picture should be. From here we
may move, if we choose, to such theses as by no means belong
exclusively anymore to undergraduate groupies, such as that
"Pynchon" actually is a committee, or a computer, or Woody Allen-or
that he is perhaps Professor Irwin Corey, the standup comic whose
expertly manic doubletalk routine is a running parody of academic jar
gon and of intellectual pretentiousness generally. Sent by someone to
accept Gravity's Rainbow's National Book Award in 1973, Corey dis
rupted the high-literary proceedings in a Grouchoesque way that might
have belonged to a scene from the very book being honored. Such any
way are the mindless or mindful ways in which Gravity's Rainbow and all
comments on it conspire to create the effect of the books dynamically
incomplete state of crystallization from the supersaturated solution of
extranovelistic reality in which reader, critic, author, and the ongoing
history of systems are immersed equally.
To speak of Gravity's Rainbow as asserting its identity as an "open
system" (the thermodynamic metaphor is so pervasive in the book that I
can no longer avoid it) is also to speak of its characteristic way of blur
ring distinctions between its inside fictional world and various outside
worlds of historical fact. Pynchons precise manipulations of facts from
preterite folk cultures-ruptured ducks, German prison camp "75s,"
5