“Gravity’s Rainbow”

Pynchon has surpassed all others in exploring the phallic symbolism of the rocket. This book, possibly the most Freudian I’ve ever read, is outlandish, depraved, strikingly insightful, intelligent, and often simply gross.

As a result, it is a very difficult book to review. Some scenes in this story are unrivaled in their hilarity (with the possible exception of scenes from David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Pale King’). There are also philosophical discussions—and deeper thematic structuring elements—which transcend in their intellectual acuity almost anything else in contemporary fiction (Pynchon appears to be particularly enamored with Hegel, and the novel is structured by something of a psychological dialectic). However, if the stylistic novelties and narratival freedom of Gravity’s Rainbow illustrate the fecundity of post-modernism, the depravity of this novel also illustrates its bankruptcy and frailty. Just because something can be found deep in the psyche of someone’s drug-addled brain, that doesn’t make it a contender for truth or worthy of contemplation. 

I love the way that Pynchon depicts ‘political narcotics’ (“the opiates of the people”) as actual narcotics—we often cannot tell the difference in this story—to reveal the dark and twisted underbelly of war. The paranoia of the characters is a sort of antidote to the ‘anti-paranoia’ of a world on the cusp of a nuclear age (“anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long”). When we are denied a plausible unified understanding of existence that includes reference to goodness, truth, and beauty, we are left with a neurotic search for connecting threads. Pynchon appears to find these threads in some sort of oedipal complex (it is desire, perversion, fantasy, and sexual expression that tie the cosmos together), and it is hard to tell whether he is trying to make this worldview plausible or show it to be baseless and ridiculous. 

It is immediately clear how deeply Pynchon has influenced contemporary literary fiction, especially authors like Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, etc. I rather enjoyed seeing the roots of their literary vision and the ways they creatively adapted and carried forward so many conventions that Pynchon seems to pioneer in these pages. It also gave me an even deeper appreciation for Wallace, who, unlike Franzen, does not accept Pynchon's nihilistic characterization of existence.

While Pynchon is well-aware of the darkness in the world, I’m not convinced that he actually understands it, for evil is not simply a twisted psycho-sexual fantasy projected on to the world. The descent into depravity is not the expression of something stable and true deep within, but the perversion of habitus, the unleashing of desire from the guiding influence of the intellect, the fetishization of hope through the obscuring of meaning, the corruption of goodness through the adulteration of beauty. 

In all, Pynchon’s masterpiece is lively, creative, intricately crafted, and the perfect testament to the insufficiency of his worldview.