Well: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before [—]”
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So. Okay. So I finished Gravity’s Rainbow on Friday night, and reread the opening section (and more than the opening section) on Saturday morning, resisting a compulsion to immediately return to the beginning.
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So: Okay: Right?
The ending of Gravity’s Rainbow cycles back to the beginning (like Finnegans Wake): Blicero’s rocket, screaming across the sky—yes? no?—to invade the dreams (?) of psychic Pirate Prentice? The book: a loop, a Möbius strip, a film, its reels discombobulated, jostled, scattered…
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“…it’s all theatre,” we learn on the book’s first page (page 3); the book ends in a theater—the Orpheus Theater!—where maybe scattered Slothrop is the leading man, scattered, we find ourselves in him, parts of him—where the audience demands, on the book’s last page: “Start-the-show!”
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“You’re putting response before stimulus,” Spectro shakes his head at Pointsman, early in “Beyond the Zero,” the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow—does this describe the beginning/end of the novel? (“It has happened before”).
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Or, a bit earlier even, at the seance, (page 32), Gloaming describes one kind of plot: “…we should get something like a straight line” — but then gives us another kind of plot — “…however we’ve data that suggest the curves for certain —conditions, well they’re actually quite different—schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper—a sort of bow shape … classical paranoiac—” Is this the shape of Gravity’s Rainbow?
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—but right this moment it’s that final dash that intrigues me—this in a novel full of dashes, this in a novel that name-checks Emily Dickinson, Eternal Empress of Dashes—the fragmented conclusion is full of dashes, lines obliterated by more perfect, straight lines, simultaneously connecting and disconnecting—like the novel’s final line:
“Now everybody—“
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Or just the “Now—” of the little fragment before the final fragment “Descent.”
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Or the second-person address a few pages previous (757), when Pynchon assassinates us (“you”), complicit with Richard Milhous Nixon: “Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. ‘I don’t think—‘“
(I don’t think therefore I am not).
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(Or is this just the death-fantasy Zhlubb/Nixon admits to: All theater?)
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(Oh and hell Zhlubb’s adenoid?!)
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Where was I—?
Okay: So: Well:
That dash at the end—an invitation back to the beginning?
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The questions I have are many, and many of the questions I have might result from attending to sections of the plot (Slothrop, Roger and Jessica, Pointsman’s complaints) at the expense of attending to other sections of the plot (Blicero, Enzian).
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But the rhetorical technique hides the plot, like Slothrop’s desk buried under mounds of detritus. (And this is the aesthetic pleasure of reading Gravity’s Rainbow).
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Aesthetics though: Light and sound: This is a major element of the plot that I need to attend to in my rereading.
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So: I put a lot of question marks in this riff (and I threaten to write more as I reread)—so I’ll end with a question:
Good books/essays (preferably not-too-academic-in-tone) about Gravity’s Rainbow, dear readers?
Try “A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion” (by Stephen Weisenburger). I think of the book as an enormous, obsessive, mathematical proof: every symbol/idea has an opposite, which undercuts/cancels it out at some future point in the narrative. Excellent novel.
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Off the top of my head, there’s the Tom McCarthy review of the GR audiobook from earlier this year. (If anything, it’s much better reading than his last novel, Satin Island). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/gravitys-rainbow-read-by-george-guidall.html?_r=0
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[…] work of “encyclopedic heteroglossia”). Weisenburger also quickly helped to (re)confirm my sense that GR loops back into itself, its end cycling back to its beginning: “Gravity’s Rainbow is […]
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[…] over the past few weeks, both of whom were having a tough time with Gravity’s Rainbow. Up until last year, Gravity’s Rainbow would easily have been my first answer to this question. How many times did I try to read it […]
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