Verbals Furballs. (Pynchon, Pt. 1)

My god, the man obfuscates.

I have decided, after hours of contemplation, that I'll allow my first post to be little more than a knee-jerk RANT against the refrigerator-poetry of Pynchon's style. But let me start at the start.

I'm blogging, along with K.R., as I read Gravity's Rainbow in a united effort to hold ourselves accountable for actually completing the darn thing. It's my first go, but KR has tried several times and, not "failed," but decided to move on to less irritating reading material. Let me put it this way: many of you know my feelings about Don DeLillo's White Noise and James Joyce's Ulysses, so you'll understand my initial hesitancy when I searched GR on Amazon.com and they BOTH appeared as results. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but I imagine that if you like one or the other of these (supposedly, and I have my doubts) venerable tomes, you're sure to LOVE GR. Not exactly an auspicious beginning to this summer reading adventure.*

So... I decided to take the literary academic approach; or, at least, I decided to make an attempt at such an approach. And I still insist that I will have a few posts along the way that will gesture at scholarship, perhaps even brilliance, although the probability of the latter is quite slim. I'll save my attempts at thematic analysis, linguistic parsing, and etc, for later posts, however, for right now I have a terrible itch that I must satisfy, a tickle in my (virtual) throat: Pbbbttthhhttt! The Emperor is naked!

First, studious little scholar that I am, I practiced my "Fiction Preview" for this book. The steps of the preview are as follows:

1. Read the covers, inside and out (flaps, etc)
   
2. Read everything before Chapter 1 and after the last chapter.
   
3. Read Chapter 1 (all 180 pages).
   

First, the covers: Front cover is apparently black paint/ink splattered on a white canvas/surface, with the shape of a missile - purportedly the V-2 rocket, but not named - marked out as negative space. The edges of said shape are not sharp, perhaps to further indicate the space as negative space, rather than 3-D object. The rocket, then, does not have actual presence on the page (here or in the text), except as, like subatomic particles in physics, the measurement of the reactions or it's imprint on the environment. Okay, got it. The MISSILE/ROCKET represents the centerpiece of the novel, but the novel pivots on it, rather than focuses on it. And that's just Frank Miller's cover. (I KNOW! Frank Miller!)

The back cover, delight of delights, shows war-torn London, the famous bridge aflame in the deep background, rowhouses tumbled into lumber, rubble, and ash, defamiliarized (thank you, for dropping the cake, Jenna) into their disparate elements, though a complete wall of empty windows rises. Notably, perhaps, that wall lines up with the burning bridge in the deep background. Two figures, male and female, seem to have just escaped the collapse of a wall, although the male, following the female, may sill be caught by the legs in the crushing fall of whatever it is. His hand covers one eye and his forehead, and a frightening bit of lumber seems headed straight for a lovely impalement beneath his upraised arm. The woman faces away from the disaster, while the man watches the collapse. The artists depicts most of the scenery in reds and browns, edged in white to emphasize the heat and brightness, but the figures have a greener underlying tint. This coloration may indicate living vs. unliving, although the intuitive tinting for that purpose might have been the opposite: color of living should be red - blood, life, etc, color of death/nonliving/inanimate - green, black, industrial. In this case, the city is bleeding, burning, dying, the humans(?) frozen, copper-statue-like, concrete, mechanical. Hmm..

As I wrote this, I took another look at the inside back cover and learned that the image is "from a German D-Day leaflet showing scenes of apparent disaster in England." Anyway, here's a link to Calvin College's online German Propaganda archive (3rd image down).

Then, I read the only text on this back cover. A quote from The New Republic:
"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II."

Um, what exactly is that supposed to signify? That it's a difficult book? That Pynchon somehow "accomplished" some mysterious SOMETHING with it? Is the verbose, complex, style "accomplished"? The in-jokes and puns? The (possibly) throwaway allusions and oblique references that may go somewhere but may have appear as a diversionary tactic? ("Hey, look at this bright, shiny thing I can do! Oh? What? I have no idea how this talking dog got here while you were looking the other way!").

Inside Front:

A
SCREAM-
ING
COMES
ACROSS
THE
SKY

Red font on black background, with mirror-image and reverse countdown to 2 in white at the extreme bottom edge. I now recognize the latter as a reference, not entirely subtle (oh yeah - it's Pynchon) to the Pavlovian reverse-neurological processes, the "ultraparadoxical phase" (Pynchon 49, his ital.) of impending/receding doom. Yes, well. How wonderfully clever.

Clever, clever Pynchon. Does the emperor actually have on a delightful set of magical robes that only the wisest of us can see? Or have we all been hoodwinked (heh, pun) by a man with too much time and too many verbals... or, is that the cleverest joke of all? That he, being TP, knew of the academicians and our desire for meaning, and he weaves a horrifyingly apt post-modern joke to expose - an humiliate us all?!

I don't think that I'm necessarily grasping at straws - or bananas - here, in an embarrassing attempt to explain my ignorance. I'm actually having little difficulty comprehending his "story," if it may be termed such, or even his metaphors, allusions, puns, descriptions, what have you. I'm just a little irritated that he won't let me in past this veritable wall of language to the heart of... himself? His tale? His point? It just makes me wonder if, like the child with the Russian doll, there exists nothing at the heart. Perhaps the tangle of alleyways and darkened windows in/around/through this wall are the point of it. The journey, not the destination, blah-blah-blah. Frankly, I don't know how I feel about picking up all of these jigsaw clues he leaves about in the twisted corridors and on the ledges of his text, only to find that the picture is only another post-modern attempt at abstract expressionism without meaning. Call me a luddite, but I don't care about books that I don't care about, and I especially don't care about Thomas Pynchon's thesaurus-diving.**

Alright. I have read Ch. 1, but, obviously, haven't written on it. I have the notes! I swear, Dr. Roney, I've been keeping up! I'll write on this tomorrow, since I've talked too much today.
~~~~~
* Mantra: I'm reading this for pleasure. I'm reading this for pleasure. I'm reading this... oh hell.
** Yep.