Gravity's Rainbow

So I decided as another random resolution this year to try and be more analytical about the things I consume and not just simply take in entertainment- that and I kinda miss writing analytical essays for school sometimes... (although I don't miss worrying about being graded on them :P). I'll be making future posts like this that are more akin to the Bible series of posts I've been doing, just for other stuff.

Anyway, after a year of on and off reading (although most of it in the last month), and a couple of more years before that with it just sitting in my stack of books, I finally finished Gravity's Rainbow. FINALLY. (although I think Brothers Karamazov took about just as long.)

I don't remember exactly why I decided to get this book originally. I remember looking for it at Barnes and Nobles years ago and finally buying it, which meant that I had already been looking for it before then, I guess. Maybe because it got touted as the Ulysses of the latter 20th century (even though I still haven't read Ulysses yet) and I have this thing for trying to read notoriously difficult books that aren't Finnegans Wake. And also since it was infamous for being the reason no Pulitzer Prize was awarded in 1974, because of a disagreement between the jury, who nominated it, and the board, who vetoed it, calling it '"unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and, in parts, "obscene."'

[I also have this memory of Miki being over at our Piedmont apartment once and asking for a book to read because she was bored. I gave her Gravity's Rainbow cause it happened to be sitting on top of my book stack and she facepalmed. She meant light reading. >_>]

In some sense the board might've had a point. GR takes a lot of patience and effort to read through, and a lot of the time I would find myself rereading the same few pages multiple times because I'd get through them once and think, "I have no idea what just happened," and even after several re-reads still not really have much of a better idea. To be honest at some points I felt like I was just reading to finish the book and not really to understand it. Having finished the book now, I suppose I could come up with a general summary that kind of makes sense, but there were still a lot of passages in the book that I couldn't understand or figure out the purpose of. 

[spoilers follow]

The main driving force behind most of the book- once you get past the confusing first quarter, anyway- is the German V-2 Rocket program during WWII and the main character (Slothrop)'s attempts to find the mysterious 00000 rocket, whose impending launch looms over the latter half of the plot. After a while, though, you realize that discovering the Rocket isn't really so much of the point anymore considering how often Slothrop and the plot and the narration itself gets sidetracked by random nonsensical digressive episodes,  stream of consciousness that looks like it should be readable but isn't, obscure flashbacks (half of which I didn't realize were flashbacks until reading a summary later), the breaking of the fourth wall, and lots of paranoia and obscene sex (one particular scene almost made me want to vomit...). So after all of that, I don't have trouble seeing why the board vetoed the book. It's not really a book that the general public would want to read anyway unless they felt like being masochistic.

That said, I have really mixed feelings about this book, because there were times where I suddenly was able to follow the narrative thought progression and had a moment of "woah, this is actually pretty good." Getting past the difficulty of figuring out who the narrator was currently following (the narration changes a lot without warning, sometimes mid-paragraph), I found that were a lot of seemingly nonsensical moments that actually somehow... made sense. Ironically. Kind of similar to how when you're daydreaming you end up thinking a lot of nonsensical or irrational thoughts that make sense to you at the time and then later on you're wondering what on earth you were thinking. Only this was essentially the reverse of that. And even some of the really random episodes- like the one about the extinction of the dodos, or the history of Byron the light bulb, or the dream sequence with the attacking giant adenoid, or the technical jargon about Poisson distributions and an aerospace engineering equation and the chemical properties of a molecule that somehow triggers hallucinations, or the random argument about the semantic use of the term "ass-backwards" where "ass" might be a exaggerated modifier except that "backwards-ass" would make more sense in that case and so on- were really entertaining, even if I couldn't quite figure out why the author was writing about them.

There's too much going on in this book- perhaps almost an encyclopedia's worth of allusions and scientific/historical/literary references and so on, to really give a reasonable analysis or explanation that isn't essay or resarch paper length, but the one major theme or thread that struck out to me was the obsession with predeterminism. Going back to Slothrop and how the locations of his sex-capades in the war coincidentally (or not) predict the locations of the V-2 Rocket attacks (I know... what.) and the attempts of the other major characters to research and take advantage of this ability; the continuous atmosphere of paranoia about some conspiracy going on, some other force or "Them" manipulating and adding or removing the characters and changing the setting behind the scenes; the preoccupation of several characters with the division between the Preterite and the Elect (from the Calvinist Predestination) and which side they're on, and their fate; and the whole idea behind the title itself, Gravity's Rainbow, the predetermined arc that the Rocket takes towards its target. There is a constant sense throughout the book that the events to come are inevitable, even though most of the characters in some sense struggle within their circumstances to find a way to control this outcome, the "arc" of the Rocket so to speak, as exemplified by the Pavlovian research project at the White Visitation and the huge manhunt for Slothrop late in the book to harness his ability... (which culminates in a really uncomfortable mistaken-identity-castration-scene). Only they find their efforts in the long run to be futile. 

This culminates with Slothrop himself, whose quest for the mysterious 00000 ends up fragmenting into a series of increasingly random adventurous episodes across Europe. Slothrop exemplifies the Fool tarot, representing a character who, ignorant of conventional wisdom, travels around and acts as he wishes (or as a reddit user put it, "lets his arc carry him where it will" rather than seek to control it). In spite of his apparent quest, he continually gets sidetracked into some other irrelevant plot by reacting to his surroundings and the people he comes across on his journey, allowing their influence to guide the trajectory of his journey across the novel, to the point where in the process his personality eventually fragments and he ceases to be. I found it a bit off-putting at first when the novel suddenly ended and I realized that Slothrop had disappeared somewhere in the last 30 pages without even getting near the Rocket (whose launch in the ending itself was a flashback), but on further reflection, it does fit in with the overall scope of the novel... as well as its tendency to eschew normal conventions of character development or plot anyway. They don't seem to be what the author was seriously trying for to begin with, so it doesn't quite make sense to criticize it on those grounds, I guess.

I think to really appreciate this novel, though, I'd have to re-read it again (with the Companion book), but I don't really know if I'd be up for it... maybe not for a long time. Too many books to get to in the meantime. I started 1Q84 as a cool-off book since a friend did so after attempting the first ten pages of GR and recommended it- and I realized how much I missed being able to understand what I'm reading. Haha.