04-14-2013, 03:06 PM
I was reading Doom and laughed out loud and Lady Cranefly wanted to know why. I told her about the Santa Cruz bumper sticker DM saw. Anyway, I've been meaning to revisit Gravity's Rainbow, and that served as the catalyst.
There are things to like about Gravity's Rainbow and about Pynchon himself. He writes some very whacky vignettes. That's the thing. Pynchon loves making digressions, and in my opinion they can be the best part of his writing. He'll have this crazy episode about intelligent light bulbs and how G.E. has a special team that goes out to track down the rare light bulb that, by the luck of manufacture, is immortal, and their objective is to destroy it. Or there's the bit about a character getting flushed down a stool, or someone's adenoid that, once removed, lives and grows to haunt the woods. Or the ancestor best known for almost single-handedly wiping out the dodos with his shotgun. These flights of fancy, taken alone, are wonderful. But I don't think they add to the larger work. There's no synergy to Gravity's Rainbow. It doesn't become bigger than the sum of its parts, and in fact I think there's some subtraction happening. But Pynchon is brilliant, a wunderkind, capable of some great bits of writing, and I might someday visit him again.
Finally, I recognize the possibility that Pynchon may be beyond me, and that his work actually is synergistic, and that I am simply incapable of fully appreciating it.
There are things to like about Gravity's Rainbow and about Pynchon himself. He writes some very whacky vignettes. That's the thing. Pynchon loves making digressions, and in my opinion they can be the best part of his writing. He'll have this crazy episode about intelligent light bulbs and how G.E. has a special team that goes out to track down the rare light bulb that, by the luck of manufacture, is immortal, and their objective is to destroy it. Or there's the bit about a character getting flushed down a stool, or someone's adenoid that, once removed, lives and grows to haunt the woods. Or the ancestor best known for almost single-handedly wiping out the dodos with his shotgun. These flights of fancy, taken alone, are wonderful. But I don't think they add to the larger work. There's no synergy to Gravity's Rainbow. It doesn't become bigger than the sum of its parts, and in fact I think there's some subtraction happening. But Pynchon is brilliant, a wunderkind, capable of some great bits of writing, and I might someday visit him again.
Finally, I recognize the possibility that Pynchon may be beyond me, and that his work actually is synergistic, and that I am simply incapable of fully appreciating it.