metafiction – Second Slope

Pynchon is surrealist in travel

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin 2000

Toward the end of the 1924 First Manifesto, Breton distinguishes between “absolute surrealists,” like himself and his colleagues like Aragon, and artists outside of or predating the surrealist camp but who nevertheless may be surrealist in a certain area. So Jonathan Swift is a “surrealist in malice,” and the Marquis de Sade is a “surrealist in sadism,” which seems odd. Baudelaire was a surrealist in morality, and apparently Sartre (Breton must have said it elsewhere) was a surrealist in quietude.

I offer a reading of Pynchon as a surrealist in travel writing. Sometimes his landscapes are products of deep research, and other times they are 100% phantasy, like the plastic candyland version of hell that he throws two characters in for no reason that I’ve comprehended.

Part 3, “In the Zone,” is visibly the bulkiest. Weisenburger’s companion tells us that it’s as if this part has drawn in, accumulated, assimilated more episodes than all the rest, 32 in all. The Zone, postwar Germany, where all regulating forces have been suspended, is a “center of gravity,” pulling on the cast and the narrative material (things fall at 32 feet per second per second). There are several plotlines creating near misses: Slothrop’s quest for self-knowledge and rocket 00000, chased by a crazed American Major; the Soviet agent Tchitcherine’s mission to find and liquidate his half brother Enzian, leading one faction of the split Shwarzkommando; a quick heist to extract a bag of hashish out of the Potsdam conference; episodes on an aristocratic yacht party; and the story of Pokler, enlisted by Blicero (the kinky SS officer who also goes by Weissmann, whose brainchild is rockets 00000 and 00001 with the black device inside each), which is played totally straight, and makes a core of pathos for the whole book.

I shouldn’t offer yet another impossible summary. My own takeaway is that GR in one sense has the 50s 60s and 70s imaginatively superimposed on the 20s 30s and 40s, two overlapping chronotopes. (Which is bewildering in Pynchon but can also be sober and poignant, like in David Albahari’s novels.) Thinking about America, or the idea of America in 1973, what would it mean to revisit Europe and the second world war so fabulously? We have to follow baby-faced young American Slothrop back to the old world…into death.

Here’s a less lazy thought: GRAVITY’S RAINBOW is very similar to Goethe’s FAUST, especially part 2. I mean they share the same basis for many complaints of overstuffing the narrative to the point of boredom. The Zone functions like the “classical walpurgisnacht,” a center of gravity drawing out gods, mythical creatures, soul-bearing angels, all the entities through all the ages. They both allow their heroes to escape capture through cartoonish switcheroo gags. I vacillate between finding GR very very hard to recommend to people, and touting it as -the- literary work of the modern epic.

But as to being a surrealist in travel.

Light pulses behind the clouds. Tchitcherine tracks mud off the street into the Center, gets a blush from Luba, a kind of kowtow and mopflourish from the comical Chinese swamper Chu Piang, unreadable stares from an early pupil or two. The traveling “native” schoolteacher Dzayp Qulan looks up from a clutter of pastel survey maps, black theodolites, bootlaces, tractor gaskets, plugs, greasy tierod ends, steel map-cases, 7.62 mm rounds, crumbs and chunks of lepeshka, about to ask for a cigarette which is already out of Tchitcherine’s pocket and on route. […]

Here [Luba] has become a connoisseuse of silences. The great silences of Seven Rivers have not yet been alphabetized, and perhaps never will be. They are apt at any time to come into a room, into a heart, returning to chalk and paper the sensible Soviet alternatives brought out here by the Likbez agents. They are silences NTA cannot fill, cannot liquidate, immense and frightening as the elements in this bear’s corner—scaled to a larger Earth, a planet wilder and more distant from the sun…. The winds, the city snows and heat waves of Galina’s childhood were never so vast, so pitiless. Se had to come out here to learn what an earthquake felt like, and how to wait out a sandstorm. What would it be like to go back now, back to a city? […]

Out into the bones of the backlands ride Tchitcherine and his faithful Kirghiz companion Dzaqyp Qulan. Tchitcherine’s horse is a version of himself—an appaloosa from the United States named Snake. Snake used to be some kind of remittance horse. Year before last he was in Saudi Arabia, being sent a check each month by a zany (or, if you enjoy paranoid systems, a horribly rational) Midland, Texas oil man to stay off the U.S. rodeo circuits, where in those days the famous bucking bronco Midnight was flinging young men right and left into the sun-beat fences. […]

They’re riding away from the railroad: farther away from the kinder zones of Earth. Black and white stars explode down the appaloosa’s croup and haunch. At the center of each of these novae is a stark circle of vacuum, of no color, into which midday Kirghiz at the roadsides have taken looks, and grinned away with a turn of the head to the horizon behind.

Amongst all the backfilling details, the noun clauses, and these other crufty elements, the figures of Tchitcherine and Qulan riding horseback in central Asia stand out. I enjoyed these moments the most, the voice working like in a Robert Howard pulp story; he gives the impression that these landscapes, “zany” as they are, can be inhabited and deeply understood. The moments are like Weird Tales but also simply tall tales, stories and rumors about Tchitcherine and his ward that the narrator has gathered.

And it’s these situations that have stayed in my memory, against the more esoteric material. (I finished the whole thing in the last week of April.)

Early in this part is a long stretch of backfill on the Shwarzkommando and the history of the Herero people in southern Africa under colonization.

A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one’s subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What’s a colony without its dusky natives? Where’s the fun if they’re all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it’s Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it’s nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets…. Oh no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts…. No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets….

(Now I see where David Foster Wallace got so much of his haughtiness.)

Is it just because of the rejection of Marx that passages like this one strike me as the most postmodern, ideologically? The narrator clearly prefers the chapter in Brown’s LIFE AGAINST DEATH on excrement over the closing chapters of CAPITAL volume 1 on primitive accumulation. He prefers the language of desire over that of political economy (“Christian Europe was always death and repression”). The latter merely explains while the former describes, maybe endlessly. Overall, it’s a move from class politics to instrumental rationality as a way to take stock of capitalism in its imperialist stage. And would Pynchon or the narrator prefer the colonial products, the opium, weed and coke, over the European fungal component of LSD?

You’ll notice how evasive I’ve been about the shwarzkommando, a black battalion for national socialism. I can’t explain, but can describe Pynchon’s reading of German ethnographic monographs on Herero organization and political struggle, including the use of suicide, worked into the novel as a line struggle over the question of the V-2 rocket. He wrote in a letter:

But I feel personally that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christianity minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration.

I take his point that cheap labor and overseas market as explanatory phrases doesn’t do justice to the irreducible sensuous manifold of elephantine proportions that is the Pynchon Novel. It’s just that the words of the skipping Marx are not simply reductions (or else Marxism isn’t anything). And GR’s sprawling plurality can itself be an inverted reduction, into a new universalized stew, as homologous as it is eclectic.

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

Oh, banana!
Anal explosive
Pynchon is surrealist in travel
I may have lost the plot

Oh, banana!

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin, 2000

Some discrete moments jumped out at me in part one of GR, “Beyond the Zero,” this time.

During the Banana Breakfast sequence, just before Pirate serves that disgusting amount of food, we get a paragraph about the Banana Breakfast smell.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjurer’s secret by which — though it is not often Death is told clearly to fuck off — the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations…so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind secret blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects….

It’s not a principal or dominant odor in the scene, this Banana Breakfast spell. It seems to operate more “rhizomatically.” We have permeating molecules that do an intricate weaving. “Meander, repossess, prevail.” The word choices, the way they focus on aimlessness, a dispersed and groundless movement, reclamation — these seem like positive things in this world.

The banana fragrance is a kind of model, for weaving together narratives maybe, but also a model for resistance against the books primary situation, which is the proliferation of technology, of the development of productive forces driven by imperialist war.

(GR is a WWII novel that is so clearly actually about everything that came after. Its length and heftiness as a physical book alone suggest that the post war world is so immediately and absolutely different that it’s as if it has come into being all at once.)

This resistance is also one against “Death,” like the persistence of humanity in our genetic material. The death drive in GR is not necessarily nihilistic, since there does seem to be a real afterlife or paranormal dimension in this world, and the multiple mad scientists in the novel are trying to breach it.

Another micro-meditation, this time a little digression in the middle of the Adenoid set piece.

In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm’s plastic surgeons…their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.

Another thing about GR being a cold war novel set in WWII is that it resembles a spy novel more than a soldier narrative. There’s a pithy notion that the code technique conceals writing but makes the operatives recognizable, like the icon of a secret society. These spies and soldiers are atomized and dispersed like the banana odor molecules. I haven’t looked it up yet, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the mustache thing, silly even compared to the Adenoid, were real. Pynchon’s surrealism is usually reinforced by something from empirical reality, either historical or scientific.

This digression only exists to explain the absence of one character who was needed for the Adenoid taking over London like the Blob. The narrator inhabits northern chauvinism, the “Ottoman rump,” and the same bit of language makes a contrast between assholes and mouths, maybe. Plastic also jumps out on a re-reading, not just for the plot, but the plasticity of Pynchon’s style.

A bit later, Jessica is hanging out at a seance and talks to the practitioner Milton Gloaming.

“Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes, yes yes…we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves — certain pathologies, certain characteristic shapes, you see–“

“I’m not sure that I–“

“Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word P sub n against its rank-order n on a logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful, “we should of course get something like a straight line…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…I think with this chap, this Roland, that we’re on to a classical paranoiac–“

“Ha.” That’s a word she knows. “Thought I saw you brighten up there when he said ‘turned against.'”

“‘Against,’ ‘opposite,’ yes you’d be amazed at the frequency of this one.”

“What’s the most frequent word?” asks Jessica. “Your number one.”

“The same as it’s always been at these affairs,” replies the statistician, as if everyone knew: “death.”

Well if this isn’t the book in miniature. The search for patterns and meanings in the contingency of automatic writing, a contingency that’s not absolute because it’s still mediated by the human, by the mechanical practice of human writing. And it confirms the statistical analysis reported in this paper, which is what moved me to reread this novel even though school’s starting up.

Notice the narrator’s tone, which seems to take up Roger Mexico’s infatuation with Jessica. And the “bow shape,” which is what links together the arc shape of bananas, rainbows, and rocket trajectories.

“Babbling into her silence.” It’s a nice phrase. I’m noticing that this is something he likes to do. A linguist would explain it more eloquently. But Pynchon likes to use nouns that are supposed to indicate (abstract?) states in this way. Like how later on a room is “filled with noon,” light from a V2 blast.

To touch on the plasticity thing earlier, Pynchon will simply cram any old things together. Like “were-elves.” Pynchon writes as if Henry James experienced ego death during a psychedelic experience, and renounced the psychology that his brother studied, the human dimension of psychology that his baroque prose captures so precisely. And now he writes pretty much in the same way but to prove the opposite point. The difficulty of James (at least for us goldfish brained millennials) is at the syntactic level: fiction has a certain logic to the order of details in the narration, and James’s prose ain’t that, because he’s capturing the bombardment of tiny enigmatic encounters that make up practical life. Pynchon is a similar bombardment, but not of psychological moments, just a lot of mise en scene material. It doesn’t get clearer than in the musical numbers, (more than anything else, I drive myself mad over what the tune for these lyrics are, if there is even one to set them to), when the prose becomes so telegraphic that you’re basically reading a deranged movie treatment or screenplay. Scenes are usually set with discrete details, and their relationships, and even what character’s subjectivity we’re aligned with, gets put off. Which makes sense, because the names of Pynchon’s cast are so wacky, we would have nothing to go on if the events were narrated conventionally. Imagine “Pirate Prentice woke from a dream…” instead of what we’ve got. The names are labels. The point is that the narration represents what it’s like to experience Pynchon’s mock reality, part epic, part satire, a little Libertinage, a little Rabelaisian grotesque, a little Picaresque…

One other thing about the Pynchonian character that I’m undecided on. They don’t have psychology in the realism sense but many of them have dossiers, thanks to which the system can command their ids through knowledge of their fetishes. With all of the atomization and immanent weaving through the structure noted above, and the usual litany characterizing denatured modern capitalism it evokes (fragmentation, alienation, etc.), is the Unconscious in this book’s world a kind of personal property, the closest thing to representing identity as we’ll get?

Pynchon is also an interesting node for the realism-modernism discourse. GR can be claimed for either camp because either its techniques do more to capture the chaos and absurdity of material life and demystifies the practical ideology put up by so-called realist fiction; or it is an absolute break from the novel’s naturalized drive to represent reality, withdrawing into a fabulous realm of raw imagination, on an infinite quest for self-determination, becoming the central text of the postwar American wave of metafictional experiments.

But like any modern classic, GR does a lot of work to understand you as well. There’s a reference to Dutch painting in the sequence with Frans van der Groov and the dodo birds. This comes in the middle of a long paragraph describing the compulsive slaughter of the dodo birds in Mauritius.

Once he sat all day staring at a single white dodo’s egg in a grass hummock. The place was too remote for any foraging pig to’ve found. He waited for scratching, a first crack reaching to net the chalk surface: an emergence. Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea, and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first minute of amazed vision, of wet down stirred cool by the southeast trades…. Each hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world’s light. There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian ocean, to tarry night. The egg, without a quiver, still unhatched. He should have blasted it where it lay: he understood that the bird would hatch before dawn. But a cycle was finished. He got to his feet, knee and hip joints in agony, head gonging with instructions from his sleeptalkers droning by, overlapping, urgent, and only limped away, piece at right shoulder arms.

The Vermeer reference is an obvious move. And it seals the deal on the the stillness and pictorialism of the above description. The “wet down” retrospectively takes on painterly lighting. Another reference to the notion of the “ancestral chain” of genetic continuity. Not sure what the sleeptalkers are. These lines are packed with moments of realism, drawing links to human world, and human details. And that’s because realism vs. modernism is a metaphysical opposition, when realism is always a moment in modernist writing practice. Jameson says they are independent methodologies. Maybe so. Reading GR, or any of the supreme metafictions, you wonder if there was anything at one and the same time so sturdy and so fragile.

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW