Pynchon - Guides: Gravity's Rainbow

Pynchon - Guides: Gravity's Rainbow

Sorry this is a bit late, but the above is the helpful guide to GR on the web.

words, words, words

Well, then. I'm afraid I can no longer smugly grin and say "Yes, I have an understanding of this novel, I'm doing well on my own." Because in our reading assignment for Thursday (consider this your warning), the novel goes spinning off the rails, flying without hesitation from a sort of amusing vagueness to a complete nonsensicality that sounds very pretty but defies any attempts at understanding. I don't know if I like the warning signs that are flashing. One of my complaints with po-mo writing is that I don't see intentional vagueness as a virtue unto itself. If done for a specific reason (Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury," for example), it works. But here, I don't see the point, other than so Cooler Than Thou Pynchon can make some statement about how cool and thoroughly experimental he's being. Really, what's the point? Or, in asking that, would I just cause a post-modernist to shake his head and laugh at my small-minded expectation that everything must have a point?

Some things to consider for Tuesday's class

Righto,

GR is on the map and causing concern and enjoyment from the get go. Some of you are appreciating the style of Pynchon, his barely constrained, hyperactive descriptions. Some of you are fretting over the structure and "meaning" of the work. Some of you just like reading about bodily secretions and excrements.

Here are some things to start thinking about.

Book 1 opens with a quote from Wernher von Braun about transformation. For those of you who don't know, von Braun was a Nazi rocket scientist who was "rescued" by the US after WWII. He became very instrumental in NASA after the war. You can thank him for the Apollo moon landing.

But the notion of transformation will play a role in the book. Who or what will be redeemed? And "Beyond the Zero" also suggests some redemption. What is the zero line?

preterite: the passed over, those not elected--very important from Pynchon's puritan heritage. Who are the preterite in GR? (Incidently, Pynchon's ancestors (like Slothrop's) can be traced back to the puritan founding of the country. William Pynchon wrote a heritical text in the 17th century, and John Pynchon founded Springfield and Roxbury, Mass.

We may want to talk about Pavlovian psychology of Pointsman vs the statistical data of Roger Mexico. (see pp55-56)

"I've seen an octopus brain or two in my time..."

Count me!
Maybe it’s just because I’m weird and I have a weird sense of humor, but I’m actually not having that much trouble understanding this novel. I think part of what helps is a certain attitude, which I will now share with you:
Nothing is going to make sense right away. Accept that. The first time you see a character or situation mentioned, you won’t know what it is, and it’s possible that you won’t for a long time. Pynchon will probably get around to clarifying some things. Not everything, but some things. Just read slowly and carefully, and accept the things you don’t understand with a grin, and keep going.
(Parenthetical aside to demonstrate personal brilliance, and insult to Ginger. Self-congratulatory laughter.)
The thing I really love about this book is that it reminds me why I write fiction in the first place. The novel form is liberating. You can do almost anything, and I think I can see why Pynchon will never let anyone adapt this novel to a play or a film. Those forms are restrictive, and many of the things that he achieves on the page couldn’t be done in another medium. This is the novel taken nearly to its limit (I think House of Leaves probably goes further than this does), and Pynchon as an artist is testing the capabilities of prose as he tells a story. It’s beautiful to watch. I would say it’s inspiring, but let’s not get sappy.
I didn’t think Gravity’s Rainbow would be as fun as it’s turned out to be. I hope it continues.

Hypertext novel

Untitled Document

This is the hypertext novel written by some friends of mine.

The reason for it all

Count the words, captain.

All right, so Quilty’s dead and Lolita’s married and dead and Humbert Humbert is dead and we’re done. That’s the story. (And to help out Ginger, who can be a little slow: I’m talking about the last part of the book)

But there’s a question that has to be considered. Why this story, why these characters? Why did Nabokov decide to write the story of a pedophile outwitted by another pedophile? He obviously wanted to tell something that was unconventional and new, with the unreliable narrator and the realism-dissolving winks. It’s possible that in order to tell a story that took us so far away from our normal fiction expectations, he needed a situation that was also out of the ordinary. Nabokov took us out of our comfort zone both morally and narratively.

And yet, he took us a little farther than that. I haven’t seen discomfort in our class sessions, I’ve seen blood-pissing anger at Humbert, at Nabokov, at the society that produces individuals who rape children. Now imagine the reader of 1958. How angry would they have been? I imagine, much worse. Nabokov couldn’t misjudge his audience that badly. He knew that he was creating a work which would violate social taboos so fiercely that the book would have to be cleaned up to be merely banned.

It’s possible that he wanted us to be angry. Anger is a strong reaction, and evoking reactions is the ultimate goal of any work of art, classical or modern or otherwise. If that is the case, then he suceeded. But of course there’s a snag to this. If Nabokov just wanted to ruffle feathers, he could have used much clunkier prose style and come off as a close cousin to Bill O’Reilly. Instead he wrote it beautifully.

In modern society we see several groups who promote pedophilia as a natural form of love, the idea being that no sexual behavior can be called deviant so long as it is an innate desire of human beings. I’m sure that Nabokov’s beautiful prose and image of pure love felt toward a child could be appropriated by these sick bastards as an example of their purity. Fortunately, Humbert and Quilty are much too monstrous to allow for that.

The purpose of the story could be any of these things, or more likely none of them. I’m not Nabokov, so I can’t know why he wrote Lolita. But it’s worth thinking about.

A mystery novel that has found my trash can

Hooray!
A mystery novel. I agree with Matt’s view of the change in genre in part two. And, you know, for about eh… twenty pages I had a renewed interest in the book. This was until, I realized that, wait, I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. Am I suppose to, well maybe. I am sure that Nabokov would hope his reader is intelligent enough to look at the missed piano lessons, the “recent” change in Lolita’s attitude (obvious she was up to something), the dirty shoes and an obvious lie, being followed, and for Christ sake the tennis match, and say “ahhh its Quilty!” Regardless, it was certainly intended for me to figure that out on my own. No. Instead the thrill of following alongside a character in a mystery novel (which is turning out to be a fascinating mystery) is lost because of a crappy long-winded introduction and endless footnotes. Thanks, great. So, let us guess how this ends ummm…. Lolita runs away with Quilty… Humbert takes that gun he has recently picked up (and that Nabokov is continually reminding the reader of), and blast a whole in Clare’s head. Taking bets?
It was not my intent to ramble however, as a romantic of the mystery novel, I would have taken much more satisfaction in figuring this out without the aid of the introduction and such, even if it meant a second read. Does anyone else share this frustration? Oh, and count this.

THREE hundred fifty words! Ha!

We have spent a great deal of time discussing Humbert Humbert, his lies and motivations, which makes perfect sense since he is the hero(?) of the novel. But we’ve spent very little time on Lolita herself. Her name is on the cover, so maybe we should turn our thoughts to that. And it is difficult to focus on what she thinks about all this. It’s mainly difficult because we see it all through Humbert’s lens.

In the beginning, it was she who initiated the sex, due to whatever crush she might have had on Humbert. But as time goes by, it seems that she is getting bored with it, and by page 192 (where I’m at now), she appears outwardly hostile toward it. During their trip across America, she is much more interested in sightseeing and movies than Humbert and his sex. Yet, and this is a big yet, she doesn’t leave. I know at first she doesn’t have anywhere else to go, but the guy is commiting statutory rape. At any point, she could have gone to the police and gotten away from him. Particularly when they settle down (Beardsley, is that the city’s name?), she could easily get away. And at one point Humbert believes she is saving money to do so. She refuses to bring attractive friends home, she spends a lot of time away from Humbert, and did I mention page 192?

But there must still be some knd of attraction, some desire for Humbert’s attention. She is not entirely hateful of him, the way she was of her mother. Even if he does almost have to bribe her to have sex with him, she still does it. Is it possible that it’s just become such a normal, routine act that she’s become apathetic toward it?

On page 186, Appel notes that Lolita is already spending some time with Quilty [more reading has confirmed this], so we have to assume storm clouds are strong in the sky. I’ve tried to find some positives about Lolita’s relationship with Humbert, but it seems to have dissolved into apathy and hatred, and I can find no real evidence of mutual admiration. So why does she stay?

Kudos

Let me reiterate that I'm very pleased with the scholarly interaction on this blog. All of you are contributing really interesting material, and that has been reflected in the classroom discussions. The work that you are putting into the blog before class begins has already made all of you a bit better at approaching Lolita. The end result is a course much more intellectually engaging than the mere recounting of plot and character (the all-too-frequent danger of the literature class). I suspect that as the course continues, you will grow more astute in your observations and continue to push me as a teacher. I look forward to that.

End of part one

Chapter 33 is the most chilling chapter in the novel so far.
For pages and pages, Humbert has seemed charmingly clumsy, and kind in his own way. But if we're going to go on with the mask metaphor, then the end of Chapter 33 is where the mask falls away and we see that his seemingly haphazard planning carries a cold edge. His protestations of gentleness may have helped us overlook his use of sleeping pills, but this can not be excused or explained away. We must remember that Humbert Humbert is a master seducer, and he knows how to handle any situation.
I think I'm going to read Harry Potter now. After I take a shower.

Lolita

Lolita

Worth looking at for probable questions to ponder.

Online requirement

Since you have a requirement to post one 250 word response each week, please identify the post that you want me to grade as that response.  Otherwise, I will just consider it as a secondary response.

Narbokov’s Accomplishment

So here it is.
The real twisted turn of the text; Hint: and it’s not HH and his perverted lifestyle. Yet instead, the real twist is, in fact, on the reader, and this is what Narbokov has accomplished. He took a character that is so repulsive in his thoughts and actions that anyone, on the surface, would cast him into the depths of hell without batting an eye, and yet… we feel pity. We don’t feel anger or hatred… we feel disappointment. If we simply heard about this on the 10 o’clock news we would turn to someone and say “people should be killed for such a thing.” Yet, Narbokov has created a character that deep down we desperately want to be cured. Any thoughts?

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions

Nor, apparently, do they occur in the Annotations.  See p33 note 3.

Links

I've started to compile some links to various websites relevant to our class. Check out the sidebar at your leisure.

Let me caution you about depending upon web sources for any research. They can be helpful, but they are typically inadequate for the sustained work you will need to do for the final seminar paper. Use them as an entry way, another way to brainstorm, a means for getting ideas. Then go do the deeper research in the stacks.

Impressions

My first impressions of Lolita (after 79 pages) are leaving me very intruiged, as I'm similarly disgusted and fascinated by Humbert Humbert, but I admit this doesn't quite seem like what all the introductory material had promised.
We've been told endlessly that Humbert is an untrustworthy liar, who keeps up a constant mask. I admit his writing style is overblown, probably to hide his real feelings, and there have been a couple of small lies he's let out (he claims to be shy in romantic relationships, for example), but I'm not seeing the massive unreliability that I was brought to expect.
There were also many comments in the introduction about Nabokov's intrusions, little comments and the like that shatter the realism of the story. I've only seen one of those, and overall if Nabokov was aiming for a style that opposed realism, then perhaps he shouldn't he shouldn't have written realism.
While Lolita is undeniably great, I think that the commentary of Alfred Appel is a little... overly-enthusiastic. Humbert is definitely a liar, and his true intentions are shadowy, but if this is the height of Modernism, then Faulkner and T.S. Eliot are Post-Post-Modernism. I'd probably see Appel's point if I could stand to pay more attention to his footnotes, but when I see an analysis of the Latin roots of each syllable in Lolita's name, I can't take it seriously. I'm sure he makes some good points, but half that time he just comes off as a ponce.
I must just be missing something, because a thousand PhD.s can't be wrong.

Nabokov and Pynchon

An interesting fact not mentioned in the introduction.

Nabokov taught at Cornell. Pynchon attended Cornell. Pynchon took Nabokov's Masterpieces of European Fiction course. While Nabokov did not remember him, his wife Vera--who graded all the student essays (nice, eh, to have that old world sexist relationship with your spouse) did remember Pynchon. "He had very neat and precise handwriting" was her comment (or words to that effect).

Foreword

Perhaps it is my inability to grasp this foreword (or perhaps, I am just unsure what to take from this), or perhaps a comment made by Scott has confused me to an extent, however, is John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and actual person? If so, the foreword is much more comprehendible. The source of my confusion was, I believe, that Scott had commented that the author begins by providing the readers with a fake editor…? To perhaps summarizes… am I to take anything from the foreword besides the text being a concept of several, horrible acts written quite creatively, that will be studied by Freudian “wanna-bes” for quite sometime…

Matt