Gravity’s Rainbow: A Love Story
March 14, 2016 10:51 AM   Subscribe

There’s a dirty secret tucked away in Thomas Pynchon’s novels, and it’s this: beyond all the postmodernism and paranoia, the anarchism and socialism, the investigations into global power, the forays into labor politics and feminism and critical race theory, the rocket science, the fourth-dimensional mathematics, the philatelic conspiracies, the ’60s radicalism and everything else that has spawned 70 or 80 monographs, probably twice as many dissertations, and hundreds if not thousands of scholarly essays, his novels are full of cheesy love stories. [SLTM]
posted by chavenet (40 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
And what beautiful cheese it is. The scene in Gravity's Rainbow where Roger Mexico and Jessica wander into the church service full of soldiers is one of my favorites.
posted by crazylegs at 10:57 AM on March 14, 2016 [7 favorites]


“They're in love. Fuck the war.”

Roger and Jessica are also the part of Gravity's Rainbow that I think about the most.
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:01 AM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


the Roger & Jessica scenes are some of my favorite parts of the first section. they have a quietness to them, like they have created a little refuge from the war, which they have.
posted by supermedusa at 11:02 AM on March 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


The scene with the octopus is similarly romantic
posted by beerperson at 11:21 AM on March 14, 2016 [12 favorites]


But we never write about the love stories.

This is… extremely inaccurate. I guess blanket dismissals of criticism are kind of The Millions' house style, as are personal essays about an individual's felt relationship with a text, of which this is otherwise a nice example. I just wish they could dispense with these little phatic anti-scholarly tics that seem to appear in everything they publish.
posted by RogerB at 11:25 AM on March 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


Dirty secret? Really?
posted by Splunge at 11:28 AM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


Or I guess I should just say, if you can write this:

I know the love stories are dirty secrets because I spend an inordinate amount of time in the world of Pynchon studies. I’ve read through mountains of work on his novels. I’ve written one of the aforementioned dissertations, a few of the essays, and one of the monographs. I’ve presented papers on Pynchon at academic conferences. I regularly teach a semester-long class on Pynchon. I hang out sometimes with other Pynchon scholars. And I notice that the love stories are never discussed openly

then the correct response is to start hanging out with better Pynchon scholars! It's certainly true that there's an uncommon amount of dumb criticism about Pynchon, and reflexive self-seriousness is a characteristic of dumb criticism; but literally every good Pynchon critic I can think of starting with Tony Tanner has made a point of talking about the glorious cheese that is one of his very obvious stylistic signatures. It's not a secret to everybody.
posted by RogerB at 11:29 AM on March 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


The scene with the octopus is similarly romantic

Wait, What?


(I guess I'll have to try to get into that book once again)
posted by sammyo at 11:46 AM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Grigori or GTFO
posted by RogerB at 12:00 PM on March 14, 2016 [6 favorites]


Mason & Dixon is almost entirely love story, albeit mostly a platonic one.
posted by HeroZero at 12:36 PM on March 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


The Crying of Lot 49 definitely has a love story there..
posted by k5.user at 12:42 PM on March 14, 2016


General Wivern's love of poop is similarly romantic.
posted by nikoniko at 12:43 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Pynchon is to me as Umberto Eco is to many people. I just can't seem to get into Gravity's Rainbow, no matter how many times I've tried. I feel bad about it, because I feel like it's always been presented as a book I should read, and yet...
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:04 PM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


The scene with the octopus is similarly romantic

Wait, What?


Certainly, an octopus. A trained attack octopus.

"The biggest fucking octopus Slothrop had ever seen outside the movies, Jackson."

It's in the French Riviera section of the story, natch.
 
posted by Herodios at 1:12 PM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


Roger and Jessica

also inspired a gorgeous and not at all cheezy love song by our beloved Camper van--a high point from a frankly perfect album.
posted by Zerowensboring at 1:20 PM on March 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


...though my favorite love stories are in Against the Day. The Reef & Yash & Cyprian story is a crowd-pleaser, so to speak, but the long courtship of Kit and Dahlia really gets me. Will they or won't they? Those crazy kids... And then the ending, when the Chums and Wandering Sisterhood start to pair off, God i just eat it up.

Mason & Dixon is almost entirely love story, albeit mostly a platonic one.

...the tragic tale of Mason and Rebekah, i'm tearing up a little right now...
posted by Zerowensboring at 1:27 PM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


This is news to somebody?
posted by 3.2.3 at 1:29 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


I just can't seem to get into Gravity's Rainbow, no matter how many times I've tried.

Try Inherent Vice maybe? It's designed to give pleasure moreso than GR, and isn't nearly as knotty (understatement). Plus, it's short! Though if you want the full magnum opus experience, Mason & Dixon is really marvelous...though, yeah, Against the Day is mah fave, though i might be a pervert about that book...
posted by Zerowensboring at 1:36 PM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


Pynchon is to me as Umberto Eco is to many people. I just can't seem to get into Gravity's Rainbow, no matter how many times I've tried.

Same here - picked up Mason and Dixon with very little preconception, just a vague notion that this is something worth reading. Plodded on, then finally gave up at the mechanical duck - I just can't get into this kind of postmodernism: after I get past the idea that it's all so meta, I am not left with much I care about.
posted by Dr Dracator at 1:45 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


the jessica and robert story is definitely the heart and soul of GR to me. i love the way their romance is described:

It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing really holds her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms… If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall[. . .]

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine." It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible […]

Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me…

and then the way that pynchon ends their story near the end of the novel, after not mentioning jessica in at least a hundred pages, in less than half a paragraph:

Jessica is weeping on the arm of Jeremy her gentleman, who is escorting her, stiff armed, shaking his head at Roger's folly, away forever. Does Roger have a second of pain right here? Yes, sure. You would too. You might even question the worth of your cause. But there are nose pick noodles to be served up buttery and steaming [. . .]

that is one of the biggest tragedies of the book, i think. there's this interesting contrast in pynchon between all the pyrotechnics and the quiet moments of humanity like that. without the latter i think i would find him totally unreadable.
posted by bergamot and vetiver at 1:58 PM on March 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


Anyone who has actually read him would, of course, tell you this. it's always said about Pynchon that he is short on characterization, and yet, his characters do the most human things, for very human reasons.
posted by OHenryPacey at 2:13 PM on March 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


> it's always said about Pynchon that he is short on characterization, and yet, his characters do the most human things, for very human reasons.

Yes, exactly! I enjoyed the linked essay, but/and this bit filled me with rage:
Book reviewers have a long history of attacking Pynchon for his flat characters. Roger and Jessica are susceptible to this criticism. Neither is given much of a history. We don’t know where they grew up or who their parents were.
This is one of the great failings of... what to call it? "middlebrow" is antiquated... anyway, a very common kind of criticism (common in the Anglo-American world, anyway), and it affects how authors write (which is one reason I read mainly Russian literature these days). I don't need to know "where they grew up or who their parents were" and I don't much care, unless, of course, you write about it brilliantly because that's truly what you want to focus on, as opposed to "welp, better provide a plausible background for my characters so the reader will believe they're behaving this way." Just write good sentences in a good and surprising order. Two people have fallen out of love? I don't care if it's because one of them has mommy issues or the other was bullied as a child—people fall out of love all the time, for any reason or none, just tell me what they do about it, and in language that makes me want to keep reading! Here's a story by the immortal (though dead) Daniil Kharms (previously on MetaFilter). Do you care about the psychology and background of Natasha and her father? No, you do not. And the practice of restricting stories to those that make sense according to currently fashionable (or, for aging authors, formerly fashionable) theories of psychology makes for a pale and predictable bunch of stories.

Also: nice post!
posted by languagehat at 2:43 PM on March 14, 2016 [18 favorites]


But we never write about the love stories.

That's the "essayist's we" - a lazy shorthand that means "myself and a couple of my friends from the same socioeconomic background".
posted by kersplunk at 2:56 PM on March 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm weird. You know how, you see someone on TV making a pizza. Now you have to have pizza? Or a burger. (Bob's Burgers makes me crave a burger, I said weird) Well I'm this way with books too. Now I have to reread Gravity's Rainbow. And as a real meta blast, I will end up craving banana pancakes because of it. But not English candy. Never.
posted by Splunge at 3:27 PM on March 14, 2016 [6 favorites]


But not English candy. Never.

I think that's actually how you get the greensickness.
posted by invitapriore at 3:35 PM on March 14, 2016


but maybe a little fart fondue?
posted by supermedusa at 3:53 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


I desperately wanted this to be a good essay. It is definitely not. Amongst other sins, it can't stop mentioning how 'cheesy' Gravity's Rainbow is even as it (the essay) slips into a -- yes, cheesy -- account of all that he (the author) learned from Gravity's Rainbow about the True Nature of Love &c.

Pynchon's big books (like Joyce's) are valuable precisely because they're great big civilization-encapsulating epics and closely observed intimate human stories, all at once, taking their subjects (but not themselves) seriously at every scale. The biggest ideas and the smallest lives and the hardest feelings and the finest details, all at once top to bottom. Roger & Jessica in the church? 'They are in love. Fuck the war'? They're what books are for. This isn't news.

The minor novelty here is the mention of Pynchon scholarship, which like most fanfic is primarily of interest to other writers of fanfic.

Good luck to the guy, anyway. The 'dirty little secret' thing is hamfisted clickbait, but anything that gets people reading Pynchon is fine by me in the end; he's better as his job than any of us are at anything we've ever done.
posted by waxbanks at 3:55 PM on March 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


Sidenote: heartened and happy to see folks who love the book saying (more civilly than I could manage) 'Nope, missed the mark, here's why, better luck next time.' Anyone who loves Roger & Jessica is fine by me (unless they're not, of course).
posted by waxbanks at 3:57 PM on March 14, 2016


Gravity's Rainbow - Love.
posted by adamvasco at 4:07 PM on March 14, 2016


Starting your essay with a sentence like that doesn't make you Pynchon, buddy.
posted by humboldt32 at 4:08 PM on March 14, 2016


My favorite GR nugget is the story of the rocket scientist who is given periodic leaves to a falling down amusement park with a child who may or may not be his. Heartbreaking.
posted by hwestiii at 4:15 PM on March 14, 2016


I haven't read any of his books in five or more years, but I don't recall Gravity's Rainbow or Mason Dixon as short of human characters or love. I've never read any Pynchon scholarship at all so I can't comment on that, but the discussion here is making me want to start rereading his work.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:11 PM on March 14, 2016


What's wrong with that?
posted by cleroy at 7:49 PM on March 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


"Among these things, it’s a 760-page-long dick joke."
posted by rmmcclay at 8:57 PM on March 14, 2016


And it's a musical.
posted by Grangousier at 3:12 AM on March 15, 2016


he stole the musical schtick from Melville
posted by thelonius at 4:28 AM on March 15, 2016


Metafilter: Plodded on, then finally gave up at the mechanical duck.
posted by LeLiLo at 2:17 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Hey, I just figured out that "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" might be making a sly allusion....
posted by ergomatic at 7:16 AM on March 16, 2016


The Crying of Lot 49 definitely has a love story there..

I don't know if it's a love story exactly, but that sloppy seduction scene in the motel where the forgotten 30's classic film 'Cashiered' played on TV (in wrong reel order) while garage rock band The Paranoids tuned up their 4 or 5 guitars is the best thing that Pynchon has done in my opinion.
posted by ovvl at 5:42 PM on March 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've been thinking about all of the lovely, small emotional moments and images in Gravity's Rainbow that have stuck with me, and for some reason the ones that are still burned in my brain are all with Geli and Slothrop: them sleeping in her roofless quarters, them watching their shadows race across the valley from the top of the Brocken, her and the children holding onto the side of the hot air balloon as it rises...I think languagehat kind of nails it, in that if you're missing all of the deeply felt moments in his books, it might be because you're imposing this demand that the histories of all of these characters be exposed where it's really not necessary.
posted by invitapriore at 5:01 PM on March 18, 2016


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