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| 3.85
| 14,433
| 1988
| Feb 17, 1996
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really liked it
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After finishing David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair, I had to step back awhile before reviewing in fear I would simply come across as an ove
After finishing David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair, I had to step back awhile before reviewing in fear I would simply come across as an overzealous cheerleader yelling ‘Give me a D!....Give me a F!...Give me a W!....’. Like a teenage romance, I was so blinded by my love for this collection and author that I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I loved so much, and if this brightly burning passion was distracting me from the flaws and faults that I wouldn’t realize were there until much later. After giving some time to reflect, my overzealousness has hardly died down and, through some helpful and insightful discussions and rereads of the stories with others (I highly recommend reading Garima's wonderfully comprehensive review!), I have not only been able to pinpoint my feelings on the book, but my appreciation has only continued to grow. The stories in this collection, while each varying dramatically at times in terms of style and voice, all seem to reflect upon the psychological implications of existing in the modern era of media and social pressures. Girl is an excellent introduction into the works of DFW, offering an exciting, page turning look at a wide variety of his chameleon-like styles and an introductory look into themes he would toy with and expand upon for the whole of his stunning career. Written in his mid-20s, Wallace already demonstrates a piercing intellect coupled with a seemingly effortless and strikingly versatile writing ability. What finally convinced me to read DFW, who almost instantly rose through the ranks of ‘favorite authors’, was a small discussion on him in James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Although the Wood was using the story Mister Squishy from DFW’s later short story collection Oblivion, Wood discusses how Wallace (as well as Pynchon and DeLillo) are ready and willing to ‘become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring.’ This ability is made most apparent in the title story where Wallace narrates from the poetically void perspective of an extremely narcissistic - and arguably sociopathic - young, republican attorney. Other good examples is the way he allows the society of his characters to control the narration and, most noticeably, the syntax of other stories as well, such as John Billy and Everything is Green. There are also several stories included whose characters and story allow for more of his own, personal, voice, making room for literary discussions, and terminology in Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,, and, as in Here, a discussion on the blending of mathematics and poetry. (Wallace, as shown in this useful wiki article, majored in both English and Philosophy, focusing on modal logic and mathematics). A major theme through the course of Wallace’s work was his dissection of media and entertainment. Here the reader can see Wallace’s early musings on the subject, examining popular entertainment in stories such as Little Expressionless Animals (which alone is worth the price of the book) and . It is interesting to see how the implications of these stories have only become more poignant with age. My Appearance, a story discussing the way late 80s entertainment such as David Letterman, made ‘money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things’, takes on a whole new meaning seeing it from todays standards where Letterman’s ridiculing and humor is rather benign compared to much of the other, more insensitive and cutting media satires on television. DFW explores the way society has come to tear down anything and anyone that takes itself seriously, and the only defense is to be self-ridiculing and laugh at oneself. He argues that nobody really wants to see someone succeed, they want to see someone rise to the top merely to tear and claw at them as they fall from great heights and feast on their corpse. They don’t want someone to talk about how great and serious they are, but only to mock the very things they take serious. In this story we see early examples of ‘using the joke to manipulate the very same audience that parodies had made fun of them for manipulating’ that were thematically crucial to his later masterpiece Infinite Jest. While exploring entertainment, Wallace is able to create a highly entertaining work as well. The method of which he delivers his stories takes on an almost Hollywood approach; when reflecting back on the final passage of the title story, a scene spiraling out of control narrated as if all of the action is occurring in slow motion, it rises in the mind as if it were a film I had viewed instead if a story I had read. He manages to construct such a vivid image through spatial diagramming the scene with his descriptions and flawlessly illustrating the flow of motion. The scenes of Little Expressionless Animals are cut up and rearranged like a Tarantino film, allowing for an emotional impact through the descriptions of a scene to occur before examining and explaining the emotional and psychological significance later on. It keeps the reader turning pages, seeking out the piece of the puzzle that, once fit to the rest, brings the whole picture into focus. At times Wallace does tend to serve up a characters backstory to explain why they are the way they are in one big unsubtle scoop, but this scoop is served on a golden platter of intellect as a side to the delicious story that it is hardly worth criticizing him over. The most blatant example is in the story Girl With Curious Hair, when the sexual deviance of the narrator and the fiery consequences enforced by his father are revealed during an acid trip, which allows the reader to draw their own connections from his childhood to his current sociopathic behavior (1). To simply conclude as such would be cause to moan, yet Wallace offers a brilliant non-ending that allows for the reader to decide how the final scene plays out. Suddenly the reader must become aware of their own opinions on the character, judging for themselves if the narrator is able to change, or is purely a monster. There are several key moments in this collection where the significance of the ending is left ambiguous, most notably in the wonderful (and personal favorite) Luckily The Accountant Knew CPR, or, in the case of Everything Is Green, the whole story and all it’s implications are ambiguous, and allows for a reader participation that offers both insight into the characters and the character of the reader. The post-modernist are clearly an influence on Wallace, yet he manages to let his own voice and style take its own shape under their guidance in this collection. There were a few points (primarily the way each character or story has it’s own little ‘quirk’, something repeated a few times such as on character always taking Xanax) where I briefly caught comparisons to Chuck Palahniuk. I only mention this as the two authors seem to have a few similar influences, but to compare DFW at his earliest to Palahniuk at his best, is more to Wallace’s credit than anything. Wallace grew to be mentioned in the same breath amongst his influences instead of a become a brief stepping stone in the reading career of a young reader on their way towards those influences as Chuck P became (at least that is how it happened for me, Chuck P led me to DeLillo and Pynchon at the end of high school when his style began to grate on me and I thirsted for something greater). There are times when Wallace is clearly ‘Pynchonesque’, where Wallace openly expands on Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, or how the story Lyndon seems to have been influenced or inspired by Donald Barthelme’s story Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning, but it reads more as a celebration of genius, a salute to his influences as he marches forth into the fields of literature, than a mere rehash and nod to greater authors. Despite all the love I’ve been spewing for this collection, I should probably touch on the downsides to offer a fair warning. John Billy, which being a great exercise in diction, something he would later employ with great talent in Jest, is cumbersome and leaves the reader feeling underwhelmed after exerting so much to follow the story. Say Anything is another that the word ‘exercise’ should apply to. It felt more as if Wallace was attempting to sharpen his skills, narrating a story from the least interested, or possibly the least expected, member of the story, while demonstrating versatility over style within one story. The ideas can be deduced and examined, yet it felt lacking compared to the stand-out stories. While I loved Westward, those adverse towards metafiction should steer clear as it is essentially metafiction of metafiction. I have seen the argument that Wallace’s sentencing is overly difficult and run on to the horizon, his techniques are something I greatly enjoy. It wasn’t until after reading multiple complaints of his style that I noticed how long his sentences were. In his defense, Wallace is a self-declared grammar nerd, so at least you can be assured he keeps to proper form and grammar. If you are looking for a great, accessible introduction to the man Himself, or are an old fan looking for more, I give the highest of recommendations to Girl With Curious Hair. While I must admit a few stories were less than loveable, on the whole this collection is a joy. His intellect shines brightly from every page and his acute observations, such as the fat man walking being described as ‘moving only via a shifting of weight from side to side, a humanoid balloon with too much air’ will have you laughing while thinking ‘that’s so true!’ Each story demonstrates a young artist coming into his own and gives hope to the future of literature. This is more accessible than his other works, and while every book written later each displays a tremendous leap in growth, writing ability (compare the impressive vocabulary and technicalities of Oblivion to this one), and footnotes (none in this one), but Girl is still wildly addictive and entertaining. Crack it open and enter the mind of a genius. 4.5/5 (1) It has been suggested that the title story is Wallace's attempt to poke his elbow into the ribs of 'literary Brat Pack' writers such as Bret Easton Ellis. It has been speculated that Ellis' recent negative commentary on DFW spawned from stories such as this. Read the article by DFW's editor ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Oct 07, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0330353292
| 9780330353298
| B009XQWQPY
| 3.87
| 1,115
| 1969
| 1999
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really liked it
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‘How can I place his order, his disintegration?’ Through fragments of a randomized collection of memories called up while wandering through a city, the ‘How can I place his order, his disintegration?’ Through fragments of a randomized collection of memories called up while wandering through a city, the reader explores the life, loves and losses of the narrator. As such a premise would remind many of Ulysses and Joyce’s incredible use of the stream-of-consciousness, B.S. Johnson (1933-1973) manages to create something unique and inventive with The Unfortunates. His story is separated into 27 packets which are intended to be read at random aside from the First and Last chapter, and allows for a creative artificial impression for the act of memory and thought. The random approach, which may initially be dismissed as cutesy and gimmicky, manages to go deeper and beyond the gimmick and explore the implied meanings we place upon order. In the Hungarian translation of the book, which was published as a regularly bound novel, Johnson included a special introduction urging the reader to still experience the chapters at random, stressing that ‘perhaps the point...of the novel in it’s original format; the tangible metaphor for the way the mind works’. By randomly selecting the order, each reader is given an opportunity for a personal experience of the novel. The form itself is a larger explanation of form. In the context of the story, we experience his memories out of chronological order, much like how we experience our own sets of memories. In the context of the form, it examines how order affects our understanding and meaning. In my own personal reading, Johnson, the narrator is a potentially fictional version of the actual author, spent much of the present eating and referring to vague moments of him and his desceased friend Tony eating in the city. It wasn’t until the penultimate packet that I actually experienced the fleshed out memory. This gives an impression that this memory was somehow of extreme importance to Johnson, and was possibly suppressed in his mind until he could properly deal with it at the end. It is a statement on the way I have been conditioned to approach novels; I noticed that the final few packets had a subtle sense of greater intensity as I typically expect the final sections of a novel to be where themes tie together and where the climax of plot should be. Had the luck of the draw given an entire different plot point near the end, the food scene would likely have seemed less crucial and the different point would have been garnished with this implied intensity. While this is a short book, much of the information is rather repetitive, which allows it to not only to seem to fit together well regardless of order, but positions the reader to different vantage points on memories. Depending on which view of an event the reader experiences first – Johnson, when in one memory, will refer to events in later or earlier memories and then have another packet pertaining directly to the memory, provides a subtly different meaning to the narrative. Sometimes you have forshadowing, sometimes just a simple revisit of an earlier idea. ‘Anything means something if you impose meaning on it, which in itself is a meaningless thing, the imposition,’ writes Johnson. He draws are attentions through the form to our impressions and imposed meanings, but also dismisses them all as meaningless. Perhaps our explanations on the form don’t matter at all, and the random order serves as an elaborate distraction when all he really wants to get across is the workings of the mind. ‘How the mind arranges itself, tries to sort things into order, is perturbed if things are not worted,’ he muses as he sorts threw the mental shoebox of strewn about memories. There is plenty of evidence to support that this is the real impression he wants to get across, as the style of writing is rambling with extensive use of commas, breaks to represent a drifting mind, and a constant second guessing and correcting that reminded me of the narrator in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. ‘I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.’ Rest assured, there is content to the book beyond the form and style, although the story is admittedly secondary. While that is the initial draw, be it gimmick or no, there is substance to be had from the story. This is a rather tragic book, exploring the themes of death, frailty and futility. The death of Tony is the major set of memories Johnson wrestles with, yet in digging up the past for Tony, a whole slew of other painful, and sometimes pleasant, memories are pulled to the surface. The death of Tony and the death of Johnson’s relationship with his college flame, Wendy, are eternally forged together in the imprints of his memory. While they occurred at the same time, it is the betrayal of life for Tony, and the betrayal of Wendy (while he constantly references ‘the betrayal’, he never clarifies if she actually slept around on him or if it was something else) that keep them inseparable. It seems these deaths helped to solidify his use of food as an escape as well, Tony’s life being eaten out of him by the world and cancer is countered by Johnson taking in life from the world though food. The frustrations felt, the sheer futility to stop the cancer left Johnson second-guess his life from then on out. The sportswriter scene depicts Johnson constantly questioning his choices of words and his own worth as a sportswriter, displaying his feeling of futility to actually be a good, authentic writer. He has watched his closest friend disintegrate, his relationships disintegrate, and now he notices all around him peeling paint, chipped banisters, and other aspects of crumbling architecture. While this is a novel about the death of a friend, since Johnson puts the reader into his mind it is really a novel about Johnson. We learn more about him than we ever do Tony, and we are only able to know his own impressions on the events. In the introduction, Johnathan Coe observes that the majority of interaction with Tony shows them discussing Johnson, his book, his problems with Wendy, etc. Perhaps this is the strongest argument that the book is really about our implied impressions, unique to each reader, as the book is the unique impressions of events as seen by one person. ‘The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies’. The standard novel is perceived as a generalization of themes, symbols and ideas that all readers can light upon, but this novel insists on doing away with generalizations and entering into a solipsistic viewpoint on life around us, to fully appreciate what one individual feels, to be alone in a sea of perspectives. His anger towards Christianity in the book, seeing turning to God only in the final hours as a cop-out, is an expression of ‘generalization’; it is submitting to a general idea of existence and general set of goals, ideals and morals. He feels you should face death in your own narrow viewpoints, goals, ideals and morals. The terrifying thing is that no matter how we view life though, we still are all barreling towards death and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, ours and theirs. ‘It is difficult to think of these things without terror, the pity is easy to feel, easy to contain, but so useless’. As this is often considered a work of post modernism, my opinions and imposed meanings are essentially meaningless. Besides, don’t take my word for it (take Mike’s word in his review though!), the idea is to form your own perspectives and meanings since that is how we experience life. Well, a decent metaphor for it at least. If all this is meaningless, and this book is nothing but gimmick, it is still worth investigating. Picking packets and random was a fun experience, and the box makes a nice addition to any bookshelf, as well as a great place to store your packets, notes, pens and stash your bookmarks. While the book is rather repetitive, it is still a good, quick read, and the structure is exciting. What I enjoyed most of all was how he placed you in his lecture halls and all over campus through his memories, places I really love to be. It brought back my own memories of sweating through exams, tragically failed college romances, late-night debates and laughter amongst classmates over booze or coffee. It is impressive as well that this book came out in 1967, yet still hasn’t received much attention despite publishers like McSweeny that clamor to deliver quirky structures such as this book. That really gives further meaning to Johnson's discussion of 'old solutions to modern problems'. So open up Johnson’s box. 3.75/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 20, 2012
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Aug 30, 2012
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Aug 04, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 0916583503
| 9780916583507
| 0916583503
| 3.94
| 6,683
| May 01, 1988
| Feb 01, 1990
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it was amazing
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‘The world is everything that is the case’ When looking to purchase a book I always try to buy them used. This allows me to stock my personal library w ‘The world is everything that is the case’ When looking to purchase a book I always try to buy them used. This allows me to stock my personal library with nice hardcover editions that often cost just as much, or occasionally less, than the price of a new paperback edition while also supporting small businesses that do their part to keep the dream of physical books alive. Used copies of books also come with an elusive presence of the previous owner haunting the pages. Occasionally I will wonder how the book came to be resold, especially when there is a small inscription on the inside cover such as my hardback edition of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems: Dad, Happy 83rd Birthday - 2007. On one hand, the recipient may have disliked the book, or already had a copy, or there is the chance that this owner may no longer be with us. In instances such as this, the small asterisks that precede a handful of titles in the Table of Contents suddenly become an increasing point of interest as I thumb through to these poems and wonder what they meant to the former owner. Is there a message within the lines that provided comfort to someone in their twilight years, be it a laugh or an encouraging sentiment? Another side effect of purchasing used editions is chance that the former owner was, like myself, the type to underline and take various notes. This has been beneficial at times, such as a dirty softcover of Dylan Thomas’ Selected Poems I purchased from the Dawn Treader in Ann Arbor, MI (my personal favorite bookstore) when I was 19 and just beginning to immerse myself in the world of poetry. Despite seeing a slew of margin notes, my shallow pockets persuaded me to buy it anyways after seeing a $4 price sticker. Later at home while diving into Mr. Thomas’ work, I discovered the notes were incredibly insightful and detailed and further investigation led me to realize that it had once been used by a UofM professor for use in lecture. Without such accessible lecture notes, I may not have ever cracked the Thomas code and may never have become such an avid reader of poetry. However, margin notes can occasionally be distracting – I have a copy of Mice and Men where every single metaphor or simile is denoted in thick black ink, but I cannot complain too much as I also mark up all my books. In his poem ’Marginalia’, Billy Collinsdescribes this act of note taking as showing that ‘we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge’; I find taking notes a unique method of further interacting with the author and leaving a tattoo of consciousness to commemorate my times spent between the covers of each book. It is an old habit born from many hours spent in classrooms discussing literature that I have nurtured to keep from getting lazy with my readings (plus certain authors come in handy to flip through while writing college essays to browse the many defined terms that may come in handy). When I received Wittgenstein’s Mistress in the mail, I opened to the first page to discover an onslaught of margin notes and underlines. Many of them didn’t seem particularly helpful, and appeared as the previous reader attempting to get their bearings with Markson’s innovative style. Encouraged by their notes, I dove in as well, comforted by the echoes and footprints of a former traveler. Even Kate (it would seem that critics and scholars alike have accepted this as the signifier of our narrator despite it only appearing once in a novel where facts have a revolving list of names attached to them. Kate refers to herself by a different name later on as well.) left messages in hopes of reaching a fellow soul such as ‘someone is living in the Louvre’ Even underlining seems to be encouraged by Markson, as Kate will cite favorite quotes of hers that she underlined in non-required books during her college days. My safety net was not to last though. 11 pages in, the notes stopped and I was flung into the maelstrom of bouncing ideas and fragmented consciousness, left to find my bearings in the dark without a fellow hand to hold as I descended deeper and deeper. Having made it through to the other side, there could be no more fitting way to approach this novel. Now that the overlong introduction is through, it is time to encourage you to read this wonderful novel. Despite being rejected fifty-four times (Moore), this novel was picked up by Dalkey Archive Press (who have done great things to keep the dream of literature alive) and has lived to literary glory. David Foster Wallace called it ‘a work of genius’ and wrote an extensive essay, The Empty Plenum, dissecting and praising Markson’s masterpiece. It is not an easy novel, which can most likely be ascertained considering such praise by DFW, but it is a novel that unfolds into powerful messages of loneliness, language, art, and the human condition. As the title would suggest, Markson alludes heavily to Ludwig Wittgenstein and particularly to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a major work of modern philosophy, and of which the single sentence paragraphs found in WM seems to mimic. The first line of Tractatus, ‘the world is everything that is the case,’ is referenced often by Kate, and the nature of this novel further investigates what Wittgenstein meant by such a statement. In Tractatus, Wittgenstein furthers with: ‘1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things. 1.2 The world is divided into facts Kate illuminates her life to the reader through a churning smattering of facts of art, music, literature, and events of her life. It is through the jigsaw pieces of various facts falling into place that we are able to view the world through her eyes. She, however, views ‘Things’, as not important beyond the facts they deliver. Books she loves and cites often are burned up page by page – or ripped apart to watch them soar on the wind ‘like seagulls’; favorite painting are burned or painted over; clothing, watches, electronic devices and any other ‘baggage’ she carries is all left behind. Wittgenstein writes that: 2. What is the case--a fact--is the existence of states of affairs. 2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world,’ and ‘2.0271 Objects are what is unalterable and substantial; their configuration is what is changing and unstable.’, thus showing Kate’s burning of books and houses a method of transforming them from being simple things, into objects, an idea, which make up the substance of the world, This ‘substance of the word’ is a fact, which is the world. Through destruction, Kate is creating a world of facts. It is fitting then, that Kate is an artist, a person who creates, and Markson does an excellent job of showing creation and destruction as two parts of a whole. Much of Kate’s writings double back in an attempt to portray the most precise and accurate use of language possible in expressing herself. This often becomes comical, redundant, and often obscures her original intentions by sidetracking into a different branch of thought. She pays such close attention to phrases: The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frighten me. For instance I thought about them like that, also. In a manner of speaking, I thought about them like that. The more she attempts to affect concise language, urging the reader to believe her more and more by employing phrases such as ‘on my honor,’the more she exposes the latent fallacies and impreciseness of language. Occasionally, when she double backs to exemplify the multiple interpretations that exist for these arrangements of words. Word, Wittgenstein argues in works such as The Blue and Brown Books, are merely ‘dead and trivial’ signs and symbols that only ‘get their significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs’. Essentially, words are meaningless signs and we only apply meaning to them through our arrangement of signs to create a set reaccepted connotations, denotations, and, well, meaning. By calling to mind the possible variations of interpretation for each phrase, she is ‘checking’ our preconceived notions and making us more aware of the analogous nature of words. Many times, the sentence in question was accepted by the reader and wouldn’t have seemed cumbersome without her direction, or, as Kate says ‘even if for some curious reason one’s meaning would generally appear to be understood, in such cases.’ While she often questions if she is ‘mad’, observing her acute sense of language makes the reader wonder if this awareness comes from madness (as it would initially seem), or a higher sense of consciousness and understanding. It should be mentioned as well that such attention to the multiple interpretation of words can be applied to the enigmatic conclusions of the novel itself. Markson leaves room for many interpretations while simultaneously, as DFW posits, cries out to be interpreted while also directing the reader towards the tools for interpretation. Validity is crucial to Kate. She stresses the importance of believing her fractured mind, yet bombards the reader with facts that are constantly morphing. A reader should be wary of prematurely spouting out exciting factoids, as pages later they may find the factoid was attributed to the wrong artist. Late in the book, Kate questions why writers such as Homer would blatantly lie or stretch the truth on matters such as the number of ships involved in the battle of Troy. ’Quite possibly Homer knew perfectly well himself about the real number of ships, but decided that in a poem one thousand, one hundred and eighty-six would be a more interesting number as well. It is curious how ‘lies’ and impreciseness can be more effective that the truth, and that falsities of language may not be intended to deceive but actually have an honorable impetus of furthering a deeper literary meaning. ‘Certain writers are sometimes smarter than one thinks’. Therefor, Kate’s revolving names and facts may be more than the slip-ups of a damaged mind. Various facts get paired, or mis-paired, in a method that furthers the understanding of one fact by using the other as a ruler of sorts, some system of measurement or reference such as the back of Kate’s hands are a reference to her age. When facing the harsh reality of her past, Kate refers to herself by a different name, Helen. Kate has spent much energy examining the impossibilities of the Trojan war being just over ‘one Spartan girl’, and applying the name to herself may be her method of accepting full responsibility while also expressing that it is foolish to actually believe all the blame could rest on her shoulders. Wittgenstein’s Mistress boils down to a gorgeous climax that should not be missed. This novel, which almost never saw publication, is a true gem of literature. Through her exploration of language, validity, and madness, Kate leaves the reader questioning their own perceptions. Free yourself from the safety harness of the world and take the plunge into the eye of the hurricane that is Wittgenstein’s Mistress. 5/5 Works Cited: Wallace, David Foster - The Empty Plenum Moore, Steven – Afterword to the WM Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Major Works: Selected Philosophical Writings Thank you to Mike Puma for recommending David Markson, and for joining me in my read of this wonderful book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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not set
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Jul 09, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0316010766
| 9780316010764
| 0316010766
| 4.07
| 14,947
| Jun 08, 2004
| Aug 30, 2005
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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Jul 08, 2012
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Oct 07, 2012
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| 1564786021
| 9781564786029
| 1564786021
| 3.75
| 188
| Jan 03, 2011
| Jan 11, 2011
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really liked it
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‘Water is always water – above, below, in flood, trickle, rapid or sea, but the traces we leave in it last like our changing thoughts.’ Joseph McElroy, ‘Water is always water – above, below, in flood, trickle, rapid or sea, but the traces we leave in it last like our changing thoughts.’ Joseph McElroy, best known for his sprawling novels such as Women and Men or Lookout Cartridge, evinces an equally impressive prowess with his short game in Night Soul and Other Stories. The twelve stories, collected from the past three decades¹, demonstrate his versatility as an author and philosophical investigator as he deals with topics ranging from politics, musical theory, family dynamics and the tense racial atmosphere of a post-9/11 America. While these stories appear on the surface to be unrelated, individual stories, McElroy affects an undercurrent of subtle motifs and themes drawing these stories together in a nearly novelistic sense. Despite being twelve separate stories, they beat together with one heart. A highly decorated author, being the recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1976; the American Academy of Arts and Letters fellowship in ’77; and twice honored with the National Endowment of the Arts fellowship², it is a shame that McElroy has a relatively low readership. The difficulties found in McElroy’s style and prose is rather bewildering initially, which may turn many readers away. As Burns argues in his article on McElroy in the New York Times Book Review, ‘McElroy’s cosmopolitan, erudite fiction needs to be received on a wider bandwidth that also registers signals from other disciplines and earlier literature… [Reading Night Soul] is, in fact, a little like being a member of Marlow’s audience in “Heart of Darkness.” We listen in a foggy void, and try to puzzle out the significance of a narrator’s inconclusive experiences.’ To read McElroy’s collection is like facing down a much better equipped and formidable opponent, yet, if the reader digs in and stands their ground, they will find an author that doesn’t wish to spar for domination, but to build a sense of mutual respect*. McElroy wants his reader to succeed through his trial by fire – like the tyrannical fathers whose obdurate demands spawned the drive to immortality of the world-renowned classical composers, McElroy wants his reader to transcend his safe-zones and really strive for personal glory. He offers to assistance along the way, but privately holds out for hope that a reader can reach his summit. The final line of Unknown Kid best demonstrates McElroy's message to the reader: 'figure it out yourself'. Each story centers about a collision of sorts. There is the collision of culture in No Man’s Land; collisions of political ideals and perspectives in The Campaign Trail or The Last Disarmament But One; and frequently the collision of city and country life shown most effectively in Canoe Repair, a major highlight of the collection, and Character. Dizzy and reeling from each collision they have been dropped into, McElroy’s style effectively has the reader receiving the information around them in a jumbled, incomplete, and often a nearly incoherent manner as they attempt to steady themselves and find their bearings again within each story. The reader is further disoriented through the constantly fluctuating usages of syntax and punctuation. The dialogue in particular varies practically from paragraph to paragraph, being received in one instance in through traditional line breaks and signified by quotation marks, and a few paragraphs later with dialogue embedded within the larger paragraph, often unidentified through punctuation, and even occasionally flowing together without any sort of break similar to José Saramago’s signature style. To call these variances mere inconsistency or laziness would be a gross mistake however, as McElroy’s style is entirely abstemious and alternates to accommodate what is best for that particular instance of the story. Each word or phrase is an individual brick crafted for it’s particular place, however, instead of being a rejection of the overall façade, McElroy manages to interlay each brick to create a potent mosaic when taken in as a whole work of art. Even the narrative perspectives are subject to change, as in Canoe Repair, with the story alternating between Zanes’ first person perspective, or a third person perspective. Interestingly enough, the reader learns more about Zanes from the third person point of view than they do when he is able to openly assess himself to the reader. ‘We are all nomads’ the young boy in No Man’s Land asserts, and like nomads, the ideas of this book are always traveling, taking on new surroundings and meaning, but essentially remain the same as well. Between each individual story is an intricate network of overarching themes and motifs, most notable the water and architectural themes. These motifs, which easily identified, are difficult to pin down there exact meanings within the text, as they take on a nomadic, always altering explanation. Similar to the double-S motif of Gravity's Rainbow, the themes and motifs are wrapped in multiple layers of applicable metaphors and symbolic connotations, taking on different meanings to suit the vast array of literary needs present in this collection. Near the conclusion of Unknown Kid, carefully placed near the end of the book, McElroy alludes heavily to the theories of topology³. Seemingly as a reward to a reader who has made it that far, McElroy constructs his most apparent clue to the overall totality of his work. In a proper postmodernist gesture, he invites the reader to examine the stories as interconnected whole with each theme or motif being the tonal center, to borrow from Particle of Difference, for which he builds his overall melody upon, or perhaps the stand of web for which he grows each story around in a similar fashion to the bone growth specialists in Silk. Had the words ‘and Other Stories’ been removed from the spine of this book, it could have easily worked as a novel of elaborate connected ideas. The overall effect is simply staggering. This little known collection, released relatively under the radar by the Dalkey Archive in 2011, may just be one of the foremost publications of that year. McElroy manages to both deliver exquisite short fiction while still maintaining a novelistic approach complete with intricate thematic networks and cohesion. With a whirlwind of styles, a wide range of stories, and an interesting cast of narratives that often spiral into a flurry of fragmented ideas, this collection is a wonderful postmodernist feast that satisfies on the same level as the best of Pynchon, DFW, and DeLillo. Although he is a difficult author, he is a worth opponent to spar with intellectually. I highly suggest getting in the ring with McElroy. 4.5/5 ‘…troubled or still, water is always water…the sameness of the Ocean suffers no change.’ ¹ Topological Fiction by Stephen Burns of the New York Times Book Review ²Joseph McElroy ³Topology from Wolfram Alpha * for a further discussion on facing the formidable opponent that is McElroy, and in keeping with the ideas in Annals of Plagiary which say artists always return what they borrow, I would like to direct to to Mr. Nathan "N.R." Gaddis' exquisite review of Actress in the House ...more |
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Sep 27, 2012
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Oct 24, 2012
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Mar 03, 2012
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| 0141180935
| 9780141180939
| 0141180935
| 4.19
| 6,010
| Sep 14, 1981
| Jan 01, 2007
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it was amazing
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I spent this past summer with Barthelme’s Sixty Stories never far from my side as my most recent ‘dashboard book’. The stories contained in this hilar
I spent this past summer with Barthelme’s Sixty Stories never far from my side as my most recent ‘dashboard book’. The stories contained in this hilarious and bizarre collection are rarely more than 5-10pgs in length, making them a perfect companion to turn to whenever you find a few spare moments where you want to simple get-in-and-get-out while still walking away with a headful of ideas to chew on. The stories are as varied as the horizon viewed through a travelling car, often as pretty as the sunset or as gloomy as pouring rain. With strong influences of Samuel Beckett (of whom Barthelme was quick to admit in interviews, saying ‘I'm enormously impressed by Beckett. I'm just overwhelmed by Beckett, as Beckett was, I speculate, by Joyce.’ in an interview with Jerome Klinkowitz), Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Pynchon and Franz Kafka, Barthelme creates powerful scenes of absurdist black-comedy that both challenge the intellect and tug the heartstrings as his characters play out their sad fates upon the page. Each story is a breath of fresh air, even from one another. The styles, themes and lexicon of each story vary, often dramatically, illustrating Barthelme’s wide linguistic and narrative aptitudes. It would be hard for a reader to not find at least a few stories that seem geared to them, making this collection rather accessible to a large audience. While I greatly enjoyed most of these stories, finding a few filler tales along the way, I feel that some of the ones I disliked aren’t necessarily ‘bad’, but just not for me, whereas another reader might particularly enjoy the ones I did not. Much of the enjoyment comes from being able to deduce what Barthelme is trying to get across; these stories read like an elaborate joke and sometimes a reader won’t ‘get it’ on the first attempt (there were a few that I finished, thought ‘what the hell?’ and had to carefully go back through). Some of the language and stylistic choices are bewildering, but often they were just the sort of unique postmodernist obfuscation or structure that I really love. The stories are often strange, surrealistic, and absurd, yet done with just the right amount of flair and subtlety. Barthelme’s surrealist narratives seem to be a precursor to more modern types of bizarre fiction, however, Barthelme is never ‘weird for the sake of weirdness’ and the absurdist qualities of Barthelme feel more dreamlike, where each aberration of normalcy seems to fit right it and it isn’t until the dreamer awakes that they notice anything was amiss. Everything is grounded in the theme and overall message of the story, and you will find King Kong as a history professor socializing at a party, an adult stuck in middle school to do a clerical error, a reptilian lesbian confronting the infidelities of her human lover, a city wide balloon and an extraterrestrial president with possible mind-control all read with surprising normalcy. The comparisons to other great authors, especially the postmodernists like Pynchon, is difficult to avoid in a collection with such a wide range of styles as this one. There are straightforward, 3rd person tales, claustrophobic first person rants, 3rd person rants (occasionally in one, long multi-paged sentence) stories done entirely through dialogue which calls to mind William Gaddis, and a few stories that are more an exploration of an idea, such as the essay-like qualities of On Angels that recalls Borges. I’ve wondered how much of Barthelme that David Foster Wallace read, as the story Robert Kennedy, Saved From Drowning read as if it was an early version of DFW’s own Lyndon. Barthelme’s Mr. Sandman, in which a man writes a letter to his girlfriend’s therapist in a highly self-conscious manner arguing that it is her faults and flaws that he is in love with and of which he does not want tampered with (it is a rather touching story), is another story where DFW was immediately brought to mind. For anyone with a burning love for Wallace as I have, this collection has many examples that will satisfy that particular thirst. There are a surprisingly large amount of touching stories, and an equal amount of comically cynical stories of adultery, failures and frustration with the social structure. It is his cynical side that really gets me, such as the story mocking the Phantom of the Opera, having him an old, pathetic man who’s theatrics of appearing and disappearing in an flash annoy his only friend, his constant longings for lost love reduced to mere whines, and the wonderful concluding sentence of ‘until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense’. Compare that to the way he is able to move from an intellectual inquiry of signs and symbols in The Balloon to an extremely moving and romantic final paragraph. Simply put, this guy works pure magic. For anyone who loves the postmodernists and would like to be moved or posed with an intellectual puzzle in small, bite-sized doses, then this collection is just begging to be added to your bookshelf. The philosophic, emotional and societal investigations are sharp and witty, the humor dark, and the settings surreal. This collection will reinstate your beliefs in the powers of language and literature and you will be pleasantly surprised with what he can do in a short amount of space. 4.5/5 (rounded up) If you would like to wet your whistle with Barthelme’s wit, here are a few stories to try: The School (often considered one of his best) Game (for LOST fans, try not to think of the Hatch) The Balloon Also, here is an insightful article on 60 Stories from The New York Times: Working Like A Stand-Up Comic ...more |
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Oct 14, 2012
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Dec 12, 2011
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| 9780140077025
| 0140077022
| 3.86
| 118,009
| Jan 21, 1985
| Jan 07, 1986
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it was amazing
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‘All plots tend to move deathward,’ lectures Jack Gladney, the Hitler studies teacher central to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, ‘this is the nature of plo
‘All plots tend to move deathward,’ lectures Jack Gladney, the Hitler studies teacher central to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, ‘this is the nature of plots.’ This comic masterpiece of postmodern anxieties does indeed move towards death—the meta-statement as much a Chekov’s gun as the actual gun Gladney is given—yet the whole wild ride is permeated and beleaguered by thought of the inevitability of death. Just like all of us. Though originally titled Panasonic, the title White Noise is a nod to the constant white noise of society that chirps, hums and whirs to the cacophonous tune of industry, entertainment and consumerism that numb our minds to our mortality salience, DeLillo interrogate our aversion to death in a culture where consumerism has practically become the new religion and steers it into the chaos of disaster emergency. White Noise hits harder than it did when I first read it over a decade ago and the novel feels just as urgent and relevant as ever, especially with a global pandemic now resonating through society. DeLillo’s love for language and philosophical investigations come alive in this humorous and insightful National Book Award winning novel, making for a scathing criticism that finds the pulse on US consumerist society and our trepidations of our own death and decay. ‘Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.’ Published in 1985, White Noise came out just a year before the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and amidst an increasingly technology anxious world. ‘The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear,’ DeLillo writes, and as technology plays an increasing role in every aspect of society from medicine to communication there are always the fears that what we create may be our undoing. White Noise is a book jittering with anxieties, from the pre-eminent Hitler expert’s imposter syndrome over not being able to speak German to the experimental drug, Dylar, which claims to remove your fears and obsessive thoughts about death, and DeLillo brilliantly depicts a death avoidance society that has plunged itself into consumerism and symbolic living to stave off the creeping reality of death and finality as an form of terror management theory. But with each step we take to push away death, it still comes. ‘Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.’ What a great line, honestly. ‘No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.’ Much of the novel, told through Jack often in dramatic fashion that dips into something akin to what his classroom lectures would sound like, investigates the different ‘white noises’ of the book and how death is always a major fulcrum for our psychological responses in the world. There is the idea that death makes life precious, questioning if ‘anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit,’ but also the rebuttal that ‘what good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety?’ He and his fifth wife, Babette, often discuss who they hope dies first, weighing out if their fear or loneliness overrides their fear of death, and acknowledging the inevitability that their many children will grow up and out of the house. Family, in a way, is a sort of white noise too. Or any sort of group to belong in. ‘To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from a crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.’ Jack is all too aware of this as the leading Hitler scholar, arguing ‘Hitler was larger that death,’ which points to how authoritarianism rises out of fears and anxieties. Fear of the unknown, the Other, collapse, etc., all drives people towards a group mentality. When a sudden accident occurs in their town—The Airborne Toxic Event—leaving a great dark cloud over town like an unavoidable symbol of death, thoughts of mortality reach a fever pitch. ‘I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.’ According to Trauma Management Theory, mortality salience (the awareness of one’s death) wedded to death anxiety in incidents like this (or, say, global COVID) causes people to solidify their worldview and react in ways they feel will defend their social groups. To become a crowd, as Jack says, to boost self-esteem which TMT states reduces mortality salience. It is an existential terror of death, coupled with feeling a lack of control against the inevitable, that causes people to then react in ways to try and assert control over some aspect of their life. The higher the fear of death/lack of control, the more people try to push it out or scapegoat it, blaming others, or reacting violently. This is especially true of people who have an overinflated desire to be controlling (think of the men two weeks into the COVID pandemic so overcome with fears of their own mortality they broke into my State’s capitol building armed for murder). This idea also exists in John Steinbeck’s theory of the phalanx about crowd mentality. The idea is that being reactionary is an attempt to assert control on a situation that feels beyond you, and in White Noise attempts to control or assuage death are everywhere from the rampant consumerism to the Dylar drug. Think of the crowds, the groups, the solidifying of ideologies we’ve seen in the past few years in reaction to, or grifting off of, a global pandemic. Even I found myself reacting, such as really launching back into running at this time. As someone that loves reading for subtext, in my mind in longer runs I would chide myself “what are you running from, eh? Is it ?” We all find our soothing methods and self-medicating behaviors. ‘It is surely possible to be awed by a thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and wilful rhythms.’ But there is also a general sense of trying to assert control in the general uncertainty of the world. With the Airborne Toxic Event there is the uncertainty of what to do and what is even happening. ‘In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are,’ DeLillo writes, ‘no one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.’ Had this been written today that would feel very on the nose amidst the past years where grifting off misinformation and gaslighting increased the uncertainties of truth. White Noise also touches on distrust of authority, who are often as uncertain as everyone else but tasked with upholding a false certainty. There is a brilliant dark humor in aspects such as SIMUVAC running simulation evacuations though it is a real evacuation. ‘It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.’ This makes me think of our current age of social media where, sure, it is great everyone gets a voice but the element of social media algorithms boosting voices based more on popularity (and paid content) can make it difficult to parse out which voices have actual authority on subjects or are even worth listening to. You have to sift through the static sometimes wondering “is this actually a bad take?” Or “is this even accurate?” and then there is the capitalist aspects of society where opinions are valued most due to profitability (even social profitability such as reinforcing one’s own world view) only increasing the maelstrom of bad faith framing. We live in a white noise of opinions crackling in social media static where the loudest opinions are those attempting to discredit others and often motivated by self-preservation over “truth”. I love the uncertainty of the effects from the disaster that DeLillo instills, such as Jack receiving a timeline towards death that seems indistinguishable from a timeline of death by aging. It just becomes a lingering idea just like the already regular thoughts of inevitable death. Another aspect I truly appreciate is how DeLillo keys into how uncertainty leads to art: ‘The toxic event had released a spirit of imagination. People spun tales, others listened spellbound. There was a growing respect for the vivid rumor, the most chilling tale… We began to marvel at our own ability to manufacture awe.’ We pass on stories, write songs or poems that capture the current mood and moment, and these are the artifacts of a disaster that become the footholds to scale an understanding of a culture in a place and time in hindsight. But above all, it is all ways we compensate for control in the face of uncertainty. This accounts for the philosophical tone the novel takes, one part earnest philosophical investigation and another part lampooning academic seriousness. Jack and his colleague friend Murray engage in circuitous discourses on a wide variety of topics throughout the book with a certainty only a learned academic can muster, though the certainty of their conclusions is vague. Though they are able to leap into the ways ‘everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material.’ This opens the narrative up for incredible observations, however, with gorgeous passages on everything from the cultural signifiers in supermarkets to a co-lecture on Elvis and Hitler’s relationships with their mothers. Take Murray’s explanation of supermarkets for example: ‘Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.’ The simulation of religious experience colors the novel in many ways, such as Jack’s daughter saying brand names—Toyota Celica—in her sleep ‘like the name of an ancient power in the sky.’ Consumerism has replaced God in America and even the nuns don’t believe but put up a front because ‘the nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe,’ and even mocks Jack for thinking anyone would sanely believe in a god. It is the burden of worry people impose on status figures like nuns, doctors and even politicians, handing them the reigns of reality to grapple with death as a way of avoiding it. Consuming, however, becomes the biggest short-cut to a sense of self-esteem that would stave off mortality salience, such as the following on the effects of purchasing: ‘ I began to grow in value and self regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me.’ It becomes a stand-in for real life, like tv plots and literature become a stand-in for life to put the death on the screen or the page, in the aisle and behind the counters. This is, perhaps, where I find DeLillo to be at his finest: discussing issues of phenomenology and language. We see much of the world as a symbolic replica of what Martin Heidegger termed dasein, or the thing-in-and-of-itself. Early in the novel, Jack and Murray visit ‘the most photographed bridge’ where they observe nobody sees the actual bridge, only the spectacle of it and ‘[t]hey are taking pictures of taking pictures.’ They exist in Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle. Which is why symbolism is so central to the novel as a sense of control. Jack mentions of Babette all the ways that are ‘the point of Babette,’ constructing a literary reality over the true, chaotic reality that is life (and also attempting to assert a sense of control). Which is much of what literature is, carefully constructing a world of ideas we can control and cast death as a character as opposed to a real force that strikes without warning. The ultimate form of control against death, it seems, is violence. ‘The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life.’ Jack receives a gun from his father-in-law (there are some great anxieties of masculinity here, with Jack feeling lesser due to his inability for household repairs that Vernon finds second nature) and, as all plots move deathward, it is no surprise this culminates into a violent confrontation with the man sleeping with his wife in a way that seem adjacent to a similar climax in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Here we witness a major side-effect of Dylar is to interpret words literally, being unable to tell signifier from the signified, and shouting ‘ plunging aircraft’ causes his target to react as if there is in fact a plane crash occurring. This is a clever nod to the idea that society moving into the spectacle to cover reality erodes our ability to differentiate between symbol and actuality. ‘May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.’ Ultimately, we are left to question if all narrative in life merely moves towards death or if narrative is a way to ‘seek shape and control’ our lives during our limited time. Should we drift and let things come as they may, knowing the cliff of death will be here eventually? Or should we plot and plunge towards death. White Noise is a fabulous book and a deserving winner of the National Book Award (DeLillo, known for a distaste for public fame accepted the award in person saying ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming.’). Comedic and insightful, with a penchant for the pretentious as part of the gag, White Noise has a lasting power that seems all the more relevant in a modern age of social media (symbolic of ‘authentic’ communication?), late-stage capitalism, misinformation and a literal global pandemic. It is an excellent look at the wear mortality salience drives people into empty symbols or consumerism or religion and into crowd mentality like authoritarianism to abate the loss of control against the reality of finality. DeLillo knocks it out of the park in White Noise with a smart and flowing prose that soars through the stratosphere in order to carry the heady philosophical investigations and this is certainly a book worth revisiting again and again. 5/5 ‘How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 24, 2011
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| 0143039946
| 9780143039945
| 0143039946
| 4.00
| 44,912
| Feb 28, 1973
| Oct 31, 2006
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it was amazing
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‘What is the real nature of control?’ From the first sentence of Pynchon’s National Book Award winning novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, the Reader is transpl ‘What is the real nature of control?’ From the first sentence of Pynchon’s National Book Award winning novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, the Reader is transplanted into a threatening world where death strikes first, the cause second. It is a world of frightening realism and comic absurdity, all fueled through drug induced hallucinations, paranoid ramblings, and psychological investigations that is not all that unlike our own reality once you remove yourself to view it from afar as if it were some painting in a gallery. This is the Zone, and Pynchon is your field guide through the wasteland of paranoids, preterits and pornographers. The novel is stylistically staggering and so carefully researched that the line between fact and fiction blurs and is not always easy to deduce. It is carefully plotted out with extreme precision, aligning the events with actual weather detail from the days played out and in keeping with a metaphoric representation of the zodiac signs through the passing months. While this novel can be demanding, it is also extremely rewarding for those who make it through this wild rocket ride of literature. A first time Reader should be cautioned that Part 1 of this mammoth text is exceedingly difficult. Pynchon seemingly takes great joy in pummeling the Reader with a labyrinthine structure of characters and plot lines, each accruing through dramatic left turns in the narrative. The effect is pure disorientation, obfuscation and outright frustration. It feels just like spinning plates. It is, in a sense, Pynchon’s boot camp for the real war awaiting across minefields of prose; it is where he must break you down and reconstruct you as he sees fit. While the Reader must keep their head down and gut through, soaking up as much of the swirling stories as they can, Pynchon lays out the groundwork for the larger themes to come. Many of the ideas expressed early on won’t seem particularly meaningful, but by the end of the novel the Reader will realize it was all right there in their faces from the start. As characters will come and go like ghosts, with only minimal dimension and reference to them, the Reader will begin to realize that the coming tribulations are not there for the growth of the characters, but for the Reader themselves. The Reader must come out the other side changed in order for the novel to be a success. They must let go of their notions of story and plot, for Pynchon views even the smallest plot structure as comfort, they must let go, give in, and submit to Pynchon. He demands it, and he will fire off heady diatribes against your intellect with philosophy, theology, conspiracies and actual rocket science. The novel takes off running once the gun sounds the start of Part 2 when, dropped from foggy London town, the Reader finds themselves in the Zone. Early on is a discussion of Pointsman and Mexico, Pointsman being crafted as the ultimate embodiment of Pavlov’s cause-and-effect conditioning and Mexico being considered as ‘the Antipointsman’. ’The young statistician is devoted to number and method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something. Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between…. to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one – the middle Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion – the probabilities.’ Much of this novel deals with these two major perspectives. Pynchon often establishes structure, the Pointsman method, merely to deconstruct it and show the faults that lie within. By showing two specific points, in this instance excluding those inbetween points, Pynchon is able to demonstrate moments of symmetry, which he will then reverse. Normally a rocket would be heard before it explodes in a ball of death, but with the V2, now we have the death before sound (reversals also play a large key to the novel, from the countdown before a launch, to hypnotic imagery of English explorers sailing backwards to home). These two specific points are also expressed as binary differences, such as black and white, life and death, good and evil, preterition and the chosen few. These binaries are clear-cut sides, direct opposites of forces in keeping with the theory of entropy which rules the novel, sides that we clamor to reach in order to have a firm ground to stand on and a cut-and-dry vision of who is friend and who is foe. But Mexico, and Pynchon, rejects these binaries. Mexico acknowledges the space between zero and one, which is a wild, lawless no-man’s land (recall the McCarthy-esk western vision of Slothrops where there is one of everything – a endlessly compounding ‘one’ that creates an asymptote never actually reaching 1) where everything and anything is possible. It is a place more dream than reality, and the hallucinogenic nature of Pynchon’s spiraling prose and plots do well to express the ambiguities inherent in such a Zone. However, the novel never fully subscribes to one theory and can be interpreted as a cautionary tale for those who wander into this territory. Plot, laws and binaries are structures that keep our minds at ease and provide comfort and safety, so when we enter into the infinite freedom of the decimal we open ourselves to forces that may scatter us, kill us, and rub us out into oblivion. Pynchon himself will try to scatter and thwart the Reader in consequence of stepping into his Zone. He acknowledges you are in his territory, and will speak as he chooses, often with what seems an intention of belittling your own intelligence. He only occasionally makes concessions to the reader when he realizes at least a slight bridge must be made in setting a scene such as saying ‘you will want cause and effect. All right’, which, considering the rejection of such an idea in this novel, also serves to mock the reader for scrambling to grasp the reassuring ledge of the pool in the deep end he has thrown us. To swallow this novel on a first read, a reader must attack it somewhat like middle school mathematical story problems – find the important information in the bloated paragraph, divide and conquer. There is a plethora of information to choose from as he will offer a vast variety of the same symbols and metaphors (the symbolic us of the letter S, for example, shows up as the SS, the shape of the bomb factory tunnels, people spooning, the symbol for entropy, etc. There is a death/life metaphor on practically every page) Yet, Pynchon seems hell-bent on keeping you on your toes and disoriented. He will allow the Reader to slide into a groove of strong forward velocity, and then deliver a scene so grotesquely funny or vilely disgusting to shock the readers mind and scatter their thoughts and perceptions from decoding this vast network of ideas and then tries to evade us in a web of looping plots, obtuse anecdotes and countless characters (some of which come and go with hundreds of pages between mention). The maze of a plot that must be navigated is acknowledged as being similar to the course of events Slothrop encounters on the way, which he compares to the Boston public transit (MBTA): ‘by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he’s headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom.’ There must be a sense of trust that eventually, if you keep gutting through, there will be a conclusion to satisfy a journey of such magnitude. Honesty, this is successful and not only did I feel a massive sense of accomplishment for finishing this beast, but also felt satisfied intellectually and narrative-wise. There is a constant paranoia overwhelming each printed word, a paranoia that the Reader must assimilate by proxy in order to fully appreciate the madness at hand. Yet paranoia itself must be a sort of comfort as well. While there is a fear of the Invisible Hand at play, pushing us through psychological nods in the right way, it is still a comfort that we are part of Their greater plan. For the preterits, this They is the only sense of God they will ever feel, as they are looked over by God himself. This whole novel is the interaction of such Preterits, from the self-proclaimed fetishists to the colony of escaped concentration camp members, and the Reader must become a member of these second sheep as they must lose their selves along with Slothrop. The Reader is dragged through the mud and muck of a smattering of various theories, and to keep their sanity, they attempt to assign meaning to these elusive threads flashing about them in order to keep going. But perhaps this is just what Pynchon wants us to do, assigning Him the role of the They, and the Reader will begin to feel paranoid that this is all in jest, that Pynchon is simply pulling the world over their eyes and will begin to question even their own powers of deduction. We have learned that all that is comforting must be released (not yet knowing at these points in the novel that there is only a void awaiting with total freedom), and even the paranoid ponderings are only a comfort for us in Pynchon’s world. If there is something comforting – religious, if you want, about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now, Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky’ First, note the reversals in this, then swoon at the powerful prose in the second half. Now, assign meaning to this quote – but Slap, no! – Pynchon says there is no meaning. But then feel yourself become transparent and weightless, fading into oblivion with no reference to the world around you. This is the ultimate dilemma we are faced with in the Zone. It is no surprise the Reader is made to feel so paranoid in a novel rife with corporate conspiracy, much of which is highly researched and forms an impressive historical fiction aspect to this novel. If those rambling through the Zone are the preterits moved by the They, than these corporations are one of the highest tangible link to the They we can see. They decide who lives and dies, who is rich and from who wealth is gatekept, what we want to consume and how we consume it (‘consumers need to feel a sense of sin’) and They exist in a realm where the War is simply a shuffling of power. ‘This war was never political at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology….by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques’ Throughout the course of Gravity’s Rainbow, we have endless looks into mans thirst for technology, which in itself is a thirst for death based on the nature of the technology, even when it is also a life-giving force such as is the case of Pokler who had no life until the Rocket, and how this goes beyond the War itself. Even the White Visitation simply uses the War as a reason for more funding. Mans role in technology is at the heart of every idea in this book. Entropy is a measuring stick which this novel employs (in a book that sets out to dissolve all rules, having a rule that is upheld highlights its importance), and all events and ideas serve to counterbalance each other in keeping with the conservation of energy with the preterits being the heat burned off. As a quick aside, if I may, many of these preterits, Mexico and Jessica’s romance or the concentration camp members (‘their liberation was a banishment’) for example, are directly tied to the war and become a casualty of peace – the budding romance (there are some tearjerker lines, Pynchon really shows his soft side with them) being the ‘waste heat’ in a chemical reaction. The Rockets, being the focal point of the book, are both life and death images as well as phallic metaphors while many of the literal phalluses in the book being used as metaphors for rockets. Film plays another large role, with much of the book containing constant allusion to pop culture, and Der Springer believes he can reshape reality through film. This struggle of life and death is something that must be embraced as two parts of a whole in this novel, much like man and machine become one with Gottfried and the 00000 Rocket. Life and death are found strung together all throughout the novel, yet, as critic Harold Bloom points out in his essays on Rainbow, in Pynchon's book so focused on the idea of Death, the Reader never actually experiences or witnesses one - not one in all of the 800 pages. Many deaths are spoken of, some ambiguous like Tantivity’s, and others referred to plainly such as Pudding’s (note that ‘shit’ is spoken of as a metaphor for death, ‘shit is the presence of death’, and he is made to ingest it during – for him, not us – a sexual peak as another way life and death bind together in the novel), but the camera of the prose, if you will, always cuts right before the Reader must be an active participant in the death. Like Gottfried again, we know he dies, but because the com-link is only one way, we never can know the precise moment. Even Peter’s clubbing to the head cuts before the club can land. In this way, the novel is shown actually as a celebration of life, all the moments moving from 1:life to 0:death but never getting to the zero. We are forever in the Zone, for better or for worse. But with the final words of the novel, nay, the final two words, he pulls us from oblivion back to the whole. We escape death by existing in the moments between 1 and 0, and, ironically, in a book bent on annihilating structure and group alignment, he calls us all back into one large group: humanity. Gravity’s Rainbow is a massive novel that takes quite a bit of decoding and deboning in order to devour. But this is precisely what Pynchon wants and requires of us. This is a book that more or less requires a second reading just to grasp all that it has to say, the first is just a test of survival. The agglomeration of ideas are too much to chew and savor on one trip, and there is so much ambiguity present that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, he intends to scholars to dissect and analyze this novel for years and years to come. In the novel, the Zone members gather to become Kabbalists of the Rocket, ‘to be scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop’. This book is Pynchon’s Rocket, ‘our Torah…our darkness’, which he cast forth into the 1970’s literary scene as a harbinger of destruction to all preconceived notions of literature. Pynchon in this way is not all that unlike the Rocket launchers, hidden far away out of sight in his reclusiveness, avoiding photographic surveillance, sending his Rocket into a brave new world. We, the Readers, are Gottfried strapped inside with ‘fire beneath our feet’ as Pynchon, as Blicero, hurls us forth into the irreversible future. Now everybody- 00001/00001 'Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone' roll credits I would also HIGHLY recommend the A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel to any readers of this novel. It was a huge help, especially with the pop culture allusions. Just be wary that it does occasionally give away plot elements and devices, sometimes long before they appear in the novel, and will practically double your time reading the actual book because there is so much information. Also, I have to thank Stephen M's wonderful group read for inspiring me to read the book, while doubling as a support group to get us all through this tome! The discussions and links there are extremely helpful and insightful. Last, but certainly not least, I'd like to direct you to the amazing reviews of my reading buddies on this strange ride, Steve, Ian, Jenn, Mark,Shan, Sean, Paquita, and many more to come! ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 09, 2012
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Jun 22, 2012
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Sep 24, 2011
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Paperback
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