It was 36 years ago this weekend that one of the great American post-modern novels was published, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. So what would make this anniversary any different from the previous 35?
Well, it occurred to me upon finishing it that the book is now exactly half as old as its famously shy author. The same sort of symmetry is bound to pop up when one discovers it came out fifty years after another great 20th century novel to which it is often compared, James Joyce's Ulysses. It also occurred to me upon some Wikipedia-trekking that he was born the same week as another boomer icon who meshed lively wordplay with serious undertones, George Carlin.
A half-life for any cultural font is a satisfying measure, it seems to me, for endurance, and though some aspects of Gravity's Rainbow show signs of dating it—the constant presence of drugs, the narrative anchoring in an epic war that is now seeing its last survivors leave us forever—the sheer audacity of its mix of arcane erudition and profane hedonism descends directly from our Apollonian and Dionysian yin and yang that the Greeks played around with millennia ago. Having just re-read it after my initial deflowering 20 years ago, I re-discovered how much it changed me, made me let go of some cherished concepts, especially the idealization of success, which may have just saved my life, or at least saved my concept of self-worth. It also planted others, such as the skepticism of technological progress begun in the nascent Industrial Revolution and brought to crescendo in American involvement in Vietnam, which had ended just a month earlier, or, more simply, that it's okay to fight back when you've been hurt. One reads in the context of historical moment, and what readers glimpsed in its pages in 1973, or 1989, or now, can mean different things even to the same reader, as I discovered. One insight which I have always felt in my bones that concerns our place in not only the present but history, and my conviction that in the long run, we may be dead but others carry on, Pynchon sewed up neatly into "Mondraugen's Law":
"Temporal bandwidth," is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "Δt" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.
Given the titanic struggle which may now be engaged for the soul of our nation, could we not apply Mondraugen's Law to measure ideological foes who warp facts to fit their faith, reality notwithstanding?
Irrationality may be our enemy in this case, but I believe it also lies beneath every rational achievement, something we are wont to forget when unleashing our technology on the Other. Who else could project this concept into a multilingual pun?
What she means to scream is "Hübsch Räuber! Hübsch Räuber!" which means "Cute-looking robber! Cute-looking robber!" But she can't pronounce those umlauts. So it come out "Hubschrauber! Hubschrauber!" which means "Helicopter! Helicopter!" well, it's 1920-something, and nobody in earshot even knows what the word means, Liftscrewer, what's that?—nobody except one finger-biting paranoid aerodynamic student in a tenement courtyard far away... a helix through cork air over wine of Earth falling bright, yes he knows exactly—and can this be a prophecy? a warning (the sky full of them, gray police in the hatchway with ray-guns cradled like codpieces beneath each whirling screw we see you from above there is nowhere to go it's your last alley your last stormcellar) to stay inside and not interfere?
Finally, as we take stock of our economic frailties and whether we attempt to revive the only way of life we've ever known or embark upon discovering some radically new and inevitably disrupting paradigm, nothing jolts the senses quite like this clairvoyant glimpse at the heart of the novel into how it has all been working for us—well, for somebody—up to now:
Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity -- most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
As for the man himself, he is still with us, and yes, still productive. A new novel, Inherent Vice, which from publicity blurbs I gather to be a departure into noir storytelling, is scheduled for release in August, and unlike every book from GR on ( 1990's Vineland the lone exception) promises a swift read, coming in at a svelte 416 pages. I count myself fortunate I was able to see George Carlin perform just five weeks before his death. I hope this will not be the last we get from Mr. P, but time, in its great march to either paradise or oblivion, will tell.