Pynchon's Road of Excess
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing PYNCHON'S ROAD OF EXCESS BY PEARL K. BELL To say Thomas Pynchon's new monster of a novel, Gravity's Rainbow (Viking, 760 pp., cloth $15.00, paper $4.95), is an ordeal, an...
...In his new book Pynchon no longer asks: crazy is all...
...Plucked, hell-stripped...
...Nothing is omitted-or explained-along this road of excess littered with the abundant flotsam of bawdy ballads and collegiate drinking songs, the biography of a light-bulb named Byron who burned forever, Wagnerian arias on the American conquest of Europe, a film critic's 18-volume study of King Kong, and little burlesque scholarly monographs on the molecular structure of language...
...It's doubtful if he can ever be 'found' again, in the conventional sense of 'positively identified and detailed.' " This enormously complicated parody of a picaresque novel, it must be remembered, is by no means easy to follow, and is as full of snares and traps as a hunter's dream of avarice...
...At terrible risk, he will not let himself become the docile scientific instrument of technological manipulators for whom "only destinations are important, [and whose] attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals...
...The concept of damnation is far more complicated than an uneasy sense that things are falling apart...
...When the road of excess leads only to another apocalyptic fun-house, it is not worth taking...
...They are mere decoration, however...
...In bombed-out Berlin, Slothrop surveys the domestic debris: "Shattered Bieder-meier chair, mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar . . . chalcedony doorknob dyed blue long ago with ferrous ferrocyanide, scattered piano keys...
...For ail the genuinely funny jokes, the wicked parodies, the torrents of scientific expertise, and the occasionally magnificent poetic imagery, neither Pynchon's thought nor his metaphor of Armageddon rises to any level of consequence higher than his self-generated chaos of red herrings and parlor tricks...
...An idea is the product of a mind in order...
...But not even V.'s plots and counterplots, its conspiracy league calling itself the Whole Sick Crew, its neurotic automaton named SHROUD (synthetic human, radiation output determined), its cunningly mystifying symbolic graphs of man's inexorable reduction to a thing-not even this riotous proliferation of fancy and fantasy prepared one for the derailed literary imagination run amuck that is Gravity's Rainbow...
...SHROUD asks: "Has it occurred to you that there may be no more standards for crazy or sane...
...the overwhelming impression made by Gravity's Rainbow is that of a mind, albeit fecund and extraordinarily gifted, in acute disorder...
...Pynchon seems to have taken for his motto Blake's line (which appears, appropriately for this context, in the Proverbs of Hell), "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...
...But the phrase is not a serious description of our time, only "instant analysis," whose shallowness rubs off on the critics employing it...
...Disorganized mess and mama's boy though he is, Slothrop is Pynchon's travesty mock-up of the free spirit of man (in Pynchon even the mockery is mocked...
...Coueists...
...Dale Carnegie zealots...
...Imagine yourself bombarded on all sides at the speed of light, for 760 craftily opaque pages, by everything Polymath Pynchon has ever read, heard, dreamed, thought, invented, wisecracked, studied, and sung, from mathematical formulas to Deanna Durbin movies, and it is not hard to understand why anyone who persists to the end of his latest offering will feel like a punching bag whose time has come and gone...
...Writers & Writing PYNCHON'S ROAD OF EXCESS BY PEARL K. BELL To say Thomas Pynchon's new monster of a novel, Gravity's Rainbow (Viking, 760 pp., cloth $15.00, paper $4.95), is an ordeal, an endurance test, a trial by fire of demonic virtuosity, a Sisyphean marathon that erodes eyesight, patience, thought, feeling, and Sitzfleisch, is still an understatement...
...At the serious working heart of PISCES is a team of psychiatrists, statisticians, and cold-blooded social scientists trying, in their current project, to find out why Lt...
...As he runs and hides (in a series of increasingly futile disguises) across the eviscerated and death-strewn landscape of Europe...
...Wearing an elderly zoot suit that he buys from one Blodget Waxwing (Pynchon names are verbal comic strips, in a dozen languages), the captive American slips loose from the tentacles of PISCES, escaping first to the Riviera, then to Berlin, where he is chased all over the Russian, French and English zones by sinister double-agents, serving God knows whom or what, posing as dope-peddlers, obsolescent movie stars, Russian colonels, Japanese naval officers...
...Tyrone Slothrop of Massachusetts, a Harvard classmate o( John F. Kennedy's, invariably has telltale erections just before the Germans launch their rockets...
...And only Pynchon would then have to add, tossing a learned dog-biscuit our way, "all white, an octave on B to be exact-or H, in the German nomenclature?the notes of the rejected Locrian mode...
...His ardent admirers, no small number, find in his snowstorm of scientific-philosophical-pop-culture confetti a gravely disturbing metaphor...
...Pynchon's earlier black comedies of the 20th-century apocalypse portrayed contemporary man as the reified pawn in a conspiratorial, dehumanizing chess gar e controlled by the politicians of technology and progress...
...By the end he has ironically been transformed into a cipher known only as the Rocketman, the inhuman thing that PISCES had tried to make of him at the beginning...
...That he also regards himself as a vaudeville Jeremiah, a sassy prophet of the doom of modern man, was equally plain...
...In similar fashion, Thomas Pynchon's enthusiastically decadent and scatological image of modern technology as a manipulative conspiracy of profane gods for the degradation of the human spirit can best be understood not as a theological idea but as one man's paranoid though erudite hysteria...
...Damnation is his idea...
...It was only logical that such a novelist would eventually arrive at the subject of technological warfare...
...On each page he batters us with seemingly endless evidence that he has read everything from the complete Mad Comics to the Bhagavad-Gita...
...Scattered all over the Zone...
...neither Pynchon nor Maddocks seem to have grasped what the French Catholic Leon Bloy meant by the Gospel as "the good news of damnation...
...The preponderance of the grotesque and the kooky in the work of Pynchon, Barth, Heller, Barthel-me, and all the other symbol-makers of cabalistic despair is dismaying testimony to the fact that in their obsessive dedication to the abstractions of "living death...
...It pervades the book with foully assertive insistence and reaches its apotheosis in a five-page explicitly copro-philic episode that will make even the strongest stomach protest in a violent spasm of nausea...
...Slothrop gradually loses any sense of the reason for his desperate odyssey...
...But one thing that is not simply incidental is Pynchon's obsession with excrement...
...In the Western world, Pynchon reminds us loudly and often, no man can find refuge?he has become one plucked albatross...
...Future shock" is the sensationally neon-lit catchword of a period that craves the intoxication of apocalypse-as the Victorians craved sentimentality...
...But Slothrop, that phallic radar system, refuses to stay put in the bureaucrats' laboratory...
...Few novelists seem to understand this aspect of future shock better than Pynchon...
...It is both a punitive corollary of religious belief and a positive instrument toward man's awareness of the power of God...
...That Pynchon's intellectual and comic resources are superhuman in their pyrotechnical range and eccentric brilliance was clear from his two previous novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49...
...call it the modern world where science and technology change the rules faster than they can be written...
...In turn, the novelist moves from Nazi rocket headquarters to what he obviously regards as its fun-house-mirror image, an Allied counterintelligence outfit named PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender), with its loony staff of "wireless technicians...
...It is interesting that among all the fictional architects of nightmare writing in America today, none has created a single character who is not essentially a freak...
...In each case the critic has incautiously taken Pynchon's intent-something that is always highly elusive-for the deed, and wrapped his windy praise with the gaudy-colored ribbons of contemporary intellectual cliche...
...It's a mad, mad, mad intellectual toboggan ride all the way, but does it in fact lead Pynchon to the palace of wisdom...
...R. Z. Sheppard writes solemnly: "Call it history...
...Thus Gravity's Rainbow is set in London and on the Continent during the final months of World War II, as the German V-rockets scream their last desperate hits over the Channel from Holland...
...Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts...
...Pynchon's poetry of chance and highjinks is tedious because it lacks the loving immediacy of any sustaining moral vision...
...In V...
...the stubborn, enduring concreteness of ordinary existence has been banished...
...And Melvin Maddocks goes even further: "Pynchon, for all his antics, is a theologian, laying out the road to damnation...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 7
