The video game Pathologic contains a tower built out of its own blueprints. I think it’s a beautiful concept, maybe not because it's so unique, but because it literalises the lens through which I try to see all art. One of my favorite personal (probably somewhat warped) takeaways from Freud and Lacan's theories is that every work contains the story of its own creation. I would like to believe it launches vectors for analysis that are not so commonly explored these days.
In writing, there's this idea of just letting words flow, almost by means of free association, the stories somehow weaving themselves through you. Some people try to make a distinction between improvisation and planning things out in advance, but I believe in the moment itself there is just the former, as in, you can never know the exact shape of your work until you put it on paper. Unless…
(…) the further I get into this wretched profession the clearer it is I am doing very little consciously beyond some clerk routine – assembling, expediting – and that either (a) there is an Extrapersonal Source, or (b) readers are the ones who do most of the work, or all of the above. Which is not a bringdown to realize.1
This July I read Gravity’s Rainbow and enjoyed it a lot. Minor spoilers ahead.
Before I progress, it's important to note I do not consider there to be any sense in trying to dig into some actual “hidden” meaning of anything. I believe the act of interpretation is always productive in itself, suggesting a certain reading that others can accept or disagree with, always pushing things forward in one way or another, sometimes even by sheer negation. There's never any actual permanent disentanglement of symbols, just the opposite. But, uh, feel free to let the authoritative tone fool you.
There are certain works that skirt the edge of the symbolic, making for good entry points for the aforementioned kind of analysis. Jameson suggests Beckett as one such figure, highlighting his use of the term “pseudo-couple” to refer to a pair of characters who require one another to form some kind of a complete ego2. It’s a great example, seeing as his creations often lack the energy to pretend they function as singular persons, their very interdependence made into a source of gallows humor.
The characters of Gravity’s Rainbow work in a similar manner, although their aims and methods are different. Many of them are scientists trying to work out the rules of their world, bound to forever remain at some incomplete image of it because of this very division. The relation between duos such as Mexico-Pointsman or Tantivy-Slothrop gives us an insight into Pynchon’s inner conflicts, internal splits along the lines of spiritualism, science, duty, desire.
They work for shadowy organizations, trying to predict the future trajectories of rockets, among a variety of other things, trying to find correlations in a world that, tragically, seems to actually have them. It can’t not have them. You can’t say anything without it also saying something about you. It’s not as simple as a character realizing they’re a part of a fictional story, because, okay, once you get to that point, and the character is just some aspect of your ego, what is it that moves them? Can you really answer that question any better than all of these goofballs put together?
Their names don't matter in themselves. It's the act of naming that matters, we are told. How does it work? Why those and not others? What could possess Thomas Pynchon to write character names such as Maas, Pointsman? Throsp, Enzian? Tchitcherine? Myron Grunton in London, Mason & Dixon, Byron, on and on and on?
The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes.3
What I'm suggesting here is that the shape of the names conveys a certain relation of given characters to its creator. Each of them represents some aspect of his mind. The narrator is always outside in some manner, because the act of naming creates distance. The voice screams across the sky. His mind is the grid. The city. The vague 'They' that works in mysterious ways, guiding each character into unexpected destinations.
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there…4
The Evacuation is the putting together of something. Someone. An attempt to organize and classify the part-ego splits of his mind, one name after another. It’s a controlled sacrifice. Pynchon goes a step further and suggests that the actual point of consciousness is located not within the mind-grid itself but the movement between its points. His argument is that “we” (the elusive subject) only exist when we run between the points, that is, think, and that we are the thought. Yippi!
Bleeding Edge, aside from some nice autobiographical aspects and being the only novel I know that lies at the intersection of milf footjobs and 9/11, seems like a supplementary piece to Gravity's Rainbow. It describes a piece of underground experimental software named DeepArcher, cooked up by another mysterious pseudocouple, created for… safety? Community? Death-transcending safekeeping of knowledge? There's even some hints of its inner workings, way below the surface, concepts that confuse things further… hidden keywords... 1x1 links… How paranoid do you want to get?5
A rainbow is the splitting of light into a bundle of separate frequencies. When you throw a ball into the air, the shape mass makes through space is an arc. Its exact curve is based on the principle of least action - it is the optimal path that uses the least amount of energy to arrive at its destination. Let’s zoom back into familiar territory. When you’re writing a book, do you know its final shape? Can you ever know what lies beyond the caret? The space to its right is always blank. How do you pick each new word? If language is a space, certain combinations of words are more commonly found together. Less energy is needed to jump between them. And so each novel charts its own path through our own universe of words, concepts and symbols. How can one know the final shape before it’s traced? ‘Free’ association? Come on, now.
As an aside, when tech guys try to Optimize Time and ask AI to sum up Dostoyevsky in a single sentence or whatever, what do they really think is happening? Do they really believe such compression of meaning is lossless? The point is not to reach the end of a stream of thought, the point is to get lost in it. The form matters more than any of them would ever know, because they (and the system they uphold) don’t care about processes. All art contains some element of roundabout communication. Information systems accessed through peepholes (who made them and where?). Trying to read three books at once while a grinning man shuffles them about (randomly?). You just learn to see the beauty in the arcs themselves, whether manufactured or grown.
This shit is bananas
B-A-N-A-N-A-S!6
Once there are axes of death, desire, knowledge, passion and trauma, there are also extremes. Freshly developed gradients can swiftly take you from one to the other. It only takes a moment to go from 0 to 1. Recently one of my city's universities organised a tech showcase of various types of robots and rovers. It was an all-family event, wide-eyed kids staring at dancing bots, undergrads with lanyards hastily recoding some iffy drone subroutines among booths plastered with logos of Pratt & Whitney (“Our engines help connect people, grow economies and defend freedom”) and other contractors. It's like a globe-wide taunt. Develop any passion for the inner workings of our world and we'll fuel it into our own chosen directions. “That's where the money is…” No, that’s where we are. The fluctuating whims of capital are a good way to dissolve the blame, but there are a few constants embedded somewhere within. And now back to 0.
Many of the reviews and writeups on Pynchon praise his broad range of knowledge, the sheer amount of references to other works, which I’m sure I can never fully appreciate. It’s as if he was reaching out with his arms, encompassing all of the Western postwar world. It’s beautiful. Of course. All I want to suggest is that this parabola eventually becomes a closed circle of his own mind and that through talking about a variety of topics he attempts, consciously or not, to build some kind of long-lasting image of himself. People talk about him as a mysterious (or just not fond of Western Nazi-collaborator media systems) individual, but read this book and you’ll see him as a person with sincere quirks, flaws, fears about the future, love for his friends and a seemingly unstoppable passion for every aspect of our world. It’s not my only takeaway from the novel, but it is one of the big ones and I’m really happy with it.
Surface = scratched. I wish to do another writeup sooner or later. Pynchon Summer had a nice ring to it, but Pynchon Fall seems much more appropriate. So keep your head up and—ouch!—we’ll meet again.
Weisenburger, Steven, “Gravity’s Rainbow” in The Cambridge Companion To Thomas Pynchon, ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, Brian McHale (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 44.
Jameson, Fredric, “Pseudo-Couples” in London Review of Books, vol. 25, no. 22 (20 November 2003).
Freud, Sigmund, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” (1908).
Bowie, David, “Five Years,” The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, (1972).
I’m still trying to work it all out, but I appreciate you checking this footnote. It’s the exact kind of go-getter mindset we’re looking for here.
Stefani, Gwen, “Hollaback Girl,” Love. Angel. Music. Baby. (2004).