Here She Be — The Battlements

Pan’s Grove in Gravity’s Rainbow — Cursory Thoughts

March 27, 2009 at 12:37 am (Critical Writing, Prose, Reading)

     Something caught my eye on 674, about two-thirds of the way down the page, and it was the reference to “Pan’s grove.” Looking at Weisenburger’s companion to Gravity’s Rainbow, I thought it was interesting that he only put down the allusion to Pan’s grove being a meeting place for witches, and while there is an interesting parallel there that I would like to come back to, it seems to me that there is also a strong connection between Pan’s grove and being the place where it all comes together. “Pan” of course has this additional meaning of universal or all-encompassing, and I think there is strength in seeing it this way with all that is going on, in addition to the words “a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends” closer to the bottom of the page. I think that at this point with all the talk of “transcendence” and being “free” we are meant to recognize that greater strands of the story share a connection here. If transcending pain is entering into “Their province” then we are at the spot where Them and Us are joined by whatever bridge can be said to exist between the two. It is similar in notion to the Norse rainbow bridge Bifrost, which joins the lands of the gods to our own lands—Them to Us. This is a meeting place, but in a certain sense it is also a place of overlap. We get a glimpse of the past of Katje and the future of Katje, as well as several other characters. Time loses some of its weight here, and what They are does not seem distinct anymore from what We are.
     Now, I said I wanted to revisit the idea of the meeting place for witches for a few reasons. One, a gathering of witches alludes to prophesy—Macbeth uses a similar notion. And two, we had a witch back during the events of the kinderofen—the witch who wants to eat Hansel and Gretel. Given Katje and Blicero are at the center of conversation here, it is a rather obvious connection to make. The way events are being talked about, however, has a definiteness to it that seems more certain than prophesy or even preserving the forms, but I cannot help but think that that is somehow what is occurring here: preserving the forms of tradition. The system is preserved here; although, we seem to have stumbled across the place in which it truly co-exists on equal footing with those it controls, which presents a bit of a problem with that theory. Is the system our way of preserving the forms? Is the superseding system just that, a traditional form or manner of expectation, which we predict and maintain in spite of the ways in which it has come to control us? I think there is some allusion along those lines that could present this conclusion about our relation to the invisible hand present in the book and its origins: “toad to prince, prince to fabulous monster”—another fairytale and another way of interpreting the world. Weissmann makes the gesture of suggesting that he could devote himself to Katje’s fantasies, in a similar gesture of control and controlled, while analyzing her as a sacrifice. This section would suggest that Weissmann knows the story that is being told, what the form resembles, what the truth is, but his own contradictions and desires seem to obscure even for him what the underlying cause of it all is. We get glimpses, snapshots, and I feel as if this is a point where the book brings it altogether and simultaneously unravels as the need to find Slothrop arises. Of course, these are mainly preliminary thoughts, but this part of the book seems the most intimately interesting to me because of how densely packed the evidence is and how promising the winning of the struggle with unpacking it seems to be. Then again, it could all be a façade.

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Gravity’s Rainbow on Rocket Limericks

March 27, 2009 at 12:36 am (Critical Writing, Prose, Reading)

     There is a rather entertaining song that is sung from page 309 to 312, and is woven into the goings-on of pretty much everyone getting blotto, including—perhaps especially—Slothrop. Not that no one ever gets drunk otherwise, but I liked the effect of backgrounding it or perhaps foregrounding it—depending on your perspective—with the verses of the song. And I thought I would write about this ineluctable modality of the audible. There is an interesting cross-cultural blending that occurs in this section. We have the Americans singing, but in “German Storm Trooper style”; we have a “fat cracker Pfc.” (the truly white American); the Russians are standing around drinking as well. There is a strange conglomerate of many of those involved in the war, both axis and allies. The pieces of song are mostly laced with somber ideas: the first verse is about the bomb killing people, the refrain alludes to having garbage but not food, the fourth ends badly for Hector, in the fifth Moorehead loses his wife. And these comical but sad notes (a seemingly Modernist technique because it focuses on the manner of experience in many ways; also fits with the description of Modernism as “the laugh with a scream at its center”) punctuate the events at regular intervals for a few pages, disappearing briefly and coming back on 315. Interestingly on 315, when the refrain comes up again, it is truncated with “u.s.w.” rather than having the whole of it written out. One might expect to see “etc” for et cetera, but the German side of this event is made very clear with the “usw” meaning “und so weiter,” the German equivalent of et cetera.
     The parallel between sex with the rockets and Slothrop’s conditioning is a fairly obvious one to make. The sexual connotations of all these different parts of the rockets ring humorously out in limerick form, but the somber endings to many of the verses are suggestive of the desperate state Slothrop is in; although, perhaps less aware of as he drinks. There is a suggestion of others being involved in the rockets the same way that Slothrop is, given all the characters mentioned in the limericks who have taken a liking to the deadly phallic symbols. There’s even a suggestion that everyone should get likewise involved with the line “But if you ain’t tried it, don’t knock it!” This connection of others to the rockets as well as others to Slothrop seems particularly strong because of the line “Slothrop does not know that they are singing to him, and neither do they.” This goes back to the idea of the invisible guiding hand, or the system that controls all those involved. Slothrop can be seen as a sort of rallying point—although perhaps a failed one—for these people. Of course, he fails because no one knows that that is what he is.
     This suggests a problem with the established system. The system has to remain concealed to a certain extent, otherwise it becomes readily identifiable by the populace and much easier for them to rebel against or disassemble; however, Slothrop is the cog that people need to see in order for the system to function at its full efficiency. The problem with the system is that it is transparent by nature, so no one will recognize Slothrop, even though his function requires him to be seen. These limericks could even be seen as a side-effect of this situation. They are a means for Slothrop to be recognized, but of course, no one has any idea that that is the case.
     In the midst of the section, Slothrop does manage to get everyone’s attention by hollering “Major Marvy sucks!” Then again this gets him more hostile attention than the sort of attention that would be beneficial to the system. Still, it seems to largely be drunks playing games, including mock Kamikaze attacks. But the situation is legitimately dangerous—Marvy firing his .45s wildly, and warheads abounding. What we end up with is a strange metaphor of the war to Slothrop. Slothrop is the instigator who the war chases after. He has sex at the locations V2s will hit before they hit there—similar to shouting at Marvy, although presumably he is directed by the V2s, and shouting at Marvy gives Slothrop the power to select the site by his actions. Then Slothrop and Glimpf take off, the war following close behind—the V2 hitting the location where Slothrop has been promiscuous. This is supported by the relation of the verses of the song towards the end of the encounter to Slothrop and Glimpf and their escape. Slothrop and Glimpf think at several points that they have lost the group in pursuit of them, but they quickly discover otherwise as song erupts behind them about the bizarre sexual relationships to rockets. Slothrop thinks he has escaped the system, upset the order, finally broken free, but in fact it is rampaging behind him, ever in pursuit, announcing his sex life as it goes—sex being more or less the trail it tracks him by.
     At the end Slothrop does manage to push a warhead into the way of Marvy’s cart, allowing him to escape. Could this be foreshadowing? Maybe. Also, because I didn’t know where else to mention it, I want to briefly make a note of the midgetry that pull the mock kamikaze attacks (is there a joke here about the Japanese people being short?). They seem to be the predicate in an extreme way. Slothrop and Marvy have commandeered what they think of as belonging to them in order to play their dangerous game. And there does seem to be some parallel established with the kamikaze attacks, as presumably kamikaze flyers would be the Japanese equivalent of the predicate—sacrificed for the system.
     I really liked this scene, as it was really amusing but paralleled large parts of the book so well. The way the music interrupts the going on at times, and at other times fills in the empty space of waiting for something to happen, has its own connotations that I think are interesting. It has a pervasive quality, where it invades whatever space it can find. Whether this is a sort of rebellion or just a sort of added part of the system to disable any possible freedom of movement by its participants is hard to say based solely on the context of the scene, and perhaps it can be said that the verses are both of these things. Some additional actions of people will play into the system, and some additional actions occupy the space between the system’s controls without giving in to it, which is perhaps why Slothrop can escape at the end.

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Gravity’s Rainbow — Issues of Character

March 13, 2009 at 6:35 am (Critical Writing, Prose, Reading)

Hume, Kathryn. “Repetition and the Construction of Character in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 33.4 (1992): 243-254. MLA International Bibliography. Ames Lib. 12 Mar 2009 .

     I initially decided to look at this article on Gravity’s Rainbow because its title suggested a look at something I had not yet considered in regards to the novel; namely, how Pynchon constructs his characters and what effects that has on the work. Of course, I felt ever encouraged to read it because it began with a reference to Joyce. Hume’s initial observation is in fact that unlike Joyce, whose characters’ struggle we can observe through the psychological portraits he constructs, Pynchon does not ground the struggle of his characters in the psyche of the individual. Hume then presents what she considers to be the two popular explanations for this: 1) as a result of the book being a satire or 2) as a way of invoking postmodernism. I am not convinced by these premises, which could make it awful difficult for the article to prove anything to me. Just because Pynchon paints the psyche differently than Joyce and often uses it as a source of enigma does not mean that that internal struggle is absent or even unrepresented. Also, I don’t think that the book is so preoccupied with being a satire or invoking postmodernism that it directly constructs flat characters. I would hesitate to call many of the characters flat, anyway. Slothrop I certainly think of as dynamic. And any simplifications that appear to exist I think play to the theme of people that are controlled. They only seem flat because they are constantly under a state of being controlled and are forced into situations where the freedom to be a dynamic human being is denied them—they are reduced to conditioned cogs in the machine that is the system represented in the novel. However, it would be unfair to simply abandon the article so early, before it really even gets to utter its initial analyses of these premises. And of course Hume doesn’t disappoint, responding to these “popular” explanations with the following: “I would like to focus on material that their assumptions necessarily obscure for them and their readers” (243).
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