Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom

Gravity's Rainbow offers a lot. It also demands a lot. Many readers try, fail and bail. Others push through, building a literary core memory. And then there are those who become obsessed. To oversimplify, the obsessed fall into two camps: fanboys and academics. Some carry both flags. I'm a fanboy. This is what happens when a fanboy goes to the academics for help.

I finished the book again and wanted more. What inspired Pynchon? What did people who read for a living see that I missed? What questions did they answer that I never thought to ask? I got answers. I also came away with a problem I didn't have going in: a suspicion that I read with shallow eyes.

Several books offer a way in. I chose Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom by Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, because Weisenburger also wrote a lauded companion to Gravity’s Rainbow. Across a dozen essays they dredge depths I didn't know were there. The hours these two have put into reading, thinking and writing about this one book made me feel dumb. I suppose that's what academics do.

Their core argument is that Gravity's Rainbow is a product of The Long Sixties, the stretch of massive social change, political protest and new cultural thinking that runs from the early civil rights actions to the close of the Vietnam War. Call it 1955 to 1973. What gives the argument teeth is that the book could not have been published a decade earlier. 

Consider what's in it. Misdemeanors include the profanity, which runs the length of the book. Felonies include coprophilia, orgies, S&M and a good deal else. In 1960 that content was a legal problem before it was a literary one, and Herman and Weisenburger walk through the cases that turned it into a literary one. 

The other thing they did was hand me a syllabus. They kept pointing at Pynchon's sources, and I kept picking them up. I broke off partway through to read Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, which they see behind some of Pynchon's thinking. Fromm on Luther and Calvin sent me to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man is on my desk for later this year.

It's the clearest evidence that the academics helped me. I went in owning Gravity's Rainbow and I came out owning three more books and a lot more perspective. Criticism that settles a text leaves you where it found you. Criticism that's doing its job converts the thing you possess into a thing you're behind on.

Damn, do I feel underexposed to philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas. Now I have a better idea how to fill that gap.