On Gravity's Rainbow

He's looking at subject responses to objectifying forces run rampant in a technologically advanced but very isolating modern western experience.

It's the old, "what does sanity mean in a world gone mad?" routine.

There is also a very intricate relationship to the history of novels as a genre which is thoroughly and completely trounced into the floor in a way that even bests people like Tolstoy in terms of detailed scope and is essentially a means of wrestling with the mammoth specter of Proust; he takes the opposite approach of both, concentrating on imaginitive applications of research and intra-personal relations of isolated individuals—an outside-in approach, rather than the other way around—like Proust.

Then you've got this whole post-world war to pre-post-Vietnam issue arising from the treatment of consciousness in modern novels as if an essential relation to the aesthetic quality of their composition. Pynchon's basic take is like, "look f— you and the entire ideology you deny behind what you think makes the book best" (basically, that which states 'who one is' as who you are and only when you're looking fit for company). So the response is to treat subjective phenomena of thought, feelings, unconscious responses—not as filtered through a single (Faulkner) perceptival consciousness, or even group of them in series (Woolf)—but to treat them in a carefully orchestrated relation (Joyce) which is constructed according to so massive an overall design, there is no real theory or way to expressing the totality of whole (Pynchon). He's not just doing this to show off how well he knows his authors, but to directly and non-confrontationally pull the rug, chair and table cloth at once out from under the unconscious biases that these works and authors impart in making their characters seem 'just normal' and plots quite ordinary, but which is viewed as enforcing certain stereotypes which the author believes led to the fascist horrors of, yet another, total global war.

Thomas is especially problematic in his relation to this material concerning a re-appropriation of the literary works of the past because modernism itself was, quite consciously and sub-, an anti-Romanticist response to the Enlightenment notion of 'progress' that led to that Great War. The issue at heart of Gravity's Rainbow is how this cultural aesthetic of art as essential in relation to traditional notions of self (i.e. the ones which defined to help constitute it) seemed to have really, seriously failed in faced with the Holocaust (which is only obliquely alluded to) and the uses of atomic bombs—the actual point of objective fact the novel climaxes upon (also what centers this, despite the themes of European intrigue, as an American work of fiction, rather than transatlantic pan-westernism like that Eliot goon employed). So the man is working in a highly conservative genre—that of the psychologically constituted, modern (until then) novel—while in the midst of a massive, contemporary reaction against this unconsciousness of theory which mirrored its tacit assumptions in an insurgent social movement (and we all know how this has failed) of 1960's youth culture—e.g. they're all getting to retire and like stealing people's houses.

So when you get right down to the knuckles, ol' T-Pynch's GR is actually, not about 'being about' like that 1st half of the 20th century crap, and is equally antithetical to the concept current at (t)his time that "objective" means go and take a look, if you're 'the chosen one' your first response—free from any and all encumbrance of thought or just consideration—will be good enough for true; especially if you're in charge. The man has actually produced a continuously re-centering web of fiction so thoroughly and deliberately constructed that people object to its not being reducible into an Executive Summary or directly, objective list of determinate bullet points. My guess is that the greatest living English novelist's intention in performing this monumentally debilitating task of effort (since, in case you haven't noticed, he didn't get to live too normative of a life during or since) was to destabilize notions of self, authorship—authority—also in relation to history and current social trends so thoroughly that people who read his work would have to stop and re-consider all these as concepts and categories themselves.

But if you think this is some magic bible of the world during/after some epic, dirty war that will grant you a fully comprehensive, representative glimpse into its truth from which you, just reflecting on his insights yourself, shall be able to deduce all that which comprises true according to its selfless author's perception of our time—you're going to want to get that head re-checked, Skippy: This is a book about erections, addiction, non- and organic chemistry, seduction, corporate terrorism, the quintessentially western fetishization of death and fetish itself for profit, postcolonial hand-wringing as washed & watched; rank hypocrisy in science's discursive formulations of objectivity, insanity, their reciprocal definition, torturape and censorship—fetishized list-making—there's a ton of stuff on World War II pop songs, Platonic illustration of fiction's deceptive reality filtered through a massively witty and subversive, Aristotelian oddball on tons of high-grade weed—if not the universal impossibility of a 'standard' reaction to pervading threat of death masquerading as progress in defense of the transnationally filthy right of self-appointed, bureaucratic demagogues to keep profiting off of global murder as long as everyone who knows about is paid: Not to mention how that state of affairs is one supported as maintained by no one person at the center but out of everyone just doing what they do, only not really reflecting on how's why. And best of all? He prob'ly thinks I'm wrong.