I Do Not Want to Live Under the Rainbow
Fifty years later, Gravity's Rainbow is still an obstacle
This post goes into some depth on the novels of Thomas Pynchon. My habit of diving deep into books could possibly turn away readers who are less familiar with the material, so I’ve made new sections here to distinguish between REVIEWS, which hopefully should be approachable for a general audience, and IN-DEPTH ESSAYS, which go into a level of detail that’s easier if you know the book(s). (There’s also a section for POEMS & EXPERIMENTS).
Even if you aren’t familiar with a particular book or author, I hope a discussion like this could still be interesting to those universally curious people who like to eavesdrop. If this doesn’t catch you, then hopefully enough books will be covered here eventually that you will find something you know, or are drawn to. I tend to start from particulars and then gather generalizations, so I hope the generalizations will get more comprehensible as time goes on.
Anyway, even if you have read only one of Pynchon’s books, there should be something for you here. And if you haven’t — you might be living in one!
— AR
Last February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, and it was interesting to read through the tribute pieces.1 Coming off of the previous year’s centenary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which felt like a victory lap, I was struck by a sense of uncertainty or even ambivalence in the pieces about the book.
Gravity’s Rainbow is famous for being difficult to read. It is the quintessential postmodern “doorstop” novel — more than eight hundred pages of obscure subject matter treated in dense and forbidding prose. The characters are flat, and there is no unified “plot” like in traditional fiction, though it keeps playing at having a plot. In fact, one of the book’s themes is the impossibility of plot, even the danger or the pathology of needing a plot.
There are some incidents in the book that could be called central, but the nature of those incidents and their significance are often ambiguous or are even openly debated by the characters. This makes it into a kind of monument to entropy and uncertainty — a monstrosity of aimless, disconnected episodes, a massive garbage dump of uninterpretable information, a big pile of “plots” that fail to cohere as convincingly unified stories in themselves or in relation to each other.
Dense writing style, flat characters, obscure subject matter, enormous length, and stubborn plotlessness — all this makes the book difficult to read and difficult to write about, and makes it difficult to estimate its artistic merit and its significance in literary history. It seems destined for a small audience, an in-group of devotees in-the-know.
And yet, as the tribute pieces show, we can’t seem to get away from it. One piece in Wired even says that our world is now indistinguishable from the world of the book — that we all live under the book’s rainbow, whether we know it or not. A similar note is struck in a piece for Esquire, where the real world and all of us are just now catching up with Pynchon’s work.
I have to admit that I chafe at this! Maybe it’s just the writer in me, but I think we should be protective of our autonomy in determining the meaning of our lives. I’ve written about this before — this need to seek out your own meaning, and not to take it from somewhere else. If a book has read you and your reality better than you can, then there must be some pride in you that resists. This resistance is for the sake of possessing your own life’s meaning, but also, if you happen to be a writer or an artist, for your ability to make something of your own.
I think we should learn to be alert to those moments when we are too passive, when we let strongly written books from the past do too much of the thinking for us. As soon as I hear someone claiming that a book has taken up all the available imaginative space for our time — that we can’t escape it, even that we live inside it whether we know it or not — a Captain Ahab in me says it’s time to get a crew together to hunt the white whale.
I still have more reading to do to back this up, but for years now my instinct has been that the work of Thomas Pynchon is the foremost obstacle to literary originality in our time. (I am talking about ambitious literary writing in English). You go back to the recent literary past and you keep running into him. His work is so all-devouring, and so difficult to approach that we seem doomed to be dwarfed by him, and doomed to repeat him. This is what I hear behind my own ambivalence about Pynchon’s work — a fear that it may not be possible to fully comprehend it, and a fear that it may already contains ours.
We need new ways of reading Pynchon, and we need to start identifying pitfalls that unwittingly make our literature sound too much like his. If we can turn aside from the view of Pynchon as literal prophet, then we may begin to see through his rainbow’s dazzling surface. I wish I had heard more thinking in this direction in the anniversary pieces, and so this is my contribution to last year’s discussion.
Here are my topic headings, then, for getting past the influence of Pynchon —
1. Confront themes and deep influences, not trivia
Pynchon is known for his proclivity for the esoteric. It’s not uncommon to see a description of one of his novels start with an awed listing of the range of subject matter it manages to absorb, something like: “A rock ‘n’ roll mad motorcycle ride to the outer reaches of the twentieth century and beyond, showing equal confidence with the poetry of Rilke, organic chemistry, superhero comics, regional accents, Nazi occultism, and yes, pigs! From London during the Blitz to Germany’s African colonies in the early twentieth century to Dutch expeditions in the New World — with episodes in central Asia, German V-2 rocket factories, casinos and cruise ships, and places only visitable in dreams — this novel knows no bounds … ”.
All this rings true, of course, but I think this tendency to get lost in trivia is an annoying obstacle to getting a handle on the books. Every other word in a Pynchon book is from some esoteric sub-discipline, some technical usage only specialists would understand. He talks about “scumbling” paint and railroad “spurs,” and then you have to go look it up. You chase down the definitions, the historical context, you speculate endlessly about the meaning of these minute details, and you’re made into a Pynchon encyclopedist until the end of time.
If you pick up the habit of reading literature with an ear for how books echo previous ones, then you learn to pay close attention to diction, as it can often signal how previous authors have influenced the book you’re reading. Sometimes deliberate and sometimes more unwitting, these echoes are like trail markers that point to the author’s own deep reading experiences. This goes beyond mere source hunting. If you follow these trails far enough, you can make a map of the book’s deeper connections to the past.
Seen this way, all that technical jargon in Pynchon’s work can begin to seem like a strategy to avoid producing any recognizable echoes of the literary past. They always set us off on the wrong trail. Instead of discovering his deeper influences and how his books relate to previous ones, we get lost in the noise.
Instead of trivia, we should talk more about the deeper currents of artistic and philosophical influence that Pynchon’s work has swallowed up. For example, years ago I tortured myself and reread Fredric Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Whenever I could extract something lucid from Jameson’s tangle of unreadable prose, I found that the best artistic reference point for the “postmodern” mood he was attempting to sketch was always Gravity’s Rainbow. Materialist critics like Jameson tend to explain changes in art and culture as emerging from historical crises or technological change or some kind of “media environment” or whatever, but I had to ask myself — would we have anything like our sense of “postmodern” art without Gravity’s Rainbow? How much of our cultural atmosphere was originated by it? What thinking is embedded in the novel that we now simply take for granted?
And what about “autofiction”? This thing everyone seems to want to talk about these days. I remember the feature in the magazine The Drift a couple years ago where the editors surveyed the state of literary fiction, asking What comes after autofiction? Well, what came before? It was this thing called “metafiction,” and Pynchon is king of metafiction.
After the covid pandemic, they claim, literary writing is about to break into a new change. But what if that break only leads to more books that, when we look backwards, are found to be subordinate to Gravity’s Rainbow? Where is the writing that is not the product of ideas Pynchon has already treated better, and more comprehensively? Are there other influences we might invest in, to make something new?
2. The surface is various, but the myth is always the same
Infinite trivia can suggest infinite variety, but the deeper you dig in Pynchon books, the more things are the same. Sex and psychology in particular are painfully static, heavy and immovable.
It’s always the same three figures:
The ineffectual hero — passive, sexually timid, a clumsy schlemiel, a universal scapegoat. Benny Profane in V., Mucho in Lot 49, Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason in Mason & Dixon, Zoyd Wheeler in Vineland, Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice, and Maxine’s ex-husband Horst in Bleeding Edge.
The big bad fascist psychopath — psychologically remote, death-obsessed, monomaniacally focused, fatally and universally attractive to women. Blicero in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, Pierce Inverarity in Lot 49, Brock Vond in Vineland, Mickey Wolfmann in Inherent Vice, and the soldier guy whose name I can’t remember in Bleeding Edge.
The woman torn between these two men — either remote and death-haunted, or more down-to-earth and closer to the reader. For the former, there’s the title character in V., Katje in Gravity’s Rainbow, Rebekah in Mason & Dixon, Frenesi in Vineland, and Shasta in Inherent Vice. For the latter, there’s Oedipa in Lot 49 and Maxine in Bleeding Edge.
These figures are similar to the ones in William Blake’s prophecy Visions of the Daughters of Albion. It’s also, weirdly, the same pattern as the tiresome “pickup artist” discourse, where the beta males always lose to the chads.
What does so static a myth of human sexuality indicate about Pynchon’s work? And what is the deeper story of its development across his career? From book to book, how do the permutations of this pattern change?
Are we repeating our own similar patterns in contemporary writing? If so, how do they compare to his? How might we refute what’s implied in his?
3. Pynchon is actually two distinct authors
Pynchon has published nine books — eight novels and one short story collection. Here they are in order of publication —
V. (1963)
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Slow Learner (1984), collection of previously published short stories
Vineland (1990)
Mason & Dixon (1997)
Against the Day (2006)
Inherent Vice (2009)
Bleeding Edge (2013)
His first novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, were reviewed with interest alongside other promising American novels of the 60s, and then Gravity’s Rainbow arguably marked the height of his work’s acclaim and controversy. Then Vineland came out a long time after Gravity’s Rainbow, and was largely dismissed by critics. Pynchon seemed to be taking a detour into lighter fare, inexplicable for a writer so ambitious. Mason & Dixon, in turn, was hailed as a return to form, a worthy successor of Gravity’s Rainbow. Against the Day, his longest book at more than one thousand pages, continued along the same lines, and was seen as an established Great Author continuing to do his thing. Then in Inherent Vice the lightness anticipated by Vineland was fully embraced, and the same goes for Bleeding Edge. Reviewers called these late books “Pynchon Lite.” It was still recognizably him, but the style and the subject matter had been made less relentlessly obscure, and the themes less ambitious, less morbid, and less all-encompassingly apocalyptic.
Read chronologically, the story of his writing career is curious. V. is one kind of book, then Lot 49 is surprisingly shorter and seemingly less ambitious. He even somewhat flippantly disavows it in a later essay. He seems to pick up what he started in V. in Gravity’s Rainbow, but then after that takes a surprising detour into the lighter style of Vineland. Then he seems to double back to the old style again in the other books, and then again returns to the detour in a full conversion to “Pynchon lite” at the end.
Scholars picking through his papers eventually might give us a more accurate chronological sense of all this, but I remember reading somewhere that he was writing multiple novels at the same time for years, that there was not necessarily a strict chronology in the writing behind the scenes. I guess this isn’t surprising for a writer so inclined to discontinuity, who stubbornly refuses the unity of plot and linear history in his own books.
Along these lines, I would like to propose we shuffle the books around to make them easier to interpret as a whole. This is my wholly artificial scheme — the idea of a “trilogy,” for example, has never been offered by critics or by Pynchon himself.
I propose —
JUVENILIA
Slow Learner (1984) — (or perhaps these could even be called lost episodes of V.?)
V. — TRILOGY, EPILOGUE & APPENDIX
V. (1963)
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) — “V.-2”
Mason & Dixon (1997) — “V.-3”
Against the Day (2006) — An epilogue to the V. trilogy
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) — An appendix to the V. trilogy
PYNCHON LITE
Vineland (1990)
Inherent Vice (2009)
Bleeding Edge (2013)
You can see this scheme has no regard for order of publication, but I think it makes the books cohere thematically and stylistically in a way that makes his body of work much more readily understandable.
The two main points here are:
The chronology is a stumbling block, and we should feel free to throw it out.
Throwing out the chronology will allow us to make connections between the books that aren’t usually offered by critics, and will allow us to better account for his development as a writer.
It was easy for reviewers to notice how much things had changed in the transition to “Pynchon Lite,” but I have never seen an in-depth discussion of the substance of that change. What happens to his stance as a writer after he becomes this other author? Why did this need to occur? There are deeper reasons that could be offered, or more subtle things to say than what’s been said (or at least than what I’ve come across).
To use some references that might be a little obscure, why did he start out as an author who could be compared to the Romantic poet Percy Shelley and then later morph into something closer to Shelley’s friend, the satirist Thomas Love Peacock? His stance goes from predominantly visionary, apocalyptic, and morbid to more equanimous, satirical, and even Epicurean, with some elements kept the same.
How was this change brought about? Why? What is its deeper meaning? And what are the consequences of this change for contemporary writing?
4. What can we learn from his imitators and heirs?
When I reviewed the novel Fake Accounts a few years ago, I was surprised by how much that book’s plot resembled Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The Fake Accounts protagonist is like an emptied-out version of Pynchon’s paranoid detective. In Lot 49, Oedipa’s paranoid searching through the evidence of hidden histories she finds in her dead ex-boyfriend’s financial dealings parallels her implied search for the meaning of this old relationship. The Fake Accounts protagonist has a similar dead ex-boyfriend scenario, but the book mocks any playing at paranoid meaning making. It also refuses the metafictional game that would identify the reader with the searching protagonist.
Unlike the ending of Lot 49, which implies that the ex-boyfriend may not be dead after all and may be about to reappear (though the book stops before we can see), Fake Accounts does have the ex-boyfriend come back to confirm his death was indeed a hoax. Protagonist and reader are left baffled, and truly “nothing happens” is the best summary of the book. There are other ways to read Fake Accounts, and other influences present, but read this way it’s like a cry of freedom. Pynchon’s metafiction game is contained, transformed, and escaped.
Is this too nerdy an analysis? I insist this level of detail matters!
For another example, when I looked at some authors who rose to prominence in the 1990s, Pynchon’s shadow was there too. It might sound strange, but I have some suspicion that Tim O’Brien, author of the Vietnam war book The Things They Carried, struggles to hold off the influence of Pynchon in his work. And when I reviewed another 90s book, Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen, which is a very different sort of book than Pynchon’s, I noticed it at least had to nod to narratives of paranoia.
Or what about Sally Rooney? If she were to make her books more openly political — let’s say one of her privileged First World Millenial couples joins an anarchist movement to become real live political revolutionaries — how much would the romance plot, the sado-masochistic themes, the bruised alienation and the sense of captivity to historical forces infinitely larger than the characters could ever hope to influence — how much would this all start to sound like similar episodes in Pynchon? How would Rooney’s thematic treatment compare to his?
And one final example. I am not so well-read in Gen X authors, and I know only vaguely the famous “hysterical realism” critique leveled by the critic James Wood at authors like Zadie Smith or even casually at Pynchon’s own Mason & Dixon (though not in much detail). He complains about the inhumanity of these authors’ work, about their empty imitations of vitality and their fumbling attempts at writing fiction at a global scale. “Hysterical realism,” as he tells it, is a hollow genre of writers stretched to the limits of their ambition. He tries to offer the influence of Dickens as central to explaining this, but I’m not convinced. Doesn’t his argument actually amount to something like: “you have tried to imitate and surpass Gravity’s Rainbow and have failed?”. This, to me, is the real story behind “hysterical realism.”
5. We must escape from passive theories of art
I complain about this a lot, but I think we need badly to do away with the “writer-as-seer-of-technological-change” paradigm. To say, as some of the anniversary pieces did, that Pynchon wrote literal prophecy of 2023 way back in 1973 because he saw farther than everyone else into the coming technological changes is to assume a kind of passivity in history that borders on mechanistic.
What is a writer, anyway? Just a stenographer of historical crises? An economic subject, a product of “historical forces”? Where does the writing come from, exactly? Do we have any choice in what we write? How would we read Pynchon’s work if we were less beholden to the stiffness that seems to have taken hold over our sense of history?
This is what I read, though maybe there are more that I’ve missed. A brief bibliography, if you’re interested:
A piece in Wired says we all live under the book’s rainbow, whether we know it or not. We are doomed, like the movie theatre audience that has the rocket dropped on it at the end of the novel, to hear the sound too late. An urgent message, but one that we refuse to hear.
A more academic essay in an outlet called The Conversation urges us to join the novel’s paranoid rebels, called the Counterforce, in the universal fight against the regimes of the System with a capital S, against mass death and social control.
A piece in Esquire has a similar vision to The Conversation, where the book’s readers are communities of little Counterforces in-the-know, sharing shreds of love and grace, letting others in on the secret.
A piece for the Verso Books blog is thorough in its description of the book and useful in its searching for sources, but refrains from much speculation regarding the book’s meaning or its lasting influence. The author describes his sense of “frisson” at first having encountered it, and knows he will return to it again.
A piece in Compact magazine contemplates Pynchon’s visions of technological systems as “systems of power.” It ends on a similar note to other pieces, like the one in Wired or the Esquire piece — beckoning the reader to join the “Counterforce.”
I've read a lot of the discourse on Gravity's Rainbow, including some articles that made the book seem a whole lot less muddy than I believed, as long as one treats every detail as a metaphor. But this article is the first one that seems to have sidestepped the discourse altogether, to come at Pynchon orthogonally, historically, rather than getting sucked into the psychedelic hole of his charm. I like this view from the outside... though it strikes me as ironically Pynchonesque that you see a vast, spidery network of crypto-Pynchonian influence extending underneath modern lit. But you may well be right.
I haven't read Against the Day or Bleeding Edge, but I did all others. I like Pynchon, and he's amazing at what he does, but sometimes I want to grab him by the labels and beg him to concentrate and be a little more serious. I read Mason & Dixon last year, and it had some stunning sections, but so often it seemed like his other books just in a period costume. How many times can he gesture at the secret conspiracy without that trick getting old? Is it really so clever that he has George Washington smoking weed with his Black Jewish servant? At times the wonky intellectual swordplay seemed like the lame jokes of a fossilized stoner... And the hard layer of irony that encases everything--I'd like an author to talk to me straight, and not out of the corner of his mouth. Pynchon is in part so popular, I think, because his work is so cloaked in ambiguity and mystery; it invites people to spin their own theories, and to read greatness into what they cannot understand.
Wonderful critical essay !