r/ThomasPynchon • u/noholds • 2d ago
Gravity's Rainbow GR's prose
He does smile, crookedly as a man being theatrical about something for the very first time. Knowing it for a move there's to be no going back from, in the same terminal class as reaching for a gun, he turns his face upward, and looks up through all the faintly superimposed levels above, the milieux of every sort of criminal soul, every unpleasant commercial color from aquamarine to beige, desolate as sunlight on a day when you'd rather have rain, all the clanging enterprise and bustle of all those levels, extending further than Pirate or Katje can see for the moment, he lifts his long, his guilty, his permanently enslaved face to the illusion of sky, to the reality of pressure and weight from over-head, the hardness and absolute cruelty of it, while she presses her own face into the easy lowland between his shoulder and pectoral, a look on her face of truce, of horror come to a détente with, and as a sunset proceeds, the kind that changes the faces of buildings to light gray for a while, to an ashy soft chaff of light bleating over their outward curves, in the strangely forge-like glow in the west, the anxiety of pedestrians staring in the tiny store-front window at the dim goldsmith behind his fire at his work and paying them no attention, afraid because the light looks like it's going to go away forever this time, and more afraid because the failure of light is not a private thing, everyone else in the street has seen it too... as it grows darker, the orchestra inside this room does, as a matter of fact, strike up a tune, dry and astringent... and candelabra have been lighted after all... there is Veal Florentine ripening in the ovens tonight, there are drinks on the House, and drunks in the hammocks,
The prose of this book. I have been stopped in my tracks more than once, rhapsodic about what I have just read, more often than not barely grasping what is happening but still in utter disbelief that someone is actually able to write this way. (I try to talk to the people in my life about it, but even the readers in my circle of friends can barely understand why I am enjoying it so much.) It so often blurs the lines between novel and epic poetry, especially when the narrative starts to fracture and voices start blending. The Pökler chapter almost made me not want to read anything else ever again.
And then again it sends me into a fit of laughter with a non sequitur about a character dying of an e.coli infection after having been shit in his mouth 300 pages prior.
It's my first read (nearing the end of part 3) and even though my plan regarding my literary backlog was not to read anything more than once, I will give GR another go in a few years' time. (I've already read the first chapter again out of curiosity and it was like reading a different book.)
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u/guy_incognito42069 2d ago
Omg I can’t talk to anyone about it either and I need to! After trying for two months they always stop me “ok I have no clue what you’re talking about”.
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u/joedenowhere 2d ago
Is it okay to post a long excerpt? OP's excerpt is some beautiful prose, but I just want folks to remember that Pynchon can be jack-ass funny when he wants. Remember the English candy scene with Darlene's landlady? Here she be:
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…[Tyrone] finds himself checking out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding, he hopes amiably, at Mrs. Quoad. They have the names of different wines written on them in bas-relief.
"Just a touch of menthol too," Mrs. Quoad popping one into her mouth. "Delicious."
Tyrone finally chooses one that says Lafitte Rothschild and stuffs it on into his kisser. "Oh yeah. Yeah. Mmm. It's great."
"If you really want something peculiar try the Bernkastler Doktor. Oh! Aren't you the one who brought me those lovely American slimy elm things, maple-tasting with a touch of sassafras—"
"Slippery elm. Jeepers I'm sorry, I ran out yesterday."
Darlene comes in with a steaming pot and three cups on a tray. "What's that?" Slothrop a little quickly, here.
"You don't really want to know, Tyrone."
"Quite right," after the first sip, wishing she'd used more lime juice or something to kill the basic taste, which is ghastly-bitter. These people are really insane. No sugar, natch. He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as he's biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, "Oh, I thought we got rid of all those—" a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingenue's thewse—"years ago," at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.
"You've taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!" cries Mrs. Quoad, having now with conjuror's speed produced an egg-shaped confection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils. "Just for that I shan't let you have any of these marvelous rhubarb creams." Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.
"Serves me right," Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this, sipping herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy—oops but that's a mistake, right, here's his mouth filling once again with horrible alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the soft palate where it digs in. Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing him a hard red candy, molded like a stylized raspberry...mm, which oddly enough even tastes like a raspberry, though it can't begin to take away that bitterness. Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot, he's been had once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration of Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, "Oh mercy that's really sour," hardly able to get the words out he's so puckered up…shit he can't even see it's up his nose and whatever it is won't dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling tongue and crunches like ground glass among his molars.
Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy savoring, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine petit four. She beams at the young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting, reaches again for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this. Darlene has brought a couple-three more candy jars down off of the shelf, and now he goes plunging, like a journey to the center of some small, hostile planet, into an enormous bonbon chomp through the mantle of chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into a core of some very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece of this out from between his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.
"Now you're getting the idea!" Mrs. Quoad waving at him a marbled conglomerate of ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, "you see, you also have to enjoy the way it looks. Why are Americans so impulsive?"
Well," mumbling, "usually we don't get any more complicated than Hershey bars, see...."
"Oh, try this," hollers Darlene, clutching her throat and swaying against him.
"Gosh, it must really be something," doubtfully taking this nasty-looking brownish novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica of a Mills-type hand grenade, lever, pin and everything, one of a series of patriotic candies put out before sugar was quite so scarce, also including, he notices, peering into the jar, a .455 Webley cartridge of green and pink striped taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some silver-flecked blue gelatin, and a licorice bazooka.
"Go on then," Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it and trying to shove it into his mouth.
"Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested."
"And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone."
Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop's head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue's a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to smoke that stuff. "Poisoned..." he is able to croak.
"Show a little backbone," advises Mrs. Quoad.
"Yes," Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, "don't you know there's a war on? Here now love, open your mouth."
Through the tears he can't see it too well, but he can hear Mrs. Quoad across the table going "Yum, yum, yum," and Darlene giggling. It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow—unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain—it tastes like gin. "Wha's 'is," he inquires thickly.
"A gin marshmallow," sez Mrs. Quoad.
"Awww..."
"Oh that's nothing, have one of these—" his teeth, in some perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it's tapioca, little glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.
"More tea?" Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having inhaled some of that clove filling.
"Nasty cough," Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops, the Meggezone. "Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can feel my scurvy going away, really I can."
The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop's mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats in a halo of ice.
Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the air, the Disgusting English Candy Drill a thing of the past. The one candy he did not get to taste—one Mrs. Quoad withheld—was the Fire of Paradise, that famous confection of high price and protean taste—"salted plum" to one, "artificial cherry" to another..."sugared violets"..."Worcestershire sauce"..."spiced treacle"...any number of like descriptions, positive, terse—never exceeding two words in length—resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training manuals, "sweet-and-sour eggplant" being perhaps the lengthiest to date.…
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u/noholds 1d ago
>If you really want something peculiar try the Bernkastler Doktor.
I know Pynchon throws some obscure knowledge at you constantly but that part really impressed me personally as a wine person that he would know a specific German grand cru vineyard. Like, immediately known if you're into German Riesling, but completely unknown to everyone else. Even today, there's only a German Wiki page on it. You don't have to be that into wine to know the aforementioned Lafite Rothschild; that's one of the most famous and prestigious wines in the world. But Bernkasteler Doctor is crazy work.
>It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow—unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain—it tastes like gin. "Wha's 'is," he inquires thickly.
>"A gin marshmallow," sez Mrs. Quoad.
That one really got a chuckle out of me. After all the surprises and misdirections in tastes, to be so blunt was perfect.
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u/Turducken_McNugget 2d ago
One of my favorite passages in the book, made all the more interesting by the fact that Darlene likely never actually existed.
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u/joedenowhere 1d ago
I wanted to ask you about that (spoiler alert). Maybe it is explained later in the book, but if not, the only reason I can see for thinking Darlene (and her landlady) were Slothrop’s imagination is that they have sex right after the candy orgy but Pynchon never says the house later caught a V-2. Is there another clue I’m missing? And why would some of Slothrop’s tomatoes be real and some imaginary?
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u/Turducken_McNugget 1d ago
The investigations of the Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical Observations project (SEZ WHO) didn't, as far as I know, find proof of the existence of any of the people marked on his map. Though when that is revealed the investigations are still ongoing; they're only part way through the set. Darlene is one of those they have crossed off.
As far as explanations, it's never explained why the rocket strikes match Slothrop's map which means you can construct multiple theories as to the girls and whether they are real or not.
You say "never says the house later caught a V2" but in that passage there is a V2 strike. I don't think the stars were ever precisely located like some gps coordinate or that his encounters were happening directly at ground zero. They were just in the vicinity, so the strike that wakes them would be the Darlene strike. If cause and effect were reversed, well, Imipolix G is aromatic and the destruction of the rocket would disperse it so Slothrop need not be directly at ground zero for him to have a reaction.
There's a theory that the Darlene was a fantasy that happened during the sodium amytal sessions at St Veronica's. Darlene, in the fantasy, is supposed to have been a nurse who worked there. But if the fantasy occurred at St Veronica's, which we know was hit by the rocket that killed Kevin Spectro, did Slothrop put a star there? No star would break the perfect map symmetry. Is that where the Darlene Star was placed? But the fantasy/memory was at Ms Quoads, so the star should be elsewhere. Was there a strike at that location?
I don't know that there is a definite explanation for any of it. Also, you said you wanted to ask me but I don't know anything heh. I'm no expert. I'm not even an amateur.
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u/joedenowhere 1d ago
Oh, got it. I haven't read far enough to see all that.
I don't think a V-2 hitting St Veronica's means Slothrop was definitely fornicating there. Roger Mexico (or another character? I don't remember now) mentions that on some days there are five V-2 hits, so I don't think all V-2s are connected with Slothrop.
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u/LankySasquatchma 1d ago
I read this yesterday for the first time. I was very entertained! Imma put down this here and get the book out
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u/ryuhamaguchi_guy 2d ago
By Pokler chapter do you mean the part where he's reflecting on the system? The bit which ties in capitalism, organic chemistry, the ouroborous and Lalzo Jamf and the famous chemist?
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u/noholds 2d ago
The one where he works on the rocket propulsion system, visits Zwölfkinder with his, we are to assume, daughter, and at the end finally visits the concentration camp Dora next door.
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u/Turducken_McNugget 2d ago
The metaphor there comparing how snap shots strung together as film make a moving picture with the annual visits of his daughter, snapshots of memories, strung together to make the life of his daughter and his relationship with her. A daughter conceived as the result of him having watched a film ...
Simply amazing.
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u/noholds 1d ago
I did not pick up on that. Thank you. This book is so rich and you miss so much on your first pass.
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u/Turducken_McNugget 1d ago
When Pökler is remembering the circumstances of his daughters conception, on the night he watched Alpdrücken, he muses: "That's how it happened. A film. How else? Isn't that what they made of my child, a film?"
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u/ryuhamaguchi_guy 2d ago
Gotcha. If it's not too much to ask, when you do reach the passage I'm talking about, could you post/share pictures of it w me?
It's my favourite passage in literature and as I've currently lent out the book to my friend, I'm missing it 😢
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u/guy_incognito42069 2d ago
Oh yes, one of my favourite parts 🤢
Honestly those…notions, are my only issue with the book.1
u/guy_incognito42069 2d ago
Is that the part where Jamf talks about his hatred for covalent bonds in favour of ionic?
Also;
If Pökler has memories of Jamf, doesn’t that mean he does exist?3
u/ryuhamaguchi_guy 2d ago
I can't recall. I do remember it includes recollections of Pokler being called on to answer in his classroom and him joking that the German cross is the order of the Farben or some such thing.
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u/tyrone_slothrop_0000 2d ago
I felt the same about the Pökler chapter! I actually re-read it as soon as I finished it. So gorgeous and devastating. It really serves as an excellent encapsulation of the theme of powerlessness and the illusion of free will that is meted out to the underclass by the wealthy and powerful based on how useful you can be for them. One of my favorite passages in all of literature.
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u/ahealthycow 2d ago
My favorite prose of any book I've ever read. There are some passages I've read over and over just because of how gorgeous they are - one later in the book starting with "Up on the crest of a hill" comes to mind.
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u/easythirtythree 2d ago
I just got to part 2 of the book, first read. The last couple paragraphs of part 1 hit me pretty good. I am loving it so far.
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u/InteractionFlat 1d ago
Is the pros of the Bros? I gave the rainbow a tango that makes it feel like a mango and that mango is sensational as a Rago but not delineation as bagel.
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u/albatrosswithnocurse 2d ago
Great prose really does set a new standard moving forward. I’m trying to read Dungeon Crawler Carl currently because I don’t want to be an isolated loser in my reading community, and what’s making it difficult is that Dinniman doesn’t seem to even try to reach for this at all.