In which our journey ends….
Congratulations and my thanks to everyone who took to the trail, you 35 or so who started this journey and enabled us achieve launch velocity, and you 13 or 14 who will make it through to the other side, 750 pages and 350+ comments later. A survival rate to be proud of, I think, given the history this book has for breaking people’s spirits.
Me myself, I’ve still got about 30 pages to go, which seems appropriate — I’ve been just a little behind most of the way. I’m savoring the last little bit now, sorta soaking up the sauce. Just got to a sequence this morning that seemed an excellent sharp-elbowed response to anyone understandably searching for a tidy wrap (page 733, p/v):
Underneath, someone else has written, in English: Good drawing! Finish! and underneath that, in another hand, It IS finished, you nit. And so are you.“
Defensive jabs and all. I’ve just loved the hell out of this book. The first 100 pages or so were pretty rough going for me, as I struggled to get the rhythm of the thing. And there were a few parts in the middle where he almost lost me. But certainly, from the Casino on, the pure fun factor has been much richer than I ever expected.
All in all, there are few books I’ve gotten more out of than this beast. And there’s just no way I would have ever gotten past page 30 without the group. So here’s to you all, with a mighty clink to clinking mugs in celebration.
Next week: We take a little bit of a break and soak our feet in preparation for the next trail — something a little bit easier on the knees and a great deal shorter. Look for “The Pale Fire Deathmarch” — coming soon to a cecilvortex.com near you.
(I might have something pithy later. Unlikely, yes, but might. However, let’s get this on the record while the record is open, OK?)
I’ve been waiting four days to say:
Never. Again.
I was going to say something nice here however the book ended. If nothing else (and it’s a lot else), GR is a hyperactive celebration of the human imagination. The accumulation of detail is amazing. My favorite in this stretch is the pipe Gottfried (“God’s peace”) lays his face against inside the rocket as he lovingly hurtles toward death. In the middle of all the weirdness, Pynchon gives him that pipe! So human. And that kind of stuff happens all the time. Pynchon seems to really like these people, even the “bad” ones–Marvy, Pointsman, Blicero–are kind of funny: the book’s really warm that way. Maybe it’s why he has a tough time letting subplots go?
And it ends on a note of warmth and subtle hope I think (do you?) that I really responded to. Blicero’s death rocket fizzles, maybe was even supposed to, given Pynchon’s view of Western Rilkean angelic science power as an erotic drive for the white north of Death. Enzian’s life rocket doesn’t exactly lift off to the stars, but at least gets passed on to the next generation. The boy finds his lemming. Slothrop dissipates, true, but Rocketman lives on in the anarchic harmonicas that surround the manager of that L.A. movie theater c. 1973 (?). Some rocket or another’s bound to hit us all, we’re each of us in that theater on the last page, no? esp. since we’re analytic Westerners, not myth-driven preterite Hereros. But is Death really the end? Or just a conspiracy to make us afraid? Time’s arrow gives way to that Gnostic/Kabbalistic Tree of Life that needs to be seen all at once, not in a series, a la those German engineers analyzing rocket films in segments way back when. Hey, is that why we end in a movie theater?
But forget ideas; it’s just amazing to see what the brain can do given enough talent, obsession, drugs, and time. C.V. & fellow Marchers: Thanks.
back a few comments to potsdam being at the center of it all–i had forgotten that amazing stretch. and there are so many arcs to choose from throughout. but i’m feeling a tug (gravitational?) from the passage about kekule’s dream–also near the center of the book–and that vision of a different form–the circle.
i guess it’s not a competition–arc vs. circle: who will step out of the ring victorious?!–but perhaps TP meant the two forms to represent competing views–say, crash-landing vs. orbit, beginnings and endings vs. cycles?
as for the end, hmmm–doubt and confusion reign now that i see rk’s take on it. my reading of the last few pages was far enough off from this one that i actually wondered for a moment if we had different translations…. so the next time i am of clear and calm mind, i’ll be giving those pages another read.
and that gets right to, yup, the center of how wonderful it’s been to read GR in this company–all the “translations” lighting up so many corners i would have missed. so i’ll wholeheartedly second: hooray for cv and the marchers!
Rather than offer any sense of conclusiveness, I’ll throw a few more thoughts into the pile.
So many arcs to choose from – beautifully put. It’s always the one or the zero – the life rocket or the death rocket – the white man and the black instrument. Except how do you choose your binary opposite. Is it Tchitcherine v. Enzian, Mexico v. Pointsman, Slothrop v. the rocket, Slothrop v. Tchitcherine, old Tchitcherine v. his son, Slothrop v. everyone… where do I stop? Give me eight ones and zeros, I’ll give you 256 possible digital combos. And the one and zero are suppose to limit choices?
The start and the end – at start, we are in the dream of a rocket strike compared to theater. In the end, we are in a theater awaiting a rocket strike with the image on the screen dreaming.
Edward Mendelson in “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” noted that we start by hearing the rocket – if we learned nothing else in this book, it ought to be that if you hear that rocket, it missed you. Therefore, we survive at the end.
Death – I said before no one objectively is seen to die in the novel. Gottfried must at the end. OTOH, Prentice must when his plane is crashing at the start of the last book. Yet he shows up to explain systems to Mexico later. At the last delta t we die, but the last delta t can be put off …infinitely?
I’ve loved this ride folks. Hope I can join in for Nabokov – BTW, I can’t remember, have we discussed the fact that TRP took a writing class with Nabokov at Cornell? Apparently, Nabokov did not remember him; his wife (who helped read student work) did – especially his handwriting.
I finally crawled to the finish line about 4 PM yesterday. Picture me haggard, unshaven, coughing, nursing my sprained knee, getting a little burst of energy as I spot the yellow tape ahead. Once across I collapse in a heap, satisfied but eager to take a long hot tub and forget the whole thing.
Still, I’m glad I did it. A lot of nice scenery along the way, and a few moments of real transcendence. Did anybody get any good pictures?
just finished and I will confess to a fair amount o’ confusion, particularly re those mini-scenes leading up to the rocket launch. I blame Steve Edelman! And I have no idea why.
Will have to take some time this weekend to re-read some of the last 10 or 20 and try and figure out if/how these fragments add up. For now, they’re fragmented like fragments, sliced like apple slices that have been sliced by an apple slicer.
By the way, I took the movie theater interlude as the Pnychon version of “it was all just a dream, folks.”
As if we needed to be told that.
All in all I ultimately enjoyed the book. Wouldn’t have made it all the way without knowing there were others on the march as well. It was kind of hard to find the bits of beauty in this journey, but Mr P. didn’t disappoint in the end P735, “This is magic. Sure-but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it.” Lovely stuff.
It was a bit unsatisfying to me that Slothrop didn’t have a more definite ending, kinda just disappated into wherever. It was a long journey & I think he deserved better. Looking forward to the next book-think I’ll take a nap now.
It’s barely been a week, and I guess I’ve sort of forgotten that I read it. It’s dissipated. But somehow something’s there nattering at the endge of my sleep.
Hi Gang,
I got to see the poet/classicist Anne Carson interviewed last night. She said something about Greek drama that helped me squeeze a little more sense out of GR.
Modern drama, she said, is about emotion: the characters, their inner states, the personalities that motivate their behavior. Greek drama is about the action unfolding in time, its particular shape and design, to which the characters serve as attendants. Greek actors wore masks because the characters they depicted were generalized types, and the particular emotions that pass across an actors’ face were irrelevant to the drama. She said she couldn’t imagine a modern play, even Beckett, that put the actors in masks.
GR’s got a hell of a lot of personalities, very deftly drawn, but in the last section of the book they retreat in service of the design traced by the Rocket, that simultaneous arc toward death that’s also, seen as its own mirror image (a la Tchitchere/Enzian to take one of many “mirrored” characters in the book), the second half of an orbit (thanks, e.!!). Cycles of life, snakes gobbling tails (412), distinctions like preterite/chosen, black/white erased, a polymorphous perversity with “all notes truly equal at last” (440): “All the same here. Birth, soul, fire, building. Male and female, together.” (563). The possibility of synthesis without control?
Anyway, do you think it’d be fair to say that this is really a story about an ARC? And with the arc, as Dr. Vitz points out, you never ZERO IN, you just keep doing delta t’s in an algorithm that never hits a limit (like I know from math). “The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero,” (319, this whole page worth a re-read) but it’s OK, that “movement toward stillness” is endless, because you never reach it. Can’t find that passage where the German scientists study their rocketfilms, trying to analyze the arc in short, repeatable strips of film. But it’s got to feed in somehow, if you find it and it looks helpful, please let me know. Does this jibe at all with your “translations”?
at this point, i’m just going on fumes–no analysis, just impressions and more questions.
but i keep coming back to the knot more than the arc (a knot on its surface appears to be made up of lots of little arcs, but that’s an illusion). pynchon tells us at the beginning that he’s knotting into, not disentangling. but even if we’re meant to untie the knot, what’s at the center? nothing there. zero.
so is the knot like approaching death–always a delta-t away? objectively we know humans die. but either we will not experience it at the very moment (because consciousness ceases at that moment) or we will find ourselves on some other “side,” on our next trajectory, and then that moment of the passing might seem immaterial.
rk: is this the film reference you wanted at p.407/413?
“During flights the camera photographed the needles swinging on the gauges. After the flight the film was recovered, and the data played back….There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries–since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now Pokler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been extended past images on film, to human lives.”
i’ve read that more than once, and i just can’t grasp the meaning of it, but it comes just a few pages after a zen-and-the-art-of-archery scene and this text: “Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid….We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.” oh, ok, so that sounds like we CAN experience the zero, the nothingness at the center of the knot. or maybe pynchon is just making fun of zen?
and then (at around 516/524) there’s this bit: “John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the movie images that hadn’t quite yet faded from his eyeballs….” so there he is, a historical figure whose death at a movie theater we can be certain of, but pynchon has him approaching his death by way of “the rapid flashing of successive stills”–so he’s not at zero yet either, even while gable is exhorting him to “Die like ya live–all of a sudden, don’t drag it out–“.
Hi e.,
Yes, that’s it! Thanks a ton, I was going nuts!!
On experiencing the zero (per e.) – sure, but not for long. Imagine the rocket arc; as the rocket ascends, potential energy is increasing the whole way up, and kinetic energy is decreasing. At the top potential energy is at its highest, and kinetic is at absolute zero. Then kinetic energy starts increasing, and potential start decreasing. The moment of the “zero” for kinetic energy is fleeting at best and is necessarily accompanied by the highest possible potential energy. Is that experiencing zero?
And calculus – what a great fiction that is. Take a function, and figure the area under it. How? Imagine a rectangle with an infinitely small width, and figure its area. Now imagine an infinite number of rectangles with infinitely small widths. According to all the principles of math we are taught going into calculus, those rectangles effectively have zero width and, therefore, zero area. You can multiply zreo by any number you like (even infinity) and it’s still zero. And yet, adding together an infinite number of infinitely small rectangles does not yield zero in calculus; it accurately determines the area under the function.
Is there nothing at the center? If you peel away every layer of an onion, what’s at the center?
Does Pynchon want to have it both ways? Absolutely. But maybe it is both ways in nature too.