The gangplank to the Ulysses S. Spivak von Badass raises for the Royal Anglican College of Upper Manhattan’s Comparative Literature and Society Faculty Lounge Club’s Annual Conference celebrating the magnum opus of the only allegedly–existing Thomas Ruggles Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow. There is no hope of escape. Many of the gathered, either grubbing for work–study hours or ignorant of the book altogether, are already drunk, clawing their way to the open bar. A number of jittery research assistants, emaciated from a diet of Yiddish demonology and Jacobean revenge plays, are ladling powder heroin under each other’s noses.
Over by the pool is a grad student, sucking another draught of cheek–pinching peach sherry. “Pinching Pynchon peach!” he ejaculates before uriating off the side of the boat, streaming not ungracefully onto the head of New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. “Pig,” she mutters angrily while ascending to the main deck. She considers the unfolding scene: legions of Pynchonites, tight–packed below deck and jealously gripping their self–annotated standardized editions of Gravity’s Rainbow. “This is a book that should only be read in the most monastic of atmospheres,” she laments. “Not on a fucking dinner cruise.”
From the prattling below deck, crucial details of the book in question can be discerned: it takes place in London during the Blitz, and revolves around a paranoiac named Tyrone Slothrop. British intelligence specialists, led by a neurotic bloke named Pointsman, figure out that wherever a V4 rockets lands, the location corresponds to a place where Slothrop had boned a woman days earlier. An army of ethically tranquilized British scientists wants to get Slothrop in order to sort things out about the inadvertently lethal consistency of his erectile tissue. Maybe his pherocious phallus has to do with his childhood, when he was sexually experimented upon by a doctor who developed materials for a brand new kind of V4. It’s one a possibility, though Slothrop disappears from the book before any conclusions can be drawn. It’s a monolith of a book—it could be about anything or everything or nothing, and we don’t even know when or where it ends or if it ends or if it’s still going on, right now, on this very boat.
The night’s main event, a panel titled “Gravity’s Rainbow: Uh...What?” is about to kick off on the lido deck, which is already strewn with cigarette butts and vomit and tears over a life wasted and other detritus you’d expect to see here. Li “Prez” Po opens the panel and proceeds to do what he does best, namely spoil the mood, as he leaves the jilted guests—“this book shows all the signs of being unreadable...”—to defend themselves.
“Agravity’s Arrrrrainbow,” growled Lionel Wellington Assmont III, the William S. Burroughs Professor of English Literature, “is oooouuuut to answer a single question undeniiiiiiiiably fundamental to our contiiiinued human existence: how elaaaaastic is the nature of cause and effect in this world of ouuuurs? I have examined such graaaaandiose themes in postmodern liiiiiterature since I received my PhD in the late–twenties from Priiiinceton. Recently, I have attempted to find the soluuuution to this prompt with my graaaaaduate students. You see, I lock them in a claaaassrrroom and have a work–study freshman read Gravity’s Rainbow to them aaaaallllll the way through without aaaany breaks of aaaaany sort. The freshman is kept awake by an IV drip of caffeine; the graaaaaduate students, straaaaaaapped to wooden chairs, are administered periodic quizzes to make sure they’ve consuuuuuumed it all. If they reach the end without noticing this natural elasticity, exemplified by how the rocket is only heard once it has laaaaaaaaanded as well as this inverrrrrrsion of cause and effect by Slothrop’s ability to sexually prediiiiiiiict where they’ll laaaaand—if they, in short, recognize aaaannny rational correspondence between aaannnny phenomena period—they can kiss their fellowship year goodbye! Because that’s what this book is reaaaaaally about.”
“Moron!” cries the Pavlovian specialist, Natalia Romanislovatsky, in a thick Russian accent. “Slothrop is nothing other than a deeply troubled man with a hyper–realistic case of extreme schizophrenia, cranking away while the rockets rain overhead. This book may appear to have 400 characters—Nazis and Soviet spies and Herero genocide victims and quintuple agents and killer octopi—but really it only has one. Time, space, plot, events—everything, in essence—is a moot point, because he spends the entire book masturbating in his London flat.”
“No one calls meeeeee a moron!” yells Assmont III, unleashing a geyser of saliva and coughing out false teeth. “I was reading Calviiiiino before youuuuuu even read Goodnight Mooooooon!”
“Cause and effect?” Romanislovatsky replies. “Utter ridiculousness, comrade. He is a sexually frustrated individual, which combined with his paranoiac propensities makes him the most troubled individual in all of literature. Slothrop, despite his psychological weaknesses, is the central force of the entire novel!”
“Slothrop the central force?” cry the multitudes in disagreement. A skirmish ensues, as the hired 14–piece Dixie jazz ensemble ducks a flurry of highball glasses while skonking with a certain incoherent concern.
“I must here interject, chaverim (friends),” a shrill, feminist voice exclaims. It belongs to Rabbi Aviva Joobag, a professor at the American Seminary of Theological Judaism. “If, as Pynchon suggests, the rocket is a kind of Torah—if in fact it is the Torah of our time, with rocket scientists replacing G–d and Slothrop replacing Moses and Pointsman replacing Pharaoh—then we must assume a complete Kabbalistic interconnectedness between everything in Gravity’s Rainbow and everything in the reality that Gravity’s Rainbow reflects. To understand this book is to look G–d in the face, to ask him ‘what is going on you twat,’ and to get flummoxing silence in return. ‘My children,’ (S)He says, ‘you’ve slaughtered one another with unbridled verve, and reduced My kingdom to a crippl’d Zone, ravaged by designs hateful to My sight. I shall withdraw, leaving you with tantalizing evidence of my divine presence: my 18–volumes on King Kong, the sacks of hashish Rocketmensch left in Berlin, a copy of Things That Can Happen in European Politics...’ And then G–d shuts up, and you’re left looking for Her sparks...”
“Whooo invited the feminist Jewwww?” cries Assmont III. “There is no place in Pynchon for your nitpicking!”
“Excuse me, chaver,” replies Joobag with a rapid twitch in her left eye. “Without the Torah, this book has nothing left. The rocket, you see, is the ultimate synthesis of science and religion! For the Torah is the source of all forms of human creation: literature, theater, film, music, painting, video art, one–man shows, manga, web design, Israeli dance—”
Joobag, overwhelmed by the sheer velocity of her speech, gags ever so slightly.
“Can it, you imbeciles!” cries the Pavlovian with severe impatience. “Science is the source of all knowledge. The rocket? Sexual conditioning? Slothrop would have no reason to exist without the scientific forces guiding his every thought, move, and, above all, seminal release! This book is a paean to scientific determinism. You religious zealots and pretentious literary shits cannot understand that without science there would be no art—no divine proportion, no symmetry, nothing! Pointsman is a hero!”
“All right, that’s it, that’s fucking it,” says an exasperated Roger Mexico, a minor character from Gravity’s Rainbow. “Look, I was fucking there, alright? I knew Slothrop. I’m in this goddamn book. These petty oppositions of yours are never meant to resolve themselves. Science and religion and literature and everything share in the same oncoming disaster. They all launch the rockets that are falling on every one of us, and this fact renders just about everything that happens in the book all but completely irrelevant. Furthermore—”
“Aaaaaand that’s all for today’s panel,” interrupts Li “Prez” Po. “Thank you to our panelists. You are now all invited to join in a delightful soiree on the pool deck.”
And so then everyone moseyed on over to the pool, where the yearly faculty orgy commenced. It is a shocking thing to witness, this long–rumored academic exercise in sexual recreation: a sea–borne sexmarch snaking down the stairs to the pool, up again to the domineering captain’s tower and then down to the vulvic depression of the deck below. Ferret Farraday jerking off Monkey Maxwell while simultaneously consuming an entire bowl of kreplach, while Maxwell eats out at Chez Sheep Sachs while she rubs down Tarsier Tyrone with some exotic Kirgyz love potion made from crushed young wisteria, who trips over one of the Dixie musicians just as he’s receiving a full–body massage as epic as the Rocket’s final descent...
Amidst this madness, a couple of the wonkier academic types carp over the degradation of this current stock of scholars. “I mean really—an orgy?” one of them asks, taking in the outrageous scene below. “Predictable. Gravity’s Rainbow has plenty of orgies, but they’re all a distraction from the dark, terrifying heart of the thing—the kamikaze rocket, symbolizing the possibility that the entire human race is imprisoned in the V4. There’s no solution to this, this human–rocket synthesis, this mindless hurtling into purple–tinged rocket noon and beyond the zero beyond. Look at the ending, the “Now Everybody—,” that impotent emdash. This book doesn’t end per se—it quits. Is it nihilism? Is it ambivalence? Are we all going to be cut off mid–sentence?”
Hurling his highball glass at a nearby trombonist, he finished, and removed his hands from his pants. In time the band regroups, and everyone, with a certain post–coital exhaustion, sings:
I dipped my head into the bowl
Down toilet I did go,
Into a mystr’y cratered Zone,
With Kirgyz lights aglow.
Approaching them I durnst not do
The distance flashes bright,
Harmonica I follow you,
Till wither does my might.
Once more—
Above: The central (or not-so-central) character in Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, about whom academics so tenaciously disagree. Illustration © Zak Smith, http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/zak_smith/366.htm
ARMIN ROSEN, List ’10, is a senior editor of The Current. Armin can be reached at arr2133@columbia.edu
SAM KERBEL, List ’11, is staff writer of The Current. Sam can be reached at ssk2140@columbia.edu.