Revisiting some old friends...

So I'm reading Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler once again, which has completely confirmed my thoughts on Calvino's influence on Orhan Pamuk (whose novel, The Black Book, I read earlier this summer). Both protagonists in If on a winter's night a traveler and The Black Book seek out their love of literature through the female characters they pursue. The Reader in Calvino's novel is obsessed with not only the books that are continuously disrupted, but Ludmilla, the Other Reader, and the way she experiences and enjoys the act of reading. Galip of The Black Book has a similar pursuit. He is absorbed by Celal's columns, and in his investigation finds himself to be very much like the characters in the detective novels his wife Ruya devours. Ludmilla and Ruya thus become a physical embodiment of literature. This is particularly the case when in If on a winter's night a traveler, the protagonist and Ludmilla have sex. The narrator compares the act of love to the act of reading (NOTE: this novel is mostly told in the second person),

"...now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds" (155, If on a winter's night a traveler).

I think it's interesting that Calvino deconstructs a pretty carnal human experience. Sex becomes
an examination, as one would pick apart a piece of text.

The structure of these works are similar as well. Every other chapter the audience reads the actual text that the protagonists would be reading themselves, while the other chapters fill in the plot and courses of action the protagonists take in order to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. The reader becomes a tag along in these characters' literary explorations, finding that they themselves could be in Galip's case deconstructing, or in the Reader's, solely enjoying, the piece of literature at hand. Despite such similarities, I find Calvino and Orhan's progatonists at odds. Calvino's character reads for the sake of reading, throwing away analysis of the work and ignoring any "position with regard to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems that demand a Solution" (44, If on a winter's night a traveler. Calvino). In The Black Book, Galip looks to find symbols and hidden meanings in his cousin Celal's columns. Galip begins to look at the world and literature as being rich with "mystery and ambiguity" (304, The Black Book). Everything becomes a clue and he marks up the newspaper columns like a mad man.

At the end of The Black Book, Pamuk completely pulls a Calvino. The narrator switches gears and chooses to withdraw you from the story of the book, "that, dear reader, is why I would prefer to leave you alone on this page...this would allow you to use your own imaginations to create that which my prose can never hope to achieve" (443, The Black Book). Here we are being asked to become a more active reader. We must look at what is beyond the page and absorb ourselves in our own thoughts. Throughout If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino's narrator does the same thing. He guides the Reader (the protagonist) through his interaction with him and speaks to him, but at times chooses to fade from the text. Calvino's descriptions withdraw the Reader from the narrator, "the author piles supposition on supposition in long paragraphs without dialogue, a thick, opaque layer of lead where I may pass unnoticed, disappear" (14, If on a winter's night a traveler).

Altogether, I find that each of these novels is "a bottomless well of stories inside stories inside stories" (177, The Black Book). The stories within these books bounce back and forth, meeting each other but quickly moving along their own path. I can't help but think of a Pynchon quotation from The Crying of Lot 49, the interaction between the stories is "a kiss of cosmic pool balls".

Women in GR

Throughout my reading of the novel, female characters have at times appeared to be within a slightly chauvinistic framework, but I think that this idea is all around quite limited. The common thread of the most significant female characters in the story is their relationship with whiteness and Light. First and foremost, white is the color of Death in Gravity's Rainbow, which is most significantly seen in the character Blicero or Captain Weissman (literally "white man") who is the director of V-2 manufacturing. The color white weaves in and out of the story, casting light on landscapes in the novel, and is exuded by several characters. What's interesting here is that within the context of women in GR, white gears away from a virginesque meaning, and transforms these characters into vessels that link the living to the Other World. This theme is most prevalent in the characters Katje Borgesius, Greta Erdman and her daughter Bianca.

We discover Katje as an agent of the White Visitation. Pynchon fleshes out her personal history, Blicero's using her as a sexual device along with Gottfried and her wide knowledge of mathematics. After her escape she meets Pirate against "an enormous sky all sea-cloudes in full march, all and plum, behind her, detects danger in her loneliness, realizes he's never heard her name, not till the meeting by the windmill known as 'The Angel'" (106), which completely frames her as a preternatural being. Through Pirate she eventually comes to help Osbie Feel in order to seduce Slothrop through a staged octopus attack. Her eventual sexual relationship with Slothrop reveals her mysterious qualities, "Katje's skin is whiter than the white garment she rises from. Born again..." (196). She is rather angelic here ("her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings" 224), and this enigma gives way to her slight omniscience that is exhibited by her physical being. The white of her skin and radiance portray her as a bridge between the concrete world and the paranormal. Beyond her glowing whiteness Slothrop is able to see another side that exists inside her:

"the moonlight only whitens her back, and there is still a dark side, her ventral side, her face, that he can no longer see, a terrible beastlike change coming over muzzle and lower jaw, black pupils growing to cover the entire eye space till whites are gone and there's only the red animal reflection when the light comes to strike" (196)

As we see here, the intimacies between Katje and Tyrone convey an unfamiliarity in Katje's being. While the moon reflects her angelic essence, the obscurity of light reveals her dark energy, which may function as an anti-gravitational force that could possibly challenge the Rocket. Katje's mystical traits illustrate her as having a power beyond this world, she is of "the Other Order of Being" (222). When she turns away from Slothrop in their post-coital state, Slothrop is more in tune with the hidden realities of her character.

Much later after Katje abandons Slothrop, he finds himself in the Zone and meets the former German actress Greta "Margherita" Erdman in Neubalbelsberg, and later aboard the Anubis, her daughter Bianca. He learns of Greta's self-proclamation as Shekhinah, the female representation of God in Judaic mysticism. She proclaims that "my home is the form of Light," which reveals her feminine god-like presence. As Shekhinah, Greta embodies the light of God but also contains dark side, which makes her vulnerable to evil powers. She then wreaks destruction by murdering children. Bianca is another White goddess that Slothrop keeps on trying to maintain a firm grasp on. Her power over Slothrop during intercourse forces him to feel as though he is "inside his own cock" (470). Her omniscience is exhibited through sex, "she has him all figured out" (469). After Bianca's disappearance Slothrop feels the same void as he did after Katje left him. Encountering Bianca's dead body, Slothrop sees the "mortal possibilities for light" (532), in other words, the extent at which this Light, which seems to be immortal, can have a demise.

In the Zone

The following concerns page 303:

In episode 2 of Part 3, Slothrop finds himself in the Nordhausen works where the rockets were transported through tunnels. Pynchon describes the ambience of this underworld where artificial matter dominates:

"All objects have grown still, drowned, enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. Tough skins of oxides, some only a molecule thick, shroud the metal surfaces, fade out human reflection. Straw-colored drive belts of polyvinyl alcohol sag and release their last traces of industrial odor."

Chemical and industrial materials (in particular the polymers used in the V-2) have digested whatever human traces remain. They are sovereign entities, much like the V-2 itself when it is released. Pynchon reveals how man has removed himself in the creation of warheads. Although bombs are made and directed by humans, they take on a life of their own. The symbolism of the Brennschluss point, "end of rocket's ascent when fuel is cut-off and it gives way to gravity" (http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/b.html), comes into play. When the initial energy given to the rocket burns out, gravity goes beyond being a physical force and becomes a cosmic power, controlling the life and death of whatever it strikes, raining down on the Earth as if the gods were displeased.

The lack of humanity in these underpasses gives birth to haunting energies, the "traffic of somewhere remote". Here everything seems to stop, "There is no more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to". Such an absence does not create a wasteland, but exudes an entirely different potency, which suggests something paranormal, something most definitely ambiguous. The "Uncertainty" that Pynchon describes is the blurred line between the living and the dead in a war zone. "Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living"...these are the prisoners of Nordhausen-Dora concentration camp who made and transported the V-2 rockets. The author reveals that in order to create such fatal weapons, the handwork must come from a soulless place, and what better than from the mangled bodies of war prisoners.

Going back Beyond the Zero...

So I've returned to Part 1 of Gravity's Rainbow in order to trace a couple of prevalent themes:

1. I've noted the use of the term zero, as in Absolute Zero, which reflects Pynchon's use of entropy (also significant in the Crying of Lot 49) and equilibrium in the novel.

2. Paranormal existence and the occult...reflected by Slothrop's memory of seeing the Northern lights as a child, and his sensing the supernatural forces that exist beyond them. Pynchon then parallels this phenomenon to the "great bright hand reaching out of the cloud..." (29) before the V-2 rockets are fired (Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Penguin Books. 1963.) This theme is further explored in the seánce where Roger Mexico and Jessica are introduced. The ritual reveals an encounter with the omniscient power of death as a guiding force, or as Pynchon describes, an "Invisible hand" (30).

These underlying elements create the negative space that molds the plot, similar to how gravity can dictate an object's course of motion or determines the shape of the Universe.

Gravity's Rainbow: 250 pages strong....

So about halfway into Part 2 and I’ve only just started using the companion. What have I gained from this? Names of Third Reich scientists, various polymers used in the V-2, competition between European chemical industries, Argentinian anarchists, Teutonic mythological figures, and references to culture way before my time.