I am reading a book by
Thomas Pynchon which is called Gravity’s Rainbow
This
presentation will refer back to it a lot, so I thought I'd talk about
it first.
Thomas Pynchon is an
American author. This is him. He is a reclusive character – hence
all the question marks - he doesn't have any promotional photos for
his books, and until someone ran a police check on him in the 80s,
everyone thought he lived in Mexico. These are the only photos widely
available of him, when he was in high school. Because of this
'recluse' status, there are loads of weird rumours about him, like
that he was the Unabomber,
or that he had tried
to kill the Executive Director of Peel holdings whilst on a trip to
England .
In reality, his
no-photo policy is just a mixture of shyness and contrariness.
Even when he appeared
as a cameo on the Simpsons, he appeared with a paper bag over his
head...
I guess he is like the
king of the American post-modernist novelists – All these later
writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers are really
influenced by his style and the themes he writes about. Gravity's
Rainbow came out in 1973 and is an anarchic sprawling, multi-layered
piece of fiction which weaves together loads of different stories and
ideas. It is sort of hard to summarise but I'll need to at least give
it a go in order to do the talk so here it goes.
It takes place in
London at the end of the second World War, and then in Europe in the
weeks after VE day. The whole book is about the V2 rockets that were
fired at London by Germany in the last year of the war.
There is this American
Intelligence Officer in London, called Tyrone Slothrop, and he is
being followed by these war scientists because it seems that he can
predict where the V2 rockets are going to fall. Basically, where ever
he has sex, that is where the next rocket will fall. The idea is that
his erection is sort of sensing where the rockets will land.
The thing to know about
V2 rockets is that they work backwards, in terms of how people
perceive them from the ground. With the blitz, you would hear the
planes coming, then see the planes, then hear the bombs dropping,
then see and hear the explosion. But V2 rockets are faster than the
speed of sound, so you would see the explosion, and then, moments
later, you would hear the screeching sound of the rockets
approaching. They reversed the causal chain in terms of your
subjective empirical perception.
The book relates this
reversal of causality to the possibility of predicting events. As in,
V2 rockets reverse the causal chain of noise and
thing-that-makes-noise, and therefore are, in a way, working
backwards in time. Sort of like if you could bet on a horse race
after it finished and you knew who won.
But the thing is that
Slothrop, the character who is predicting these events, doesn't know
that he is doing it. He just goes around London having sex, it is
everyone else who makes the link between his erections and the V2
Rockets.
After VE day, he goes
on the run, leaving London and going to Europe, because he realises
that he is being watched by “Them”, but he doesn't know why.
“Them” is an
important term in the book – the paranoid idea that there are
people who are watching you, and who are controlling everything.
“Them” is who you have to look out for, “they” connect the
dots, without “Them” nothing makes sense
So “They” end up
following Slothrop around post-war Europe – which Thomas Pynchon
refers to as 'The Zone' - and Slothrop follows his cock, via a
succession of sexual encounters with women, men, children and animals
towards this Nazi rocket base – at the base is the next stage of
the V2 rockets, which are faster and more powerful than anything ever
built. This is what “They” are really after. They are following
Slothop's cock to secret Nazi technology.
These ideas of
prediction and causality and technology are also linked to Slothrop's
paranoid theories about why “They” are following him.
And this really becomes
the central theme of the book, because it turns out that everyone in
The Zone has various paranoid theories about what is happening and
who is behind it. Everyone is getting incomplete information, and
this naturally leads to everyone having a different interpretation of
what is going on.
Paranoia, in the
context of The Zone, becomes quite a functional, useful thing. It
helps the different characters make sense of what is happening. I
suppose Post-war Europe was totally chaotic, so anything that
explained what was happening was better than nothing, even if it was
based on misunderstanding and falsehoods.
In the book, paranoia
is seen more as an excess of reasoning, sometimes true and sometimes
untrue, but never un-useful or unreasonable. In fact, sometimes it
seems that paranoia is the only way that any of the characters can
make sense of the chaos in which they are trying to live.
At one point someone is
talking to Slothrop about the hierarchies of paranoias. There is your
basic paranoia, which is all about Them, the “Them” that is
watching you and out to get you and knows what you will do next.
But if you want to
really get into it, then you need to move onto “Us” or “Me”
paranoia. As in, the paranoia that even your own actions are
motivated by other, mysterious reasons that you can't possibly
comprehend.
Once you have
cultivated this paranoia, says the character, then you can really
understand The Zone, because you can rid yourself of the fallacy of
reason, i.e. you can finally submit to the chaos of reality, without
believing that you have any influence over it whatsoever.
–
So for my bits of this
talk, I'd like you to keep in mind the idea that perhaps all human
reasoning, all our understanding of cause and effect, and all our
attempts to predict what will happen next (in daily life, in the
economy, in politics, in everything) are just different levels of
paranoia, different but equally ill informed psychotic hypotheses.