[text|film]notes

It’s stunning to read this a third time, though the first reading was about a decade ago and the second was maybe five years ago (and I don’t think I quite finished it, as I left my copy with my friend Naren in New Delhi). But reading this with the annotations, while slow (and incredibly awkward to hold two books, especially when on the bus or subway {with added embarassment factor, as heads turned, constant Glaswegians thinking ‘why does that dickhead have two books?’}), has been rewarding beyond my wildest dreams.

It’s hard to try and capture this into any sort of sensible framework, but this blog is merely for rough notes, which I neglected to jot down throughout the reading. I’ve realised that this novel is pretty much the opposite of how it’s perceived. The incredible, tight structure of the narrative makes my head spin; it’s crazy to think how most people regard it as a formless mess. The circular mandala imagery reigns throughout, from the Schwarzkommando’s Herero symbol to the rainbow itself, visible to us as the beautiful, ‘elect’ half while the preterite half lies under the earth. (Of course Against the Day goes wild with this duality/refraction imagery, which makes it feel even more like a prequel and makes me want to read that again now, and attempt to position it into a similar structure).

Structure aside, there’s an incredible clarity to some of the writing; it is extremely digressive but the constant analpses (and the odd prolepsis or two) is all purposeful. Weisenburger’s annotations gave me the erudition to understand the references, whether it be Kabbalah, rocket science, or any of the other historical and cultural traces that litter this encyclopedia.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a work of very tightly defined morality as well, perhaps even into stereotyped, ‘good vs. evil’ opposites; Bliero/Weissman as the elect, the embodiment of pure evil, the ‘white man’ who fragments into the Dick Cheneys and Aristotle Onassises of post-war America … then Slothrop, the celebrated Bohemian, his preterite molecules dispensing into the seeds of counterculture and rebellion. But then again, Pynchon seems cynical of that - the mythologising of Slothrop as Rocketman, in the Zone, prefigures the marketing and commodification of youth rebellion, hippie/yippie culture, etc. Who symbolises that more than Der Springer, Gerhardt Vön Göll, who exploits the changing tastes for business purposes? Plus as a film director, he is in a position to utterly manipulate reality, even “creating” it: ‘it is widely believed that the Schwarzkommando have been summoned, in the way demons may be gathered in, called up to the light of day and the earth by the now defunct Operation Black Wing’. (276).

The cinema actually figured quite strongly here, as the frequent film references do more than just situate GR in its mileu; it reflects the change in times, the end of the novel, sent packing with what else by a massive, dense 760-page novel that features a rocket landing on a cinema on the last page. The sexual potency of film exists throughout, whether it’s Grigori the Ocotpus being conditioned with films of Katje Borgesius or Greta Erdelmann’s pornographic exploits with her own daughter. In a way, GR shows technology as yet another means of control, whether it’s the ‘hard’ technology of the rocket or the ’soft’ approach of cinema/propaganda.

Maybe one could read GR from a Virilian perspective, though with the sexual connectivity to the rocket/Imipolex substituted for (or accentuating) Virilio’s dromos - maybe this is what happens if you eliminate Virilio’s Catholicism from the equation. In my master’s dissertation I wrote about Virilio, specifically his idea of the ‘accident’ in art; that with all technology there is an implicit negative side, an accident, that is created with the birth of the technology. This is the other side of the rainbow, gravity’s rainbow, buried underground, repressed beyond the Zero but certainly there if one can be conditioned to retrieve it. The preterite, eternally championed by Pynchon in all of his novels, are the foot-soldiers of the accident, ready to march on despite being passed over by the machinations of Blicero, Richard M. Zhlubb, and the Ned Pointsmans of the world.

Without Weisenburger’s annotations, I would only have sensations of the allegories present in this text. The Kabbalistic idea of the Qlippoth, while explicitly mentioned multiple times, has it’s modern-day analog in the shedding of rocket parts. The numerological themes are 8, 10, 12 - which occur in the structure of the book, the number of identities of Slothrop, and a bunch of other things. The overriding colors are black and white (of course, with Blicero and his counterpart Enzian) and red, the color of blood, of the Nazis, of fire, the heat of the rocket fuel burning…

It’s easy to say that postmodern fiction always leaves loose ends and resists interpretation; of course Pynchon is famous for that, and he even warns against trying to connect all of the dots (”You will want cause and effect” (663) and a bunch of other narrative intrustions). We are left ‘glozing’, distracted by the encyclopediac style and missing the point, caught up like Slothrop himself. But that’s okay, for ‘glozing neuters are just as human as heroes and villains.’ (677) Metafiction aside, Pynchon’s conspriacies are strangely perfect and beautiful; coming when this book did, it is perhaps the truest novel of American empire, despite not taking place in America. It is the birthing of us all, Weissman and Slothrop as the postmodern Adam and Eve.

I can’t think of anything that is more perfect as a summation of late-20th century capitalism. The sheer number of references is a testament to diversity, the choices available to us; where the highbrow and the lowbrow merge in a sea of satire. If Pynchon is critical of the structure of our society — which he has to be, at least a little bit as shown by his characterisations of Them — then he is also a master at celebrating it. Slothrop, motivated to understand the “truth” behind his own manipulations, essentially gives up, sidetracked by an endless Zone of ‘mindless pleasures’ (the original name of the novel, of course). Likewise, the Counterforce that assembles in the 4th part of the book, a collection of conspiratorial middlemen who mutiny and ’see the light’, loses steam narratively as soon as they are formed; they are “too late” (752), unlike the comic book heroes of fantasy that offer solace to the grinning Fool, Tyrone Slothrop. “Too late” is perfect to describe the preterite, who trod on endlessly making the best of what happens. I don’t know what I think of Oberst Enzian’s goal of self-obliteration; maybe this is present in us, though we are distracted by the products of Blicero, ascended as the King of Cups (749). The free market, the choices of consumerism (which even art is reduced to, again exemplified by Der Springer), is the seed of Blicero; it ‘bleaches’ us into a monoculture, satiating us into a planet of Fools. Our tarots are incomplete, unlike his; we aren’t concerned anyway.

Obviously there’s a lifetime of reading and re-reading for me here; having read this right after Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke I’ve just seen World War II before and after through books. Of course one Baker is somber and informative; then I skip ahead a few years to Gravity’s Rainbow which is totally bonkers and fragmented, as if the war itself is a prism of absurdity.

p.25 - Art has ‘lost the desire for illusion’ - has become ‘transaesthetic’. Art must have underlying mystery, cannot be just superficial and null. Irony is part of ‘the conspiracy’.
p.104 - what to be done ‘after the orgy’? orgy = ‘explosive movement of modernity, of liberation in every domain.’ Orgy can only be simulated now. p.106 - ‘Sublime of modern art lied in the magic of its disappearance’. But this utopia of disappearance has been accomplished.

Juxtaposition of political story of Baaden-Meinhof activities against personal sounds, domestic life, conversations.

Offscreen dialogue with pans over meaningful objects - bread, baby shoes, hands again and again but no bodies; symbols of a political nature as well (gun, books, photograps); tin cans … compare to Stalker’s long sequence of rusty objects underwater.
Sequences on train also has this horizontal panning motion, back and forth or should I say <-->

What is the relation between the sound and images here? The sound is really the star of this film.
The woman interviewed at the desk - psychiatric patient as explained in the credits - thought she was supposed to represent Meinhof at first but then is called Annette at end, also speaks of being american. Language is disorienting. Queues of people in the background add sense of surrealism otherwise absent.

Homemade radio from tin cans - invention, echoes repeated shots of hands which could be symbols of ingenuity or violence.

Repeated images - such repetition - Stonehenge? Why? The oriental-style doorway, train shots… reveals an amateurism, or is this all very careful?

Berkman’s account of assassination attempt on Frick, followed by the woman’s account of Trepov assassination attempt. Both over this endless shot of the doorway - actual words of dramatisation? Both are failures. They bring a really human element to the question of violence, show the uncertainty and variability of violent acts. Is this a moral judgement? Humanity later discussed by patient at desk, or lack of. Where is the violence in this film? In the language?

Titles are critical of the German government’s suppression of free speech in the wake of Baader-Meinhof, thus giving the film a subjectivity, involuntarily heroizing the anarchists? But this film is about (among other things) the troubles in this issue; the act of value judging violent revolutionaries.

The woman at the desk is the most fascinating voice, and also the most troublesome. Her language is disorienting, yet it draws me in. A violence of words?

Ending - becomes quicker with edits, sound bouncing between soundtracks; two voices, managing to be confusing though it really isn’t.

Final shot of Rainer learning (or teaching?) recorder - to mark her connection to the creative process? To be seen as the rejection of violence? Some sort of personal stance?

Such intensity despite no actual plot, and very short, terse paragraphs/sentences.

Reminds me a bit of David Markson’s novels, except focused on introspection instead of cultural matters.

Natural descriptions are beautiful and moving; the lists that populate the book are very functional - but rather than providing a comedic effect as they would in Sorrentino’s writing, they emphasise the variety of the natural world.  The rain overpowers the novel, actually providing a physical effect on me.

Would be interesting to write about this a bit, maybe compare it to other novels that are just old men thinking, like ‘Agapé Agape’.

Geology is such a force here.  I can only wonder what my elderly thoughts will be like.

I’ve always thought of Godard and ‘A bout de souffle’ as the beginning of Modernist film, but these Antonioni films (though slightly after) make a good case. There’s something so … austere? about them.  The shots are so clean and unemotional.

-Could there be a more “modern” film than this? Electo-acoustic music during credits of La Notte, with sparse, barren cityscapes behind it. Lots of verbal space in both films, fleshed out by images, all carefully framed.

-Stock market scenes in L’Eclisse (though they feel lenghty) accentuate the inhumanity of it. Vittoria is often obscured by furniture or architecture, consumed by her environment.

-All architecture is very modern, nothing of the Italian tradition. Very cold, urban focus, though Lydia’s return to her old neighborhood in La Notte indicates a yearning for it.

Ending sequence of L’Eclisse is completely amazing.  Paves the way for Patrick Keillor’s London and a million other things.  That sequence almost seems like it’s an attempt to completely break with the cinematic tradition and reduce the film to an obvious series of frames, spaces and lights.  The newspaper with the arms race reference almost upsets it, because it seems to be too obvious.  The eclipse of humanity by pure objects?

-I guess this film is about romance yet is the most unromantic film ever.  The use of sound is great too - it punctuates the silence between the characters - esp. the electric fan at the beginning.  The stock market sequence seems all the more strange given how I felt like i just watched the most placid, uneventful film - yet there was this long scene in the middle with hundreds of people screaming, though it didn’t seem to register in my impression of it.  Or maybe it’s just that the ending sequence blew over everything else.  Wow.

Finally read this after years of looking at it on the shelf — it’s been maybe six years since I’ve read Light in August or any other Faulkner.  The stream-of-consciousness style that is always remarked upon was manageable, even easy compared to what I was expecting - maybe it’s all of the other difficult literature I’ve absorbed in the meantime or just being older as a reader.

Idea of the uncertainty of history - this was what I enjoyed the most about this novel, not so much the family drama but the way it was told and re-told, becoming a confusing mess and thus capturing the difficulty of any sort of repesentation.  Joyce’s influence is always remarked upon, but beyond the stylistic aspect, the pluralism of viewpoint through text is a much deeper comparison.

But beyond this there is a wealth of more conventional novelistic themes: guilt/shame, the myth of the self-made America, of course the Southern take on all of this.

Esp. interesting in regards to Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge that I’m trying to bash my way through at the same time - ideas of signifiers and language are totally in play here, and a close re-reading could be benficial.  Not that it will happen any time soon.

-second episode: stunning!
-game theory led to (inherently pessimistic) view of human behavior as agenda-pursuing, backed up by r.d.laing’s research into the family as the cause of schizophrenia. right-wing seizes on that to model their reform of government services on the assumption that there is no such thing as the public interest - that a common good for competing agendas is impossible.
- followed by clinton economic model
(fascinating how greenspan met with him before the inauguration - find sources, could be the genesis of the new democratic party)
- market democracy a la thomas frank - deregulation is burying politics -[interesting to think about how the culture war leads to the election of politicans, which perpetuates the deregulation that leads to class differences]
- prozac and SSRIs as perhaps a defining moment at the end of the 20th century - regulating mental disorders, which were more than likely improperly diagnosed.
- gene theory of our bodies merely as hosts for genes, and the conflicting viewpoints on the ax fight experiment with napoleon chagnon

“One way or another, our small country has seen the birth of a miracle - the Zone.”

-fears of Stalker going to prison again, but he is imprisoned anyway through his relationship with the Zone

Writer: “The world is ruled by cast-iron laws, and it’s insufferably boring. Alas, these laws are never violated.”

Both Prof and Writer hire Stalker because they “need” the Zone for something - Writer for inspiration, Prof because he wants to destroy it.

(Chernobyl? Negative monuments, invisible accident….)

Pre-Zone: sneaking in, subterfuge. Puddles of stagnant water everywhere (Estonia is damp!) - even this most action-packed section in the film has lengthy shots and an avoidance of sudden cuts.

“The moment we name them, their meaning disappears.” (Writer)

Soundtrack: Tense, water droplets create rhythm — gunfire overrides the sounds of birds and wildlife but is a cruel counterpoint to the dripping.
In the Zone:
-bent power lines - immediately a break with 90′ angles, weird disjointed viewpoints. Broken car in dsitance.

Stalker calls it “home” - having defined himself through the Zone, must physically connect to it upon entering.

Extremely slow camera movement in opening shot of the Zone. In non-Zone scenes the camera momement is linear, two-dimensional; in the Zone, it moves in 3 dimensions, creating the sense of shifting physical space.
Building in distance - looks serene. Fog shifts, covering and uncovering imprecise background objects and landmarks.

the flowers don’t smell!

Stalker’s behavior is the effect of the Zone on him over time - physical changes in himself (and Monkey).

Destroyed cars have become integrated into the landscape.

“We all thought then that somebody wanted to conquer us.”

Fossilized military residue.

Path to the room cannot be direct.

When Writer attempts to go to the Room on his own, voice tells him to stop. We are not afforded a clear view of what he sees - the Room is always slightly blurry, unreachable, intangible.

“Lets those pass who have lost all hope.”

-fragments of newsprint underwater.  shimmering landscape - dustclouds on foliage that is now bleached brown.

-sepia dream sequence makes us think we’re back “behind the barbed wire”, but actually we’re in the Zone still - the long underwater pan: fish, coins, needles, religious icons, gun, springs, moss - water is transforming, creating a new world from the debris of the old.  This IS montage, though a montage of objects without a single, cyclical shot (beginning and ending with the body of the Stalker, the human presence needed to connect the material world to the spiritual).

“Everythying has some sense.  Sense and reason.”

In the meat-grinder:
-entering the tunnel - 3 men are scared, the fear is caried over though we don’t see what they are seeing - it proves to be just a dark, empty tunnel, so they are also afriad of what they don’t see.  Fear follows from a  lack of knowledge/understanding about this new world.
-Water saturates the tunnel and all areas of the Zone that are enclosed.  Writer pulls a gun, but there is no physical enemy.  Inside the door is a pool of water that must be passed through, like a baptism.  Stalker pushes the gun deeper into the water.

Sand room - the pools of water return.

stalker: most important aspect of the Room is that “you have to believe”.
Prof: Zone is part of nature, and therefore hope.
Stalker: The room is the only hope.

“behind the barbed wire” - inverts protected, closed off area of the Zone to make “normal” world the prison.  he feels free in the Zone.

Camera remains stationary throughout the debate outside of the Room, only moving when they all sit.  It pulls back, the color/lighting changes so the sepiatone returns to link us to the non-Zone - and then the rain begins to fall.

Piece of bomb, fish, and blood, shown underwater, with train sounds, again uses water to link the two worlds.

-Riddley Walker centers on Canterbury; Kent becomes a Zone, an area explored in an attempt to unravel the accident
-Myth: bomb is the great destroyer, like Shiva

-epicenter of RW is “womb” in Canterbury Cathedral - again, a room at the center like in Stalker.  Cannot be approached directly.

-Eisenstein: idea of montage based upon movement and space; Tarkovsky rejects artificial rhythms and builds his cinema around internal rhythm

-emphases of poetry through movement in frame

-T rejected editing through cuts + juxtaposition - time is integral to the film, physically.