Gravity's Rainbow vs. The Brothers Karamazov

Two caveats, to start with.  The first is that I got a letter today (a real live letter) from Google suggesting, among other things, that if I were to focus my blog on one subject--or even two--I might receive more hits.  I thought this was interesting, and a good suggestion, and I resolved to focus more on retro-futurism, Buckminster Fuller, and century-old illustrations of hypothetical astronauts.
However (caveat two) I was walking back from the coffee shop after finishing my German homework and got to thinking about the two BIG books I read last year, "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon, and "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

On the surface these books have nothing in common except that they are both long and difficult; the Pynchon is more difficult than the Dostoevsky, I would say, but they are both supremely rewarding masterworks of modern literature.



About Dostoevsky I will say this: for all the drama around the central mystery in "Brothers Karamazov"--that central mystery being, who killed Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov?--the novel is less a thriller than a study of three personalities.  Smerdyakov (the bastard) excluded, the three eponymous brothers are Alyosha, (Dmitri) Mitya and Ivan.  Alyosha wants to be a monk, Ivan is an atheist with primarily political and academic ambitions, and Mitya takes up the middle two-hundred pages being the most obnoxious character to get this much "screen-time" since...God, I don't know.  I tried to read this book several times, the first few times not being wholly dedicated from the start and being, primarily, motivated by a matter of pretension.  When I started it last year--the case in which I finished it--I only ever thought about dropping the book down a sewer during the middle hundred or two-hundred pages, when Dotoevsky was focusing on Mitya, who as a character and as an allegory was almost purely a sensualist; that is to say, he lived for good times, and he also, it seemed, lived for drama, because all he accomplished in said two-hundred-pages was to lay the groundwork for a motive to murder his father (Fyodor Pavlovich).

I jump around (of course I do) but what is arguably the central question of "Brothers Karamazov" is who killed the father.  Dostoevsky, despite being a Christian in a weird, inarguably Russian sense of the word, manages to make Ivan (the Atheist) sympathetic as well as the other characters; that is, he can argue both sides of the coin.  That Ivan suffers in the end and that Alyosha merely gets abused by some children is not an ideological critique; that is Ivan's character as well as Alyosha's.  For, despite being a sort of novel of ideas--Ivan does symbolize atheism and the avant-garde, and Alyosha symbolizes purity as well as Christianity--the characters exist in-and-of-themselves without relying solely on their ideas for meaning.

You just look at that guy and say man, what a baller.

I have a conclusion, but to get to it--and to tie my twin subjects together in my own ridiculous fashion--I must turn to "Gravity's Rainbow."

These two books have almost nothing in common besides length.  Both, I would argue--and I would probably have to argue a little harder with "Gravity's Rainbow"--are masterpieces.  "Brothers Karamazov" has a plot.  "Gravity's Rainbow" has set-pieces.  The former has ideas presented in the form of a story, and the latter has storeas in the form of idys.  That last sentence may strike the more educated among you to think of me as an asshole for writing that sentence, and I wouldn't altogether disagree, but "Gravity's Rainbow" has got to be one of the strangest books I have ever read, but also the most--in a perverse way--rewarding.

Pynchon appeared on the Simpsons, but kept his identity hidden

whilst making jokes about his Crying of Latke 49 Cookbook

Back up ten years.  Thomas Pynchon wrote a first novel, "V.," about both a weird (semi-autistic?) guy named Stencil searching for the mysterious "V," which could stand for anything from Venus to Vesuvius, as well as on Benny Profane, ex-marine and party to the events in the story that make sense.  Benny's part of the story is generally just this side of vaudeville; Stencil's cover periods of time and space from Egypt to Malta and are generally cryptic and sometimes adapted from Pynchon's earlier stories.

Pynchon's second novel, "Crying of Lot 49," is (of the works of his that I've read) perhaps the only one that makes immediate sense--to some degree.  It follows Oedipa Maas, as she is elected executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity and falls into the middle of a (possible, potentially real, but just as easily hallucinated) conspiracy involving a centuries'-old postal service called Trystero.  The book--short by Pynchon standards and short by any standards, at less than 200 pages--manages to involve a Beatles-parody-band and an Elizabethan play.  It's probably a masterpiece, if only because, as Pynchon fans know, it's a lot easier to explain (and read) than his other stuff.

We Await Silent Trystero's Empire

"Gravity's Rainbow" is insane.  I read once, that if you wanted to read "Gravity's Rainbow," you should read his first two novels beforehand.  To this I say: it's not gonna help.  It would be better to read "Naked Lunch," which is a 'novel' only in the sense that it's prose and comes in between 200 and 900 pages.  William S. Burroughs wrote with the cut-up method; those of you interested can google it.  For those of you not interested, all you need to know is, none of the passages in "Naked Lunch" necessarily connect to others.

According to the back of my Penguin Classics "Gravity's Rainbow," this book has something to do with Tyrone Slothrop, whose erections (as in, penile erections) predict attacks by V-2 rockets, in London, in the middle of the Blitzkrieg.  And that's because, as a child, he was conditioned (in the Pavlovian sense) to...this is the sort of book where a summary is useless.  I read the book with a guide and am still more or less amenable to the suggestion that the book was written by aliens; it's that sort of book, the sort where you finish it and say, "I don't know what that was about, but I laughed quite a bit, and found much of the prose to be exquisite, so if you want to tell me it was written by aliens, I'm not necessarily going to agree with you, but I'll hear you out, because that's as good an explanation as I've heard so far."

I make it sound daunting.  It is.  Books, movies--anything with a plot, it tends to go A, B, C, D.  "Gravity's Rainbow" goes A, B, C, D, and then Ë.  And then ø and then back to, well, K, and then on to Ħ, whatever that is.

There are three or four things, I think, that can help explain the appeal of such a monster tome.  The first is that this book is full of ranomly interspersed, exceedingly quotable lines, to wit:

"They are in love.  Fuck the war."

"You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures."

(from a series of aphorism on paranoia, the final one) "Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations."

Second, the book's difficulty--the way it flashes between World War II, Nixonian fantasias and Boer War atrocities, along with (one of my favorites) a scenario where a poor trained octopus has to abduct the hero's love interest so that the hero can save her--it's part of the point.  For some reason the novel's final section is a collapsing narrative.  Plots, separated by time and space, inter-weave; things that didn't make sense before start making less sense.  The novel--spoiler alert here, although, trust me, this is a spoiler that helps keep you sane--the novel ends with nothing making sense (because war doesn't make sense?  Because reality doesn't make sense?  Pynchon is possibly making a point here, but I'll get to that) and the V-2 Rocket, whose arc makes the parabola referred to in the novel's title, being launched at a theater (with a young male prostitute inside, no less.  Don't ask) that contains (ostensibly) both the reader and the NOVEL itself.

HOLY SHIT, you're saying.  Why would anyone want to read a thing?


This is where I try, hope against hope to tie things together.

Dostoevsky: The funny thing is that, despite his reputation as another brooding Russian, I finished "Brothers Karamazov" feeling ecstatic, joyful and full of belief in my fellow man.  The novel ends with the guilty party dead (although not because of any sort of the provincial justice you might have expected, given the past 400 pages) and Alyosha making a speech among some children.  Despite everything that happened earlier--son killing a father, a potential visit from Satan himself (it sounds silly, but it's got to be one of the greatest scenes in all literature) and everything else, Alyosha still has faith in humanity; and not just because of his religion, but because he's a good person, who actually puts the effort into believing that man in not just a conglomeration of animate slime, but rather, sometimes, a vessel for greatness.

There is something supremely touching about optimism winning out despite all the odds.  When someone, especially a character like Alyosha, manages to retain his hope--in spite of all else--and when the author makes it believable--

Pynchon doesn't go for that.  If anyone wants to argue that "The Brothers Karamazov" is the greatest novel of all time, I will probably agree before they finish their third syllable.  It's that kind of book: a masterpiece.  If anyone wants to argue for "Gravity's Rainbow," I will listen and, if not necessarily agree with them, give them the benefit of the doubt, because "Gravity's Rainbow," to echo Walt Whitman, contains multitudes.  Dostoevsky crafted, in that novel alone, at least two of the best characters of all time (and probably more like six or seven, but I'm putting Alyosha and Ivan up against like, Hamlet here) ...Pynchon wrote a novel that--despite its difficulty, despite everything--is endlessly inventive, alternating between goofy and poetic, occasionally dramatic but always with an out-of-the-blue take on things that makes you say--
"holy shit, that just--"
--"Brothers Karamazov" leaves you hopeful for the human race; "Gravity's Rainbow," although seemingly (and probably objectively) more cynical, showcases a weird kind of hope in the human power to create.
Autobiographical addendum.  I was writing the bus, when I finished reading "Gravity's Rainbow"; more specifically, I was a hundred pages from the end, having turned onto PCH from Balboa in Orange County, California, on Route 55 toward Newport Beach Transportation Center.  Hundred pages from the end, I was giggling and laughing and--overall--amazed at the audacity who could write seven-hundred-pages of nonsense, perversion and farce and turn it into what is, in my opinion, an all-time classic.
I said to myself, this book is eating my brain.  And I meant it.  And I still believe it.  Last digression, I swear: in High School, I read a book called "The Trial," by Franz Kafka.  The last few pages (spoiler again) feature the protagonist getting executed, seemingly out of the blue.  That book made me feel awful.  As I finished "Gravity's Rainbow," I understood a lot of the points Pynchon was making about the horrors of war, et al, but instead of feeling terrible, I felt delighted that in this day and age, someone was able to write a book that inventive and, ultimately, enjoyable.  "Brothers Karamazov" gave me some faith in humanity; "Gravity's Rainbow" gave me faith in art.  Whether the two are synonomous is, I suppose, up to the reader.