Book Review

Forbidden Knowledge:

From Prometheus to Pornography

by Roger Shattuck

     What a mess. Forbidden Knowledge: from Prometheus to Pornography, as written by Roger Shattuck, is a book by a literary scholar who knows a lot but doesn’t know what to do with what he has learned.

The question Shattuck poses is simple and clear: are there things that humans should not know? His answer from the start is a clear and succinct “Yes, absolutely.” But as the book progresses he chips away at his own conclusion and leaves the reader doubting the author’s convictions.

Shattuck starts off in the ancient world, analyzing texts from the Greek and Roman mythologies. Prometheus, who gets punished for eternity for stealing fire from the gods, is used as a framework for the rest of the book. Just as importantly, Prometheus’s sister Pandora, the one who opened the forbidden box unleashing evil into the world, is also just as prominent. The moral he derives from these stories is that Prometheus and Pandora deserved to be punished because they did what they were forbidden to do. The result is that we all have to suffer because of their transgressions. Shattuck does not thoroughly examine any alternative interpretations of these myths, which are considered by some to be archetypal heroes’ journeys. Prometheus, for example, sacrificed himself to bring useful knowledge to humanity, a step along the way of human progress. From the start of the book, Shattuck runs the risk of losing his audience. If he does not want to preach to his own choir, the tastkof the author then is to win over the resistance. His next move in the argument is not helpful.

It is not hard to see a connection between Prometheus and Pandora to the Bible. Prometheus is an obvious progenitor of Jesus Christ, among hundreds of others. Pandora easily predicts the transgression of Eve in the Garden of Eden. He draws the same overly simplistic conclusions from the Bible that he got from Greek mythology: stay in your place or you will get punished and bring immense harm to everybody else in the world. This amounts to little more than circular logic. Even worse, Shattuck’s religious bias comes out into the open, freely displaying that, to him, dogma, belief, and obedience are more important than rational inquiry or exploration of ideas. To be fair, Shattuck’s analysis is more literary than theological, therefore he gets off the hook for not merely being a Bible-thumping, knuckle-dragging conservative. Up to a point, he does put some thought into what he is writing. But another further problem creeps into the text here. Just what does the author mean by “forbidden knowledge”?

Regardless, Shattuck takes a quick flyover of the Middle Ages to bring, what he calls the Wife of Bath Syndrome into his argument, the meaning of this being that when you tell someone that an act is forbidden, that makes them want to do it even more. This is derived from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. This makes an easy transition to John Milton.

Shattuck first takes issue with Milton for his poem Areopagitica, a piece that celebrates and vindicates free speech. Then he goes into a fairly detailed analysis of Paradise Lost. We all know the story of Adam and Eve, but Milton famously brought the characters of Satan and Eve into full three-dimensionality. This isn’t the part that Shattuck fixates on though. After taking Eve to task for eating the forbidden fruit, committing the sin of disobedience, he makes an exaggerated claim, based on a stanza from the epic poem, stating that people should learn but never more than they need to know. Shattuck keeps beating this same drum throughout the rest of the book without ever analyzing it, testing it, or examining its useful application in practice. In one paragraph he even goes so far as to say the Hegelian triadic method of analysis involving thesis-antithesis-synthesis should be dropped for a dyadic thesis-conclusion method of argumentation, meaning counter-arguments and analytical reasoning should be abandoned in favor of argument by authority and acceptance of unproven axioms. Authorities became authorities because they were right, therefore authorities can never be wrong so just do as you are told and don’t ask questions unless you already know the answer.

What follows is analyses of several classic literary texts. Goethe’s Faust, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Emily Dickinson. Like in the author’s discourse on Milton, a thorough breakdown of themes and literary stylizations are given, followed by some references back to Prometheus, Pandora, and Eve. The passages on Emily Dickson are especially problematic because they don’t expressly address the theme of forbidden knowledge. Shattuck actually praises Dickinson for not marrying the man who loved her. She follows Milton’s dictum that you should never know more than what you need to know. Dickinson is a role model for Shattuck; he gives her a patronizing pat on the head while telling her she is the good little girl he believes she should be. His reasoning behind celebrating her virtue is that she wrote a poem that he liked. The discussion gets no more complicated than that. This begs the question, what does this have to do with forbidden knowledge? Is marriage forbidden knowledge? Is marriage even a form of knowledge?

The most exciting part of this train wreck is the chapter on Albert Camus’s The Stranger. While Shattuck has a slightly different take on the book than my own, he claims that Meursault is a man who lives without any self-knowledge or self-reflection while my interpretation was more in line with traditional existentialism which means he goes through life refusing to make choices, we both agree that The Stranger is the most misinterpreted book in literary history. A lot of readers fail to recognize that Meursault is an unreliable narrator who lies to the audience and to himself as well. Also a lot of readers fail to see that he is not being sentenced to death for not crying at his mother’s funeral, as so many seem to think based on the lawyer’s testimony, but he is sentenced to death for the cold blooded murder of an innocent man. You can only make the case that Meursault is a hero if you ignore the fact that he committed the crime. But Shattuck’s larger point is that Meursault does not awaken to himself until he is put in the prison cell where he begins to grow in self-awareness for the first time. You could make the case that Meursault has forbidden himself from self-knowledge. But doesn’t that go against Shattuck’s thesis? If Meursault had transgressed his own self-imposed limitations, in pursuance of forbidden knowledge, he probably would have avoided getting himself into the trouble he did. Shattuck, in the most effective argument he proposes in his book, shatters his own argument in the process.

At the end of this first section, two things stand out. One is clear, the other not so much. The clear point is that Forbidden Knowledge is a work of literary criticism more than an examination of ethics or epistemology as it is originally presented. The second, and less clear revelation, is that Shattuck’s definition of “knowledge” is fuzzily defined and broadly includes the other concepts of “actions” and “experiences”. Therefore, Faust is transgressing the law of forbidden knowledge through the act of selling his soul to the Devil and Viktor Frankenstein is doing the same with the act of creating a human life in his laboratory. Both stories are about forbidden acts, not about forbidden knowledge. Furthermore, Emily Dickinson is celebrated for remaining a virgin and Meursault is punished for murder. Although it is possible to have knowledge of marriage and murder, sometimes both in some tragic circumstances, the knowledge and the act are not the same thing. Knowing how to build a nuclear bomb is not the same as the act of building a nuclear bomb. Imagining yourself saving a baby from a burning building is not the same as the experience of saving a baby from a burning building. If so, then everybody who knows how to build a bomb would be a bomb-maker and everybody who imagined themselves rescuing a baby from a burning building would be a hero. By logical extension, most men on Earth would thereby be millionaires and porn stars and we know that isn’t the case. Reality doesn’t work that way.

So half way through, can this book get any worse? Yes it can.

The second section addresses an unusual pairing of subjects, namely science and the Marquis de Sade. In the scientific chapters, Shattuck specifically addresses genetics and the mapping of the human genome. His writing on this topic is histrionic, paranoid, and sadly misinformed. Shattuck worries that genetic engineering will lead to some kind of evolutionary disaster without taking into account that geneticists have already taken the moral implications of their science into consideration. They aren’t a bunch of back-alley kitchen chemists who fund their projects by manufacturing low-grade crystal meth in abandoned trailers in the woods of Tennessee. He calls for congressional oversight and watchdog panels even though we already have these things in place. His biggest fear is that gene editing will inevitably lead to the creation of a monster in the same way Dr. Frankenstein created his own creature. Never mind that scientists have already asked these kinds of questions before setting out on their endeavors. What is truly worrisome is that Shattuck falls back on classic literature to say that the human genome should not be mapped. It should be left alone because Pandora opened her box, Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and Viktor Frankenstein created a monster that killed all his friends. We can use Shattuck’s own advice against him. He could have prevented himself from making this error in judgment by not trying to claim expertise in a scientific field that he doesn’t understand. This doesn’t mean he shouldn’t learn about science. It means he shouldn’t condemn it when he doesn’t know enough about it to make an effective judgment.

The final chapter on the Marquis de Sade is confused, muddled, and lacking in direction. Shattuck defines pornography as “works of art or literature whose sole purpose is sexual arousal”. He uses that as a starting point but then never sufficiently examines whether Sade wrote pornography or not. Considering that Sade’s oeuvre consisted of a mixture of sex, violence, and philosophy, it might not be so easy to pigeonhole him into the category of “pornography”. Sade’s lesser known works consisted of essays, novels, short stories, and plays that contain almost no sex at all in them. Furthermore, it is not obvious that Sade actually wrote with the intention of sexually arousing anybody. Most readers react to his writings with a combination of disgust, amusement, and boredom and unless you are a complete sicko, you probably won’t be sexually aroused by any of it. If Sade was a pornographer, he wasn’t a very good one. It is probably that Sade’s main intentions were to shock and offend rather than turn them into practitioners of his poorly articulated philosophy.

Shattick’s intentions in writing about Sade are not especially clear. Once again, he analyzes a lot of content without giving a definite purpose for it. He claims that reading Sade makes one take the risk of turning into a pervert or a sadist and that living in the kind of world Sade imagined would be a disaster for everybody even though such a fantasy world could not possibly exist. But do we really need to be told this? Do we really need to have someone explain to us why having sex with a mutilated baby corpse is wrong?

Shattuck’s two biggest worries are that some psychologically imbalanced people might try to imitate what Sade wrote, citing Ted Bundy and the Moors Murderers as examples since they were inspired by the Marquis. The other is that Sade might become part of the literary canon. His concern is based on the fascination that some obscure French modernist intellectuals, and Camille Paglia too, admire Sade for various reasons. It isn’t likely that Sade will ever sit comfortably in the ranks of Homer, Voltaire, and Dickens any time soon, especially not in this era of political correctness. American college students probably think a literary canon is a big gun that shoots books anyways. Most people of the internet generations don’t even have a long enough attention span to read a Sade novel.

Shattuck doesn’t think Sade should be censored, but he should be kept away from those who are potentially psychopathic, as if we can easily spot them as they grow into adulthood. Imagine the courts granting a restraining order on some twelve year old kid, preventing him from accessing 120 Days of Sodom because the judge fears it might turn him into a serial killer. By the same token, we should suppress operas by Wagner because they might inspire another Hitler. Charles Manson was inspired by Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Maybe we should restrict people’s access to that one too. Has Shattuck put any thought into what he is saying? And again, his critique of Sade is more about forbidden acts of sex and violence and less so about what the perpetrators of these acts actually know. Ultimately we are the ones who should be forbidden from knowing about Sade. Shattuck himself should never be forbidden from reading those books though, and why he is exempt from such restriction is never explained. I suspect it is because, like many conservatives, his moral grandstanding is a smokescreen to prevent people from thinking he actually enjoys pornography.

Forbidden Knowledge is a pointless mess. The arguments are not well-supported, terminologies are not well-defined, and logical conclusions are not drawn. It is primarily a work of literary criticism, even though a lot of the literary analysis has no direct connection to the position that the author argues for. He never addresses real issues of forbidden knowledge like the necessary secrecy of governments, corporations, the military, or espionage agencies. He also never addresses the need to keep personal data private, a necessity that is more endangered now that we have digital technology and people are willingly giving up private information to vampiric data mining companies for the sake of being popular on social media. I wouldn’t fault Shattuck for that, however, because he wrote this book before the internet became the dominant entity in our lives. Roger Shattuck has an incredible range of knowledge, but his range is too deep and not wide enough. He can’t see past his own nose. Maybe he would have done himself better by pursuing more of the forbidden knowledge he prevented himself from knowing.

Actually, considering how shallow and ignorant most Americans are these days, more people could benefit from the pursuit of knowledge rather than the pursuit of likes on the internet. There’s plenty of information out there to be known and a lot of this forbidden stuff is of trivial importance but at least it gets people interested in reading. Real knowledge consists of how to separate quality information from garbage and having what it takes to use it effectively once the reader has apprehended it. Leave censorship to cult leaders and authoritarians who exert control over people by restricting their access to information. Freedom comes from the pursuit of knowledge be it good, bad , or ugly so don’t hold yourself back just because some puritanical control freak doesn’t like whatever it is that interests you.

 

Book Review

Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

     I will say the same thing about Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow that I said about another of his novels, The Crying of Lot 49. You need to read this book a minimum of three times before you can really start to get it. The first time is just to see what’s there and to familiarize yourself with the text. The second time is to identify the narrative structure and the scheme of the story. The third time is when all the fine details emerge and the book really comes to life.

What eventually does emerge, after the third time through, is a loosely-structured, picaresque story that takes place at the end of World War II. It involves an ordinary and unremarkable man named Tyrone Slothrop, who is under surveillance. The reader gets introduced into a work with a countless number of characters, subplots, situations, symbols, show tunes, and commentaries, most of which may or may not add up to a complete and comprehensible picture. If it sounds like an overwhelming mess, that’s because it is and that is also why the novel is brilliant.

As it all begins, Tyrone Slothrop’s presence is barely noticeable. He doesn’t actually show up until three quarters through the first of the four sections. What does show up is his map of London covered with stars like the ones you get in kindergarten for getting all the answers right on your homework. As we a re led to believe, Slothrop puts each star on a place where he had sex with a woman. The stars multiply rapidly and the British secret service take notice because they have a similar map with stars located in the exact same places. But the spies’ map marks all the places where German bombs fell on London. These just happen to coincide with the places where Slothrop got laid. As they monitor his map, they feed the information to a team of researchers in a former mental hospital called “The White Visitation”. The team is managed by a bitter, sexually frustrated control freak named Pointsman, a Skinnerian behaviorist psychiatric researcher who also overseas a team of psychics and mediums whose seances are used to coordinate information with the statisticians and scientists in the vicinity. They are attempting to figure out how Slothrop is able to predict, through his sexual behavior, where each German bomb will fall.

Take note of a few things in this first section. The heavy snowfall introduces the color white as a symbol of death that persists through the whole book. BDSM is introduced as a symbol of colonial domination. Behavioral psychology experiments are also used to raise the question of whether humans can be controlled or not. Connections are made between science, technology, and multinational corporations. Also, the secret service and their colleagues at the White Visitation are involved in making a movie of some sort. Other themes that are introduced are the proximate relation of opposites that never correspond in full and the circularity of life. As one scientist points out, the stars on the maps of London are supposedly a record of Slothrop’s lovemaking, the place where bombs fall, and also the places where births are given. Then of course, there is the Rocket.

One of the great things about Pynchon’s writing is that he always states his main ideas in ways that are loud and clear. That is why his novels need to be read more than once; you can not identify what is being said loudly and clearly unless you are able to recognize how this is being done and familiarity with the text is what makes this possible. In the Case of Gravity’s Rainbow, there is a scene towards the end of the first section in which the captains of German industry attend a séance. The message they get from the medium, who later dies and makes contact with the psychics at the White Visitation, is that they need to learn about synthesis and control. This is also a message to the reader that these are the main themes of the novel.

But going back to Slothrop, we learn, if his memory serves him correctly, that during his childhood a behaviorist psychologist named Laszlo Jamf conducted Pavlovian experiments on him. But instead of conditioning a dog to drool, Jamf experimented with conditioning Slothrop to get an erection in the absence of sexual stimulation. As Slothrop progressed through life, ending up at Harvard studying rocket engineering, he always had a suspicion that he was being watched by people who were keeping records of when he got aroused. Then when World War II broke out, the American military stationed him in London for an undisclosed reason. It is there that we learn the private thoughts of Pointsman, a man who is obsessed with control but impotent and unpopular with women. Pointsman, being jealous of Slothrop’s sexual prowess, assigns himself the task of destroying the bumbling American soldier.

This first section is the most clearly written part of the novel. This is significant because it is here that all the major themes and characters get introduced, later to reemerge as the narrative moves on. The writing really does follow a narrative arc, like a rainbow or the trajectory of a rocket. As this arc climbs upwards, the literary threads all begin to intertwine as a clear picture of interconnections come into view, but as it descends, the details become less clear, the characters less distinct, details become fuzzy, the themes and interconnections less certain. Slothrop comes closer and closer to solving his own riddle and then the entropy sets in full force.

What is Slothrop’s riddle? He is searching for the Nazi-manufactured V2 rocket S-Gerat with the serial number of 00000. He thinks that finding this rocket will help him solve the mystery of what happened to him when he was a child and why there always seem to be people following him and arranging the events in his life. This plot comes into sharper focus when the secret service move him, again for some undisclosed reason, to the Hermann Goering Casino on beaches of the French Riviera. Notice that Slothrop, in his quest to find the source of the V2 rockets, moves below and counter to the route they take to London; the rockets are manufactured in Peenemunde, Germany, and shipped to Holland where they are launched to land in London while Slothrop moves from London to the Mediterranean coast, then up to Zurich and onward to the northern seacoast of Germany.

While on the beach, Slothrop rescues the Dutch prostitute and spy named Katje from an attacking octopus and becomes suspicious that the situation was staged so the secret service could film a movie of it. After that, other events at the casino appear to be staged for the same reason and Slothrop’s paranoia increases. What also happens in France is Slothrop’s frequent changing of costumes begins. It should be noted that Slothrop’s behavior and personality remain constant throughout the book no matter what outfit he is wearing. In his case, the clothes do not make the man. They are only superficial differences. The surface appearance does not synthesize with Slothrop. They are two parallel lines that come close to each other but never truly connect. This is a postmodern theme that runs through the whole book.

At a party, Slothrop meets up with a black marketeer who sends him on an errand to find a smuggler named Springer in Switzerland. At this point, the scientists and spies at the White Visitation can no longer control Slothrop because they do not know where he went. Slothrop becomes a hero because he has proven, through his own individuality and initiative, that a single person can resist and even break free from control by corporate and governmental powers. Furthermore, Pynchon is possibly telling us that Slothrop achieves freedom through hedonism; his constant pursuit of sex and drugs is what leads him out of the prison of modern technocratic domination. But something else is also pulling Slothrop along the road to freedom. While in Switzerland, he obtains a file from another espionage agent that gives details about Laszlo Jamf, the S-Gerat V2 rocket 00000, and an industrially produced material called Imipolex-G. This last detail rings a bell and Slothrop thinks that if he can learn more about it, he will know everything he needs to know about himself. He leaves for Germany in search of the rocket.

Germany, in the third section of the novel, is dubbed the Zone. The Nazis have lost and the war is coming to an end. The country is in chaos as barriers and boundary lines are breaking down. Slothrop is not the only one pursuing the S-Gerat rocket. Enzian is the leader of the Zone Hereros, a group of German colonial subjects from Namibia that were saved from genocide and brought to Germany by Weissmann, the Nazi general overseeing the building of the V2 rockets in Peenemunde. Enzian has a vision that if he can get ahold of the 00000 rocket, he can start a new religion to correct and replace the false beliefs of Christianity, thereby allowing the Black Hereros to colonize Germany. Enzian also has a Russian half-brother named Tchitcherine who was sent as a Soviet linguist to develop a written alphabet for the Kirghiz languageas part of a colonialist prject. While at a ceremonial poetry reading with the Kirghiz tribesman, he hears a poem about the Kirghiz Light, a mystical flash that caused the poet who witnessed it to go blind. Was it a flash from an atomic bomb? We can never know, but Tchitcherine gets sent to Germany and he also goes in pursuit of the V2 rocket, which he believes to be the source of the Kirghiz Light, while also nurturing plans to kill his half-brother Enzian.

There is also the story of Pokler, a rocket scientist who cares nothing about Nazi politics or anti-Semitism, but also wants to help develop the rocket because he believes it to be a means of transcendence. For him, Nazism is a means to a higher end. He believes the future of the world lies in rocket science which will allow the human race to leave the planet, reaching a higher stage of civilization in outer space. But Pokler has a sexual fetish and Weissman uses it to control him; Pokler is a pedophile who molests his daughter. Weissman lets him spend time with her whenever he wants something done, but as the years go on, Pokler realizes that each time a different girl is brought to him, probably because his real daughter was killed in a concentration camp. As this realization dawns on Pokler, the novel’s arc begins its descent and things begin falling apart.

Sexual fetishism is a theme that plays out throughout the whole book. Whether it be BDSM, sex toys, incest, pedophilia, coprophagia, or any other paraphilia, the behaviorist psychologists have caught on that people can be controlled by limiting their exposure to their fetishes. The more specific the fetish, the more control can be exerted over an individual. In contrast, Slothrop is liberated because he has no specific turn ons; he simply takes whatever sexual partners come his way, therefore his sexuality is a means of liberation rather than a mechanism of control.

As Slothrop continues on a series of misadventures, all involving sex and drugs, one character criticizes him for being paranoid, meaning he sees connections between things that are not connected. Slothrop goes into reverse and starts to think that there are no connections between anything. Furthermore, he also loses interest in his pursuit of the S-Gerat rocket. Despite his waning interest, Slothrop picks up some more information from an aging, mentally unstable German actress named Margherita Erdmann. From her he learns that Imipolex-G is a plastic invented by Laszlo Jamf and used as a binding unit in the S-Gerat rocket. Jamf wanted to invent something that transcends and dominates life, so he synthesized the material without the use of carbon which is the building block of all organic life on Earth. Not only does this plastic transcend life, it also can be shaped and molded into any form you please. For this reason, Jamf gets sent to America where he conducts experiments trying to shape and mold Slothrop, and human society as well, using behaviorist psychology, turning people into plastic to be manipulated by the technocrats who control the world. Do all the references to film and cinema have something to do with this? The passage about Imipolex-G ties together all the previous references to science, technology, and industrialization from the previous parts of the book. Here we learn that World War II is all a performance being put on to make it possible for the military industrial complex to take control of the world behind the scenes. A cabal of leaders from chemical, military, energy, transportation, and pharmaceutical companies have conspired to control the rest of us who are unfortunate enough to have no access to the realms of corporate power. Governments are just a smokescreen and World War II is just a way for the multinational corporations to make money. In fact, because of this cabal, the rockets being used to bomb London were made with materials manufactured by a British corporation.

But then one character explains that Laszlo Jamf never existed; he was created in the paranoid mind of Tyrone Slothrop to help him make sense of the world he lives in. But what if that character was lying about Slothrop’s delusions? What if that character was the one who was delusional? In the works of Thomas Pynchon there are no final answers. Weren’t they really out to get Slothrop anyways? When a couple of British doctors go searching for Slothrop in a German whorehouse, they find Marvy, the fat racist redneck idiot from Texas, and castrate him thinking he is Slothrop. This was done on orders from Pointsman. If that isn’t certain enough, we at least get a sense of what sector of the American population Pynchon isn’t proud of as Marvy is the butt end of cruel jokes throughout the whole story as he deserves to be.

In the final section of the book, Slothrop has faded away out of the narrative. There are suggestions that he has turned into the Horned God Pan as he lives in the woods without clothes and plays his harmonica rather than panpipes, which he almost loses in a creek. This refers us back to the beginning when Slothrop drops his harmonica in a toilet while attending Harvard while Red and Charlie, references to Malcolm X and Charlie Parker stand by and watch as he tries to get it out in one of the grossest passages of the book. There is one further mention of Pan in later pages. Perhaps Pynchon is suggesting that freedom from the military industrial complex can be achieved by a return to nature. The 1960s counter-culture makes an anachronistic intrusion into the latter half of the text.

The final section of the book also ties back to the first section in other ways too. Slothrop is first introduced as he eats some disgusting candies with an elderly woman in her London apartment and at the end the statistician Roger Mexico deliberately ruins a dinner party by describing the most disgusting foods he can think of. This is one of the most hilarious passages and I can not describe it any way that can do it justice. Are these passages connected? Kind of, not really, but maybe. That is how the book operates. There is also the final scene where an audience is watching Hansel and Gretel being performed in a London theater, but the end of this scene takes place closer to the beginning of the book. The scheme of the book is circular, turning back in on itself in Joycean fashion.

The themes of the book are also fuzzy. We learn towards the end that Slothrop’s map may not mark places where he got laid after all. The scientists at the White Visitation try to locate all the women he slept with and are unable to do so. The only one they can find is the old lady who gave him the disgusting candy. It is possible they were misreading the situation all along. And how would that explain the parallels between Slothrop’s map and the secret service’s map? Is there something they overlooked? Again, two parallel lines that never actually join together.

Then of course, there is the story of Benny the Bulb, a seemingly randomly inserted non-sequitur of a story that explains a lot of what Gravity’s Rainbowis about. Benny is a disobedient light bulb who tries to lead a conspiracy against the company that manufactured him. But the other bulbs aren’t too bright. Haha, get it? That’s Pynchonian humor right there. They refuse to go along with him. Still, he insists on rebelling by switching off at times of his own choosing. He is the bulb that sees the truth of the world and how the industrial corporations control everything, but he is powerless to do something about it so he spend his lifetime, if light bulbs actually have life times, simmering in impotent anger. Just like so many people in the world who have reached the same place as him. But wait a minute...weren’t there other bulbs in the narrative that went out at random times? Or am I remembering something that wasn’t there? If it’s true, then were all those bulbs part of Benny’s conspiracy? If it’s not true, am I being paranoid? Am I having false memories or am I more accurate than I think? In order to understand the novel, Pynchon makes you paranoid so you can see the point he is making about paranoia.

There is so much more to Gravity’s Rainbow. It would be impossible to cover it all here. There is a bewildering amount of information, none of the plots ever reach completion, we never learn what happens to most of the characters. That is what life is like. It is impossible to tell if all the interconnections are connected or if we, like Slothrop, are using paranoia as a mechanism to make sense of the world we live in. My interpretation of it all is that Pynchon is telling us that paranoia is a normal response to a world that is consistently uncertain, incomprehensible, and without any final answers. Maybe he also means to say that a little paranoia might go a long way in making each of us, as individuals, more free.