Book Review & Analysis: Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes

Terra Nostra

by Carlos Fuentes

      In literary and historical studies, we hear a lot about post-colonialism. We hear far less about pre-colonialism and what led colonialists down their destructive paths towards the domination of their conquered territories. In his monumental novel Terra Nostra, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes tackles this subject, taking into account a myriad of byways, sidestreams, and subplots that all feed into this massive literary undertaking.

This is one of those densely written novels that immediately confuses the reader with layers of symbolism, non-linear narrative, characters that appear in multiple times and places without any clear explanation as to whether they are the same or not, shifting time frames, dream sequences inside of dream sequences, multiple characters with the same name, improbable anachronisms, and so much more. I could write an entire essay alone on all the things in this story that are deliberately meant to throw the audience off track. Fuentes repeatedly pulls the magic carpet out from under your ass so you find yourself tumbling through the air into disorienting labyrinths of prose without giving you many clues as to how to get out or where you will be if you ever do.

The best way to approach this monster of a novel is go straight into its heart and summarize thmain character Felipe el Senor. Please note that this summary does not go in the order in it follows in the narrative. He is the king of Castile in Spain and successor to his father, also named Felipe. The kingdom is a feudal estate so that the king is entitled to everything produced by the peasants. The king is also entitled to have sex with any bride on the night of their wedding. This is what happens when the elder Felipe rapes a peasant girl named Celestina before she can consummate her marriage with her husband. This sets all of Felipe el Senor’s life into motion. The younger Felipe inherits not only his father’s kingdom, but also his father’s syphilis which is called “the French disease” throughout the novel. Felipe thinks of his father as a disgrace so he becomes preoccupied with ending the familial dynasty by not having any children thereby not having a son to put on the throne when he dies according to the law of primogeniture. Felipe el Senor also turns to religion and theology to purify himself in order to get closer to the Christian God.

As Felipe el Senor is coming of age, he runs off to a beach where he has a chance encounter with four subjects if his feudal estate. All of them have utopian dreams. Celestina, the same woman who was raped by Felipe’s father, dreams of a world where carnality is not considered sinful and dirty. The monk Simon wants to live where there is no sickness or disease. Ludovico is a student who wants to see a world without religion. Pedro is an old man who is building a boat to sail off to another land. In this, the foundations are laid for exploring the attitudinal themes current on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that led to the impulse of colonialism. Felipe tells them to forget their dreams because he can bring paradise to his home in Spain. They go through the villages, telling everyone no matter their age, race, gender, religion, or class status that utopia has arrived and takes them to his castle. They indulge in a massive orgy complete with food and wine. Then Felipe tells his four friends to leave and has his knights slaughter everybody partying in the castle. This passage is derived directly from alchemical symbolism and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Felipe’s motivation for this mass murder is that he wants to prove to his father that he can be powerful enough to be king.

In the first third of the novel, another plot element that gets introduced is that of the Three Bastards. When Felipe takes a deer hunting party to the hills near a beach, presumably the same beach where he previously met his four utopianist friends, three identical men wash up on the shore. Each has a red cross permanently marked on their back and each also has twelve toes. They are also accompanied by three green-glassed bottles with rolled up parchments inside of them. We learn more about the Three Bastards, who they are and what they represent, later in the third section.

As mentioned previously. Felipe turns to mystical Christianity to cleanse himself of the filth of existence. His initial impulse is to invade Flanders, hire a mercenary army of Teutonic knights, and slaughter a heretical sect called the Adamites. We later learn that this cult was founded by Ludovico and Celestina and boasted the painter Hieronymous Bosch as a member. After the Adamites are killed, the Teutons celebrate by ransacking a church, getting drunk, fornicating, pissing, shitting, and vomiting all over the floor. This is the first of Felipe’s existential crises because he sees first hand that you can not rid the world of filth by killing people you deem to be unclean. The second component of his crisis is that he meets Ludovico in the church who explains the Adamite philosophy to him. Sex can not be sinful because it was not sinful in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Therefore, Heaven can be reached by living the way Adam and Eve lived before she ate the fruit. Remember that Felipe has sexual hang ups due to the impurity of his syphilitic body and his desire to end the Castilian dynasty by not producing a son to be crown prince. He usually lives a life of celibacy.

The alternative version of Christian practice causes Felipe to return to his partially built castle and meditate in his private chapel on a painting of Jesus and his disciples that anachronistically moves around like a television screen. Felipe explores alternate interpretations of the New Testament like the possibility that Mary was promiscuous and her cuckolded husband Joseph made up the story of the virgin birth to hide his disgrace. Another idea is that Jesus escaped crucifixion by having another man substituted for him on the cross at Calvary. These ideas come from Gnostic Christianity, a heretical theology that gets examined in other parts of the book. Felipe doesn’t believe in these theories, but they cause him to consider that there might be different ways to interpret the Bible and it also causes a theological rupture for him too. His mind is steeped in Augustinian thought so he believes both that getting close to God means cleansing oneself of the filth of existence and that the eternal represents divine purity and perfection while the temporal and ever changing world represents impurity which is evil. Whatever doesn’t change is eternal and divine therefore the only things in the world that don’t change are death and literature. Since the medieval Bible manuscript he owns doesn’t change, he erroneously believes that the written word is eternal and perfect. Whatever dies stays dead, so death is also eternal and perfect. He has realized that killing heretics does not cleanse the world of filth and evil, so he turns inward, building a castle with a private chapel where he will isolate himself from his kingdom and the rest of world. The chapel contains a necropolis housing the relics of his dead ancestors and stands as a monument to eternal death which he thinks of as perfection and divine purity.

All is not well in the necropolis-castle. Felipe’s wife Isabella is sexually frustrated so she brings a homunculus to life in a mandrake root and tries to create a golem using body parts she steals from the necropolis reliquary. Meanwhile, two monks who live in the castle tower use their religious practices as a cover for secretly pursuing their passions for art and astronomy, again indicating the coming of the Renaissance. The peasantry, due to their rotten living conditions, begin discussion on rebelling against the king. And in the middle of all this is Guzman, Felipe el Senor’s chief advisor, who despises both the king and the peasants yet plans to play the two sides off against each other to exert his own power. Felipe falls further into crisis as he begins to doubt the accuracy of the Bible and could possibly be losing his mind due to syphilis. By the end of the third section, it is obvious that Felipe’s desire to get close to God is little more than a massive ego trip. He feels no remorse for killing innocent people be they heretics, Jews, Muslims, or peasants and grows more and more into obsessive self-absorbtion as a quest to reach God by separating himself from the world. His attempt at redemption has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with escapism into a fantasy world that negates all that exists.

In the second section, a story is told by one of the Bastards, known as the Pilgim, about a journey to a new world across the sea. He gets on board a ship with Pedro, the elderly ship builder introduced earlier in the novel who dreams of sailing away to a new land. They use the planet Venus as a navigational guide since it appears in the western sky every dawn. This is a subtle hint of the Pilgrim’s identity since the indigenous Azteco-Toltec people associated Venus with their returning sun god Quetzalcoatl. If you are familiar with the mythology and Mexican history, you can already see where this is leading.

The ship gets caught in a whirlpool and sucked down to the bottom of the ocean. This is obviously symbolic of a passage through a birth canal. They land on the shore of what is now Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico. Pedro, a symbol of the Old World, gets killed while the Pilgrim is welcomed into a community of indigenous people who treat him as a hero meant to replace their elderly dying chieftain. That chieftain is kept inside a basket that just might resemble a cradle, but in any case, he gives the Pilgrim some clues as to his true identity and what he must do to fulfill his destiny. Before going off on a series of adventures and encounters, the Pilgrim meets with a young witch whose physical appearance links her to Celestina. On their first meeting, she is a young woman who promises him love if he pursues her into the interior of the New World, Eros in pursuit of Thanatos. Along the way he encounters monsters who we later learn represent his dark side which he must incorporate into his being. This involves Quetzalcoatl’s alter ego the Smoking Mirror. Mirrors, self-reflection, and death are closely linked throughout the whole novel.

The second time the Pilgrim encounters Celestina, she is on top of a pyramid where various rituals are performed including a human sacrifice in which the victim’s heart is cut out of his living body. At this point Celestina has aged into maturity and takes on the aspect of a goddess who devours all the filth brought to her by the community for the sake of disposal. Again, she gives further information and instructions to the Pilgrim.

The third time he meets with Celestina, the Pilgrim is being hailed by the Aztec people in the city of Mexica as their god Quetzalcoatl who is prophesied to return and bring peace to their empire. They give the Pilgrim access to everything in the city but he rejects all of it for Celestina who appears for the final time. This time she is an old hag and tells him he can only receive her love temporarily before he is sacrificially killed.

This whole second section is heavy in mythological symbolism, alternate time dimensions that pop into the narrative occasionally, and parallels with other themes in the first and third sections of the book. One example is that the Pilgrim on his journey purifies himself, eliminating his filth, and eventually rejects the world’s wealth to be in solitude with his goddess in a way that parallels the crisis of faith suffered by Felipe el Senor. As we learn in the third section of the novel, the elder King Felipe is actually the Pilgrim’s father and his mother is Celestina. Recall how Felipe rapes Celestina at the beginning of the story. The cycles of death, birth, and return are constant throughout this whole book.

In the third section, the trajectory of Felipe el Senor’s life and ascetic rejection of the world continues. The story of the Three Bastards takes on more prominence. One of them , Don Juan, arrives and seduces Felipe’s wife, Queen Isabella and then moves on to all the other women in the castle, namely nuns and duennas. The second Bastard, the Idiot Prince, marries a dwarf and the two of them retreat into a relic filled coffin because he can’t handle the complexities of life. The Pilgrim tells his story to Felipe, who doesn’t believe it, but it inspires Guzman and others to build a ship and sail off to New Spain which we now know as Latin America. Before leaving, Guzman leads a failed peasant rebellion against the King and then takes the peasants who lost the battle overseas to colonize the Americas.

But then there is the backstory of the Three Bastards who are all sons of the elder King Felipe and the brothers of the younger Felipe el Senor. They are raised as wanderers by Celestina and Ludovico. All three boys represent different characteristics of Castilian Spanish society. Also, some characters speculate that the Three Bastards are actually all the same person since no one ever sees the three of them together.

That carries over into another theme. While living in a Jewish village, Ludovico gets a job translating between Hebrew and Spanish. While working with the rabbi, he begins studying the cabbala. The rabbi goes into a long discourse on numerology. These long passages can be a challenge for those of us who are not inclined towards mysticism, but the important part that applies to the rest of the novel is the first three numbers. Number one represents totality but also solitude. Number two is a factor of conflict because two individual entities can not synthesize into one. Therefore three is necessary to unify one and two , holding them together in a trinity. This goes on until number 24 or so, but the explanation of the first three numbers plays out throughout the entire novel. Whether this has symbolic meaning or if it is simply a narrative device is debatable.

Lastly, the colonization project of New Spain and the settlers’ return to Spain is given marginal literary space. Colonialism turns out to be a disaster for both the Spainish and the indigenous people who live in the colonies. But despite the extreme length of this text, the colonialism really emphasizes what the novel is all about. Before leaving for the New World, Spanish society was in a state of crisis as it transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. They were emerging from feudalism, religious backwardness and hypocrisy, poverty, disease, and a desire for impossible utopias to be reached into democracy, economic mercantilism, science, rationalism, and social justice. Fuentes demonstrates how this flux in social changes was transferred over to the colonies of Latin America, a traumatic birth for a new society that left it in a mess that only replicated and exacerbated the failures of the Old World.

Felipe el Senor does not believe any of this is happening because it is not written in a book. Aside from depicting the conditions that lead to the troubled birth of Latin America, this novel forces you to ask the epistemological question of how we can know what we know with certainty. Memory and the written word are imperfect and inaccurate, so how can we be certain of anything if we rely on these to make judgments about truth? Fuentes plays a sly trick when he has one character say that the Jews had preserved Greek scientific manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages and yet, all the historians I have read say it was the Muslims who preserved those ancient Greek writings. But what if those historians were wrong? Fuentes forces us to confront the limitations of our own ability to know.

There is so much more that you could spend a decade or two explaining all the different ideas contained in Terra Nostra. Another point that Fuentes makes is that one lifetime is not long enough to reach completion as a human being. Is he suggesting reincarnation? Maybe. But one idea I get from that thought is that since we can only experience one life within our lifetime, through the lives contained in books we can have access to an infinite number of other lives lived either in fiction or reality. Even if the written text is inaccurate, those fragmentary understandings can still help us to live more than once, at least vicariously. Terra Nostra is not a book for everyone, but if you’re up for the challenge it’s worth the effort.

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: Miss MacIntosh My Darling by Marguerite Young

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

by Marguerite Young

      It’s all about the isolation of the individual. It’s also about the interrelationship between life and death. More or less. That’s it. But such simple concepts get stretched out into 1,321 pages of dense, long winded, and sometimes opaque text that is written less like a novel and more like an extended prose poem. Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is like atomic fission. Just as a nuclear physicist takes a microscopic atom and smashes it against anothet atom to make a bomb explode, Young takes the tiniest of ideas, clashes them together like cymbals, and the result is an explosion of contemplative language.

Vera Cartwheel is the narrator. At the start of the book, she is a thirteen year old girl, living with her invalid mother and being raised by a nursemaid named Miss MacIntosh. Vera thinks of Miss MacIntosh as her mentor and hero. The elderly woman is described as being plain, practical, and pragmatically opposed to any embellishments or flights of the imagination. The education she gives Vera involves doing chores in preparation for her future as a housewife and making her memorize the facts in an almanac. They live in a mansion owned by Vera’s bedridden mother on the ocean shore in Massachusetts. Then one day, Miss MacIntosh wanders off into the sea and disappears.

Soon, we find Vera Cartwheel on an old bus, traveling at night through Indiana, going in the direction of Miss MacIntosh’s hometown in Iowa. Aside from Vera and the bus driver, there are two other passengers, newlyweds named Madge and Homer. The two have a long discussion about Homer’s ex-girlfriend who, according to Madge, is dying of tuberculosis. Homer had never heard this news and Madge chatters on about it all throughout the bus ride. We never find out if Homer’s ex is really dying or not, but it is quite obvious that Madge is jealous of her. In this conversation, we get introduced to a theme that gets examined throughout the whole novel: the relationship between marriage and death. Closer to the end of the bus ride, the couple also discuss other people in their town and the themes here morbidly involve poverty, incest, mental illness, suicide, and the possibility that a woman who had married two brothers in two separate marriages had murdered both of them. Another interesting thing to notice abput their conversation is that the two of them hardly know each other. Madge and Homer’s discussion about the dark side of their hometown is one of the only instances of actual dialogue throughout the whole book. Thus, the two characters who display the deepest level of intimacy are two people who barely understand each other. Other character speak in the forms of soliloquies or monologues, sometimes with Vera listening with only minimal participation.

The bus driver is another example of this. While drinking whiskey throughout the entire trip, he drunkenly talks endlessly about why he never cuts his hair, how he is unmarried and lives with his mother, and then obsessively rants about a senile doctor who tries to drive a car that is falling apart and has delusions about delivering babies. The doctor delivers babies that never exist. Death, life, presence, and absence are all intertwined. You can’t even be sure that the doctor is real as the bus driver’s babbling seems to veer off into delusion too. In fact you can’t even tell if the bus driver and his leaky bus are real or figments of Vera’s imagination. Throughout the prose, from beginning to end, the interpenetration of reality and fantasy are just as prevalent as the mixture of life and death or presence and absence. One thing is for certain: this bus ride represents to Vera a journey into the unknown and a place where all reference points of familiarity recede. But then again, nothing in the novel, from the start, can ever be known with certainty.

By this point, it becomes clear that this Herclitean dichotomy, this clash and harmony between opposites are a defining element of Young’s writing. Norman Mailer uses this dichotomy to a different effect, but with similar results in terms of expansive prose. Once you latch onto this theme, the ideas become easier to follow. The writing remains dense and heavy until the end though. It moves slowly like a Stanley Kubrick film, say Barry Lyndon, and reading it slowly but steadily helps to move it along with consistency. If compared to music, you could say it moves, possibly at the pace of a glacier or tectonic plate, not with the verse-chorus-verse structure of a rock song, but like the movements of a symphony. It is an exercise in variations on a theme, and the theme is repeated rhythmically like calm waves on a gentle shore.

So as the bus driver pulls into the destined town, Young takes us back to the New England mansion where Vera lives with her mother and Miss MacIntosh. Vera’s mother is bedridden and addicted to opium so that she floats in and out of hallucinations so freely that it is impossible for her to tell what is real and what isn’t. The porous boundary between the real and illusory allowed for visitations of guests from ancient times and the presence of the dead. Through her we get introduced to a whole constellation of objects that may or may not be symbols depending on the context in which they appear. Doorknobs, apples, moths, stars, fireflies, starfish, seashells, and all kinds of other things appear in conjunction in ways that sometimes make sense and sometimes confuse you. It is possible that a state of confusion is what the author is sometimes trying to achieve, especially in some passages relating to her friend Mr. Spizter. Otherwise, the presence of horses is another constant in the text as is the presence of water in all its forms, especially in the form of fog as an element of concealment and confusion, and also the ocean which sometimes acts as an element of consciousness. In any case, water in its varied forms is closely related to revealing and concealing hidden aspects of the writing.

While Vera’s mother lives in the flux of her fantasies and realities, her friend Mr. Spizter lives a life of restraint, rarely ever venturing outside his self-imposed limitations. He hunts butterflies, capturing them and then enclosing them in glass cases for his own private collection, symbolically killing the free spirited creatures of flight to be permanently imprisoned, like Mr. Spitzer is inside his own head. Mr. Spitzer also composes music in his head that no one will ever hear because he never plays it for anybody. Instead he writes it on scraps of paper and cloth in hopes that when he dies, someone will piece them all together to form complete works of music. Is that an indication of the author’s intention? She feeds us loads of information and leaves us to our own devices to piece it together to make a coherent whole. As readers we may never be certain if we put the pieces together in the right way or not. Mr. Spitzer is also a lawyer and executor of last wills; his job is to hunt down lost relatives who, without knowing so, are heirs to abandoned estates. He never succeeds though, so the man who hunts and captures butterflies is never able to track missing ancestors of the deceased. It probably doesn’t matter anyways because the deceased, being dead, can’t know that their relatives are absent. And Mr. Spitzer’s mind is saturated with silent music.

The most distinctive thing about Mr. Spitzer is that his twin brother died. His brother’s first name is Peron and his first name is Joachim. Peron is the opposite of Joachim who lives his life though the avoidance of taking chances while Peron lived by doing nothing but taking chances. He earned a living by being a professional gambler. There is a catch to all this because Vera’s mother was in love with Peron even though Joachim is in love with her. She doesn’t love Joachim though and his presence in her life represents the absence of Peron because Peron, allegedly, committed suicide. The suicide is alleged because we never find out if it really happened or not. It is possible that Joachim and Peron are actually the same person, a point driven home by the complete absence of any references to Joachim’s life before Peron’s death. The way that life and death and presence and absence dance around each other in this book takes on a dizzying pace at times.

Through Mr. Spitzer, we also learn about Cousin Hannah, a suffragette and union leader who traveled all around the world at a time when women rarely left their homes. Mr. Spitzer is the only person present as Hannah lies on her deathbed, a strange paradox considering her supposed fame and distinguished life. Hannah was once a woman who appeared in the newspapers and now she is dying forgotten and alone. Like Vera’s mother, she is in opposition to Mr. Spizter who stays within his own boundaries. While Vera’s mother goes outside her boundaries mentally in opium induced hallucinations, Cousin Hannah went outside her boundaries through travel and activism.

Hannah’s romantic relationships are a prevailing thought at the time of her death. She was once on the verge of getting married and then disappeared from the public on the day of her wedding. There are overt hints that she is a lesbian. She once fell in love with another woman. They were climbing a mountain together during the winter. After ascending to the peak and starting down the other side, Cousin Hannah lost her skirt. Her lover was waiting for her return and when Hannah came back over the peak without her skirt, her romantic interest insisted on going up and over to get it and bring it back, only she never returned, presumably dying in an avalanche or from something else like hypothermia. Here we are again with love-death-marriage-life-presence-absence and the ubiquitous water in the form of snow, ice, fog, and tears.

Narratively, the stories of Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah are told in the first person omniscient by Vera who probably isn’t even present in the room as Mr. Spitzer patiently waits for Hannah to die. This is a strange trick to pull off since the narrator presumably has no access to the inner workings of the others’ minds. The two of them do soliloquize parts of their story, but these passages are largely told from Vera’s point of view. This is strange also because, even though the two characters sometimes speak in monologues, neither of them actually interacts with each other. This is true throughout most of the book; characters mostly overlap while their actual interactions and conversations are minimal. What this does is highlight the individuality and solitude of each character, emphasizing the empty and impenetrable spaces between people despite how proximate to each other they might be physically. Each character is like a tightly sealed container with massive spaces, heavy with emptiness, between them.

The central passages about Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah get to be redundant, excessive, and sometimes confusing. But we get a break from all that when Mr. Spizter goes to a funeral for a frog that once lived in a deaf mute’s mouth and did all his speaking for him. Presence and absence. After that, Mr. Spitzer has a transcendent experience, reminiscent of James Joyce, in which he finishes composing the silent music in his head and “hears” it in the form of hallucinations. It is like French Symbolist poetry where you need to interpret it according to how it feels rather than what it means.

And then the last 400 pages are the strongest, and weirdest, part of the novel. Vera reappears in her mother’s house and learns the darkest secret of Miss MacIntosh before she disappears into the ocean. The secret involves her inability to grow hair and the absence of one breast. In an earlier part of the book, Vera had a dream in which she learns this secret. Learning the truth in a dream is another plunge into uncertainty and also emblematic of how close fantasy and reality are in our consciousness. This secret acts as a broad framing device in this maximalist novel. After the disappearance of Miss MacIntosh, some odd characters enter into the narrative. One is an insane old woman who insists Vera’s mother hired her to be a new nursemaid even though Vera no longer lives there. And when I say this trollish woman is odd, I really mean she is odd.

Then with another broad framing device, we return to Vera on the bus as it pulls into a town at daybreak in front of a hotel. Vera checks in and encounters more weird people. One is a devout Christian farmer who claims to be making the world a better place by being a professional hangman. His wife committed suicide by hanging herself from a peach tree and his kids amuse themselves by hanging dolls, teddy bears, and a sick dog from the same branch. His moral dilemmas run between the same points of certainty and uncertainty that so much of the book is about. He resolves this moral contradiction by pegging it to the certainty of his religion.

Vera also encounters the senile doctor that the bus driver talks about obsessively at the start of the book. This ties in with a waitress Vera encounters in a diner named Esther Longtree. The waitress tells her life story and we learn she has a unique problem. She gets pregnant over and over again, but each term ends in a miscarriage. Now she is pregnant again, but the baby is long past its due date. Esther’s problems are deeper since as she tells her story it gets more and more contradictory. Her miscarriages may be self-induced, they may be abortions, or she may have committed infanticide, killing the babies after they were born. But she so desperately wants to have a baby even though she may have gotten pregnant while being raped. We never know if she was actually raped or not because she has always been eager to get pregnant even if that means sleeping with complete strangers. She repeatedly gets raped or willingly seduced, we can never know for sure, by different men although some of them might have been the same man wearing different disguises. Esther spends her life in the presence of absent babies, each one stillborn or dying at the time of birth. Death-life-absence-presence-confusion-clarity-fantasy-reality-sanity-insanity-certainty-uncertainty. It’s a whirlwind that never stops until the novel ends.

Overall, Young’s novel is an extended meditation on the previously mentioned themes. And by extended, I mean extended to the limits. This is a maximalist novel if there ever was one. By establishing separate points divided by vast open spaces, say stars and fireflies on the beach or starboard and larboard, a vacuum is created to be filled with an influx of semantics, signs, and symbols to be unpacked and analyzed, but then again, sometimes it is a novel to be experienced more than understood. The contemplative themes are basic enough, but if this novel says anything definite through the way it portrays people, it is that we live ghostly existences permeated by nothingness. We barely exist except in the traces we leave behind in the memories and impressions left in the consciousness of others. Notice how other people like Peron, the senile doctor, and Homer’s ex-girlfriend are all explained through the narratives of characters in the narrative of Vera Cartwheel. In a Hegelian sense they may be real people with imaginary stories, alter egos, or pure delusions. We can never be certain and we can never know what separate, incomprehensible lives we may be living in the minds of other people. And if we live in solitude, we may barely even exist at all. We are barely anything more than nothingness that passes away into death anyways, eventually to be forgotten as all the people we knew in our lives die too. And as Esther Longtree explains, we are largely defined by everything we’ve lost. Isn’t this what Derrida’s deconstruction is all about?

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is an acquired taste. It is not easy to sink your teeth into and it is not easy to digest. Sometimes it is like eating a sandwich that is bigger than your head. Probably most people who attempt to read it will give up. But it’s not impossible to understand and it is rewarding if you make the effort. 

 

Book Review and Literary Analysis: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

      “I don’t know where I fit in in this world. I’ve been wandering for years, finding no place to settle. My memories are incomplete. I can’t even remember my own name. Am I hallucinating? Am I going crazy? I’ve heard about a place somewhere in the Midwest where people like me have found a home. I think I’ll go there and see what happens. And, by the way, who wrote these words anyway? Me?” At some point the central character of Samuel R. Delany’s monumental novel Dhalgren must have thought things like these. But don’t expect any clear answers to his questions. You have to figure the answers out for yourself. But then, how do you even know you’ve come to the right conclusions?

Part of the confusion is that this novel doesn’t necessarily start at the beginning. The beginning may be somewhere in the middle or near the end, but then again, maybe the beginning really is at the beginning. You can never really know. The protagonist can’t remember his own name or who he is, but he goes by the name Kid, Kidd, or sometimes the Kid. This name was given to him by Tak, a gay leather BDSM guy who acts as the local welcome wagon when Kid and others enter the city. Tak is a strangely matriarchal figure, not just because he is a man, but he also brings the nameless main character into the city of Bellona like a midwife bringing an infant into the world and, like a mother, giving him a name: Kid, something we call a child. When they have sex, Tak insists Kid sit on his lap and bite his nipple until he draws blood, an inversion of Christian iconography of the Christ child on the lap of Santa Maria, and a sado-masochistic inversion of breast feeding in which blood stands in for a mother’s milk. Tak introduces Kid to the world and the people of Bellona, sometimes acting as a teacher and sometimes a nurturing matron in leather and spikes, providing food, shelter, and healing when Kid needs it most. Early on in the book, you become aware that Delany has a talent for character building and word building too. There is nothing shallow in the way he writes Kid and Tak into the narrative, and this is true of many others along the way, even those who are of minor importance.

Now here’s a real problem. If I analyze everything, even limiting myself to the most important themes and elements, I will end up with a book review that is twice as long as this 900 page novel and I don’t want to do that.

But the setting is important. Bellona is a post-apocalyptic city where something bad, we’re not sure what, has left it mostly abandoned with a smoke-filled sky even though it appears there are no big fires anywhere. It is completely cut off from the rest of America where life continues on as normal. The remaining inhabitants are four main groups. The two most prominent are African-American people and various remnants of the 1960s counter cultures, namely bikers, hippies, and beneficiaries of the sexual revolution. The counter culturalists and African-Americans interact the most freely. The other two categories of people are a small band of middle class families and a small group of upper class intelligentsia including an order of monks in an isolated monastery. These upper and lower classes mingle less often. All these groups of people are outsiders in some way.

Tak introduces Kid to a hippie commune dedicated to distributing food they lift from abandoned stores. He doesn’t quite fit in with them, but hooks up with another peripheral friend of theirs named Lanya who becomes his girlfriend. She is multi-talented, highly intelligent, free spirited, plays the harmonica, and likes to be naked, a fully realized embodiment of the female hippy who is too individualistic to actually be a part of any one group.

As the story progresses, Kid become the leader of a gang called the scorpions. Their name is never capitalized suggesting that it isn’t actually their name, but rather a subcultural designation like “thugs” or “gangbangers”. These scorpions resemble the Hells Angels only they are interracial, in fact most of them are Black, and they only have one Harley Davidson which they can’t ride because there is no gasoline in Bellona. They squat communally in abandoned houses they call “nests” and spend most of their time eating, getting drunk, and having sex. Sometimes they go out on runs which usually involve nothing more than looting and vandalizing abandoned stores. When Kid joins the scorpions he meets his other lover, a teenage boy named Denny who becomes a third partner in the relationship with Lanya.

Kid is a richly detailed character. He is half Native American Indian and a former inmate of a psychiatric hospital. His two outward emblems of identity are a chain with various jewels, lenses, and stones wrapped around his body and an orchid, a type of weapon he wears strapped to wrist and holding five razor sharp blades which he uses in fights. He acquires these two objects the way a character might come across a magic ring and enchanted sword before setting out on a Grimm’s fairy tale style quest. Aside from recovering his memory and name, Kid’s two main ambitions are becoming the leader of the scorpions and becoming a poet. He accomplishes both. He becomes the gang leader, taking over from a guy named Nightmare, by proving his courage in a run on a department store, but he becomes a poet for a reason he doesn’t choose. The mayor of Bellona is looking for a poet laureate to represent Bellona and Kid is the writer he finds through a scout. Since he is the only writer around, and a charismatic individual who actually writes about Bellona, his poems get published even though they are probably not great writing. This novel, as it touches on the craft of writing, is in part a self-referential work of literary criticism, a use of the novel to philosophize about the writing process.

In regards to the writing process, Delany presents us with a puzzle in the form of a notebook which Kid finds when he is with Lanya. It is a ragged spiral bound notebook which has writing only on the right side pages (for bibliophilic nerds who actually know anatomical terms concerning books, the right hand side of the page is called the “recto”). The author of these writings is never revealed, but we do know they contain extensive commentaries on literary criticism and, by a possible interpretation, they are also pages from the novel Dhalgren itself. Something else in these pages written by the unknown author is a list of names, some of which bear close but not exact resemblance to the names of other characters in the book. One of these names is Dhalgren, which may or may not be the name of a journalist that Kid meets at a party given in his honor. Are the contents of this notebook the writings of Kid, being part of the memories that he lost? There are clues that suggest Kid’s real last name is Dhalgren and that the journalist is actually himself and the author of the entire novel. Does that make Kid a literary persona of Samuel R. Delany? But wait a minute, aren’t all the characters personae of Delany? Is that true of all authors? Can an author write characters that are actually not a part of their own mind? Before I expand on this meta-meta narrative framework, let me just point out that the blank pages on the left hand sides (called the “verso” in book nerd language) are where Kid writes the poems that will later be published by the mayor.

One key to understanding this book might be the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body. Several characters wear these chains and Kid learns early on that it is considered impolite to ask anybody what they mean. These people are all symbolically connected through these chains. What the lenses, stones, and beads attached to them actually do is distort visual imagery when looked through, refracting light, fracturing appearances, and redirecting eyesight during the act of looking. If these objects are different occurrences strung together in the narrative of the novel, then it is an indication that what we read is a distorted and fractured view of what actually happenes. We use language and memory to interpret the world and neither can be entirely accurate since they approximate and distort the world the way the stones distort visual imagery. This distortion can be seen in several ways, one of which is the shifting of narrative voices. In the earlier chapters, there are points where the narrative changes without warning from third person singular to first person with the first person being the voice of Kid. The final chapter of the book switches over entirely to first person narration which tells us that Kid is the author of Dhalgren, especially because the last section is made of fragments relating back to other parts of the story complete with meta-critical commentaries, reworkings of passages, corrections of spelling errors and typos, and other editorial notations, all of which are presumably written by Kid. This suggests that the final section contains contents from the right side pages of the notebook he writes his poetry in. This narrative chaos forces the reader to think in terms of narrative distortion, shifting planes of reference, and redirecting of attention which can be compared to the way the objects on the necklace distort visual perception when held in front of the eye. This alteration of narrative lines also indicates another theme in the novel: the questioning of Kid’s sanity.

As Kid wanders through the novel, he constantly frets about whether he is insane or not. We know that he was once diagnosed with a mental illness and forgetting your own name isn’t exactly healthy or normal. If that isn’t insanity, it certainly indicated an identity crisis at the very least. Kid’s mind also appears to play tricks on him. Streets and buildings seem to move to different locations when he isn’t looking, for example, and then there are a series of fortean anomalies. A woman he has sex with turns into a tree, two moons appear at the same time, one day passes for him whereas one week passes for everyone else, and then the smoke in the sky clears as a giant red sun appears over Bellona then goes away. These can’t be simply attributed to insanity and hallucination because, at least with the moons and the sun, everybody else in Bellona sees them too.

My contention is that these anomalies are merely literary devices, especially because they occur at major turning points in the development of Kid as a character. For instance, one morning Kid and Lanya go off on their own. Kid takes a bus to a department store where the scorpions are preparing for a run that involves breaking into the skyscraper which is guarded like a fortress from the top floors by members of the middle class. Kid joins the scorpions and, through his actions, sets himself apart from the others in terms of courage, intelligence, and fighting ability. During the span of this day, Lanya is out searching for Kid, but for her this span of one day lasts an entire week that ends when they meet up in the evening. Previous to this time warping, the two had spent most of their days together having sex. This shift in time perspective happens when they reach a crossroads in their relationship and go their separate ways for a bit which is further enhanced by the fact that Lanya is against the idea of joining the scorpions. The time distortion represents a major turning point in how Kid and Lanya see each other,

The most memorable anomaly is the appearance of the giant red sun, the most mind altering, entrancing, and emotionally intense passage of the novel. My interpretation here is that this event symbolizes another major turning point in the story of Kid’s life. As the sun begins to rise, Kid leads the scorpions to the balcony of a house so they can watch. The sun is so intense that it scares everybody, some to the point of dread and tears, and yet Kid, feeling fear the same as the other, remains calm simply knowing that if it is an indication of impending doom, there is nothing he can do about it. But what really happens is that this coincides with Kid’s ascension to the leadership of the scorpions, taking over the mantle from Nightmare. The sun appears when he reaches his goals of becoming a famous poet and becoming the leader of his gang. At the same time as the sun’s appearance, one scorpion also kills somebody and a sniper begins firing from a rooftop at African American people on the street.

Now take a step back for a second and look at this from another angle: if Kid is the writer of this novel, than these anomalies and the people who say them might be creations of his imagination. Or maybe these things really did happen. But if he is the writer, editor, and narrator of his own story should we take these anomalies at face value as hallucinations, or did the writer write the witnessing of these events into the story to prove that other people saw them in order to ward off accusations of insanity, a possible defense mechanism protecting his own ego from dissolution. By forcing us to think on different levels about the possible reality, hallucination, or symbolism of these anomalies, Delany draws our attention to the fact that we edit our own personal narratives, adding details and leaving out others, in a way that a writer makes choices when writing a novel. It is human nature to embellish stories so where is the dividing line between truth and fiction? Is the line between sanity and insanity really all that clear? The shifting narrative planes make you see the story from Kid’s point of view in a way that make you think like a person who might be insane while wondering if this is really insanity or just human nature. Or just a bunch of literary devices. Anyways, the reason I think these anomalies are nothing more than literary stylization is because of the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body.

As said before, the chains with their ornaments are worn by many people in Bellona and it is considered impolite to talk about them. Kid believes the people who wear them are special in some unexplained way. This gets reinforced when the psychiatrist Madame Brown offers him a job moving furniture for her friends, the Richards family. She tells him she is doing him a favor because he wears his chain. She later reveals that that is not the truth; she only told him that to conceal the real reason she offered him the job. She tells him that the chains actually mean nothing. This is also reinforced when Tak brings Kid to a warehouse where massive amounts of these chains are being stored. Anyone who knows where this warehouse is can get an ornamented chain to wear. They are nothing but cheap trinkets. It is possible the reason no one who wears them wants to talk about them is that there isn’t anything special about them and they just don’t want to admit that. So if the chains are a metaphor for the novel itself and the objects attached to it have no value other than the purpose of distorting the viewer’s vision, then we can conclude that the anomalies and some other details in this novel have no intrinsic meaning other than ornamentation. The anomalies dazzle the mind, but if the reader looks too deeply into their meaning, they get sidetracked from the more important elements in the story.

This brings us to the passage where the two moons appear in the night sky. There is a backstory and a subplot related to this. During a riot in the African American neighborhoods, a Black man named George Harrison gets photographed having sex with a white teenage girl named June Richards in an alley. The photograph is printed in Bellona’s newspaper which describes it as a rape. But the situation is complicated because it may not have been a rape considering that June wanted to have sex with George Harrison. His name is interesting considering he has nothing to do with the now deceased guitarist for The Beatles. Maybe the author chose that name as an element of distraction, a symbolic dead end. There is one night when George Harrison is hanging out in a bar and June is outside because she is stalking him for the purpose of having another sexual encounter, negating the accusation that she was raped. When Lanya confronts George Harrison about this, the Black man himself, who has the status of a celebrity in the community partly because nude posters of him are being circulated by the female minister of a church, explains that the controversy isn’t that he raped her. The controversy is that American society has anxieties and fears regarding Black sexuality and, just as much, there are fears and anxieties surrounding women’s sexuality. So when a Black man and a white woman are exposed for having consensual interracial sex, the society reacts with accusations of rape. So what happens when June comes close to catching up with George Harrison at the bar is that two moons appear, one a nearly full with a sliver of shadow over its left side, the other gibbous with its two horns pointing right. This is an anomaly because the Earth’s shadow would project onto the same sides of the two moons but they don’t. This is because June and George Harrison are going off in two different directions without meeting even though they are in close proximity to each other. The people in Bellona immediately assign the name “George Harrison” to the new moon to emphasize this point. The symbolism is so obvious that you have to second guess your interpretation to check if it makes sense or not.

The character of June Richards links into another of the novel’s many subplots. June lives with with her parents and her brother in an apartment building. Kid gets hired to move their furniture from their apartment into another one because the people downstairs make too much noise. The people downstairs are actually a nest of scorpions. While helping to move a sofa, the son falls down an empty elevator shaft and dies. After the scorpions help Kid pull the corpse out of the shaft, he begins to get closer to them. And we find out that all is not right with the Richards. The scorpions say they hear strange noises coming from their apartment, suggesting the possibility of domestic violence or incest. Mrs. Richards is a nervous woman who talks endlessly but cautiously when Kid comes to work for her. Her goal in life is to be a great housewife and a socialite who entertains friends at dinner parties. She is also agoraphobic and never leaves the apartment. Mr. Richards leaves every day to go to work, but he lives in Bellona where there is no work and probably does nothing more than wander around alone, a perfect portrait of a middle aged man who feels lost in the world and tired of his life. They also have an older son named Eddie who he kicked out of the house. We later find out that Eddie joined the scorpions. The Richards are a perfect portrait of a middle class American family. They hold together by never talking about their problems and never directly confronting reality. Beneath the surface, they seem like people who are about to explode. When their son dies, they cope by leaving his body to rot in another apartment and pretending he never existed. Strangely, their friend Madame Brown insists that they are a perfectly well-adjusted family.

Madame Brown is a minor character, but by the end you begin to realize she is not a reliable source of information. That is why you might not believe her when she tells Kid that he is mentally ill because her own judgments and perceptions are always lacking.

The Richards are a middle-of-the-road American nuclear family and Kid realizes they are not his people. Mrs. Richards serves spam on wonderbread for dinner, acting as though they are elegant despite the moldy corners she has to cut off to make them edible. The way she cuts off the mold is like the way the family acts willfully ignorant in order to maintain the illusion that they are happy. They may be typical of Americans outside Bellona, but inside Bellona they are outsiders because the city is populated with outcasts. The Richards represent what the counter cultures of the 1960s were rebelling against and Bellona is an enclave of the refugees from those counter cultures.

Bellona’s post-apocalyotic atmosphere demarcates it as cut off from the mainstream outside world where everything functions as normal. Yet all is not bad there and it seems to hover between utopia and dystopia as a kind of purgatory. The 60s counter cultures valued individual freedom yet also valued communal relations. They believed in free love and the right to have non-traditional sexual relations. Some dreamed of a society without money or police. They wanted to party and do drugs without having to work at meaningless jobs. All of these are aspects of Bellona. But then when murders or riots happen, there is nothing that can be done about it. Material possessions have no value because everything is free. Nothing gets accomplished because society has no purpose. Scorpions commit acts of violence and vandalism simply because they have nothing better to do. Illnesses and injuries can not be properly treated because there are no doctors or medicine. Bellona represents what a society would look like if the counter cultures finally had their way. It is up to you to decide if Bellona is a success or not.

Delany’s prose is entrancing. It is the type of writing that glides along smoothly with alliteration used to give it a subtle rhythmic continuum of language. It moves along steadily and slowly and once you get into its groove you never really get out of it until the end. It reminds me of what Stanley Kubrick said about the slow pacing in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon; they move at the pace of life. If Delany had written this with a faster pace, I fear all the complex layering of meaning, themes, details, and interconnections would end up being nothing but a jumbled mess. There are a small number of passages that suffer in their execution though. Mostly these are the passages with excessive descriptions of sex. The first night that Kid and Lanya spend together is long, but it isn’t that bad. This is partly because Lanya is totally hot and I’d be chasing her tail myself if it wasn’t for two factors, one being that I am happily married and wouldn’t cheat on my wife, the other being that Lanya is a fictional character in a novel which renders the first factor null and void anyhow. The other sex scenes, and one where Lanya and Denny throw pieces of a board game at each other, just go on for too damn long.

Dhalgren is a deep and difficult novel for a lot of people. I would argue that following what is happening is not what makes it difficult, but interpreting it is what makes it daunting for some. It is maximalist in its contents. It is full of ambiguity and symbols that may not symbolize anything at all. The beginning and end overlap in a way that I haven’t even touched on here. It forces you to question your own sanity as you see Bellona from the point of view of a man who might be insane even though he oten makes sense. You might go insane yourself if you try to interpret every lead this novel offers so you have to decide what themes to pursue. Delany doesn’t offer any final answers and its open-endedness may be one of its greatest strengths. If somebody were to ask what this whole novel is about, I would answer that it isn’t about one thing; it is about a whole lot of things and you have to choose what it means to you. This might bother a lot of readers who want definite answers from what they read, but that is better for the small number of us who get deeply absored in it while pursuing a unique literary experience. Dhalgren isn’t for everybody. It’s only for a few.

 

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.