Around this time every year, I find myself mirroring the image of Roger Mexico, as seen by his girlfriend, Jessica Swanlake, in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow.
Driving through a snowbound English evening in December 1944, the pair passes a small church, "a hummock in the dark upland, lamplit, growing out of the earth." Roger, a statistician attached to a secret, highly peculiar intelligence unit, suggests going in for vespers, and Jessica, who serves at a nearby antiaircraft battery, is surprised, given "his Scroogery growing as shopping days till Xmas dwindled."
My own yuletide misanthropy drives me annually to this section of Pynchon's dense masterwork, pages 127 to 136 in the 1973 first edition. For some reason, I find it particularly apt this year. Perhaps it's because I recently endured a Mannheim Steamroller concert, with an equally unsuspecting friend who had free tickets; our fragile holiday spirits were crushed along with "Silent Night." Or maybe it's because we're in the 60th anniversary of the Christmas season that Pynchon described in terms equally poignant and perturbing.
Or it could be that paranoia is among the core themes of Gravity's Rainbow. Protagonist Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant whose dalliances in wartime London correlate with the impacts of German V-2 rockets, becomes the quarry of Roger's hugger-mugger group. Slothrop's enlightenment as he wanders immediate postwar Europe parallels the reader's: that the War, seemingly fought by "sides," was and is an entity unto itself, an organism of dark forces at large in the world. It is tempting to imagine a contemporary incarnation of Slothrop's menacing Them, shrewdly manipulating science, spirit and democracy.
Pynchon never appears publicly or suffers photography. But he is not above self-parody. He dispatched Professor Irwin Corey ("the world's foremost authority") to accept the 1974 National Book Award he earned for Gravity's Rainbow. And earlier this year, he voiced an appearance in a Simpsons episode. Drawn with a bag over his head, he invited passersby to have a snapshot taken with the "reclusive author." That the Simpsons wits know Pynchon is both heartening and maddeningly ironic, for if a Them exists, Fox surely is one of Their tentacles.
The Web, not surprisingly, has spawned a network of Pynchon devotees. A good place for a novice, or the curious, to start is www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/index.html. But even the most dedicated scholars admit they're only pecking at an iceberg.
I've read Gravity's Rainbow in its entirety once, and have made incursions into various parts over the years. I still do not understand much of it. Pynchon is an exasperating polymath, but his protean prose sweeps you with a giddy exhilaration along the surface of the deepest complexities.
The passage that pulls Roger and Jessica into the dim and frigid church is a splendid sample. It describes a recital by an impromptu choir of soldiers and civilians, but it is symphonic in scope and intricacy. Motifs arise, blossom and return to a threadlike theme, in keeping with another of the book's central motifs, the eternal return of entropy, embodied by the title's arc, the climb and fall of the rocket bombs Germany rained on England. Dependent clauses tumble down endless sentences toward distant paragraph breaks, carrying the reader from memories of the Kingston alleys of a Jamaican counter-tenor's youth, past mounds of metal toothpaste tubes waiting to be melted for solder, through train-station crowds dotted with Italian prisoners and former British POWs, to the battle raging in the Ardennes and a crib in a corner of the Roman Empire, ever returning to the reluctant choir.
Along the way, examining the War's need for iron, for electricity, for time, the narration shifts from Roger and Jessica's nostalgic yearning for the flattened cheer of youth and slowly turns to address you: "Come then, leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it ..." Almost imperceptibly Pynchon's drawn you in, and in the same way the War has become lowercase, the machinery of daily life in a world you cannot control, that you suspect might control you.
And perhaps you have hoped, still hope, like Roger and Jessica and the choir and the grandparents who "wait up beyond insomnia, watching again for the yearly impossible not to occur," for that "nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are." That is, of course, the Christmas promise, both in the Christian Advent of redemption and in the timeless, universal solstice festival.
But again and again Pynchon's towering orchestration collapses in discord. A wartime cast of characters—"the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star"—climaxes with Dumbo the elephant clutching "that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white painted tanks ..."
Then suddenly you are both in that church and on the scene in Bethlehem, leaving, wishing "you'd picked him up, held him a bit..."
As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.
You can only carry the echo of the choir "to the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark."
This might sound anti-redemptive, but it's not. Even the most devout must understand that redemption starts within. It cannot be imposed or conveniently supplied. And you won't find it in frantic commerce, or in the ponderous pummeling of Christmas carols.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.