Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow

by Kathryn Hume, Jerome Klinkowitz

The exhausting plenitude of loosely connected detail in Gravity’s Rainbow makes it a favorite of postmodern critics, who claim it describes a modern, random, unknowable universe. Hume expands the possibilities as she discloses a mythic structure that underlies Pynchon’s work and provides easier access to his world.

 

�Myth turns chaos into cosmos,” Hume explains, describing how the profuse detail of Pynchon’s book allows for the creation of a �world humankind shapes out of chaos by means of ritual and myth. . . a set of interlocking stories. . . [that] fit into a narrative sequence or mythology that conveys, supports, and challenges cultural values.”

 

Pynchon’s �mythology is not rigidly consistent,” Hume notes, but �several strands of mythological action. . . serve a stabilizing function in this chaotic book.” Pynchon creates his own �unheroic” hero to show the way for making sense of the fragmented experience of life in the postmodern world.

Genres: Literary Criticism

248 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1987

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The state of mind that permits the two modes of perception to coincide is playful and revels in the permutations without trying to pin them rigidly down. It encourages a barthesian jouissance in the open and relaxed reader, who can accept Pynchon's entire circus of effects without needing desperately to control them.

Have been decentered and somewhat displaced recently. It isn't the Zone and I don't suspect Them. Still.

Found this in a pile upstairs and took it for a spin. The thesis is that read once Gravity's Rainbow will shock and amuse but be regarded as a postmodern novel. Rereading such illustrates Pynchon as a sage collage artist situating heroic tropes in a meditation on science, death and epistemology.

This is worth people's time.

[Andrew Merritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful commentary on Pynchon’s master work through the lens of mythology, adding another layer to an already dense work. Highly recommend this to anyone looking to get more out of Gravity’s Rainbow and Pynchon’s work

[Reilly Pryma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall, 4.5/5
I was going to give this book a 4/5, maybe even a 3.75/5, for reasons I'll explain in a second, but then this book redeemed itself with a single, incredibly powerful passage:
"Orpheus fails to rescue Eurydice but gains from that experience with death the authority to speak. Pynchon too fails to rescue us and find salvation for our culture, our beloved technology. The failure in both cases is practically inevitable, but overall failure does not discredit any piece of wisdom that may emerge from the enterprise." (219)
This sums up the argument for the mythologicality (for lack of a better term) of Gravity's Rainbow, in my view, if one gives it a wider reading. There is, of course, the structural element of Tyrone Slothrop's overwhelming similarity to Orpheus, colored in by his painful differences and attachment to many other heroes, all of which Hume explains. But also the work of Gravity's Rainbow as *redemptive* but a doomed mission, in which beautiful realities are ultimately lost to a crude ritual of man being physically wed to machine ("immachinated", to use GR's language). William Slothrop's hymn to unity cut off by that screaming from across the sky.
The book's argument overall is pretty strong, especially given its originality in the face of critics enamored with GR's deconstructivist streak, which is important, don't get me wrong, but not everything. I think Hume's argument crystallized the homeyness I got from GR on my first read, of the cosmic beauty of much of the endeavor, marred as it was by brutish sexuality and the horrors of war.
However, especially around pages 120-170, the prose grows stale, repetitive. Lots of "this shows" sentences and adjacent statements of assigning clean-cut, often simplistic values of "balance" to Pynchon's ineffable work. I understand this is sometimes inevitable in academic writing, but chopping like 30-50 pages off of this book, while perhaps reducing it to an especially long essay, would do it some good.
But still, the very end redeemed it, barely edging it into 4.5.
So, yeah.

[Bill Weaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have the sneaking suspicion, call it paranoia if you will, that Thomas Pynchon is an asshole. Yes, I guess you could call this my hot take on Pynchon. Don’t ask me exactly how I know this. A few wild rumors have suggested as much to me, and aside from those, you’d have to be an asshole to come up with a line like “Jews are negotiable.” Reading this book on theory about Gravity’s Rainbow I was surprised at how little it appears to have been impacted by the Holocaust, especially given the subject matter. I know he touches on another lesser known genocide (the massacre of the Herero) but all in all Pynchon appears to have a rather amoral outlook on the subject of technology and warfare and one could say by extension, civilization. I confess it has been thirty years since I read Gravity’s Rainbow so I’ll have to go back to it and really take a look when I have some spare time. This present study is worthwhile for anyone who wants a refresh on Pynchon’s book without having to slog through 700 odd pages. I think Pynchon’s got a little too much of a hang up on the “noble savage” for my taste but it seems that was a common hang up during the seventies. Sure civilization is barbaric and all this “analysis and control” is likely motivated in large part by a fear of death, but my mom was a diabetic, and without insulin therapy she would never have lived to give birth to me, so for what it’s worth, I’ll have a side of “analysis and control” with my morning cup of coffee any day.

[Jeff Keehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an academic book and as such is not a fun read. The author expects a lot from the reader. That would explain why it took me 3 months to read this 221 page book. I read it for a number of reasons. I studied at Penn State in the mid-1980s when the author and her husband both taught there. We, the Humes and I, had a mutual acquaintance, Bill Burling, who spoke glowingly of both teachers. Bill was my unofficial mentor during my time at Penn State and my memories of him are all good ones. This book was written later. I was already a fan of Pynchon's although I have really never enjoyed anything by him except Gravity's Rainbow. Hume has some very interesting things to say about the novel and at times I felt she had opened up a small window for me to look through and see what it was that Pynchon hoped to achieve with this wild and crazy book. I just wish it hadn't taken so much energy to gain those insights.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hume writes of Thomas Pynchon's use of mythological conventions and structures in his postmodern novel Gravity's Rainbow. Not only does he make reference to such mythological characters as Orpheus, Faustus and Plasticman, she argues, but the novel itself is structured in part using devices associated with traditional myths, such as origin stories, binary oppositions and "intermappings." Hume writes that these devices represent moments of relatively stable meaning, and thus of "positivity" in the text, while noting that much commentary on Pynchon's novel focuses on and emphasizes "negativities" (irony, uncertainty, entropy, ontological instability, deconstruction, fragmentation).

This is a book for people already familiar with Pynchon's novel--and possibly with some of the critical works commenting on that work. Assuming that familiarity, this is not a difficult read. There are mentions of theorists like Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, but you could read this without needing a background in poststructuralist thought: in general, Hume's approach to the text appears to be structuralist after the manner of theorists like Northrop Frye and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an erudite discussion of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It is loaded with English department jargon and like much literary analysis has a lot of stuff that may or not be what the author of the novel was attempting to say or encode. It did offer an approach to some of the material in Pynchon's intimidating 3rd novel. References to Faust, Hansel and Gretel, The Wizard of Oz, the myth of Orpheus, and a great deal more are discussed. If you are someone who enjoyed the slog through Gravity's Rainbow and are interested in some guidance to some of the allusions, this book is very useful. I really had no idea there was so much literary criticism and analysis available for Pynchon's works. I have always just read them for the pleasure of his imagery and word play.