Berman on secular culture versus tribal culture (or, Pynchon in the morning versus Pynchon in the evening):
One of the best portrayals of these polar opposites occurs in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, especially V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the literary structure resembles a funnel. The narrative structures begin with a completely anomic, open-ended, scientific world, in which everything that happens is random and nothing has any relationship to anything else….But just as the reader can’t take it anymore…Pynchon begins to reveal that all of these random people, objects, and events are actually part of a hidden web of connections. As he draws the net tighter and tighter, the relief initially felt by the reader – that of being out of the anomic world – turns into a claustrophobia…there is no where to hide. By the end of the story, the reader is faced with two horrendous, and totally opposite, paranoias: the open end of the funnel, the world of the anesthésie, where (as in my apartment building) you could basically drop dead and nobody would notice; or the contracted end of the funnel, in which you don’t have a moment’s privacy, and where everything you do is everybody else’s business. Which would you choose? Berman, Dark Ages America (83)
I think we already made this choice and are now struggling with the consequences. Saramago explores similar themes in The Cave. The world of anesthésie always seems more terrifying (Saramago certainly thinks it is), but as one who has had no experience of the tribal alternative, I suppose I can’t make a proper comparison. Can’t we have the best of both? (Or is that too crassly American of me?)
But take a closer look at this passage: Berman is making a point about the extremities of human society with an example that draws on the structure of a novel. I’ve read Gravity more times than I care to admit1, but I had never considered this particular reading. At first pass, all of Pynchon’s novels seem chaotic; but on subsequent readings, as you learn his methods and become familiar with the characters and themes (and the peculiar and lovely cadence of his writing), they transform from a mess of inexplicable events to a complex – and organized – pattern. It’s a bit like staring at a fractal for long enough to recognize the rhythm. So, for me, the secular to tribal path was not from the beginning of the novel to the end, but from the first reading, to the third (and fourth and fifth).
- I’ve got three copies of Gravity’s Ranbow in my library, each one more dog-eared than the last, with one so tattered it’s being held together with a rubber band. ↩
