[This week is the one-year anniversary of Monsterpieces, which took over the account once devoted to my memoir, “Passing Down,” now taken down. I write to thank all who have followed the site and those who have commented. Since my review of Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune in the New York Times, many new readers have found their way to Monsterpieces. This modest double post about Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is primarily for them (you). Much of the piece about House of Leaves was at the bottom of my earlier post on three women rewriting novels about monsters by men. Most of the piece on Gravity’s Rainbow was at the bottom of my post on Shadow Ticket. Even early adapters of Monsterpieces may not have read all the way down to these supplemental pieces, so here they are again.
Not treating House of Leaves and Gravity’s Rainbow at the outset of Monsterpieces was a mistake . . . but I wanted to begin with new monstrous works and House of Leaves was published in 2000, Gravity’s Rainbow much further back in 1973. Still a mistake because no novel that I have discussed—including Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing and his first two volumes of The Familiar—is as explicitly and instructively (formally and stylistically) a monsterpiece as House of Leaves. As for Gravity’s Rainbow, I have so often compared novels here to it that I should have explained why I judge it to be the most profound and influential monsterpiece of contemporary fiction. So on this anniversary, I’m correcting my error and offering these slightly revised and moderately expanded versions of earlier writings, the Pynchon originally in Open Letters Review, the Danielewski originally in Electronic Book Review.]
Gravity’s Rainbow
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there’s nothing to compare it to now.”
Those are the first two lines of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow released fifty years ago. Although “too late” (for many humans) is a refrain in the novel, I believe it’s never too late to urge people to read what I think is the most important American novel published in, yes, the last fifty years.
The screaming is the sound of rockets raining down on London in World War II. Nothing to compare that sudden death from the air to then, but now we can see daily photographs of the death and destruction rocketing down on Ukraine. Palestinians occasionally launch rockets into Israel, but Ukraine seems to be the first extended rocket and drone war, asymmetrical until recently when Ukraine began sending armed drones into Russia. We don’t need Gravity’s Rainbow to feel the horror of death without warning, but on this anniversary of its publication we would do well to read or read again a novel that predicted and continues to illuminate fundamental forces of our own time.
Writing about 1945 in the late 60s and early 70s, Pynchon was using the then recent past to comment on what he called, in German, the “Raketen-Stadt,” the rocket city or state that the United States had become—with the assistance of German engineers who launched the V-2s--in response to Russian success with rocketry that could deliver nuclear payloads across vast spaces. In the novel, Hiroshima is alluded to only on a found sheet of paper, but Pynchon imagines a potential future apocalypse when the novel ends with a rocket bearing down on a movie house in Los Angeles. For the patrons, it is too late.
Perhaps MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction—has made nuclear holocaust unlikely, but rocket terror persists in Ukraine where fear of guided and random missiles has displaced millions from their homes and country. Pynchon wrote about that, too. The beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow describes in affecting detail the nighttime evacuation of children from London. The rest of the novel follows displaced other Europeans, even Americans, Africans, and Russians who wander through what Pynchon calls the borderless “Zone” beneath the rockets’ paths. The characters are like the London children, Hansels and Gretels out too late in the night without their happy ending.
Gravity’s Rainbow is a massive novel dense with historical, economic, political, social, and religious analyses of how rocket states came to be, but Pynchon’s most profound perspectives are anthropological and ecological. The “World just before men,” Pynchon writes, was “Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was such a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures.”
Primitive technology was invented to promote life, extend life. But, for Pynchon, the rise of technology—like the thrust of the rocket escaping gravity—ultimately led in the twentieth century to new and efficient and uncanny ways to “promote death.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, rockets are not just advanced weapons but metaphors for all corporate industrialism that mines the coal and pumps the oil to build towers and fuel machines that seem to promise rising above the “living critter” planet Earth to achieve a high-tech transcendence (which some of our grandiose billionaires are proposing now with off-planet life).
The climactic event and symbolic summary of the novel is the launch of a German rocket with a young man inside, an act of murder and suicide. Humans have been committing murder for millennia. It’s the suicide that our industries have now enabled on a planetary scale that is new. For Pynchon, World War II was just an accelerated incident in humans’ long-running global war on nature. If this seems a truism to all but Republican lawmakers now, remember please that Pynchon was writing his radical environmental novel five decades ago. It is indeed getting late here on this planet heated by that coal and oil.
And rockets are still screaming across the sky from east to west. Ironically and tragically, Putin is using the Nazis’ rocket power to, he has said, “de-Nazify” the government of Ukraine that is led by a Jew. Like the Nazi characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, Putin uses phallic rockets to demonstrate Russian macho mastery and to reclaim territory for the sacred Russian empire that was dissolved when the Soviet Union fell. Pynchon anticipated rocket mysticism, showing through his characters’ erotic and spiritual obsessions that rockets are more than weapons. They are symbols of godlike patriarchal power like the Biblical plagues sent raining down from heaven.
Gravity’s Rainbow is most essentially about masters, but it has plenty of monsters, some of whom are masters. An architectural folly offers “different versions of Homo Monstrosus” and becomes a metaphor for Gravity’s Rainbow. The towering rocket is a monster. So is the Reichstag building. The globe-controlling “They” is a monstrous system of control. Technology is a “monster by the tail.” The Nazi villain Blicero is called a “fabulous monster,” and his former lover, Enzian, is called Blicero’s monster. Even the comic protagonist Slothrop is termed a “monster son.” King Kong is mentioned, as is a huge octopus. A giant sci-fi Adenoid is a “lymphatic monster.” A character attentive to the sky imagines clouds are a monster. Numerous monsters don’t make a novel a monstrosity, but Pynchon does with his radical mix of genres, forms, and styles—prose and poetry, science fiction and historical fiction, linear quest for a secret and patchwork collage of information, high lyrical and low comical. Gravity’s Rainbow is an “elegant chaos” like the pinball machines it describes (they use solenoids, by the way) and a massive literary Frankenstein which is referred to twice.
Lest I scare you away with the profound gravity of Gravity’s Rainbow, know please that it is also an encyclopedia or rainbow of humor, what scholars call “the carnivalesque.” Pynchon includes a Huck Finn-like Innocent Abroad as protagonist, a large gallery of fools and frauds, slapstick chase scenes, movie parodies, Catch-22 absurdities and Monty Python stupidities, as well as bawdy songs, Proverbs for Paranoids, and word play worthy of Nabokov, with whom Pynchon studied. I should also mention goofy conspiracies and plenty of sex scenes to please just about every taste (and tastelessness). But be not fooled: the hurdy-gurdy carnival is present to conduct you into the big tent, where gravity-defying high-wire acts of human rocketry occur.
In the space I have I cannot begin to describe Pynchon’s plot in which several main characters from different nations quest for the mysterious rocket 00000, a kind of Grail in the rocket state. As in a medieval romance, the characters move through settings both super-realistic and magical and ultimately hallucinatory. Some get close to the 00000, but they are too late. It has been launched.
I also can’t summarize or even list all of the essays and books that have been written about Gravity’s Rainbow, ways of supporting my assertive thesis about its importance, both philosophical and literary. I think those critics who say that Pynchon belongs only to professors (like I was) and that the novel is heartless are wrong. Pynchon deeply empathizes with the victims of rocket states, those he calls the “preterite,” the unchosen. Many of his characters are like Hansel and Gretel, away from home and out too late at night.
I can mention forerunners such as Moby-Dick and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and coeval admirers such as the systems-influenced novelists Joseph McElroy and Don DeLillo, whose Underworld is the closest in orientation and achievement to Pynchon’s novel. For literary influence, I can report that Gravity’s Rainbow is referred to within four of the most ambitious American novels of recent decades: Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, and, yes, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. If you have read and appreciated one or more of these science-influenced monsterpieces, consider that it may be time to go back to the writer Powers called “Pop Pynchon” and Wallace called the “patriarch.”
It’s not too late. In the final words of the novel, “Now everybody--”
House of Leaves
I gave the novel a rave review in Book Magazine, long defunct and without an internet archive. I used the novel in my university classes for many years, and students always voted it the most important novel on the syllabus. No archive of LeClair notes. Because I believe that many who signed up for Monsterpieces probably know about and/or know House of Leaves, I’m not going to try to reconstruct my decades-old commentaries. If you are an utter newbie to the novel, you can find reams of analysis on the Internet. The few paragraphs that follow are an attempt to compensate for my initial mistake and to encourage you to get your hands on House of Leaves.
In House of Leaves, a young Los Angeles tattoo artist named Johnny Truant finds a manuscript in a trunk. The manuscript, by a dead man named Zampano, is a fictional description of and commentary on a photodocumentary by one Will Navidson. The documentary is about an uncanny house which has beneath it a constantly shifting, possibly infinite labyrinth in which some monster, such as the often-referred-to minotaur, may live. Characters who explore the labyrinth find no beast there, but the dark unknown spaces consume the characters, physically or psychologically.
Johnny Truant edits the manuscript, and it comes to have an effect on him like the house has on its explorers. Johnny has horrible nightmares, leaves his West Coast home, and travels to Virginia where the imagined house stood and where Johnny’s mother was confined in a mental institution. His narrative ends with a story of an infant born with holes in its brain, a metaphor for Johnny’s disintegration and, perhaps, monstrousness. A few pages later, on page 528, the book proper ends, though it is followed by 150 pages of “Exhibits.”
Even without the last 150 pages, House of Leaves is a monstrosity: from the beginning, footnotes displacing text, footnotes nesting in footnotes, commentaries interrupting narrative, blank spaces, black spaces, mirror writing, upside down or skewed texts, crossed-out texts, and lists—many very long lists. Like Moby-Dick, to which Danielewski refers on page three, and like the labyrinth that House of Leaves describes, the novel swallows and literally disorients the reader forced to shift the book around into different reading positions. Danielewski quotes Heidegger and Freud on the uncanny, the feeling of being “not-at-home,” and this is the use—and abuse—value of House of Leaves.
In The Monstrous and the Marvelous, Rikki Ducornet says “the monstrous is unsettling because it appears to belong nowhere but its own boundless category.” This too describes House of Leaves. All of Danielewski’s numerous references to the minotaur are lined through in the text. If there is no monster in the novel, the text itself is the monster and it appears boundless.
From Navidson and Zampano, to Truant and Danielewski, House of Leaves seems an all-male parasitical production with mostly male hosts—Nabokov, Borges, Escher, Melville, Poe. But if Johnny Truant has invented the whole text, as is possible, then a woman may be responsible for the monstrosity of his creation. When Johnny was four, his mother Pelafina spilled boiling oil on his arms, thus deforming Johnny. When he was seven, she may have tried to strangle him. Shortly thereafter, Pelafina is placed in a mental institution and Johnny’s father dies. Among the “Exhibits” of the last 150 pages are more than 50 pages of Pelafina’s asylum letters to Johnny. In one, she warns him of her “questionable genetic bequeathal.” Increasingly disordered in their style and in their format, Pelafina’s sheaf of letters may be the formal model for Johnny’s House of Leaves.
Danielewski surrounds the letters with seemingly random elements that extend the monstrosity of the book proper: sections entitled “bits” and “pieces,” poems, collages, epigraphs, polaroids, photographs of manuscript pages, delayed epigraphs. The final section is a thirteen-page index. It is the supreme list, metaphor for the novel as a whole—an abyss—and a non-whole, a non-organic construct.
Danielewski has said that he believed his core audience would be “younger readers used to working with web pages with multiple texts,” and he said he persuaded his publisher to serialize House of Leaves on the Internet. This is an interesting experiment because the future medium for monstrous fictions may well be electronic, where space is cheap and distribution can be world-wide. It’s through the Internet that Danielewski created a large and loyal band of readers sometimes referred to as a cult.
Of recent works featured on Monsterpieces, House of Leaves is closest in its uncanny monstrosity to Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here. Not her obsessive self-reference but her book’s formal derangements and stylistic variations. Danielewski would use these deconstructive—or construction-resisting methods—in The Familiar, but the methods are more radical and more relevant to the psychological matter in House of Leaves. Its disorder creates a paradoxical density, as if the abyss in the plot of the novel extended out to make it a black hole into which all of its elements were being sucked and concentrated. In the extreme emotions it treats and elicits, House of Leaves is similar to Solenoid. That novel’s several descriptions of horror beneath some buildings in Bucharest may even have been influenced by Danielewski’s abyss.
I say all this knowing the danger that once you have read House of Leaves, you may depart Monsterpieces saying to yourself, “After this, who needs all those recent or earlier novels on the site?” Maybe think of the earlier ones as interesting forerunners, the recent ones as supplements. House of Leaves is intensely philosophical and psychological and metafictional, but doesn’t have the political leverage of big novels by Pynchon, DeLillo, Vollmann, Coover, Powers, and Ellmann. Or even The Familiar. But for pure and excessive monsterpiece monstrosity you can’t beat House of Leaves . . . unless you want to go even further back and re-read Moby-Dick.