“It is a classic ‘folly’, all right”

Gravity’s Rainbow is one of those books. It has been sitting on my bookshelves for years, going pale with not being read. Occasionally, I bring it out and dive into the first chapter. But Thomas Pynchon is not a smooth read. You can’t glide through it, like the average novel. The text resists being consumed, planting obstacles in the form of difficult (or made up) vocabulary, unannounced changes in point-of-view, lapses into stream-of-consciousness and other obscurities. Speaking English fluently, in other words, does not unlock the book, and, because it is quite long, it’s hard to force yourself through it.

Ironically enough, during this particular crawl through Gravity’s Rainbow, I’ve also read several other books, lastly I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, which includes the character of a frustrated novellist who specialises in confusing his readers. Tangentally, I have some observations on sexism in this novel - it includes some brilliant and interesting female characters and voices, and is a wry commentary on the idea that getting married is the end-point in a woman’s life. But only men are portrayed or recognised as geniuses, while women’s creative and analytical abilities are sidelined or, on occasion, ridiculed. Only the male characters understand the novellist’s work, and the narrator (his daughter, Cassandra) has to have it explained by her love-interest, who has otherwise always been portrayed as her intellectual equal.

Particularly difficult to read was Cassandra’s description of maneouvering her step-mother into staying with her father. Of course, Topaz is also Cassandra’s mother figure, who she is trying to keep close, but still:

Oh, darling Topaz! She calls Mrs Cotton’s interest in Father celebrity collecting, and never sees that her own desire to inspire men is just another form of it - and a far less sincere one. For Mrs Cotton’s main interests really are intellectual - well, social-intellectual - while my dear beautiful stepmother’s intellectualism is very, very bogus. The real Topaz is the one who cooks and scrubs and sews for us all. How mixed people are - how mixed and nice!

Well, what to say about that - no person is defined by the housework they do. One of the good things about this book in gender terms, is that it includes in Topaz a rare sympathetic portrayal of a stepmother. Yet she is also mocked relentlessly, particularly for her pretensions to being an artist in her own right. Part of this is to do with a criticism of women aspiring to be the Muse (object not subject), but her own artistic work is ridiculed just as much - except for when it finds expression in gender-appropriate forms such as dress making.

But, to go back to Gravity’s Rainbow, I think I’ve finally cracked it. I’m 83 pages in; a personal record. And I’m finally enjoying the process - I have to quote this passage:

The ceilings of “The White Visitation” aren’t the only erratic thing about the place, either. It is a classic “folly,” all right. The buttery was designed as an Arabian harem in minature, for reasons we can only guess at today, full of silks, fretwork and peepholes. One of the libraries served, for a time, as a wallow, the floor dropped three feet and replaced with mud up to the thresholds for giant Gloucestershire Old Spots to frolic, oink, and cool their summers in, to stare at the shelves of buckram books and wonder if they’d be good eating. Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most unhealthy extremes. The rooms are triangular, spherical, walled up into mazes. Portraits, studies in genetic curiosity, gape and smirk at you from every vantage. The W.C.s contain frescoes of Clive and his elephants stomping the French at Plassy, fountains that depict Salome with the head of John (water gushing out ears, nose, and mouth), floor mosiacs in which are tessellated together different versions of Homo Monsterosus, an interesting preoccupation of the time-cyclops, humanoid giraffe, centaur repeated in all directions. Everywhere are archways, grottos, plaster floral arrangements, walls hung in threadbare velvet or brocade. Balconies give out at unlikely places, overhung with gargoyles whose fangs have fetched not a few newcomers nasty cuts on the head.