PYNCHON HIGHLIGHTS

Like many writers with a reputation for difficulty, Pynchon’s books are often screamingly funny. I asked several of my esteemed colleagues to name their favorite scene from Pynchon’s oeuvre.  You're invited to join them and post your favorite scene from Pynchon’s previous novels in the comments section below. - Jim Ruland

Sean Carswell: My favorite Pynchon? Mason and Dixon smoking pot with George Washington while Washington's slave sits around making master jokes. Tyrone Slothrop escaping in a hot air balloon and fending of Major Marvy's Mothas with custard pies. Tyrone Slothrop dressed up as the pig-themed superhero stealing hash from Harry Truman's windowpane.

Louis Gallo: It's been quite a while since I've read V, I didn't like Vineland much at all, but two scenes stick out for me from Gravity's Rainbow: 1. The utterly gross, disgusting shit-eating scenes. 2. The sudden disappearance of Slothrop from the novel altogether, except for the sound of his harmonica in the distance. That bit was fantastic. Main character just disappears!!! Into the Preterite, I assume.

Susan Henderson: The scene that sticks out for me is easy. It's Esther's nose job in V. The doctor who does the surgery is an old war veteran who knows first-hand about the fraternity of freaks who have suffered deforming injuries in war. He's a rough man with old-fashioned techniques for plastic surgery; and there's Esther on the day of her surgery, medicated numb but not unconscious. And the whole scene is gruesome and oddly sexual. There's a line the doctor says as he's sawing and snapping bones about how frail we all are. God, it's wonderful, and you're not at all expecting what happens when she returns to his office for post-op, all wild-eyed and bandaged and turned on.

Dan Kaplan: Here's one that strikes me. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, in her quest to understand the operations and verify the existence of the mail-distribution organization Trystero, wanders into Golden Gate Park, where she happens onto "a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours." Such a simple, profound piece of oddity--Oedipa happening onto others' collective dream, which is apparently her own reality--that perpetuates the blurring of what does and doesn't exist, is "real" or imagined in the novel. Amplifying the spookiness is that these are displaced, spectral children who are on the outskirts of safety, hiding in surprising places and deceiving those who love them. Disturbing. Love it.

Carolyn Kellogg:  So much of Pynchon's work is ridiculous wordplay to the extreme -- say, the shrink Dr. Hilarius in The Crying of Lot 49, paranoid and locked up while the police come to arrest him -- that it's easy to overlook how prescient he is. In that book, published in 1966, there's a bar near Yoyodyne populated with engineer-type conspiracy theorists listening to Stockhausen on the jukebox; Saturdays are live electronic music nights. Ridiculous and futuristic, maybe: but since the 1990s, I've been going to that bar. We've all been there. It's at the bar that protagonist Oedipa first sees a drawing that looks like a muted trumpet. It may symbolize a secret mail system, which might imply many other things (then again, it might not). I had the symbol tattooed on my wrist. Some people recognize it. One day I was at Trader Joe's and the checkout guy asked me about it. "It's from a book," I said vaguely, not wanting to sound too smarty-pants. He asked about the book and I told him. "Yeah, I knew it," he said, smiling. I asked what he thought of The Crying of Lot 49, but he hadn't read it; I was the third person who'd come to his register that week with the same tattoo. Either I'm a member of a vast conspiracy (so secret that I'm unaware of it), or there are legions of Pynchon fans out there, all wearing our affiliation on our skin.

John Leary: V, I read in 1994, when I was "stationed" in Vietnam. V is a book about paranoia, and I loved it, and it spoke to me deeply, it seemed. Then a few years after I left Vietnam I read in the newspaper that Lariam, the anti-malarial medication I was taking in Vietnam, had as one of its side effects paranoia. So, that didn't exactly ruin the book for me, but it maybe lost a little resonance. I no longer really want to go to Malta, for example.

Scott O’Connor: I’m a big fan of a sequence not far into V., where the two protagonists, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, cross paths for the first time in the NYC sewer system. Profane has gotten work with a shabby band of alligator hunters, all armed with 12-gauge shotguns and unreliable flashlights, navigating the narrow refuse pipes far below Manhattan. Stencil, following his own plotline (and the title character of the book), has also journeyed down into the sewers--disguised, unfortunately, as an alligator. In the course of Profane’s pursuit of the gator, we hear the troubled bureaucratic history of the alligator patrol, the story of the patrol’s boss, brief glimpses of other guys on the squad, and the hair-raising legend of a Depression-era Catholic priest who tried (and failed gruesomely) to bring religion to the rats of the very sewer system Profane is stumbling through. All this within the 20-odd pages of Chapter Five, and told from the perspectives of (among others) Profane, Stencil, Father Fairing, even a couple of the catechized rats in question. Profane finally catches up to Stencil (in what must be one hell of a convincing gator costume). Gunshots ensue. The density of imagination in Pynchon sequences like this always remind me of Silver-Age Fantastic Four and Justice League comics: each panel is so packed with action and ideas—a fight scene, lines of overlapping dialogue, a villainous diatribe, subplots lurking in the background—that it threatens to become completely overwhelming when, at the last second, it propels you off into the next panel, and the next and the next, careening hellbent to the end of the book. More bang for your buck, really, with this kind of stuff.

Karen Palmer: Pynchon himself dismissed 1965's The Crying of Lot 49, saying, "I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." But the book -- witty, sly, and absurd -- offers the melancholy pleasure of prescience. In an early scene Pynchon's heroine, Oedipa Maas, encounters the Peter Pinguid Society, a group of right-of-the-Birchers, drip-dry-suited Yoyodyne engineers whose Civil War hero commanded the Confederate man-of-war "Disgruntled." In 1863, Pinguid (Dubya) plans an attack on San Francisco (Iraq), to open a second front for the war (on terror). Meanwhile, Russia dispatches its Far East Fleet, hoping to discourage Britain and France from aiding the Confederacy. The "Disgruntled" may have sighted one of the Russian ships (WMD); shots may have been fired (9/11); some vessel or other may have been sunk (Mission Accomplished) . . .

Rolf Potts: My strongest impression from his writing comes from the only book of his I read, V, where he's talking about how Benny Profane rides the subway and is weak with lust because there are so many pretty girls everywhere. I was like 21 when I read that, and it seemed so true. Still does, on spring days in NY or Paris.

Danna Sides: I loved Gravity's Rainbow even though experiencing the book was very much like chasing a rabbit down wormhole after wormhole, which leads to yet another wormhole. I enjoyed thinking about the mythological and occult connections conflated with world events, and how literally everybody and everything was in there: Andrew Jackson to Hansel & Gretel; genocide to seriously twisted sex. If I had to chose, I'd say I especially like the flashback of when Slothrop loses his blues harp down the loo and the Orpheus/descent into the Underworld allusions. I also enjoyed his oblique commentary on genocide: Herero/Jews. Lots of humor and serious rage right under the surface. His brain is like Google: his associations are limitless, fluid, wild interconnections galore. I remember thinking his prose made my brain tingle like when I drink a little too much champagne.

Benjamin Weissman: The bar scene in V with the bosom nipple spigots has never left me.

Antoine Wilson: My favorite/most memorable Pynchon moment is probably the visit with Washington in Mason & Dixon, where Washington is smoking hemp, being entertained by the proto-Sammy-Davis-Jr. slave, and Martha brings in the munchies.

Comments

[palinode]

Oh, my turn. I'm delighted that no one cited the English candy scene from Gravity's Rainbow. And then there's the vaguely remembered but still funny taffy pull scene. The chain sex orgy on the boat, the over-the-top espionage slapstick featuring Katja and Grigori the Octopus, the oversized oneiric adenoid plaguing the dreams of Pirate Prentice - there's more funny in a page of Pynchon than a season of SNL.

I also love the increasingly silly epigraphs that accompany each part of Gravity's Rainbow. If I recall correctly, the first part quotes Werner von Braun on the possibility of eternal life ("Nature knows nothing of extinction, only transformation"). The last section, "The Counterforce," is accompanied by a quotation from Richard Nixon: What?

[R. Casanova]

Two highlights:
the ricocheting aerosol can in the motel toilet after Oedipa's reverse strip (in 'Lot 49);
and the long section in Gravity's Rainbow where Roger and Jessica attend a Christmas church service somewhere in Kent - one of the most moving sequences in modern literature.

[Ken]

I started my first trip into Gravity's Rainbow as a sophmore at UC Santa Cruz (during the time when Pynchon was supposedly living in the area) but I finished it the next year as an exchange student in Goettingen, Germany, about 100 miles from the Harz Mountains. The scene that grabbed me then was Slothrop and Leni sitting on that mountain top, casting their giant shadows on the clouds. It felt like Pynchon had knowingly wrapped me up in the narrative.

[Mogolov]

Early in Vineland, a commercial flight to Hawaii is intercepted by a UFO and boarded by its occupants. To some on board the plane, this is entirely routine. To others, it is reason to break into song, and the song is cover for an escape. I love the musical moments in Pynchon's novels, but this is probably my favorite.

Also extremely early in one of his novels, the description of banana breakfast in Gravity's Rainbow is one that sticks with me. The endless variety of the menu, and that he wrote so much about a single ingredient, remaining funny and vibrant, not boring, is astounding. He'd have won Iron Chef, Writer's Edition.

[Wax Banks]

'They are in love. Fuck the war.'

In my world, those seven words are what literature is for. Whenever I think about Pynchon, the ludicrous run-on sentences, the smart-alecky carnival-barker asides, the goddamn limericks, the coprophagia and calculus, it all comes back to Roger and Jessica.

[Ric Marion]

So many things stick, but the oddity of observation is what claws at your mind - thinking "How does he do that?"
From '49' - The house numbers were in the 70,000's - Oedipa had never seen them so large.
and of course, the radio station - KCUF - In the early '70's, that word was not spoken in polite company - if at all.

[rmck1]

OMG ... what a plethora. Kudos to the first commenter for nailing *both* The Disgusting English Candy Drill *and* the Giant Adenoid. Both wet-your-pants hysterical. I used to force my friends to read the candy scene aloud until we were collapsing on the floor in hysterics. "Cubeb? Slothrop used to *smoke* that stuff ... like a journey to the center of a small, hostile planet ... " Unbelievably funny. And the Adenoid scene is also a pitch-perfect evocation of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds: "It's like a stupendous *nose*, sucking snot ... " before the cable breaks and the observation balloon is lost ...

In V. it would have to be that brief interlude when Profane, reading a copy of "Existentialist Sheriff" given him by Bodine on a night shift guard duty at a research lab, is confronted by SHOCK (Synthetic Human Object, Casualty Kinematics -- a crash-test dummy) and the even more ominious SHROUD (Synthetic Human, Radiation Output Determined). Pynchon uses this vignette to expose his historical method. (Paraphrasing) "In the 18th century, man was essentially considered clockwork. In the 19th, when thermodynamics was all the rage, man became a heat engine, about 30% efficient. Now, in the age of nuclear physics, man is a thing which absorbs radiation." Both deeply comic-absurd and incredibly disturbing ...

In Lot 49, there are just too many amusing moments -- the advertising exec who wants to do the Buddhist monk thing on the kitchen floor and his wife sneaks in with the efficiency expert she's cheating with: "It took you this long to consider committing suicide? You know how long it would've taken the IBM 1407? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced!" Or the SF gay bar, where Oedipa gets her "Hi, I'm ARNOLD SNARB and I'm looking for a good time!" name tag. Arnold Snarb, jesus christ :) But nothing's quite like the scene-by-scene description of The Courier's Tragedy: "Act III ended in a refreshingly simple mass stabbing."

Mason & Dixon, for me, would be all the wonderful interludes in the story between the flirtatious cousins Ethelmer, DePugh and the hauntingly-named Tenebrae -- and their oboe-playing Aunt Euphrenia. 'Thelmer's spinet rendition of "To Anacreon in Heavean" (which of course became the Star-Spangled Banner) is a delightful exegesis of both music theory and a theory of insurrection -- connecting Plato's Republic with (as DePugh cheekily suggests) "surf music" :)

In Vineland, I found the parts with Prairie and Che's crush-relationship, as well as DL Chastain's rotten home life to be a quantum leap in character development for Pynchon -- both very moving and well-drawn.

And the most moving thing in all of Pynchon's writing as far as I'm concerned remains the central novella section of GR -- the sad story of Franz and Leni Polker -- which I described in a later thread.

Bob

[palinode]

Don't forget the chance meeting between Tchitcherine and Enzian on the road. A-and how about the airborne pie fight, with the Americans singing dirty limericks involving rocket parts? Or the immortal phrase, "Fick nicht mit dem Racketemensch!"

[Beanbag Amerika]

It is definitely that scene between Tchitcherine and Enzian towards that end of Gravity's Rainbow that has most stuck with me, from all of Pynchon's books. Even now, nearly 17 years after reading it. "This is magic. Sure--but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it." On the one hand it's so terribly anti-climactic. But on the other it's such an expansively touching moment, their exchange of "broken German", "half a pack of American cigarettes and three raw potatoes." No violence. And then the sunset over the Zone.

[rmck1]

Beanbag & palinode:

Oh absolutely. Even though that little vignette just files by (and is, purely plotwise, entirely "anticlimatic" as climaxes are understood in ordinary narratives), I think it's very close to the heart of the book. And I also think it's one of the novel's few but powerful moments of heart-rending poignancy. It also resolves one of the most important plotlines -- the blind ethnic (and projected self-) hatred that had caused Tchitcherine to nearly annihilate his African half-brother and his never-quite-explicated plans for Rocket 00001.

What makes this passage so important, I think, is a reverie, several pages before, that jump-cuts between perhaps the two most oppositional figures in the book: the adorable apprentice witch Geli Tripping and the literally monstrous Uber-sadist Captain Blicero. In one of Pynchon's patented untelegraphed transitions, the perspective shifts from Geli emptying her mind to recieve the magic she'll need for the later scene, to Blicero pouring the poisoned content of his heart out to his willing victim Gottfried. Astonishingly, the content of the reverie remains continuous. What is different are the interpretations.

The reverie is one of Pynchon's great epiphanic moments where he parts the curtains -- like the seance conjuring Walter Rathenau, Slothrop in the Mittlewerke, Polker's dream of Kekule's benzene-ring Orouboros, various Schwartzkommando episodes -- to reveal his overarching vision:

"... green spring equal nights ... canyons are opening up, at the bottom are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell ... human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. 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 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. Counterrevolutionaries. *It is our mission to promote death*." (GR 720 Viking ed.)

And from Geli's reverie, into the nub of Blicero's:

"In Africa, Asia, Amerinda, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propogate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It learned empore from its old metropolis. But now we have *only* the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything ... while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become *one with*" ... (GR 722-23 Viking ed.)

So Geli Tripping and Captain Blicero, at opposite ends of GR's moral spectrum, each seeking transcendence, have the same key vision of humankind's dark, destructive role in an unmediated Creation.

Geli an honorary (though not explicit) member of the Counteforce, sees "defection" from the role of God's spoilers, in the name of Life, as the way out -- an existentialist resistance against implacable odds. Blicero seeks to become one with the process of systematized death in a singular act of carnal obliteration.

This five pages, for me, are the plexus of Gravity's Rainbow.

Bob

[rmck1]

Counteforce = Counterforce

[rmck1]

empore = empire, This = These

Arrggh = Arrggh

[Cyberia]

They're not fun, but IMO they are pivotal:

1. The master authorial ending of "V," in which TRP conjures a hole in the sea in which he sinks a ship.

2. In Gravity's Rainbow, Slothrop, after the long, difficult day, returns to his room. When Katje opens the door, he tell her that he "Had no place else to go." A-and crossing the threshold/doorway, we are told that he does so without knowing (or caring?) if it's a precipice.

[Andy K]

From V.:

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied?

[Andy K]

From V.:

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied?