From delirious to wonderful realism

The monumental novel Gravity’s rainbow This is the usual introduction to the work of the writer Thomas Pynchon (Long Island, New York, 1937), a text that is a challenge due to its length, themes and the style that draws on the narrative possibilities that James Joyce began with Ulisessaid chronicler and narrator Franco Félix.

The American writer’s work has anti-colonialism as its main theme, which places him as a pioneer in warning about the brutality and consequences of the appropriation of nations, Felix said.

The essayist also highlighted in an interview with this newspaper the influence that the Irish genius has on the American, especially in the mixture of characters and narrator; when the narrator explains the scene, suddenly in that same paragraph, even in the same line, we are hearing the character’s thoughts. They are very well mixed in the narrative..

He added that this curious way of narrating comes from the Uliseswhere the characters Bloom and Stephen are confused with the narrator, both are a kind of alter ego by Joyce himself. One young and the other old. They appear and are narrated in the third person, then in the second and in the first person..

The above, added Felix, “is done a lot by Pynchon in Gravity’s rainbowa monumental and difficult novel because the narrator and the characters are blurred in the narrative structure.”

The text is brutal in every sense, said the Sonoran writer. Today it could affect people’s sensitivity and even more so in 1973. It is a mind-blowing novel, but you need to spend a lot of time on it.A year after its appearance, she was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction in the United States.

The Rainbow… rises up against colonialism. It clearly speaks of the drive of the countries that won the Second World War and were appropriating nations, which some have already liberated and others have not. We have seen wars between Russia and Georgia and now with the Ukrainians. These disputes are still alive today.said Felix.

The winner of the most recent Malcolm Lowry Essay Prize spoke of the complexity of the themes Pynchon touches on in this narrative: from polymers with a chemical engineering perspective, through to World War II, nation states, the end of the war, and the incredible story of the Herero, a community from Africa that has now disappeared.

Pynchon “doesn’t say ‘colonization is wrong.’ Never. He does stories that make you think about it. Like the one about the Herero people. That story is brutal. They were wiped out of southern Africa. That genocide involved several factions of the fighters in World War II. I learned about that story from that book.”

The 60-page text details how colonization caused the disappearance of this tribe.

Sea of ​​characters

The title also incorporates subthemes such as the black commandos of the Nazi factions, the political relations between Russia, the Germans, the Allies and everything that remains afterwards, since it begins right at the end of the world war: Hitler has already committed suicide, the soldiers are scattered throughout Europe, many commit many atrocities and others are lost, like one of the main characters: Slothrop.

“This character has a curious relationship with V2 rockets. In the places where Slothrop has had sexual relations or had erections, a V2 has fallen, which leads to a kind of mapping of the places where he walks. Organizations of Pavlovian scientists who subjected this subject to a conditioning process begin to look for him, different factions among scientists, the Germans, the Russians.

Slothrop is a freewheeling, mind-blowing character, he lets himself go through the world, he runs around and has a lot of adventures while he is being chased. This story is within a sea of ​​characters and other stories. It is a bit sinister. In the first pages everything is turbulent, but halfway through the book of more than a thousand pages you realise what is happening. Slothrop disappears for about 300 pages and then reappears.

Felix defines it as a story made up of a lot of stories, so broad that its studies are not exhausted. “It is so complex that, if already with the first novel that Pynchon wrote, V.it was seen that the subject had encyclopedic knowledge, with The Rainbow… He slammed the door and made clear the capabilities to address a topic as subtle as eroticism” and move on to masochism and sadism on some occasions.

The Rainbow… It was written between the novel The auction of lot 49 and the story book A slow learning. That’s where Pychon put all his energy into. The second is a short novel with a very funny story about the detective Oedipa Maas and the third is a collection of very short stories..

Let yourself be carried away in reading

Franco Félix warned that patience is the main trait of a Pynchon reader. “As with Jacques Derrida in philosophy, when you read Derrida you don’t understand a damn thing, but you have to let yourself go and, after many pages, you say: ‘I know what he meant back there. ’ There is a generation of writers who have advanced with this current of writing, which they call delirious realism, as if everything were within a delirium, but in between you can learn things.”

Felix argued that Pynchon also comes close to the wonderful reality of the Cuban and French Alejo Carpentier (Lausanne, 1904-Paris, 1980), who in The kingdom of this world He addressed “the problem of the French colony and the Haitians. This allowed him to talk about shamans, violence in power relations, slavery, the colonized and the colonizer, the mythologies that exist within peasant communities, the indigenous people. To this day, these processes of colonization remain culturally rooted there.

“It is closer to the madness or genius that exists in everyday life. Hurricane seasonby Fernanda Melchor, is in that tradition: it works with elements of reality and turns them into something terrifying, into something overwhelming. There is nothing fantastic in the book. The brutality of the text is that it is too close to reality.”

Franco Félix added that in another novel, Backlightingthe writer uses the World Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, “to mock the celebration of Columbus’s arrival in America. Now with postcolonial studies we understand this, but Pynchon is getting way ahead of himself.

“The novel begins with the exhibition, where The Boys of Chance arrive in a hot-air balloon; a dog appears reading Henry James. It’s crazy. It moves forward to the Mexican Revolution.

Pynchon uses two perspectives: the arrival of Columbus, the Spanish and the entire colonization and, at the same time, a great milestone of the revolutions: the Mexican Revolution, clearer than the War of Independence in terms of liberation from the foreign yoke and, in that case, from the ideas that speak of a Frenchified and Europeanized Mexico, and when a people with its own idiosyncrasy finally rises up.