Irene Bilocated: Distilling the Spirit of Post-Modernism

I fear I need to begin by begging the indulgence of my three devoted readers. This week’s thoughts started off in one direction, and then life conspired to pull them in another, until finally it took from me my capacity to think at all (which in all probability is a short-term affliction). These things happen, and as my self-imposed deadline approaches for this week’s contribution, I am struggling to weave the various strands of my thoughts as they stood at the time into a coherent whole.

It is well-known that I read dead people. Almost all of my favorite writers are dead, especially now that Vonnegutt is gone. That truly felt like the end of an era. However, Thomas Pynchon is still alive and still writing and will be treating us to a new work next year, which gives me some connection to the modern world. My very, very dear friend Mr. Burns, first recommended Gravity’s Rainbow to me, oh-so-many years ago now, and for that I am forever grateful. I have continued to read books since then, even other books by Mr. Pynchon, and yet Gravity’s Rainbow still sits in a class by itself so far as works by authors still breathing as of this writing.

Often mentioned in the same breath with Mr. Pynchon is the young, and sadly recently departed, writer David Foster Wallace. Mr. Wallace has been perched on my TBR list for a couple of years now, because of the comparisons of his work to Mr. Pynchon’s, which to me is a good thing. A young writer pushing the boundaries of what constitutes the novel and how we communicate with the written word keeps the medium dynamic. This has been done by most of my favorite writers. Even the 200+ year old Tristram Shandy, which I’m reading at present, has elements which critics would call “modern” or “post-modern.” James Joyce eventually left the novel behind to create Finnegans Wake. Such treatments may not be that page-turner one reads at the beach on holiday, but they have stood the test of time as “legitimate” literature.
All of which explains why I tend to lose my decorum when, every so often, I visit a book forum and read where someone has written, almost boastfully, “I don’t get Pynchon. I like to read real books…” and then often goes on to talk about Stephen King, or -- Noilly Prat help us -- Dan Brown. It is one of the reasons I tend to stay away from mainstream book forums.

More recently, on a more specialized forum, I read a similar such attack on Mr. Wallace. The member hadn’t even read anything by Mr. Wallace, but, based on the synopsis offered by Wikipedia, this member was convinced Mr. Wallace had nothing to offer him, personally, or the world at large. Dear readers, I nearly spilled my martini! Then I’m afraid passion overcame judgment and I tut-tutted at the offender rather publicly. I blush at the memory, but how many times am I expected to allow willful ignorance to stand unremarked upon, carrying the same weight as enlightened commentary? (Post-script – shameful as this incident was later that very day I did something even more resoundingly stupid. We all have our moments.) And about now, anyone who isn’t one of my three devoted readers is foaming at the mouth and their lips are already forming the phrase “elitist” as they sharpen their pitch forks and light the torches. Truly, I’m not here to insult your intelligence or question your taste (ok, in the case of Dan Brown I am questioning your taste, but I blog about books and booze so what does my opinion matter to you?) but to attempt to communicate across the literary divide over a friendly libation with Charles Aznavour crooning softly in the background.

Most of us realize that there is “reading” and then there is “reading.” If you are reading The Complete World Bartending Guide, you are reading differently than if you are reading Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers. And neither of those is read the same way you read Henry V. And none of those is the way you should go about reading Gravity’s Rainbow. (Or, I’m venturing to guess Infinite Jest.) Reading Gravity’s Rainbow uses different brain muscles (don’t go correcting my anatomy, it’s a metaphor). GR, in one way, is like looking at those 3-D brain teasers from the 1990s. You know, the ones where you sort of had to cross your eyes and look through the picture, which was a blob or dots or stripes, and if you did it right you were rewarded with a 3-D depiction of a sailboat or the Statue of Liberty. Only in the case of GR if you cross and uncross your eyes just right and look through the picture you see a whole universe, perfectly detailed, moving and breathing and pulling you in.

It is not a “real” universe, nor was it intended to be, but a looking glass universe; reflecting, distorting, beautiful and grotesque. And then, in a very Pynchonesque way, the looking glass becomes a kaleidoscope and the images swirl, blend, reconfigure and become something else. Suddenly you get the idea that everything isn’t what it seems, there’s a tug of paranoia. Is this the lost script of a happy-go-lucky GI Joe movie from the war years, or a Keseyian Kool-Aid nightmare? Can it be both at the same time? Indeed it can. It can be an entire 20th Century that maybe happened the way you remembered or maybe happened at the whim of a handful of the “illuminati,” as an experiment in behavioral conditioning, or a delusion in the fractured mind of Tyrone Slothrop. Keep looking through the picture with your uncrossed eyes and the picture grows darker and more sinister, or maybe the whole thing’s a practical joke, but maybe it isn’t, and as Pynchon says, “a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it…” It’s up to you, the reader to decide how deep to go -- how deep you want to go – and Pynchon will accommodate you all the way down the sewer to the very depths if you want to go that far. Doesn’t that sound like fun? But it is, really. Like the rush of the scariest roller coaster of your life, exhilarating, breathless, heart-pounding fun.

And that is how you read Pynchon. It demands more than Stephen King. It takes a different way of processing and absorbing ideas, and Pynchon will not coddle you, gentle reader. He will pistol whip you with historical events, with ideas and concepts you will then need to go read about (yeah, it really is rocket science) until you feel sufficiently versed to move on. The reward is finding out that you can read in ways you couldn’t before, in discovering that the novel is an art form that still has room to expand and evolve, and delighting in finding a writer who will challenge you at every turn, leave you exhausted, and yet eager to go back and do it again. The reward is a book you will never forget, neither will you forget how it made you think, how it made you feel. It’s worth “getting.”

So what cocktail could possibly represent the step off the precipice that is Gravity’s Rainbow? I’ve searched my mind, and I think I came up with one that Mr. Burns and good friend and fellow Pynchonite Mr. Benchley would support:

The Sazerac.

http://www.cocktailchronicles.com/2005/10/02/ye-gods

Our friends at Cocktail Chronicles are much more eloquent than I could hope to be today, and it is about time they receive the honorable mention they deserve here for showcasing the myth, legend and lore of the cocktail that has contributed in so many ways to my humble efforts to amuse.

A toast to the memory of the young Mr. Wallace.