ENL262

Gravity's Rainbow reminded me often of the films of David Lynch. Not so much a la Eraserhead, although the coprophagia, the smegma, and the rest in Pynchon did evoke in me the same filthy horror as Lynch's crooning, cauliflower-faced radiator girl. I'm thinking instead of something Zizek mentions in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, about Lynch's Lost Highway and its fugue storylines where fantasies are intensified to an untenable excess, thus losing their arresting, impelling power. Blicero and Pudding's fantasies involving Katje, for example, were presented luridly enough to perform on themselves the same kind of explosion as do those in Lost Highway (e.g., Pudding doesn't mind eating Katje's feces, but what really bothers him is that the practice smacks of fellatio on a black penis; as I recall, Zizek's example involved a male ape copulating with a female cyborg, a scene in which sexual clichés are staged so overtly, exaggeratedly, as to lose their tension). Elsewhere, however, Pynchon's comedy seemed to work on far different planes. The continual references to elves, gnomes and similar creatures (as I've tried to illustrate at left)— e.g., "Dispossessed elves run around up on the roof gibbering" —suggested to me not postmodern innovation, but— as Marquez would credit his grandmother's deadpan tall tales for inspiring the magical realism of Cien Años —a return to the earnest wonder of folktale or childhood imagination. As such Gravity's Rainbow for me exists beyond its moment, does more than exemplify some blistering newness. Similarly, there was a humanity (and what a pathetically inadequate and troublesome descriptor that is) to the novel— "Fuck the war. They were in love" —that I found scarce in Lost Highway (though not in Mulholland Drive). I've very much been impressed, then, by the book's success at reconciling realistic threads like Roger and Jessica's with the dreamstate hysteria and general titillation and stridency that in other works (posthardcore lyrics, emo fashion shows) often frustrate me as transparently oblique, as painstakingly accidental, as spectacular. I suppose one could retort that this just means I prefer my sex and violence leavened with sentimentality, that I'm a cripple praising the crutch of plot. We'll see.