BETWEEN THE LINES : A READING OF THOMAS PYNCHON'S GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the coherence of Gravity's Rainbow. Given its aleatory appearance, it is too often wrongly assumed- or extrapolated - that "coherence" is a quality which cannot or should not be attributed to the novel. Yet a coherent reading that will accurately reflect the complexity of Pynchon's writing and the novel's labyrinthine structure is precisely what is being attempted in this thesis, and in fact, required of it. Any "reading" of a text, as the word itself suggests, is both an action and a noun. But in arriving at the object - a coherent thesis about the text - the process that has preceded it is necessarily effaced because it no longer belongs to the present, but has receded into the past. Thus this process cannot be contained within a reading which is a text, a thesis - the object that we have in the present. Yet the text that is produced through the activity of reading is also the only visible aspect of that process. Hence, the text, as an object, simultaneously is and is not the act of reading that has produced it. The central argument of this thesis is that a coherent reading of Gravity's Rainbow can only be arrived at through a process of accumulation. In constructing any reading or interpretation of a text, one always begins with a particular framework in mind, because a text is always preceded by other texts, and the reader by certain conventions of reading which make the current reading possible. But in each encounter with a text, a gap also emerges because the text to which the framework is to provide access has also never been encountered before. To read a text therefore is to hold in abeyance all that one needs in order to read it. This paradoxical nature of reading is especially apparent in a novel like Gravity's Rainbow, because it forces a revision of the rules that are needed in order to read it, in the very process of reading it. What the novel says concerning all that precedes it must also come before these, because it produces rules for its reading which cannot be derived until the act of reading is undertaken, and the novel itself is read. This thesis begins by examining what the novel has to say about the rules for its own reading, as embodied by the various narratives within the text. It then explores what this means for the rules of reading that come before it -- rules which the novel has not determined for itself, which are instead contained within its "context," its history, leading us to the concept of history itself, and the possibility for the production of this history that the novel implies. Finally, this thesis attempts to lay out the theoretical framework that emerges from the novel - the implications that may be extrapolated from it concerning the activity of reading and writing in general, as well as the conditions for the singular act of writing that is Pynchon's authorship.