Gravity's Rainbow and the limits of empathy.
I have been thinking about empathy and Pynchon . How the man can find a way to dramatize strange outright strange and or scary sexual situations. To know the depravity we are all capable of. The internal monolog of a death drive. Of running toward oblivion with arms open with joyful tears at the very thought of certain doom. Yet still, those silly cornball songs lift the spirit ... follow that bouncing ball and sing along (and all that). Yet some people think the bad puns are not enough... I remember distinctly a critic who said something along the lines of "The novel's inventiveness is not enough, it collapses under its own weight of ideas till the puns no longer transcend" (I am paraphrasing the critic tried to find the quote but am too tired to look it up right now). The central idea of Gravity's Rainbow is the joy of suffering. That it is possible hope is an act of masochism the universe can not accommodate and it is outright losing patience with the very th