Table of Contents
ZAK SMITH
INTRODUCTION
The one time we met, thirteen years ago, he gave me an Amy Fisher comic book. For those not old enough to remember, Fisher was the infamous Long Island Lolita, as the tabloids would have ita teenager whose affair with the considerably more senior Joey Buttafuoco resulted in an attempt to kill his inconvenient wife, who in her inconvenient fashion survived. In the early nineties it was a big story. Even those of us who lived on the West Coast were caught up in it. On one side of the comic book was an Amy Fisher cover; then you flipped it over and there was the Buttafuoco cover, half the magazine telling her side of the story and half telling his.
The comic book was the only thing about the meeting that was Pynchonesque. There was no secret handshake, no blindfolded drive deep into the woods at midnight. If theres anyone who seems not captivated by the mystique of Thomas Pynchon, its Pynchon.
The author of the earlier novels V . and The Crying of Lot 49 , in 1973s Gravitys Rainbow Pynchon distilled the Einsteinian double-helix of time and space into a word. It was not unlike the Word weve always been told was there in the Beginningbut the word is ... what? Several thousand years of Judeo-Christianity say God; Pynchon the lunatic god of modern American literature says something else, though which of the hundreds of thousands of words that fill Gravitys Rainbow he never tells. Its only one of the novels infinite secrets. Pynchon isnt above the old trick of spelling god backward, so perhaps the Word is the doga red setterthat goes up in flames with the rest of Gottfrieds memories in the novels final paragraphs, as the rocket he rides is betrayed to Gravity. Maybe the Word is Slothrop, the name of the novels central figure, or maybe its the blackout on page three or the more portentous Void on page 578 (a delicious and screaming collapse), or the pussy that the World War II soldiers sing about on page 305. Whatever is the pynchon-gods Word, like splitting an atom the Word is split in Gravitys Rainbow , along with the libido. The result is that screaming across the sky thats Doom, the death rattle of the modern age, the umbilical whiplash of Nuclear Time or Cosmic Time (Pynchon refers to not the nuclear but the Cosmic Bomb), the ejaculation of a psychedelic penis. Of course Gravitys Rainbow is as much about Freuds calculations as Einsteins. Sometimes they cancel each other out. Sometimes they conspire, crosswiring geographic and temporal coordinates with foggy latitudes and longitudes that disappear into the Sargasso Sea of the psyche.
Greil Marcus once wrote that the Sex Pistols divided in half the pop history that only the Beatles had divided before. Gravitys Rainbow fractured literature, which previously had been fractured only by Ulysses and which no book has so fractured since. Pynchons novel transcends assessment: whatever you think of it, whatever you can even begin to think of it, you cant resist it, its inexorable, the event horizon of contemporary literature. The only novel of the last fifty years in its league is One Hundred Years of Solitude. The power of Gravitys Rainbow, particularly for other novelists, is that even as the reading of a single randomly selected pagesay that one with the Void, 578, which all by itself seems to swallow up not only surrounding pages but surrounding books, whole surrounding oeuvrescan put one meekly and immutably in his or her place, it also races the blood recklessly to the erogenous zone of ones dreams. In the last half of the twentieth century, its the great American novel of possibilities. Perhaps if you smashed together the dozen best novels of Philip K. Dick you would have something that approaches ita pulpy low-culture version of Gravitys Rainbow , its tempting to say, except that not the least of Pynchons revolutions is how he obliterated the distinctions of low and high culture, at least for anyone paying attention. (Some didnt.) Novelists who have felt the influence of Gravitys Rainbow hope that all of their collective work might bridge just half the sky that Pynchons rainbow covers.
To any rational person, Zak Smiths aspiration to illustrate Gravitys Rainbow must appear doomed to failure, but true Pynchonians believe that aspirations doomed to failure are the only ones worth aspiring to. So doomed, Smith is liberated by having nothing to lose, and as seen here his illustrations pulse with neither doom nor failure but with that same sense of possibility that the novel represents to other novelists. Smiths rendition of page 578 does indeed appear to be a universe devouring everything around it, but who can be certain? He has claimed that his intent was to translate the novel at its most literal, but in the novels paradoxical fashion, that winds up resulting in a translation of the novel at its most metaphoric. If the epigram to the novels third section, on page 279, is Dorothys line to Toto about not being in Kansas anymorewhich, since the publication of Gravitys Rainbow , has become quoted to the point of clichSmith duly gives us the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow (almost edging Dorothy out of the frame altogether), which in one way is rather obvious, of course, but in another way does not simply replicate the galaxy of pop references that dominate the Pynchonian Infinite but implies their secret language. As when Dorothy steps through her doorway into Oz in the movie, its also one of the rare times that Smiths Gravitys Rainbow Illustrated : One Picture for Every Page bursts into color. And in the end theres something slightly counterintuitive about Smiths vision of such an epic, told (or displayed) (or composed) as it is not in wide-screen, bombed-out cityscapes but 760 pages of mostly close-ups, less Blade Runner and more The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Just as the only way to read the novel is to buckle yourself in and roar through itthose who try to decipher the fucking thing, like those who try to decipher Ulysses , couldnt miss the point moreso the only way to make a visual representation of it is to surrender to the inkblots of whatever Rorschach the novel inspires. Dazzling and virtuosic in its own right, with dashes of everyone from Basquiat to the early eighties punk Italian comix artist Tanino Liberatore, Zak Smiths Gravitys Rainbow is ultimately his own version of the story. It coheres among all the alternate-universe Gravitys Rainbows that fill a library comprising the novels every single reading by every single reader whos ever read it. Theres not one Gravitys Rainbow but thousands. I dont doubt the Amy Fisher comic is one of them; theres the Void right there, at the Freeport Motor Inn on page four. No one who understands Gravitys Rainbow to the extent anyone does, even its authorcan doubt that Pynchon would have it any other way.
STEVE ERICKSON
FOREWORD
So ... what the fuck?
So why does a guy best known for portraits of half-naked punk-porn chicks decide one day to sit down and illustrate every single page of a relentlessly difficult classic of twentieth-century literature?
Last year a newspaper wanted an article out of me on roughly that topic. If there was a punk-porn/Pynchon connection I didnt know what it was but I told the guy Id give it a shot and hung up the phone. I did know there was a go-go dancing, fire-eating, tattooed anarchist lying on my bed, and I knew she was busy reading Vineland out loudand that was about it.
A few days later, I went to Los Angeles and met lots of pornographers. The first pornographer had the muted post horn from Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 tattooed on his arm. He told me to read Steve Erickson.
