Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s manic schizophrenic novel, originally titled ‘Mindless Pleasures’, is a quasi-sequel to his previous work V, which had appeared in 1963 to literary acclaim. In V, Herbert Stencil raced across Malta, New York, the Sudan and German South-West Africa, hunting for a lady indicated by the initial V, who never died and who was in some sense mechanical. Gravity’s Rainbow expands the historical framework of this premise.

In the period just after the surrender of the Nazi Reich, Tyrone Slothrup is sent into the crumbling remnants of Germany – ‘The Zone’ – to find the mysterious rocket 00000 and its cargo, the Schwarzgerät, in order to explain the mystical correspondence between his erections and the grossly phallic and destructive V-2 rockets. Yet this quest becomes a journey of self-discovery, into his forgotten history of Pavlovian conditioning that has ensnared his sexual desire to destruction and mechanical death. What isn’t in this book?

The dominatrix heroine Katje is attacked on a beach in France by a mechanical octopus called Grigori. Slothrup and a black marketer throw custard pies from a hot-air balloon into the face of a German fighter pilot. In the midst of making love, Slothrup becomes his own penis. And let’s not forget the virtuoso orgy scene with sentences as contoured as the postures of the hundred fellating protagonists. Unlike his contemporaries Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut, who knew first hand the macabre insanity they were writing about in Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5, Pynchon served in the U.S. Navy in the 50’s but never saw action. Instead, working for the Boeing in-company magazine, he accessed their archives on the V-2 rocket, and gained a boarder view of war as an institution. The search for peace out of the debris of the Second World War is helter-skelter, a pantomime of clowns and scatology, a lunatic carnival, a catherine-wheel sparking in multiple trajectories.

In the Zone, Slothrup’s identity fluctuates to the superhero Rocketman, to Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero, before dissolving under the pressure of history, language, and the threat of castration. His disappearance towards the end of the book is the literary equivalent of Lea Massari’s vanishing in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, disappearances which the reader finds hard to grasp, which threaten the reader’s own sanity. Yet although there are remarkably few battle scenes or scenes of atrocity in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s vision is not whimsical or glib. The Vietnam War, still raging when it was published in 1973, is all over the text. Slothrup heads up-river in the boat Anubis, finding not a heart of darkness, like Martin Sheen, but the military industrial production that underlies peaceful civilised society, the business deals in slaughter and the deviant sexuality that creates the phallic V-2 rocket 00000.

His World War 2 is not a straight battle between good and evil. Rather, it is the Playboy bunny scene of Apocalypse Now writ large. Pynchon’s humour is excoriating, but if nothing else, reading Pynchon is an education in the roots of the modern age and its moral ambiguity. He traces the roots of the Holocaust into the genocide of the Herero people of German South-West Africa; and he foregrounds the dubious connections between the concentration camps and big business – how IBM helped optimise administration in Auschwitz through a new system of punch-cards and IG Farben, the German conglomerate, manufactured Zyklon-B for the concentration camps at a profit. Through this, Gravity’s Rainbow opens up perspectives on our own time.

For readers accommodated to a world of tired political rhetoric, compromised international institutions, and universal indifference over African atrocities, there is a clear relevance in revealing the commerce that continues to underpin our ‘peace’. And for readers used to a world of advertising, public relations and the commodification of desire, it is clear that Slothrup’s Pavlovian conditioning has bought his compliance. What could be more revealing than the scene in which our hero, in the midst of Potsdam Peace Conference and under the nose of President Truman, sneaks in to steal a massive quantity of hash? Mindless Pleasures indeed.

by Angus Mcfadzean

Thank heavens Mort is showing in 8th Week of Hilary: the term of sickness, stress and freak exams for an unlucky few. Well – thank death, shall we say…Terry Pratchett’s satirical tomfoolery translates brilliantly onto the stage, drawing the audience into his pantomimic world of medieval slime and weak gags.

Mort (Rob Hemmens) becomes Death’s (James Utechin) hapless apprentice. Learning the ways of the grim reaper’s trade, it turns out the tyke’s got conscience, as he chooses to save the doomed Princess Keli (Harriet Tolkein) with the help of a wizard, Cutwell (Chris Carter). With reality now gone awry and Death on holiday, Mort and Death’s adopted daughter (Kate Morris) have to put the world to rights, even in the face of Death’s meddlesome dogsbody, Albert (Liam Welton).

Pratchett has all the ingredients for a children’s bedtime story: an unlikely hero, a princess and a quest; there’s even a friendly narrator, whose dulcet tones form a distraction for the scene changes. But director Rhys Jones has ensured to keep the adults from yawning. Besides controlling a sterling cast of extras, who double as the minor characters (Stewart Pringle, Rebecca Baron, Thomas Woolley, Rob Morgan, Vicki Turk and Tom Richards), Jones has managed to create the unique aesthetic quality of ‘The Discworld’. The OFS looks like something out of The Wizard of Oz, through the lens of Tim Burton.

Far more sophisticated than any set-piece to be found in Harry Potter, the stage is used to its full potential, with an impressive lighting design and switches between location smoothly manoeuvred by the actors themselves. The dark hues of the set are wonderfully contrasted with flashy costumes, not least Hemmens’ head of bright red hair.

It’s almost as stark as the contrast between Death and the way in which the play mocks it.

Abstract doom is personified by a terrifying skeletal cadaver, dressed in a hooded cloak and boasting an echoing voice (a chilling effect –especially when the microphone picks up the dialogue of the other actors). However, Death is so wearisome of his position that he encourages sympathetic coos from the audience.

As a comedy, the jokes are witty rather than hilarious (“It would be a bloody stupid world if people got killed and didn’t die!”), but then this is Pratchett’s way. Fans of the books will revel in the play’s faithfulness to the text, but anyone who begrudges his style might find the 120 minutes a strain. However you react to it, Oxford deserves a bit of silliness after the past eight weeks – wall-related injuries and all. Life’s too short to be without it.

4/5

By Frankie Parham

7:30pm Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sat

2:30pm Sat

OFS

Richard Wentworth, Master of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, initially seemed slightly taken aback to discover that he was the sole panellist on what was advertised as ‘A Panel Discussion’ of the Role of the Art School in the 21^st Century. Yet, with renewed confidence, Wentworth announced that the audience, which was comprised of past and present students of various art schools, art teachers and some very dissatisfied and discontented members of the ‘Artworld’ (the existence of which Richard firmly denies), would be the ‘panel’.

A handout was passed around which detailed the compilation of sixties tracks which Richard had selected to play in the background. With the music in full swing, Wentworth expressed his concern that he was, ‘doomed to prattle about the sixties’ and consequently imparted a detailed, animated depiction of life at art school in the sixties which contained hints of nostalgia. For Wentworth, the sixties was characterised by the fact that it was illegal to be gay, the invention of the mini-skirt, the Profumo affair and the lack of central heating. He attended the Hornsey College of Art, which he described as a fairly radical move. The students didn’t refer to the teachers as ‘Mr’ or ‘Miss’ and he remembers his main activity not as sculpting, painting or carving but as ‘making long bendy things stand’.

Having provided a thoroughly envious picture of his free and easy time at Hornsey in the late 60s, seeing the likes of The Who live at Goldhawk Road, he opened up the ‘discussion’ to the audience. There emerged varying degrees of satisfaction with the art school. While some current students whined about the degeneration of art schools and described them as ‘disorganised’ and ‘infertile’, others raved about the nourishing ‘space’ (a modish, oft-repeated word) it provided for them to broaden their engaged, curious and inquisitive minds. A major issue of contention stems from the fact that, since the sixties, loans have replaced grants. Consequently, there has been an increased preoccupation with what students ‘get out’ of what was described as a fiscal ‘transaction’. While some complained that the art schools did not ‘forge careers’, the majority seemed to think that this was not, and should not be, the purpose of art schools. There was a rather acute level of tension between the ‘art school for art school’s sake’ contingent and the realist ‘What is the point in an art degree when you end up washing up for the rest of your life?’ argument.

The audience member who surely stood out in the minds of all was the disappointed, frustrated and, possibly disillusioned gentleman who had spent 1968-75 at various art schools only to have been left with an astonishing level of bitterness. For him, art school provided a free, almost fantastical world which could lead to psychological instability. He complained numerous times that the talk hadn’t answered the question of what the role of the art school in the 21^st Century was. To an extent, this complaint was justified as the majority of the discussion was spent with people recounting personal experiences rather than directly addressing the question. But the gentleman was after the impossible; he wanted an answer which would both dissolve his deeply entrenched dissatisfaction with art schools and reveal the materialistic, career-orientated benefits of an art school degree. I doubt whether any discussion of the role of the modern day art school would have been able to achieve this.

by Francesca Angelini

Holywell Music Room, 2nd March 2008

Wandering past a posterboard for the Holywell Music Room coffee concerts it is easy to feel a twinge of jealous admiration for the pro-active types who forego their Sunday morning torpor for a fix of culture and caffeine. The anxiety is quickly soothed, however, with comforting convictions of this breed’s rarity. How very unnerving then, on one’s first ever venture to this kind of concert, to encounter a room filled with audience members, as it was at last Sunday’s recital featuring violinist Thomas Gould and John Reid on the piano.

On occasions like these an aura of expectation builds and the resulting pressure on the performer can be a little overwhelming, particularly in the amphitheatre-like set up of the Holywell Music Room. From the kick off into Franz Schubert’s Fantasy in C, however, Gould and Reid delivered the goods with finesse. Gould leapt into the piece, communicating an electric spark to the audience whilst maintaining a clarity and smoothness of tone. At the same time, Reid’s sensitively judged rubato and articulation allowed the audience time to soak up every ounce of the highly expressive performance. Equally in the third movement, Gould’s light finger work and buoyancy was matched by Reid’s cascading ripples across the keys.

Their rendition of Karol Szymanowski’s Mythes, Op 30 was possibly even more captivating. The ethereal world of the Greek myths was vividly portrayed by both performers. Reid’s dynamic variety alone was enough to create a narrative in its own right while Gould flicked between the gritty earthiness of the lower strings, and unearthly harmonics, skated out with a touch so delicate that his fingers seemed instead to float, cloud-like, above the surface of the string. This dream-like sense otherworldly was dispelled as Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestucke brought the audience back to their senses. The lyricism of the first two movements was enhanced by Gould’s finely nuanced vibrato and the dialogue between the two: The transfer of the line from piano to violin and vice versa was seamlessly accomplished. The two came together in the last movement with a sharp injection of vigour which gathered up momentum as they hurtled towards the resounding final cadence.

Such an energetic performance, Sunday morning or not, is bound to have anyone skipping down the steps of the Holywell Music Room.”

by Hannah Nepil

The next coffee concert at the Holywell music room is next Sunday, March 9th, at 11.15am, and will feature the Chamber Players performing works by Arensky and Tchaikovsky (tickets available from Tickets Oxford 01865 305305).