Apolitical Pynchon

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

Greetings Listworlders!

I'm just back from filming in Cite Soleil, Port-au-Prince, initially created 
by Baby Doc as a haven for the TonTons but now a big sprawling slum (the 
poorest in the Western hemisphere by UN markers) where people's homes are 
routinely razed to the ground for any kind of grassroots political activity. 
 We were stoned out of a couple of areas because the locals thought we were 
a news crew.  Even though we were working with an amazing anthropologist 
who's lived in Cite Soleil for 12 years, and was taking us to the homes of 
people who have (unbeknowst to them) been part of drug experiments by The 
System for years now, the locals still associated us with (particularly) US 
network news crews, who routinely charge into their homes, thru their 
streets, clamber onto their roofs, stick cameras under their noses and 
bright lights into the beds of their sick, looking for those Homer-Dixon 
poverty shots.  Kind of a variant of the War On Drugs scenes in Vineland.  I 
mention this because the dignity of these people, waving their fists at the 
camera, will stay with me forever.  As will the sad confirmation that most 
First World people's only sighting of these people will be thru network news 
items of babies crawling on garbage.  None of these thoughts are new to 
Pynchon.

Anyway, I returned to an interesting dialogue (at last) on the political 
dimensions of Pynchon's work.  Many of Lindsay's statements are 
self-evidently true (heh-heh) [BTW - interersting to learn that Jefferson's 
initial draft was extensively rewritten by His Editors].  Reading the lot at 
one go, for me the identification of Pynchon's emphasis on both history and 
individual psychology was most illuminating.

Lindsay's point "8. But one could not say that TP is concerned with politics 
in any primary way" is perhaps the nub of it.  At the risk of sinking 
without trace in some lawyerly quibbling about the meaning of "primary way", 
I would just say that Pynchon's obsession with official and unofficial 
history, with the real forces that determine the-world-in-which-we-live, 
with the drives, traumas, dreams and nightmares of individuals (both Elect 
and preterite), with Zones where all the fences are down, etc etc, make his 
work as overtly political as that of any writer I know.  Oh and casting 
Woody Allen as Young Kissinger is both funny and political.


Lindsay also writes:

>What I think *is* a good generalization is to say that TP in all his work
explores as one of his two or three most basic projects the dialectical
process of a character reacting across the gap between their own personal
history and the (unavoidably) political history in which they find
themselves embedded.  A closely related theme, again exploiting the
potential across the gaps individual to group and individual to community is 

paranoia:  this is the engine of history and its secret politics
(conspiracies, secret messages, covert agendas, unexposed economic
connections, even talking to the dead) as strongly felt but dimly understood 

by the mere individual.
So its not metaphysical vs. politics---its both at the same time, in
dialectical relationship.  We might look (in terms of "revolutionary"
politics) to some strands of French Marxism, for example, particularly
Sartre at the time of Search for a Method and the later Critique.  He also
is concerned to place the individual and groups into the broader political
>process without losing the power of individual psycology.

Whilst I'm pleased to see Pynchon's metaphysics being aired again, I'm not 
sure that I would call "paranoia" in the above sense metaphysical.  (If I've 
misunderstood, profuse apologies.)  The kind of Pynchonian metaphysics that 
I think is worthy of a far fuller exploration is, for instance, his attitude 
towards and artistic use of the Golden Dawn's magickal System in GR.  The 
point about the degree of understanding of these "secret politics" that the 
individual can have is well made, but we're still often talking about the 
exposure of real economic connections.  For instance, the General Electric 
Global Empire is still going strong - and, as an individual, I can apprehend 
it in a way which I would not categorize as metaphysical.


Best
jan


PS reread Lot49 on my travels, and wondered whether the "article" on 
Tristero which mentions their being "now reduced to handling anarchist 
correspondence", and ends "By far the greatest number, however, fled to 
America during 1849-50, where they are no doubt at present rendering their 
services to those who seek to extinguish the flame of Revolution" [around 8 
pages from the end, UK edition] might not be a variant of something real 
Pynchon read around this time, and which became the creative starting point, 
the spark, for Lot49.  His Herero research was an example of a discovery 
amongst the stacks of a suppressed history.  Maybe he'd intially approached 
WASTE in a similar spirit only to realise he was dealing with a different, 
numinous and unknowable beast, capable of embodying all sorts of fantasies 
of a global underground...

PPS oh a-and as regards my gender, many on the list have already met me; for 
those who haven't, look and ye shall see....