Pirate - T.Bloat - TS: Anglo-Atlantic-Dissolution

[Joel Dinerstein]

Like a bunch of folks out there, I've been thinking about why the novel
starts with Pirate and not TS...  so how about this?

It occurs to me that Pynchon is building *up* -- or *across* -- to TS:
from Pirate to Teddy Bloat to Slothrop:  he's bringing the reader up to
contextual speed (so to speak) from British *and* American directions, from
both the disintegrating British Empire of Brigadier Pudding's adenoidal
paranoia *and* the Great Depression's great death-knell of the
Puritan-cum-Protestant-ethic, the conflagaration of the Puritan home and
mindset.  (Pynchon ends his history lesson at 1931, in the depths of the
Depression that clearly formed the teen-aged Tyrone.)

So Pynchon erects a new genealogy, a new progression -- or a new
declension, as Jeff Meikle sez --  from the responsible, autonomous British
Empire-company man (and colonial administrator)
"Pirate" Prentice

.... to the average-Joe  cannon- and factory-fodder of Teddy Bloat
.....to the principled/ confused/ decent-but-passive Tantivy Mucker-Maffick
and then ...
       .... across the ocean (and cubicle) to where these same English went
to become "new"....
......to Tyrone Slothrop, who is now at the bottom of "his blood's
avalanche," who is now the beginning
        of the endpoint of Pynchon's V (& quest).

So whereas Pirate Prentice shows off his wits right off, saving Teddy Bloat
from breaking his neck with James-Bond-ish agility, our first glimpse of TS
isn't the picaresque, happy-go-lucky fun-loving naif, it's the shivering,
"lost" soul.   TS doesn't follow rockets around because he digs the
machinery (as many American boys might have) but as a therapy to keep from
disintegrating into the *fear of the rocket*, into the fear that this is
how it all ends, that this is the endgame of Western CIv's (and especially
America's) undying faith in Technology (& rational science) to save their
soiled souls.

TS keeps from being completely "lost" in the new techno-wilderness (and
soulless vacuum) by "hoarding" women against the cold, against the cold
past, against cold History that no longers speaks to him or through him.
The women represent his eternal present, his desperate struggle for human
contact in the face of out-of-control mechanical forces, his only "reality"
("everything before 1944 is getting a little blurry now"); when he's not
with a woman, he has the colorful rocket-hits of the memories to keep him
warm, to establish a record of who he is and where he's been lately, to
validate how he's been feeling.  Just as Pynchon narrates through the
layers of Slothrop's desk to give life to the preterite objects of our
existence, Slothrop inventories the women at the blast sites to save him
from thinking about preterition.  Because it's not about getting laid.  As
Pynchon narrates through Mucker-Maffick's consciousness, "he couldn't put
this down to the regular American ass-banditry...."

One last thought:  certainly such an appetite for sex and women is not
exactly an old Puritan pastime.  Perhaps Pynchon was trying to locate the
moment when Puritan ethics died as a force in American society for the
average Tyrone.  Perhaps in 1944, perhaps in 1931:  either way, somewhere
between the 1920s Puritan-bashing of writers H.L. Mencken and William
Carlos Williams, and 1966, when Philip Rieff reluctantly noted in his 1966
classic *Triumph of the Therapeutic*  that if there's one thing we know is
dead in American society, it's the Puritan father.

Buh-dee buh-dee buh-dee... that's all, folks.  Sorry to go on again so.....

And really looking forward to all the transAtlantic views on this....


Joel
jdinerstein at mail.utexas.edu