SENSATIONAL! STUPEFYING!

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

I've been TRULY MESMERIZED by all these messages from the Other Side
of the border! (You all might have heard that the greatest hit of the
Beatles ran originally "Hey Jules", but what you didn't know was that
Paulie changed the title to protect his *really good American friend*!
Sensational, isn't it! Although, now that I think of it, *that* might
have given JS's career a real push....damn!)     

I've been THOROUGHLY HAUNTED by "our" psychic, whom we thought we've lost
for good, mediating all those unsettling voices from the past! (Although
it didn't wholly become clear to me who the "control" was to Chrissy the
spirit and Jules the medium? Not the children, for that much is sure?) So
much so, that I've decided to change my Ph.D. thesis theme to _GR_'s
spiritualism! I'm so, so CARRIED AWAY by all this! (Sorry to sound so
self-important, but these advertisements of myself might advance
my career as a Promising Pynchon Scholar! As we can learn from Jules's
breathtaking breakthrough in 1977! Any publishers out there?)

When I say that I've been IRREVOCABLY ENCHANTED by Siegel-the-vehicle I
really mean it! Because he has, honest, opened my eyes to the significance
of _GR_'s spiritualism --  this at once cheap and sublime contaminating 
principle working in the novel. Like the novel itself on the macro level,
it subverts the division between spirit and matter, high and low. While
both spiritualism and Emersonian Transcendentalism drew largely on
Swedenborgianism, Emerson hated spiritualism, which he regarded as way 
too corrupted and cheap to lead to delicate correspondences between
natural and supernatural worlds. (Although he, and on the other hand, 
many atheists (like Harriet Martineau) and agnostics, too, could
accept spiritualism's predecessor mesmerism, which was considered
ultimately explainable and categorizable - clean, that is.)

This American-born phenomenon comes and contaminates London, like
Pynchon's American novel itself. Actually, as Howells, e.g., wrote
from England, the blunt and sensational spiritualism was seen by
British elitists as one of the disguises of Americanization. Also
_GR_'s mediums -- the narrator and characters (whether "true" psychics
or not) want to get in touch with those haunting them. Anyway, these
mediums seem scandalously unstable and unreliable, as are the novel's
*media*, its myriad mediating genres. What is more, in the second half of
the 19th century, spiritualism belonged to an overlapping and subverting
array of movements: women's rights, abolition, Fourierian and Owenian
socialism, "free love", etc. Cf. the Age of Aquarius... 

_GR_'s stupefying "other side" is not "heaven" or "hell". This limbo-like
sphere is not purgatorial like Catholics would like to have it. On the
other hand, in their Manicheanism, Protestants wanted to deny the
existence of intermediary spheres altogether; ghosts were demons to them.
(Isn't the novel's unsettling division between "this side" and "the other
side" crucial to its *general economy* (a la Bataille), making its
dialectic appropriations impossible? The irreducible manifestations of
the other side pointing, among other things, to inutilizable wastes,
multiple excesses, and supplementary middle voices?)

And it really might be that _V._ is not contaminating, Hutcheonesquely
complicit, shall we even say, eh, "postmodernist" in the way _GR_ is,
although I suggested so in my reply to Matt; I'm ready to second Diane to
the extent that in _V._ there is a *greater possibility* of an oppositional 
metanarrative, which in _V._'s case is possibly "women-should-really-become-
atavistic-mothers-again". This metanarrative possibility feels nostalgically
detached from contemporary world, and readers are able to maintain a certain 
outsiderness in relation to the novel.  Not having to feel like unclean
double agents, whereas readers of _GR_ are much more likely to feel so.
_Lot 49_ is "postmodernist" too in this respect, not allowing outside
positions.

When Jules extolls Chrissy's unbeliavably desirable body, I'm in on that
game, too, with my stupefyingly straight male imagination, and Pynchon in 
person seems to have been in on it, too. (Were we to believe this newly-
surfaced sensationalistic medium, inseparably attractive and repellent.)
But still I dare say that we should not identify Jules's short description
(or for that matter, anything he writes) with _GR_; while the latter
contains dozens of drooling male gazings, too, it is also on one level an
astonishing  novel on genealogies of this kind of subject positions, and
contaminating networks to which these are related, trying also to subvert
the foundations of those hierarchic positions, while never totally capable
of detaching itself of them. 

It really isn't "clarified" fiction, as Jules hopes it were, and as his
own texts may be -- gotta check them out next week, when having come back
from the American Studies Association conference in Kansas City.



HAUNTING HALLOWEEN!

Heikki