GR's Moby-Dicks

[Joel Dinerstein]

This is my first post to the list -- I just joined for the group read -- so
I'm sorry it's a bit on the lengthy side.  But jeez, it's nice to be goin'
through GR with a motley crew.  So, then...


In response to the coupla queries on the relationship of Moby Dick to GR....

In my last read of GR, I realized Moby Dick is in the very
foundation of GR, from chasing down "whiteness" (pick up your free melanin
test kit at the door) to looking for some sort of new American malehood
on the (watery) road -- 'cause ain't nothin' worth doin' around
the ol' Puritan home.

To wit:   GR's whole opening scene of males waking up and stroking each
others bananas for breakfast reproduces Moby Dick's utopian male democracy
scene on the Pequod when the men are all a-wash in sperm oil.  The
Pequodniks are so delirious with happiness as they collect the sperm oil
from the whale, and rub it on themselves and each others, they almost
hallucinate with joyous homoeroticism.  In GR, Pynchon grounds this male
bonding in war, I suspect because war is the ancient social basis for
all-male bonding
(that hunter vs. gatherer thing).  Maybe that's a bit much (it even sounds
too PC to me), but still the novel
clearly starts in He-Land with Pynchon joyfully narrating the womanless
college-dorm-ish paradise of guys farting, belching, snarfing, joking,
cigarettes and coffee on everyone's breath, etc.

Obviously, Pynchon's dishing up the phallacy fast and hard and tongue in
cheek here (and soft and mushy for breakfast).... phallics phalling from
the sky and come a-croppin' on the roof and protruding from pajamas,
bananas bringing the boys together like the hooked ring of Josephine
Baker's skirt.  The bananas chain the boys together (all chemistry puns
intentional) like some sort of dying Iron Age bond; just as the
symbolic post-war "bond" will be the corporate taffy that opens up the
Counterforce section.  I think not just *the*"Iron Age" is imploding here,
but lots of iron "ages" -- the Ages of Conquest, Exploration,
Colonialims, etc. -- each of which is tied up in certain dying visions of
Euro-American manhood (Rational Man, White Man, Self-Controlled Man, etc.).

Pynchon's a late-breaking Beat writer, after all, and his generation of
postwar "cool" rebels
were out looking for a new version of manhood far from The [Vietnam]
War's or The Firm's.  They would find much that was cool  -- language,
music, body
movement, philosophy and bogosity -- in non-white ethnic male cultural styles
(esp. African-American and Native American).  So, like the original Ishmael
-- that Biblical exile whose father banished him from home -- Slothrop, the
Beats and their hippie heirs hit
the road looking for a new way to be far away from their long-forgotten
father.  As for Melville's Ishmael, his frank admiration of the non-white
"main men" of Pequod's
harpoon squad made a seminal contribution to the confused American amalgam
of primitivism and acculturation that Pynchon harpooned for his own uses.

Which is to say....

In-coming *male*, indeed.

But I do go on.  Sorry about blathering on so.  Lookin' forward to your
comments.


Joel Dinerstein
jdinerstein at mail.utexas.edu