GRGR(8)--parallel worlds--many faces of Roger

[Andrew Dinn]

John M writes:
> Although we are all rooting for our libidinous lovers, you
> have to admit that outside of bed there's a lot problematic
> in their relationship. Roger has pretty-well failed in communicating
> his sensitive side to Jessica. His suddenly-there-was-a-beach-etc.-etc.
> appreciation of her in the seventh Christmas paragraph (p. 126), for
> example. She's actually AFRAID of him. Sometimes  he seems to have
> no inkling at all of her depths, seeing only the flibbertigibbit who
> doesn't have a clue as to what his scientific friends are talking about.
> (Maybe she's a splitto also.)

Henry M responds:
> Am I missing a joke here? The only "condition" I see here is love. 
> It is precisely Roger's deep communication, even from the beginning 
> of there romance ("My mother is the war.") that frightens Jessica. 
> The Beaver may be a, as the Christine Lavin song puts it, "Sensitive 
> New Age Guy," but there is no there there. 

Well, you are both right in a way but not quite right enough. Yes,
there is some deep communication going on here but what is being
communicated sure as hell ain't Roger's sensitive side - more like his
paranoia. Jess is frightened all right but then that's all part of
what attracts her to Roger, whereas it is security and certainty which
attracts her to Beaver. And it looks as if her problem is in
convincing herself that Roger's love is for real. But actually, it's
the other way round. Even though she knows `there's a war on' (don't
you know there's ...), a circumstance which sanctions the transience
of her relationship with Roger, what she really needs to be convinced
of is that her relationship with Roger is *unreal*. Because if it is
real, if it is not just a game or an interlude then she has to resign
from all those conventions and expectations acquired during her nice,
neat and painless middle-class upbringing, acknowledge that there are
things more important than both middle class mores *and* wars. It's
not for nothing that Pynchon says `Fuck the war. They are in love.'

Beaver represents not the normality that she may (will) go back to
after the war is over but rather the normality which everyone finds it
nigh on impossible to shake off even though they are in the middle of
a cataclysm so enormous as to eradicate all notion of a norm. Sorry to
tootle my own trombone again but one of my first notes to the list
pointed out how particularly English this is. But it's not just an
English trait. Here's the quote

    The English characters are, like everyone else, recklessly chasing
    thrills in flight from their fear. But they do this with a
    particularly restrained (or constrained, perhaps) English
    recklessness: small scale infidelities which are for them serious
    adventures, self-deprecatingly pretending that the adventure is no
    big deal; looking over their shoulder for fear of being thought
    unrespectable; actually feeling unrespectable and uncomfortable in
    their liasons as much as their betrayals; most of all not
    acknowledging their fear `pour encourager les autres' and also
    because they believe that if everyone did so it would be the end
    of civilization as they knew it (as if that was not exactly what
    was happening to them!).

    Their hypocrisy lies not in any falseness of self-representation,
    in any blatancy, merely in the deceit itself. For they are too
    `decent' to bluff others (let alone themselves) that what they are
    doing is right. Deep down they overemphasise their sidesteps from
    convention believing (perhaps with some justice?) that this is the
    root of barbarism much more so than shooting or gassing people
    (witness the brigadier compared with Weissman - a dribbling child
    vs a master pervert - who is weaker, more pathetic?) Of course it
    is the men who bear the bulk of this guilt. The women are much
    better at dismissing their behaviour because they are saddled with
    a greater sense of proportion - saddled because what comes with it
    is a complacency which, e.g. in the case of Jessica who *will*
    leave Roger for her Jeremy, is both unimaginative and cruel.

I will demur from my previous thoughts by noting that where I say
`what they are doing is right' I should have said `what they are doing
is "right"' i.e. conventionally right. Jess can survive the war,
getting by on dreams of home life with Beaver, precisely because it
does not require her to admit to herself that the war is really
happening, that she has been affected by it, that she is irrevocably
altered by her infidelities, infidelities not to Beaver but to
convention. Accepting Roger (or whatever other sins she might have
committed if he had not chanced to have been around) as a *permanent*
state of affairs is akin to an acceptance of her own mortality, her
own need to live for the moment, as a permanent state of affairs.
Other people too sense and fear this which is why they respond to Rog
and Jess like children or innocent young lovers, portray them as so
amusing, indulge them - all that Noel Coward stuff which cocoons them.
If anyone, Roger and Jess included, were to allow that the
relationship had acquired some aspect of maturity and permanence this
would be tantamount to accepting that normality could incorporate the
intensity of their love (or rather that the notion of normality could
be blown apart by such intensity and life still continue) and this is
too much for most people, Roger and Jess included, to contemplate.
Jess is scared all right, scared to become what she so wants and
enjoys.

And that's why their relationship is so attractive. It tempts us to
let go, to live for the moment, to be overwhelmed by our love, desire
and compassion for others and ignore rules about what we can and
cannot do (or rather should and should not) do. Someone mentioned the
smiliarity to Blicero, Katje and Gottfried. Well, yes this is where it
lies. Not in some complex isomorphism of actions, situations and
couplings but in the fact that they (Roger excluded) try to retreat
from the nakedness and vulnerability they both enjoy and fear into
dulling, comforting, reassuring ritual. A ritual which is at the same
time both life-enabling and life-negating in that it enables the
prolongation of their existence while depriving them of that which
makes such existence worthwhile. Roger and Jess represent a
near-escape from preterition and everyone, themselves included, does
their damnedest to bring them down to earth, apply a little gravity
and weigh them down with routine and dulness. Even Pirate, perhaps the
earliest self-acknowledged preterite, can only express his `concern'
for them, cannot acknowledge his `love' for them, or rather for the
intensity which intermittently invades their shared world.

As for Beaver being a `Sensitive New Age Guy' that's the last
description I would have given. He's more like the stuffy bore who
Celia Johnson betrays in Brief Encounter (and there's a comparison
worthy of note and a damn fine reason if ever one was needed for
Pynchon and all of us to hate, hate, hate Noel Coward) - pipe,
slippers, fireside armchair, ecclesiastically sanctioned bedroom
postures with fingers in assholes most definitely not on the menu -
hell Beaver probably scrubs his dick before putting it anywhere near
Jess and considers oral sex horribly dirty - no, I mean literally
dirty, what with all those germs that are hanging around in the mouth
(he is described - albeit by Roger - as an insufferable prig at one
point, nix?).

There is no way Jess will (can) do with him what she does in bed with
Roger. By which I mean not that the routine of these various sexual
acts could never be performed by them but that it would merely be
routine, the sort of routine Blicero tries to employ to cloud his
perceptions of the horrible spiritual death to which he is succumbing
bit by bit, that the Brigadier hopes he can use to bind and render
powerless the demons which have possessed and are destroying him. But
where these latter fail to exorcise their demons, even in Blicero's
case achieve some sort of spiritual liberation through` persisting in
his folly' (and here I am thinking of the incredible intensity,
vulnerability, compassion and commitment he exhibits in that final
fuck with Gottfried), unfortunately there is every possibility that
Jess would have succeeded in rejecting the vitality she and Roger
might have shared without the intervention of our favourite Pavlovian.


Andrew Dinn
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And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.