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

[Henry M]

Andrew -
Good to have you back on the list.

As to Jeremy's sensitivity, it is a false one. I shoulda used quotes. 
He's "supportive" of Jessica and "understands" her "little" fling. A 
good egg, a "nice, warm"  sorta guy. Except that he is one of 
Their's, we might even "like" him if we didn't see him through 
Roger's green (are they really green?) eyes.

I do like Paul's suggestion that maybe Roger is the Beaver. I don't 
think they are, any more than any duality is a singularity. But they 
are two aspects of many people.

Your " and this is too much for most people, Roger and Jess included, 
to contemplate" is close to what I think, but my reading suggests 
that Roger does accept that intensity as something that can be 
normal, after the intensity of the war perhaps.  I don't see Roger as a paranoid 
character. Sure he's upset and doesn't keep his cool. He is the one
Pynchon character I can think of who is intensely in love a-and wants
to stay that way.

> From:          andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk (Andrew Dinn)
> Date:          Thu, 23 Jan 1997 16:21:07 +0000 (GMT)

<quote SNIP>
> 
> 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
> -----------
> And though Earthliness forget you,
> To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
> To the rushing water speak:  I am.
> 
> 


Keep cool, but care. -- TRP
Moderation in moderation. -- Husky Mariner

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