GRGR (8) Mauve, Coal Tar & Seances, Part 2

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

I've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again because I think it worth
mentioning at this time. We are coming to the end of GR part I and these last
couple of chapters are really quite difficult and in more ways than one, they
are patterns, projections and silent echoes of the mysterious and perplexing
world we are going to break on through to. What a comfort that we needn't go it
alone and that in each section we have a host--btw thanks M.D. Workman for Man
Work on this section.
 Pynchon's Slow Learner stories are really the best introduction to his Greater
works. I've read a lot of Pynchon criticism, but I think by far, the most
instructive and illuminating are the articles of Hollander-- particularly
"Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of an Absence," and "Pynchon's Inferno"
wherein Hollander (probably the first to do so, 1978) identifies Pynchon's
genre as Menippean Satire. Hollander says, "Of all of his stories, "The Secret
Integration," written after V., exemplifies Pynchon's most mature style." Now
this makes sense and Pynchon's comments on this story in the Slow Learner
Introduction confirm this, but critics in general have failed to recognize the
value of these short stories--Slade, for example rejects "TSI" as immature and
confused. This little story, Tony Tanners little book, Fowler, Weisenberger,
are imho the best introductions to GR around. Pynchon says "TSI"  has a
"junkshop or randomly assembled quality," and knowing how careful Pynchon is
with adjectives we know to "pay attention." As we know Pynchon will often take
another Text (in the general sense) and make brilliant use of it--Malcolm X,
for example. In "TSI" he takes on Mark Twain. The story opens with a  boy and a
wart in a junked washing machine turned Rocket by childhood fancy. The wart may
not remind us of Tom and Huck's discussion of how to get rid of warts at first,
but Pynchon will make it clear as the story twists and turns towards matters
Political. In any event, Tim--the boy with the wart will go to Dr. Slothrop,
"who painted some red stuff on it," and with a "magic purple lamp" the wart
"glowed bright green." This is of course only "suggestion therapy" and
"Ultraviolet fluorescence," and if it doesn't work, Dr. Slothrop will use
"liquid nitrogen." Suggestion therapy sounds rather Freudian and  the
"Progressive" Dr. Slothrop has much in common with G. Stanley Hall, but that's
another matter.  "Ultraviolet fluorescence" is in fact the discovery of George
Claude who is more important not for his work with liquid nitrogen, but rather
liquid oxygen and we all know that liquid oxygen puts men on the moon and
rockets on their way.

This little story is so wonderful and so exemplary of Pynchon's craft, that I
hope one day it may be regarded not only as more important  and more mature
than Entropy, but worthy of inclusion in those Norton books that high school
and college students read in English courses. It is certainly a story that Long
Island kids could read instead of preparing for the great jeopardy test that
most of them will fail and learn nothing from.

In any event, not far from Pynchon's boyhood home is cold spring harbor labs.
Kids often go there (as they go to Brookhaven labs to see super computers and
particle acceleration) on field trips to learn more about that old monks
flowers they study with those x and y boxes and the genetics of fish and corn
and to be inspired by meeting more nobel prize winners (male and female) than
they ever imagined existed so close to home.

You can read all sorts of great things about cold spring harbor and you can
read all sorts of BS, so the following story from the internet should be read
as all these things must--with a bit of paranoia, a bit of common sense, and
the not so common paranoia that looks things up and checks things out.

http://www.hotweird.com/heliophobe/mkultra.htm

TF

Doug Millison wrote:

> In addition to the great reference Joshua T provides, there's this _Pynchon
> Notes_ reference from a GRGR(1) post I made way back when. I highly
> recommend this article to anybody who is interested in TRP's color schemes
> in GR.
>
> On May 9, I wrote:
> ....Hayles and Eiser observe that Slothrop's first name, Tyrone,
> "can be read as a variant of the first important synthetic dye, Tyrian
> purple," aka "mauve, the first synthetic dye [...] discovered in 1856 by
> William Perkin, then a student of Wilhelm August Hoffman, father of
> coal-tar analysis and successor to Justus von Liebig, the first chemist to
> work extensively with carbons and hydrocarbons. [...] The astonishing
> success of this first synthetic dye stimulted the discovery of hundreds
> more and ushered in the chemical technology that branched into such fields
> as photography, plastics, pharmaceuticals and explosives. Historically, the
> development of th dye industry in Germany proved crucial to the German
> munitions industry, a fact lamented in a 1921 propaganda pamphlet issued by
> the American Dyes Institute, urging the public to support the American dye
> industry so that it too could develop the synthetic chemicals necessary for
> superior military technology."
> --Hayles & Eiser, "Coloring _Gravity's Rainbow_", _Pynchon Notes_ #16,
> Spring 1985
>
> d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com