Rilke, etc. #3

[Derek Barker]

Pynchon invokes Arendt's idea of lost traditions, "roads not taken" in
American politics, as J. Peter Euben describes them.   The Trystero, for
example, apparently enjoyed quite a heyday in the past, possibly even
staging the French Revolution (Lot 49, p. 165).  Various controversies over
whether to merge with Thurn and Taxis (the mainstream mail system) ruined
the Trystero, and the organization was reduced to handling the
correspondence of obscure anarchists, and later operating in secrecy and
obscurity in America (Lot 49, p. 173-4).  Slothrop, too, laments a lost
political tradition: the legacy of his ancestor, William, the defender of
the Preterite, "these 'Second Sheep' without whom there'd be no elect" (GR,
p. 556).  William somehow avoided execution for heresy, but was still
exiled back to England, and Slothrop wonders:

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular
point she jumped the wrong way from?  Suppose the Slothropite heresy had
had time to consolidate and prosper?  Might there have been fewer crimes in
the name of Jesus Iscariot?  It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might
be a route back...somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of
coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite,
without even nationality to fuck it up (GR, p. 556).

Somewhere, according to Pynchon and Arendt, America went wrong; the
challenge now is to recover the spirit of political action and plurality
that was lost somewhere along the way to entropy, political stagnation, and
the breakdown of meaningful communication.

What does Pynchon suggest as the "road back," a way to open the closed,
entropic system of America?  Arendt invokes the Jeffersonian wards not as a
realistic plan for institutional change in the present, but more to remind
us of a lost spirit and political urgency.  Arendt makes a call for a
re-opening of the political sphere, to include pluralistic debate and
active participation by every citizen.  But as long as the institutions
remain unchanged, what, short of revolution, can be done to reverse the
entropic crisis?  Are there alternative spaces for politics to be done,
voices to be heard, and freedom to be exercised?

If entropy depends on a system remaining closed, that is, with no heat
energy leaving or entering the system, only opening the system, introducing
energy from the outside, can reverse the inevitable entropic process.
Callisto fails to make the transfer with his dying bird, and Oedipa is
similarly unable to communicate with the Maxwell's Demon machine (Lot 49,
p. 107).  Nefastis seems to believe in the existence of people, who, in
fact, could really communicate with the Demon; Oedipa is more cynical.
With the Trystero, the Inamorati Anonymous, the Counterforce, and various
other underground communities and networks throughout Gravity's Rainbow and
The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon seems to be suggesting, like Nefastis, that
people exist outside the system, disenchanted, but desperately trying to
communicate, to open politics and breathe new life into the entropic system.

It at these alternative locations -- not the Congress and its bureaucracy
-- where real politics are being done; this is where the American Dream of
plurality, diversity, and an active politics have retreated.  The Trystero
is the essence of what I call Pynchon's "politics of withdrawal," a retreat
from the closed, entropic system of institutional and bureaucratized
politics, into an alternative sphere:

For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to
communicate by U.S. Mail.  It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even
of defiance.  But it was a calculated withdrawal from the life of the
Republic, from its machinery.  Whatever else was being denied them out of
hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance,
this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private.  Since they could not
have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the
separate, silent, unsuspected world (Lot 49, p. 124-5).

In the Trystero lies the possibility of real communication between the
disenfranchised, a political space, a pocket of freedom in the midst of
entropic America.  The very existence of these people, of an alternative
political sphere, suggests that the system is not yet completely closed;
there is a chance, an opening for new energy to be introduced from the
margins.

For Hannah Arendt, it would seem that withdrawal is not an answer to
political crisis.  Politics, which exists by virtue of the basic human
condition of plurality, means participation in the political sphere, not
retreat away from it.  Withdrawal would appear to be apolitical, or, worse,
anti-political:

Flight from the world in dark times of impotence can always be justified as
long as reality is not ignored, but is constantly acknowledged as the thing
that must be escaped...we cannot fail to see the limited political
relevance of such an existence [withdrawal], even if it is sustained in
purity... power arises only where people act together, but not where people
grow stronger as individuals... even the sheer strength to escape and
resist while fleeing cannot materialize where reality is bypassed or
forgotten -- as when an individual thinks himself too good and noble to pit
himself against such a world, or when he fails to face up to the absolute
"negativeness" of prevailing world conditions at a given time. 
Withdrawal allows fear or laziness, rather than the spirit of political
action to prevail.  I think, however, a distinction can be drawn between
the withdrawal of which Arendt is scathingly critical, and the "calculated
withdrawal" of the Trystero.  That is, the Trystero is a political
withdrawal, not into individual isolation and alienation, but into a group.
 Rather than escaping into the purely private realm of individual
production and consumption in Arendt's "mass society," the underground is a
withdrawal into an alternative, but no less political, space.  Although
these political withdrawals are not up to an Arendtian standard of heroic
participation in the public sphere, they do occupy a domain somewhere
between the personal and the political.  Those who are totally withdrawn
into isolation -- the dopers, losers, and dropouts -- are referred to in
passing throughout Pynchon's work, and he may understand the forces that
drive them to the margins, but because their withdrawals are not political,
I suggest that they do not occupy a central role in Pynchon's work, as does
the Trystero.  

If there is no Revolution, Pynchon is arguing for a way to somehow maintain
the tradition of Arendt's "revolutionary spirit."  The members of Pynchon's
undergrounds are depicted as waiting at the margins, temporarily silent,
seceding until the next great political revival.  One of the Trystero's
mottos, for example, is "We Await Silent Trystero's Empire."  As Oedipa
awaits the silent mystery bidder, the Trysteros hold out for their rise to
power, but they do what they can in the meantime.  Similarly, in war-torn
Germany, "The Revolution died...with Rosa Luxemburg.  The best there is to
believe in right now is a Revolution-in-exile-in-residence, a continuity
surviving at the bleak edge" (GR, p. 155).  Arendt, interestingly enough,
uses the figure of Luxembourg as an inspiring model of Arendtian action
politics.   Here, Pynchon provides a means to resurrect her legacy, without
having to depend on some mythical Revolution to come about in the future.
Until the Republic undergoes real institutional change, the Trysteros, "fag
joints," Preterites, and Counterforces become the locations where the last
vestiges of Arendtian political action can be found.

[to get to the point I'm skipping straight to the conlusion, bypassing a
bunch of stuff on postmodernism, 
Foucault, and paranoia, as well as an (I think) dandy argument on race
linking the Herrero Otukungura 
of GR  to Pynchon's "Journey Into the Mind of Watts"]

It should be pointed out that Pynchon's politics of withdrawal should not
be taken as a license for withdrawals of all sorts.  But what is the line
that separates the Trystero from Unabombers, religious cults, white
supremacists, or militant lesbian separatists?  The distinction may be a
fine one indeed, but Pynchon's withdrawals, as I have argued, are
political; that is, they open entropic systems in order to shift politics
to alternative locations and to provide cultural spaces for more voices.
These more problematic withdrawals, on the other hand, are intended to
close out, exclude, and seperate.  While the ideologies they espouse are
different from the mainstream, they are, unfortunately, no less monolithic
and totalizing.  Pynchon's politics of withdrawal sees undergrounds and
alternative spaces not as possible sites for a new "regime of truth," but
rather the locations for ongoing contestations, performances, and
counter-entropic politics.   
Studying Pynchon's political withdrawals allows us an opportunity to
breathe new life into the discipline of political theory, to theorize
alternative spaces, ways of doing politics, attending to differences,
multiplicities, and continuums.    To return to the image with which I
began this essay, Callisto and his dying bird, America seems faced with a
crisis of sameness, totalization, and nihilism, and now is the time to
communicate new energy into the Republic, to reverse the entropic process.