grgr(6) digression

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

rj wrote:
> Katje and Slothrop are 'fictional'. "Herod or Hitler"
(135.34) are
> 'historical'. Rog and Jess going to the Advent service is
'fictional'.
> The domestic and military routines of WWII glimpsed in the
sequence are
> 'historical'.

Now we have a magnet to move our moral compass. Not hard to
move our compass with Hitler or the Holocaust. In CL, Oedipa
looks at some
stamps.
Hitler heads, not a good guy in Pynchon, but Hitler is a
slam dunk, everyone
hates him, so Hitlers a give a way, what else is there?

"Thousands of  little colored windows into deep vistas of
space and time;
savannahs
teeming with elands and gazelles, galleons sailing west into
the void (someone
mentioned
Enzian and boats), Hitler heads, sunsets, cedars of Lebanon,
allegorical faces
that never
were...what after all could the mute stamps have told her,
remaining then as
they
would've only ex-rivals, cheated as she by death, about to
be broken up
into lots, on route to any number of new masters?"

Masters? Lots and masters?  Oedipa doesn't get it. She
misses the puns, the
language games, names and allusions that only we can get. In
"projecting a
world" Oedipa figures out that it's  "America"  "in code."
It's up to the
reader to break the code.

This is how Pynchon brings history up from the substrative
reality of his novels. This is why I think the Menippean a
valued approach. Not

the only approach. For those that are confused by the term "
Menippean Satire,"
forget Menippos, the Cyncic Satirist and his Ancient
imitators. Unless you are
truly interested in Ancient texts, mostly
fragments--Meleager, Lucilius, Varro,
Horace, Petronius, Lucian, Julian,
you are better to think about Swift's "Gulliver's Travels"
or Melville's  "The
Confidence Man."
Frye is good on this and in 'Anatomy of Criticism, he covers
it in five pages.
It is interesting to read as Frye struggles to fit unique
projects to genres.
But, as I have said before, if each text is viewed as the
unique project that
they undeniably are, no science of them is possible.

American code, a sub text, a substratum--put on your
Freudian cap.
Certain words together give clues. "Mute" and "death."  Like
the Holocaust in
Slothrops muted mouth, the unspeakable. Note the spelling of
savannahs,
words that take on various spellings like Tristero, for
example, are clues.What

kind of ships are galleons, when did they sail, what did
they do, gazelles and
elands, where are they found, and most important because it
links history
to major Pynchon themes,  are the cedars of lebanon. The
cedars serve as
a multiple linking allusion, this is early in the chapter
and in another
chapter Pynchon develops
his themes around ceremonial rites in which cedars of
Lebanon were
essential.

I don't think it profitable to put GR in a "box." However,
it makes no sense to
consider the book a unique project that can not be compared
to anything else or
can not be approached in many different ways. It seems silly
to debate the
merits of various approaches without considering how they
contribute to our
understanding of the novel or how they may diminish our
readings. Better, I
think, to bring the richness of the text out by bringing
different approaches
into the discussion. A Menippean approach, a  Freudian (btw,
I think Menippean
and Freudian together is quite interesting), rhetorical,
what ever. Some
approaches are not approaches at all, but we will know the
ridiculous from the
informed reading. How? We have read GR and it provides a
common object for
discussion. Can we determine its genre? Does GR have certain
characteristics
that are clearly Menippean?  Encyclopaedic?  Satire?
Autobiographical?
Confession? Romance? Anatomy? A hybrid of some sort?

Terrance