grgr4 Crutchfield or Crouchfield the westwardman (was Re: GRGR(4) kenosha kid

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Bravo! BRAVO!

To my mind this episode is as political as Pynchon gets. Hey Prairie, "Look it
up, check it out." "(Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll
ever find here.)"

The devils in the details and the devil knows that "the science of the GOOD for
man is politics."
And "it [Politics] ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state,
and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should
learn them."
                                                                        -Ethica
Nicomachea-

Note: politics uses the rest of the sciences, including Rhetoric.

 Pynchon has been working at this from the get go (he perfects it in M&D ) and
once again I say, read the SL stories, read TSI, look it up, check it out.  Why
does Pynchon "adopt a strategy of transfer" from Oyster Bay to Berkshire? Or
Boston to NYC here. Pynchon is sly, people go to the Berkshires from NYC to see
the foliage he says, and it's true, but he "transfers" history there for other
reasons. "The old Baedeker trick" is a space/time trick on history.  Who are the
Barrington's? Who is the most famous African American in this story? Indian
Raids? Where? When? On L.I. or in Berkshire? Or both? Jones? Chase? Williams?
Berlin? Etienne? Pittsfield? Alf Landon? LongShoremen? And so on and so on.
So, "look it up" and "check it out." But, the political, while functioning as
Max has described it (Aristotelian devil in the details), is dialectical. First
in the manner of Aristotle, where some pregnant statement (and the verse of a
poet or a casual remark made by a friend), will serve as well as the pondered
conclusion of a philosopher) is usually alluded to, then labored and refined in
possible interpretations. A statement by Nixon, for example, turns out to be
--however inconsequential it may seem at first--the focus of a whole episode,
chapter, or section, but ultimately in the manner of Plato, where history is a
dialectic involving living interlocutors. So Pynchon brings JFK and Malcolm X
back together, to Boston/New York and how is that possible? Dear reader, "Look
it up, check it out. " "Come, we all know who we are by now....Now everybody--"
Max was criticized for his M.Satire ism characters, but this is one the
characteristic forms of M. Satire and Platonists. For long before Marx inverted
the dialectic of Hegel by substituting matter for spirit, the possibilities of
such interchanges were subtly and thoroughly explored by Plato and Democritus,
where Plato made things basically or Essentially Ideas and Democritus made ideas
things. In Plato's dialogues, it really doesn't matter if a boy or a drunk or
flat, round or square character represents a philosophical idea and what of the
Ironic Socrates. But who would fault Plato for his dramatic method?

Terrance





rj wrote:

> Paul Mackin wrote:
> >
> > About Red River, it was also the name of a popular post war movie starring
> > John Wayne the quintessential westerman.
> >
> > I know everyone know this already.
>
> I think you're onto something here. The term 'westwardman' has always
> intrigued me. It doesn't seem to be a natural term at all, no archetype
> that I can think of. Now, 'cowboy' or 'frontiersman', yes, but
> "westwardman"? There's that stuff later in _GR_ about travellers north
> and the Kirghiz Light. And the Sudwest. And, in _Vineland_ DL heads
> *east* in a '66 Plymouth Fury whose name is Felicia, stopping in
> Columbus Ohio (_VL_ 133-4). Mm.
>
> I'm hip to this political 'names' thing Max is cued into, and I'm
> wondering about the symbolic resonances of all those cardinal points.
> So, a reading of this (surrealistic) sequence follows, thus:
>
> Crutchfield is a symbol of the American founding father -- an archetype,
> if not "archetypical" -- always heading west. One of Zane Grey's riders
> of the purple sage perhaps, he is "wood of a different grain and finish
> ... good-humoured, solid-set against the purple mountainslope, and
> looking half into the sun" (68.2), like the final sunset frames of a 30s
> Hollywood B-western. He is all free enterprise and the suits and
> trappings of democracy, nobility, honorable Old Testament intentions
> ("Half an Ark's better than none." 68.1) and benevolent force. Strong
> and silent, rough and ready, brave and dangerous ("peligroso"), with a
> wry sense of humour -- a cliche perhaps, but something we can relate to.
> He is cast as a child of Enlightenment rationalism and Puritan
> righteousness, a forger of 'progress' and 'civilisation'. But, in
> reality, he is a cruel and self-indulgent despot and sadist and sexual
> deviate, a dispassionate control freak like Pointsman. And paranoid --
> "FDR's little asshole buddies" 68.18 are the CIA/FBI, right? and "Red"
> here takes on overtones of communism as well as of indians, and those
> early feminists and the Polacks (unions?) and niggers who are also
> perceived threats to the white patriarchy. And, it's a river of blood:
> the Red River is the blood of these assassinated opponents and radicals
> being flushed away by the govt. (Or else, this is what he has become by
> 1939.)
>
> The land and all its creatures -- those pesky indians and rattlesnakes
> -- are brought under the westwardman's tyranny. He keeps heading 'west'
> (Manifest Destiny) until one by one all cultures are taken and fucked --
> assimilated -- either by force (ka-boom) or volitionally through the
> mass-production of disposible consumer objects (those bandannas, eh).
> Crutchfield's "the White Cocksman of the terre mauvais" (bad/wrong
> earth?, 69.2). All races and creeds are assimilated to his whim,
> favoured momentarily only to be then discarded at will (Kuwait, Kosovo).
> It's a vision of domination and empire. An Evil empire. And, Pynchon,
> where's he? Why, there he is, "playing a mouth harp behind an
> outbuilding -- some musical glutton, mouth-sucking giant five-note
> chords ... " (68.10) Wyrming his way into the nether reaches of
> Slothrop's (and our) consciousnesses and consciences.
>
> "Understand, there was only one." Crutchfield is the Lone Ranger.
> Crutchfield is George Washington. Crutchfield is Coca Cola. Crutchfield
> is us. Our apathy.
>
> best