Poignant Nihilist Despair Is Always In Style

[rj]

4' 33"
Yeah, David Ireland named one of the sections in his novel _The
Flesheaters_ (Angus & Robertson, 1972) after Cage's notorious recorded
silence. (p. 11)

And in John Barth's _Lost in the Funhouse_ (Doubleday, 1968) too, the
narrative persona, having "narrated himself into a corner", is
eventually unable to sustain further the fiction he is composing:
"Silence. There's a fourth possibility, I suppose. General anaesthesia.
Self-extinction. Silence." (pp. 110-112)

It's a prominent avant-garde motif and pose. There's nothing new or
remarkable about it. _The Canterbury Tales_ similarly end in confusion,
silence. It's all part and parcel of that unutterable Kantian sublime
which ever lingers just at the tip of the tongue or the edge of the
field of vision or beyond the reach of rational judgement and
consciousness. It's the paradox of creativity: the culture jamming art
forms of the pomo squadrons (dada, pop, graffito, desecration, flaming,
and comparable forms of cultural sabotage); Malevich's squares, Braque's
edges, Seurat's dots, Vermeer's light; the reflexive games and mise en
abimes of Perec and Butor and Calvino and Barthelme and Borges and
Machado de Assis and Sterne; the inexplicable epiphanies in Joyce or
Lawrence; the way nature and regeneration afford hope in Zola. Always
and ever the artist reaches this impasse: Why create? In the full and
certain knowledge of personal morality, why bother?

Art. Make it new. Make it real. Live forever. But someday Scheherezade's
stories have to stop, baby, for each and every one of us.

I don't think you'll find any answers in Austin Powers or South Park,
either, just more manic, more desperate grasping at avoiding this
inevitability. And the laughter from there is 'dirty', not innocent. We
all know who we are. Like those splendid and odoriferous banana
breakfast delights where "Death is told so clearly to fuck off" in
Pirate's parlour, these are mere trifles -- tasty for sure -- but
momentary diversions, vain(glorious) gestures of denial.

Pynchon comes to the edge of this abyss many times. The polar silences
of Salomon Andree. The Kirghiz Light. But check out 'Mortality and Mercy
in Vienna' to see where Pynchon fully endorses the nihilistic solution
you offer. Yeah, I mean, wouldn't it be great just to get an AK47 (I
hope that's a big gun) and waste all those pretentious turds mouthing
off about Wittgenstein and Kierkegaarde and Chavenet (that's us, btw).
And, get this, with the nice little literary loophole of the Windigo
psychosis Pynchon's lighted on here he really can countenance an
ultimate silencing of this pseudo-literati and pseudo-intelligentsia
Babel-tower: he's got a psychotic Ojibwa named Irving Loon who can do
the job for him and the reader, on the assembled "punks, lushes, co-eds
in love, woebegone PFCs -- the whole host of trodden on and
disaffected". (p. 10) There's no question of crime, see, of sympathy for
the victims. No criminal, because those party-goers (us) have brought it
(eg. Mr Hanky) on (our-)/themselves with (our)/their presumptuousness
and pretentiousness and self-righteousness and 'politically-correct'
ignorance and idiocy. Cosmic and karmic justice is served,
unequivocally, as Pynchon's alter ego (the unfortunately named Cleanth
Siegel) slips out and off up the street.

But Pynchon didn't include this story in the _Slow Learner_ collection
after all. I wonder why. Perhaps he wished to distance himself from the
solution it proposes (I think he does). And while I don't believe
anywhere in his literature he announces anything like a personal faith,
what I do see in his fiction (from 'The Secret Integration' on,
particularly, and in concert with a burgeoning social conscience and
purpose) is an increased level of respect and tolerance and patience for
and with those quests for insight and faith and transcendence which he
once (and still often does) scorned unequivocally and remorselessly:
glimpses of a post-ironic romanticism perhaps. Sure, Slothrop, like
Siegel, escapes from the text of _GR_ -- truly an Armageddon poised --
but unlike the story where the narrative persona leads us out of the
party's carnage and back, safe, into the street, in _GR_ Pynchon stays,
and so do we, together in that theatre, humbled, united, awaiting our
(collective and personal and no doubt deserved) fate.

Just some thoughts.

best