grgr(10) backwards

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> Thank God!  Some GRGR content:
> 
> >From: Cjhurtt6 at aol.com
> >
> >i don't know if it's been discussed yet, but i was wondering what you folks
> >take on pynchon's use of regression imagry. authors whim? some deep or
> >obvious thing that i'm not picking up on?
> 
> Well there was this post earlier from Terrance:
> 
> >David Morris wrote:
> >>
> >>THEY have an identity in mind for Slothrop which involves regression:
> >>----------
> >>(204.14) Presto change-o!  Tyrone Slothrop's English again!
> 
> OK
> >>----------
> >>Why do they want him to be British "again?"  Get him naked and give him
> >>Bloat's uniform.  Regression seems to be their goal, all the way back to
> >>ancestral times.  Note in the GRGR(10) their designs for his new mustache.
> 
> >Yes, presto, what a (flawed) perfect scheme . Yes, waxing
> >back through Slothrop's ancestry, with vomit flowing back
> >into the mouth and all. Do you connect this to V.enus?
> 
> I've been meaning to ask Terrance about this "(flawed) perfect scheme"
> comment.  The scheme must have to do with Freudian/Pavlovian models and
> Pointy's experiment, but can anyone (Terrance?) get more specific?
> 


Yes, I can, but REVERSAL is a bit like the quest/anti-quest,
in that it is a huge part of this novel and
difficult/impossible to discuss in brief and we will
certainly need to draw on late chapters to address it. I
thought I would run through Pointy's quarry first, and fit
the others men around him, then turn to Katje. Katje for
film--pornography and Pointy
and company for Psychology--Solopsism/History. When McHale's
article
was posted  I thought to turn to Virginia Woolf's "To The
Lighthouse", specifically part II--"Time Passes" and bang my
old traditional modernism drum, but that will not do. We
seem to have veered away from the text here and that's fine
with me cause I want to work on my host section, so I will
only note some of the REVERSALS and try to address this when
I post/host. 

"nothing can really stop the abreaction of the Lord of the
Night unless....the entire film runs backwards....But the
reality is not REVERSABLE." 


Late in the novel we will see film used for the REVERSAL of
the Great Irreversible, Filmed REVERSAL, REVERSAL of the
count down, of "the corpse come to life to the accompaniment
of a backward gunshot." Pynchon, as he will with music,
architecture,  paintings, and the Tube, dazzles the reader
with arts , in this case cinematographic effects, shifting
the order of events and time itself, for the characters this
is death or the loss of self. Slothrop is a strange case,
since his search for a penis or personality he only thought
was his own is the central metaphor/mediating character of
the novel.  Film reduces--and Katje looking with the
pleasure of the cameraman's eye is a good example--the
reality outside the self. Film perverts what it seeks to
preserve, record, recount, REVERSE. 

Slothrop's turning Brit. is part of the perfect yet flawed
plan. Pointy is at the center and I will at some other time
demonstrate why he branches out (money, his sexual
obsessions, his labyrinthine regression,  his reading of
Pavlov, Jamf, Prizes,  and other theories--Mexico's Monte
Carlo, for example--film, chance--Gregori and his dividend--
Katje.  

In terms of Slothrop back through his ancestry--this is
Slothrop thinking here, but it carries big themes--elect and
preterite--redemption. Slothrop chains, debt to nature, and
Slothropian estates, trusts and it's faltering,  contrasted
with the war machine and it's procreative powers--the
Slothropian money out the smoke stacks, contrasted again
with the chains of life in Pirate's banana breakfasts and
again later with Kekule dream of the "chain of life."

Sorry for this jumbled mess, I'm off to cambridge and I
won't be able to post again till I host my section that
BEGINS with "Imipolex G has proved that" the
 Cytology of the whale, o boy this is fun science stuff
here....Runs through "Loonies on Leave" and "Prettyplace's
18 volume study of King Kong" and this is the way part II
ENDS not with a whimper, but a "yin and a yang."

Tf

 
 



Two critics look at REVERSALS in Pynchon:

McHale addressing the opening dream scene of GR:

With this REVERSAL (my caps) begins the reader's
re-education - or, to borrow a metaphor from the Pavlovian
discourse which this novel sometimes affects, his
de-conditioning.

For this passage is a paradigm of problematic passages
throughout Gravity's Rainbow: the reader, invited to
reconstruct a "real" scene or action in the novel's fictive
world, is forced in retrospect -sometimes in long retrospect
- to "cancel" the reconstruction he has made, and to
relocate it within a character's dream, hallucination, or
fantasy.

After such an embarrassment, the reader, in order to
reassert his mastery over the text, may evoke the model of a
genre or period which will "explain" what has happened to
him. In this case, he may evoke the model of so-called
"Post-Modern" fiction. In doing so he will presumably have
in mind certain contemporary (post-war) fictional texts
which are strongly self-conscious,self-reflective,
self-critical; which, by laying bare their own devices,
continually raise the problem of the relation between the
game-like artifices of fiction and the imitation of reality;
which actively resist and subvert the reader's efforts to
make sense of them in the familiar
novelistic ways; the sort of texts which the French would be
apt to call texts of the "practice of writing." But such a
model, particularly when used in this defensive or
naturalizing way, is apt to draw less on the full range of
phenomena it ought to capture than on certain extreme cases:
Robbe-Grillet at his most choisiste, Borges at his most
labyrinthine, Beckett at his most minimal. The example of
such limit-texts is not, however, very helpful in dealing
with the intractabilities of Gravity's Rainbow, which falls
somewhat short of these limits. 


McHale notes the Parody and Mock-Modernism--James and
Conrad-- in Pynchon's  CL, V., Entropy, Under the Rose. 


ELH 65.2 (1998) 503-521 Imperium, Misogyny, and Postmodern
Parody in Thomas Pynchon's V. Stefan Mattessich. 

"No one who reads Thomas Pynchon can deny the force and
inventiveness of his prose. His prolix imagination verges on
the uncanny, and his mastery of various discourses awes all
who experience it. But if Pynchon is an exuberant writer, he
is so only by virtue of a counterforce acting upon that
forcefulness, interrupting its flows in particular
ways--cutting into a dramatic sequence with an absurd song,
modulating from a clipped comic diction and tone to epic
sentences a page long, mingling tragedy with pornography,
melodrama with slapstick. The diffraction of modes and
genres through the disjointed narratives of V. reflects a
highly organized, crystalline structure that is nonetheless
anarchic, patterned and intricate yet loose-jointed and
expansive."

All of these attributes can be attributed to Pynchon's debt
to the Satirists with a capital M.

See Hollander's "Pynchon's Inferno" (1978), Frye's 'Anatomy
of Criticism' "Theory Of Genres" and for direct comparison
to Mattessich's Post-modern reading of V. see 'A Hand to
Turn the Time' chapter 2 "V.: Beyond the Veil" Kharpertian,
Theodore D.

Mattessich continues:
 
A subversion of expenditure takes place within the mutations
of narrative form, undermining the illusions of continuity
and
depth, frustrating the possibilities of coherence and
closure. A peculiar emptying out of content attends this
subversion in V., marking in the language a lightness and
strange insubstantiality that is often difficult to gauge. 
This quality in Pynchon's prose corresponds to what
Baudrillard calls a logic of simulation, in which, through
successive orders of abstraction, the "real" withdraws into
a permanent elsewhere, and systems of meaning (signs,
images, discourses) no longer bear any relation to a stable
referent, but instead float in the medium of their own
"divine irreference," a hyper-real which "envelops the whole
edifice of representation." 1 This breakdown of meaning is
variously described by Baudrillard as a process of
"satellitization," as a proliferation of signs incapable of
dissimulating their own hollowness, as an implosion or a
"non-distinction of active and passive" opposites, as a
neutralization or "annihilation of stakes" in the political
and social spheres. 2 In the postmodern world Baudrillard
describes, 


    All events are to be read in REVERSE (my caps), where
one perceives . . . that all . . . things arrive too late,
with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they have
exhausted their meaning long in advance and only survive as
an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events
follow on illogically from one [End Page 503] another, with
a total equanimity toward the greatest inconsistencies . . .
--thus the whole newsreel of the "present" gives the
sinister impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at the
same time.3 

Although Baudrillard is here speaking about the effect of
the news media on contemporary culture, it could be said
that V. exemplifies this exhaustion, this artificial
effervescence of signs exactly. Pynchon's novel enacts a
search for meaning or substance behind the initial V., which
stands for a whole range of possible signifiers, partial
objects, fetishes, puzzles, secret codes,and for the novel
itself: V. as the signifier of the desire for "real" or
authentic writing. But in
what McHoul and Wills call V.'s "eternal condemnation to the
signifier," the necessary failure of this voicing becomes
itself an obsession of the text.

TF