GRGR(24)Re: That Little Package

[Terrance]

Seb Thirlway wrote:

snip
> 
> Don't know what it is about the way that whole episode is
> presented (perhaps it's Slothrop's total indifference to what
> might be in the package that drives the point home), but the
> message I get is "don't know what's in it, and you'll never
> know".  or maybe you don't want to know...and this doesn't matter
> anymore.  There's a sad note of resignation that comes into thte
> book around here, when before the focus was always on the
> possibiity of finding out, if you look hard enough: whatever
> happens to you, there is that Kirghiz Light (Holy Centre,
> nerve-centre of the Rocket-cartel, one true reading of the Text)
> waiting ahead, and then you'll get IN, and all this time spent
> OUTside looking to get in will have been worth it.
> I don't think the package can contain anything offering promise.
> That's not the way the book is going IMO.  Whatever happened to
> all that delicious paranoia?  

We have cycled over from everything is connected
("paranoia")to nothing is connected ("anti-paranoia").
Remember Tantivy tries to convince Slothrop that
'operational paranoia' can be useful, "especially in
combat...you know PRETEND something like that." So we have
several forms of Paranoia at work. The trick, it seems, is
to find a center or a way to cope with "paranoia" (the
connections), the vast, differentiated, experiences of war,
of "peace", of life's flips and flops, but Pynchon's
characters (with few exceptions, Enzian being one) can't
abide such vicissitude, bandwidth problems, too many
personalities of pretense, "mindless pleasures" that infect
them, causing solipsistic (his)tory. They try to escape, to
transcend, to Return, to deny, repress, imbibe, or otherwise
come to terms with paranoid existence and death. Most of
their attempts are some perversion of a religious quest, but
what they are looking for is lost in the Waste and they
stumble about oblivious to this fact, so they are constantly
with keys without locks or locks without keys.  


> Control deglamorised.  How many times in GR is someone
> controlled, not by lurid, possibly existent, scarcely visible
> cartels, chains of hidden causality coming down through the
> generations, in general, occult (in the general sense) forces,
> but by someone at least probably human threatening violence on a
> human, punch on the arm, stamp on the hand scale?  I think this
> is the only instance in the whole book.

Yes, the forces, like the ones that Zoyd wakes up to, the
forces unseen and so on, but remember Zoyd gets his ass
kicked in jail--a real threat to his life, his liberty, not
to mention his daughter. And in GR, we have the same. Tale
Old Pudding, he's dead right? Well that's another issue all
together, who controls the hereafter, what ever that may be
in GR? But, clearly Pointy, while he doesn't get to cut
Slothrop's skull open, is able to control others. Isn't he?
What complicates things in GR and VL and M&D too, is that
the daisy chain of victims and victimizers turns in both
directions, we have to sort it out, it's not simple, black
and white, good and evil, but it's by no means relativistic.
For example, Pudding wants to be victimized, he wants
someone else to Control his pain, his guilt, but he also
wants the Truth. What does Pointsman give him? Why? Control? 

A little flash back...

While Roger and Pointy attempt to net a dog, Pointy,
ordering the young man about, Roger thinking, "He's (Pointy)
not one's superior after all, both report to the old
Brigadier (Big Shit Brigade) at 'White Visitation' on, so
far as he knows, equal footing." So far as Roger knows, but
Pointy has other plans, he will not indulge the old bastard: 

"This fighting
everyday, there's more to damned Pudding than
I can SEE, he's always springing his senile little
surprises, he's such a bastard, he never sleeps, he plots."
And Pointy won't take it lying down, no, it's "the position
he's working from" that Pointy can't abide, the "priorities"
of the old man, the chances he can take, the strange
smugness. 



Pointy's Pavlovian "secularism" includes the "the idea of
the opposite." And this belief includes, the difference
between life and death, innocence and guilt, but on page 48,
Pynchon omits these for the time being,  "somewhere on the
cortex of the brain," it distinguishes "pleasure from pain,
light from dark, dominance from submission
." (Pynchon's
ellipsis). 

Pointy needs money, he's not at Cambridge you know, hasn't
got all that research money for an Octopus tank, filter and
food, besides, the octopus is a visual creature and the
ultraparaoxical phase, as it applies to our boy Slothrop and
the Rocket, is auditory. Pointy may need to branch out, one
little Fox, but Old Pudding, or as Pointy refers to him,
"old delusions of grandeur himself," is in the way, and with
that "damned Rundstedt offensive" chewing up all the cash,
an austerity measure is in place at Supreme Headquarters,
Allied Expeditionary Force's intelligence and propaganda
wing (Political Warfare Executive), Pointy needs to find a
way to get cash to fund his project, but he can't justify
it. Not that he's concerned with the ethics of his work, no,
he's a Pavlovian Frankenstein with Faustian Hubris,
economically perverted by Utilitarian expediency, a parody
of Shakespeare's Richard III (his dog's name was
Gloucester), "his season of despair," his winter of
discontent (internal references date this episode, December
21, the onset of Winter) well upon him, as the war, "this
State he'd come to feel himself a citizen of," now being
reconstituted as a peace, is about to be adjourned, and
Pointy with nothing to show for it but a few dogs (ARF) and
Dr. Porkyevitch, co-ownership of The Book.  Not much for a
megalomaniac with great personal expectations. ARF is but a
"colony to a metropolitan war."  "A stingy dribble of money,
desperate paper whispering down the corporate lattice,
enough to get by on," even a little support from "Psi
Section, a colony degage and docile, with no secular
aspirations at all, but not enough for Pointy, "not enough
for nationhood." Moreover, Pointy cannot make a convincing
argument that his project will have some practical or
tactical benefit, near term. Therefore, Pointy will either
need to find money from some other bankers or find a way to
get cash from old Pudding, or both. The Americans control
the money. How will Pointy get it? 

a State....and the Rocket is its soul.  GR.566