Deathkingdom

[Stacy Borah]

Hi, everyone.

I basically agree with Jill in her reading of Pynchon's "deathkingdoms".  
Home is exactly what Slothrop is looking for, and all he is finding are 
deathkingdoms: anywhere he goes is a new target for a V-2 vis-a-vis the 
Imipolex-G conditioning by Lazslo Jamf.  His dad sold him out to the 
intelligence community for a Harvard education and a commission in the Army. 
  His mother is barely remembered throughout the book, and it seems every 
woman he comes into contact with has an ulterior motive for being with him.  
So, while he's searching for home and only finding death, he uses what he's 
been given (his conditioning for erections) to try and have some sort of 
communion with other human beings.  Eventually he discovers that he can 
achieve a spiritual communion with nature, which is when he disappears, back 
into Nature.  The scene where he sees the rainbow disappearing into the 
earth like a giant cock -- sex is the only means of communion available to 
him because his humanity has been stripped away by "Them" in Their efforts 
to sustain their deathkingdoms.  In many places in the novel, Slothrop sees 
nature as a burgeoning, vital entity, capable of sustaining and permitting 
life.  (I don't have my copy of "GR" handy, so please forgive the lack of 
sufficient evidence -- however, if anyone would like a copy, I did a paper 
on this very subject in college, comparing "Gravity's Rainbow" to "Ulysses" 
with respect to familial communion, and I would be happy to email it to 
you.)  And, I see this re-entry into Nature as having a Nietzschean basis, a 
kind of circularity that occurs in Nietzschean logic based on his assumption 
of there being no inherent meaning within anything (TP's Zero), only what we 
perceive meaning to be.  So, therefore it is illogical to believe that 
anything has any meaning other than what you perceive.  And, what you 
perceive as meaning can grow to include other meanings.  (What TP termed 
"Beyond The Zero)  Yet, at the same time, since nothing has any inherent 
meaning, everything is meaningless and therefore inherently nihilistic.  I 
believe this is what TP meant when he wrote "Excluded middles are bad shit."
I guess this whole discourse seems rambling and muddled -- I just got off 
work and I didn't really give this whole thing much thought when I began 
typing.  Plus, it's been almost a year since I last read "GR".  However, 
receiving all these thought-provoking emails has given me an urge to 
re-acquaint myself with our friendly neighborhood genius, TP.

Stacy




>From: jill <grladams at teleport.com>
>To: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>CC: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Deathkingdom
>Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 08:38:13 -0700
>
>Hello,
>I take out of these readings a sympathy for something rather simple:
>
>There's no place like home. To elaborate, the stuff about the air, vacuum
>and space, I think it refers to a frightening ultimate extension of living
>in a self-sufficient sphere, manufacturing everything from within, cut off
>our naturally occuring routes of traffic and intercourse.
>
>If you extend all these things you might see we are doing the same thing:
>holograms, cell phones, *Tang, tv's, air conditioning, tv dinners, sperm
>banks, cloning, excercise and fitness equipment, laptops and satellites,
>big comfy SUV's with onboard computers. We shouldn't be surprised then if
>we "learn to do without air/the earth/" Someone earlier on the list pointed
>out the commodification of experiences on the Internet. I am probably
>stating the obvious. Oh well.
>
>Deathkingdom I just figure stems from the overall "entropy" leanings of
>Thomas Pynchon.
>
>*(in the USA Tang was more popular during the 1970's a bright orange
>artificial powdered drink, introduced by the Astronauts)
>
>-jill
>
>Dave Monroe wrote:
> >
> > ... also, any thoughts, anybody, on this notion of "deathkingdoms"
> > (V722-3/B843)?  Esp. that question, "Will our new Edge, our new 
>Deathkingdom, be
> > the moon?" and the attendant "dream of a great glass sphere," "vacuum 
>inside and
> > out" (and recall the song, "Victim in a Vacuum" (V414-5/B483)), "the 
>colonist"
> > who "have learned to do without air," why "it's understood the men won't 
>ever
> > return," why "they are all men," and why "the ways for getting back" are 
>"so
> > complicated, so at the mercy of language, that presence back on Earth is 
>only
> > temporary and never 'real'" (and why the scare quotes aroun "real")?  
>And so
> > forth and so on ... one of the strangest, most haunting, most allusive, 
>most
> > suggestive, most just plain interesting passages in the novel, in any 
>novel, and
> > yet ... but, also, those (Protestant? Hegelian? Romanticist? And so 
>forth ...)
> > notions of exile, return, reconciliation ...
> >
> > jbor wrote:
> >
> > > Blicero's scathing monologue, his vision of the Deathkingdom of man

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