Chasing ... Cutting

[Dave Monroe]

... well, it's going to take me some time today to catch up on everything posted
since Monday, but, again, might I point out that it is Blicero who launches the
Rocket 00000, Gottfried's assent or no, he ascends nonetheless, that "futile grasp
for transcendence" (and I agree there, I think "grasp[ing] for transcendence" is a
point of critique, is "futile," in Gravity's Rainbow ... vs. Slothrop's
dispersal?  Hm, think Deleuze and Guattari's root vs. rhizome [as charted in their
Fake Book]) apparently bringing Death Writ Large upon us all just after that final
delta-t at novel's (world's, life's) end.  Not with a whimper, but with a hymn ...

Which reminds me, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask, ends with a short prayer
of sorts.  Begins with that explosion, that lateness, that zone, and then ... note
that that "carriage [...] is built on several levels" (GR V3/B3) ... palimpsests,
indeed, I have no problem with Fanon and the Blitz [that lightning strike ...] and
the Holocaust and ... a-and ... (Deleuze and Guattari on the logic of the "and,"
"both ... and ..." vs. "either ... or ..." ... no middles excluded there ...) ...
well, Gravity's Rainbow as a veritable archaeology (Deleuze, Foucault) of death
and sex and war and technology and culture and  science and ... New England and
Weimar to Nazi to Occupied Germany and Southwest Africa and the Dutch Republic and
postwar America and the Vietnam War and Mutually Assured Dectruction and ... note,
indeed, the architecture, the geology, Slothrop's desk, even ...

But this is what I mean about cutting to the chase.  On your reading, as I'm
reading it, you are claiming that Gravity's Rainbow is, indeed, perhaps "beyond
good and evil," transvaluing ("subverting," at any rate) perhaps all those values
its readers are quite likely to bring to it (say, Life on Earth).  One might, of
course, note that this might well involves bringing one's own values and/or
transvaluation of them to the reading, to the text, but ... but I think the point
raised that said Nietzschean "transvaluation" might well, should, apparently,
involve the creation of new values is a valid one.  So, then, what new values are
being created?  If any?  Am interested in what your conclusuons are goind to be
here ...

In the meantime, in light of perhaps not only my own values, but ones I read out
of the text, out of Pynchon's texts, esp. in light of "Is it O.K. to be a
Luddite?" (http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/pynchon.paper.luddite.html),
I can't help but read GR as positing the Holocaust, Hiroshima, not to mention
Global Nuclear Apocalypse, as Very Bad Things Indeed.  How do you account for
Pynchon's nonfiction?  Do you?  Let me know ...

jbor wrote:

> It is the reader who must decide the extent of Blicero's culpability, who
> must *judge* him. The text is very careful *not* to judge or condemn
> Blicero; to ensure that at no point in the text is he directly responsible
> for the death of anyone (except his lover/son, Gottfried, whose willing
> sacrifice is a futile grasp for transcendence). This is unlike Katje, who
> *explicitly* sends three families to their certain deaths. Katje is the
> Resistance double agent; Blicero is the Nazi. The stereotypical "heroism"
> and "evil" of the one and the other category (both in the historical *and*
> the popular imagination) is what Pynchon challenges and subverts imo.
>
> best