V.V. (6) Argonne Experimental Facility

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Apology accepted.  That AEF @ p. 102 no doubt refers immediately to that
> American Expeditionary Force, but, of course, deconstructionist,
> insomniac and/or paranoiac that I am, I'm always up for some free
> association.  And that's what I appreciate in particular about Charles
> Hollander's commentaries, their meticulous and tenacious pursuit of all
> those interesting associations, filiations, disseminations, even, that,
> whether or not Pynchon intended them (though I suspect he more often
> than not did ...), are certainly suggestive, productive, and, of course,
> fair game.  And there is undoubtedly much of the unconscious that ends
> up on the printed page as well (from the inner mind to ...).  My only
> quibble with CH is that he has a tendency to foreclose other
> interesting, applicable possibilities which he seems to see as
> irrelevant to his immediate readings.  But invaluable research and
> compelling interpretation thereof nonetheless, among the most
> interesting and useful pieces of Pynchoniana I've been fortunate enough
> to have cross my path ...

Paul mentioned,  and indeed Mr. Hollander, in his 1978
"Pynchon's Inferno", an essay that had no small influence on
my own research into TRP's sources, that P's sympathies are
with the outcasts, or the losers, the victims, the
disinherited. Hollander may be criticized for his apparent
foreclosure of other approaches, but this complaint, while
it may have some merit, can be made about most studies of
P's work. I disagree with his basic premises, that P is
paranoid and that P is a revenge writer, but I find that his
research and his "magic eye", although at times, owing to
his premises, both presyopic and myopic (i.e. Varo/Varro) is
ground breaking scholarship that P's critics have mostly
ignored, or not cited, to a fault. Also, Hollander, for
those that go for the Genre approach, must be credited with
identifying P's fiction as Menippean Satire. This is a very
important point, Hollander doesn't quite make the genre
argument, from Frye, to settle the matter, but several
subsequent studies, replies to Mendelson's Encyclopedia, do.
That's my opinion, and as Carlo Marx says in Jack Kerouac's
On The Road, or maybe it was Bob Dylan in Highway 66
unvisited, "if you don't like it, ask WC Fields he has
plenty more where that one was."   So there is quite a lot
to Hollander's work that is of value to the professional
critic, the student, the mad Jack and Jill--that's me. Now,
bearing Pynchon's and Profane's and Rachel's and Oedipa's
eventually I guess, sympathy for all social outcasts in
mind, I turn to the context in which Paul noted these
sympathies, Gnosticism.  Plotinus criticized the Gnostics
for calling "the lowest of men brothers." The Gnostics
believed the poorest and most down trodden of men have a
divine spark and will find redemption in a world where no
hierarchies exist, if gnosis favor them. 

Another point here, P's knowledge of Gnosticism is present
in V., there is no doubt he was familiar with it from his
readings in religion, perhaps before he went to college. His
early Short Stories, Farina's Novel Been Down So Long, and
indeed the novel V., make plain his interest and his
knowledge of these matters. P's interest in great cosmic
dramas is, I admit, exceptional, but he was an exceptional
young man. What's more, we should remember that Gnostic
ideas are very much in Catholicism, they can be easily
identified in the Gospel of John, in the Letters of Paul and
of course in Augustine, who was a Manichean for ten years.
Therefore, although we often read about the persecution of
all Gnostics, of all movements considered heretical and the
eventual disappearance of these heretical ideas, of the
suppression/repression of Gnosticism, this is simply only
simply the case. In fact this is one of the things that
seems to appeal to TRP, that is the steady underground
continuance and periodic re-emergence of Gnosticism, of
gnosticisizing sects throughout history, particularly
medieval history, all confirming, dear Oediapa, that the
movement persisted clandestinely. P read Dante, probably
long before he went to Cornell, and Gnostic ideas in
Florence can be read in Dante's Divina Commedia and his Vita
Nuova. In fact, the young Pynchon would not have to discover
this fact on his own or in his classes with one of America's
renowned Dante scholars at Cornell, he could have read it in
a note in a family copy or in the Catholic Encyclopedia. At
what age did young P become fascinated with William Blake?
No one knows these things, but well...If P, and I think
there is no doubt, studied the history of religion, he would
have discovered that links between the Gnostic movement and
the Byzantine Paulicians (c.650-900) and the Bulgarian
Bogomils (10th-12th) as well  as between the Spanish
Priscillanists (350-560) and the Cathari, a medieval sect,
also called the Albigenses. The fact that P mentions them in
GR does not prove that he was reading about them when he
wrote V.. but
  P's reading in Literature, Blake and
Melville (Ahab), and Moderns like Kafka, Camus, Sartre,
Hesse, would of course  have introduced him to gnostic
attitudes. His use of Rilke, as two of his best critics have
argued convincingly,  confirms his literary gnosticism. In
modern literature, we use the term "literary gnosticism" to
refer to a particular response (Ahab, Blicero) to the
"existential" cosmos. P's questers, in a hostile gnostic
cosmos search for home. Like Slothrop, the Prodigal son,
they cannot go, home. But P's nostalgia is for HOME, the
world of the Greek Polis or the Catholic Middle Ages, even
of the Puritans of his own family, but a world where
paranoia is positive, where the gap between the WORD and GOD
is not a GAP at all, but a connection, a center that holds,
but in the gnostic world of Modern literature we have been
cast out, tossed on the streets, on the rails, homeless. The
rise of the scientific world view, M&D, the breakdown of the
Greek synthesis, the life affirming Virgin.  So in P and
other Gnostic literature, abstraction, rationalism,
objectification become mythic enemies after having been
hypostatized either in a tyrannical demiurge, as in the case
of the Gnostics, or in God the Great Mathematician of the
Newtonian Universe or modern bureaucracy and its
technological cosmos. Gnosticism is modern literature is
paired with Existentialism, both feel that the world has
been desacralized, and this fact, paradoxically, has led to
its daemonization, a metamorphosis we find in P's work from
V. to M&D. 

Like Mr. Hillman, Mr. McLuhan has much to say about images
and archetypes. 

"Between the ancient and the modern there ahs been a kind of
reversal of roles for cliché and archetype." 
				--McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype

The Movies:

The basic fact to keep in mind about the movie camera and
projector is their resemblance of the process of cognition. 
I can only regard the movie as the mechanization and
distortion of this cognitive miracle by which we recreate
the exterior world. But whereas cognition provides that
dance of the intellect which is the anological sense of
Being, the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a
dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a
means of proving reality.  The movie camera is a means
rolling up the daylight world on a spool. It does this by
rapid still shots. The movie projector unrolls the spool and
recreates the daylight world as a dark dream world. In
reversing the process of perception even the mechanical
camera and projector bring about a mysterious change in
everyday experience. The movie reconstructs the external
daylight world and in so doing provides  an interior dream
world. 

								McLuhan, 1954