GRGR(20) "Young Fool"

[jbor]

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>From: jp4321 at idt.net (jporter)
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: GRGR(20) "Young Fool"
>Date: Tue, Feb 15, 2000, 1:30 PM
>

> The confrontation of Emil and Gustav represents a clash, alright, and it
> shouldn't be given short schrift.
snip

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Agreed. This "raging debate" (440-1) is another vivid demonstration of
Pynchon's use of art and aesthetic theory as metaphors for his themes--it is
a *political* allegory if you will--as well as exemplifying the
self-consciousness and reflexiveness inscribed in his own literary process.

Gustav, possessed of all the revolutionary zeal of youth, argues that
Beethoven's music represents "the German dialectic", with its

"incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with
dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was
one of the architects of musical freedom--he submitted to the demands of
history despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36,
womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy
and grandeur."

Saure, older, less idealistic, more complacent and selfish, defends Rossini
(with one of the funniest quips in the novel):

"So? ... Which would you rather do? The point is a person feels *good*
listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out
and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn't even have a sense of
humour.... With Rossini the whole point is that lovers always get together,
isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal
movement of the world. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness and the
abuse of power, *love occurs*. All the shit is transmuted to gold."

There is real gentleness and concern in Saure's perpetuation of this debate
with the young tyro, as Jody points out. Gustav's idol, Anton Webern, has
just been shot dead. The young musician is upset, appalled, enraged, liable
to go out and do something foolishly self-destructive:

"The excuse for raiding the house was that Webern's brother was in the black
market. Who isn't? Do you know what kind of myth *that's* going to make in a
thousand years? The young barbarians coming in to murder the Last European,
standing at the far end of what had been going on since Bach, an expansion
of music's polymorphous perversity till all the notes were truly equal at
last. . . . Where was there to go after Webern? It was the moment of maximum
freedom."

Echoing both Slothrop's and Blicero's later realisations of fathers
betraying their sons Gustav rails against the farting, dribbling, doddering
old men in the concert halls (complacent bourgeois audiences not *only* at a
concert within this fiction but a refelection, too, of the novel's readers
and their milieux), "dreaming up ever more ingenious plots against their
children--not just their own but *other people's* children as well ...
listening to Rossini":

"Sitting there drooling away to some medley of predicable little tunes,
leaning forward elbows on knees muttering, C'mon, c'mon then Rossini, let's
get all this pretentious fanfare stuff out of the way, let's get on to the
*real good tunes*!' Behaviour as shameless as eating a whole jar of peanut
butter at one sitting."

Compassionate Saure consistently diverts Gustav back to their friendly feud,
devolving into their self-consciously ironic ritual of dope connoisseurship.

Both sides of the musical debate receive equal prominence in Pynchon's text;
the arguments, from either perspective, are sound, and neither viewpoint is
privileged. Pynchon, aside in the narrative, admits that the 'Tancredi'
tarantella "really is a good tune", but does not let judgement fall either
way, neither here nor later, when the debate resurfaces.

(cont.)