GRGR (20) Part 3, Episode 12: Notes, Part 2 of 2

[Michael Perez]

440.39  “music’s polymorphous perversity”  Weisenburger, via
Lawrence Wolfley’s essay in the Richard Pearce collection
_Critical Essays on TP_, attributes this concept to Norman O.
Brown’s _Life Against Death_.  Brown imagined the
experience of life without the repressive baggage of
unconscious fantasies and the need to sublimate desire.  SW: 
“To be ‘polymorphously perverse’ in this way is to delight in
the full life of the body rather than in its separate, rationalized
‘sexual organizations’ or ‘erogenous zones.’” [SW 206]  This
is another manifestation of conceptual democracy like
Slothrop’s sensual equality and, as it is referenced here, the
twelve tone technique’s theoretical equal treatment of all pitch
classes.

440.40  “Where was there to go . . . another
Götterdammerung—”  Gustav melodramatically imagines the
death of Webern as the end of progress for music, the final
frontier, the “twilight of the gods.”   Well, again this is an
arguable point, since some thought Wagner, Mahler, et al, was
as far as music could go.  Of course, much has happened since
1945 in music and though the twelve tone technique has
survived in some form or another, other innovations in
technique and instrumentation have carried on a kind of
progression, however much scholars might argue about these
lineages.  Microtonal and electronic music have expanded all
the materials at hand to a composer and adaptations and
recombinant forms of earlier innovations, in addition to the
development of serial techniques that determined more than
just the pitch content of a composition, continued to add to the
progress of music language.  Schönberg lived until 1951,
Stravinsky began using twelve tone techniques in his later
work, Messiaen used a very personalized kind of serial
technique for a time, Stockhausen grew from his early Webern
influence to become a major innovator in electronics and
spacial effects, and American composers like Elliott Carter,
Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and many others offered
unique visions of modern “classical” music.  Some composers
did what Säure suggests and began again, though not
necessarily with the triadic simplicity of Carl Orff (although
that worked well for the French prog band, Magma), and some
remained true to the Romantic vision of the end of the 19th
century.  As Charles mentioned about Shostakovich, some are
still being argued over in order to determine just how they fit
into musical history.

443.5-7  “A parabola! . . . to tonic.”  Though Weisenburger
points out the formal symphonic structure being parabolic,
Gustav may be referring to diatonic chord progressions which
at their most simple begin on the chord built on the tonic of the
key that then progresses to the chord built on the dominant
degree of the key then back to the tonic.  If this is true, the
parabola becomes more a circle if we look at it one way, but if
we consider the graphical plot of the progression with two
axes, the zero points that would represent the tonic chords can
be separated by time, with the dominant being the top of the
parabola.

445.22  “‘I’m a Lombard’”  Slothrop’s thinking, “potato,
potahto” here, no doubt.  Again Pynchon, as he has all over this
episode and the book, I believe, is playing with the illusions of
limits and boundries, in addition to the implication, ubiquity,
absence, acceptance, and rejection of various kinds of
equivalence.

446.21  “He escaped only be murmuring *Hauptstufe* three
times.”  A-and clicking the heels of his ruby slippers, perhaps? 
Well, the epigraph of this part is from _The Wizard of Oz_ (the
movie).  Is this the “main stage”?  At the end of the episode,
we still do not have lift-off - Slothrop goes fishing again - but
his dream may have been the ignition.  I guess we’ll see after
he’s done fishing.

447.5  “driven now . . . animal species to fuck.”  Again
Pynchon seems to playing with the idea of equivalence, here all
species are equal and capable of impregnating the screen door
salesman’s wife in Slothrop’s dream, and, in turn, she gives
birth to these species before she dies.  That the husband here
sells screen doors, which allow light and air to enter while
keeping out bugs and other small pests, may be significant,
also, providing another kind of boundary.  So what is Slothrop
fishing for here?  Another mermaid?  Or is Greta the mermaid?


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