GRGR(20) "Young Fool" (2)
jbor
jbor at bigpond.com
Thu Feb 17 04:05:54 CST 2000
(cont.)
When their verbal joust resurfaces in the narrative the final statements of
Saure and Gustav encapsulate two diametrically-opposed attitudes towards
musical theory and history. Saure:
"*Sound* is a game, if you're capable of moving that far.... That's why I
listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini, I'm choosing *my* game, one full of
light and kindness. You're stuck with that stratosphere stuff and
rationalize its dullness away by calling it 'enlightenment'. You don't know
what enlightenment is... you're blinder than I am."
Gustav:
"Your 'light and kindness' are the jigging of the doomed.... You can smell
mortality in every one of those bouncy little tunes." (622)
But they are intrinsically *human* attitudes, informed as much by bitterness
and self-indulgence as by objective analysis. And not one but both attitudes
are representative of Pynchon's literary method and purpose, variously,
sometimes acerbically so, at other times self-effacingly or despondently.
While there isn't quite the impetus to "invade Poland" in *GR* there are
certainly definite and definitively radical directives to the reader within
the text:
A medium-sized pine nearby nods its head and suggests, "Next time you
come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that
isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That's what you
can do." (552-3)
And in the humour, pomp and grandiosity of much of the prose there are
corollaries enough of Rossini's "bouncy little tunes".
Further, the debate (or dialectic) thus depicted isn't the endpoint of
Pynchon's artistic conception either. More than simply an infinite and
irreconcilable binary equation, in fact it is the combination (both/and, not
either/or) of the apparent opposition represented by Gustav and Saure's
viewpoints which exemplifies Pynchon's politics and historical conception,
as well as his literary method and aesthetic aspiration. Interspersed into
these final excerpts from the two dope-fiends' neverending argument is a
fragment of Slothrop's hiatus in the uninhabited countryside of the Zone.
His prodigal harmonica miraculously returned--his "harp"-- Slothrop here
finally becomes Orpheus, a "spiritual medium":
There are harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water
moves... Whacking the water out of his harmonica, reeds singing against
his leg, picking up the single blues at bar 1 of this morning's segment,
Slothrop, just suckin' on his harp, is closer to being a spiritual medium
than he's been yet, and he doesn't even know it. (622)
His blues played here *is* the resolution or compromise of the debate
between Saure and Gustav. Not analysis, or more words, but music, nature.
The importance of the Orphic myth to Pynchon's fiction, and the
proliferation of references to Orpheus which attach to Slothrop, are
commented on by both Thomas A. Bass (*Pynchon Notes* 13) and Kathryn Hume
and Thomas J. Knight (*Philological Quarterly* 64.3). It is "flowing water"
-- Nature, flow, flux -- and the "spirits of lost harpmen"-- Art, heritage,
intertextuality -- which mould and form the aesthetic response, and into
which the artefact is projected. Like Slothrop, Pynchon, rather than
plagiarise or parody, engages with the art, artists and theories of the past
in this Orphic manner, calling up the souls of others to have their "music"
ring alongside his own.
best
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