Sex & the Swastika

[rj]

tf
> BTW, Richard Nixon's name change here, someone has written,
> sorry can't remember at the moment, is apparently, a
> deliberate reference to his physicality and speech. So
> Pynchon's naming is very revealing and funny and worth
> looking into.

Yes, I think it has something to do with adenoids and blocked noses,
too, and so may link back to Pirate's dream and Osmo Blatherard at the
beginning (there are some lovely symmetries in the novel, aren't there.)
I've always thought that there are a lot of in-jokes about Nixon (the
different tapes in the glove box, for example) in that last sequence
that go right over my head, not being American and all. I do still think
though that calling Nixon Nixon wouldn't have been a wise move,
legally-speaking, but it's very very clear who Zhlubb is *meant* to be.
Pynchon is pretty fearless when it comes to naming names I think, which
is why I don't buy all the more abstruse and convoluted plottings of
character onto real figures that goes on. It seems futile to me, but in
a way it's also a licence to print and impose your own political
interpretation onto the text.

I'll give another example. A few months back there was a web address
posted to an essay linking McLintic Sphere to Theolonius Monk (the url
was hand-delivered to Andrew Dinn and myself, btw). But it just seems to
me that even here, going from the fictional character back to the real
person is working in the wrong direction altogether. If you read Jules
Siegel's Playboy memoir, which is in the archives in full somewhere
around May 1995 and is not quite as execrable as I'd formerly believed,
then, yes, Pynchon was a huge fan of Monk's, and went to see him play
often. And, in the standard sort of life influencing art way that
literature goes, perhaps Pynchon did use the real jazzist as the basis
of his fictional characterisation of Sphere (one of the most sympathetic
characters in *V.*, and who delivers what for me is the absolute maxim
of that novel: "Keep cool but care.") But I don't think it is logical or
legitimate to try to plot some biographical or political connotation or
significance onto, or from, the fictional character. The comparison I'd
make is with the appearance of the phrase "Bird lives" which crops up
several times in *V.* (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong on
this). Now, on the one hand Pynchon is making reference to the real
Charlie Parker as a historical fact, on the other he's using Theolonius
Monk (possibly) as the genesis of a fictional creation. If he'd wanted
to talk about Monk or use him as a character then he would have done so,
by name, up front.

Fiction -- all art -- derives from and is built on personal experience,
sure. I'm just not so sure that the backward-tracing of fiction onto
history (or the author's personal experience for that matter) is all
that fruitful or reliable as an avenue, or tool, of research and
interpretation. I'm not denouncing that approach mind you, and if it
works for you or anybody then by all means ... Critical pluralism is
theoretically a big enough basket to hold all. In practice, however, and
being human and having only a finite RAM, you do need to start drawing
lines and discriminating between one attempt to make a pattern and the
next, and that's why this approach falls short for me.

best