GRGR(18): Finding Lisaura

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:
> 
> Henry M. schrieb:
> 
> > ... that GR meetings, cute and
> > otherwise, are some of my favorite passages: no synthesis without meeting
> > and heating.
>                           & beating?! kfl



Yes, beating and being beat! But there is no synthesis. Not
the synthesis that is in any way genuine or that does not
deny death, love, and life in the process, but only the
synthesis and control that seeks transcendence, but denies
it by the nature of its quest, for example the synthesis of
the System, of Them etc. There is the desire to unite, the
quest for transcendental salvation, but the Sado-Masochistic
act betrays the promise of escape and is only a vain, blind,
power ritual, that perpetuates the infection of the System,
the System that perverts with its papered over definition of
the nature of synthesis and control and more importantly,
with its own definition of the nature of freedom. 

The struggle between the victim and the victimizer does not
involve synthesis in the religious sense, which is what is
desired and needed for escape.  It involves only a
complementary struggle, in which the participants do not
truly become one, but rather simply define each other to
serve their own solipsistic perversions of the "religious"
dialectic (note: Pynchon's use of the term dialectic and
dialectical is mostly negative, but here I use it in the
affirmative Platonic or Neoplatonic/christian sense). 

It is telling, that Pynchon assumes we have read Mondaugen's
story at this point in GR--"destroyer and the destroyed and
the act that united them" and "the long daisy chain of
victimizers and victims, screwers and screwees." The
breakdown, of unity, of relationships,  Pynchon  tells us,
began "40 years ago" with the rise of Nazism (though the
rise if Nazism is traced by Pynchon to, among other things,
500 years of metaphysics, and more importantly, to the
German colonies of SW Africa). What is also important here,
is the Oedipal forfeiture, the estrangement from the primal
relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and
children, etc. and the politicization of the personal (how
do YOU like that postmodernism) and private
relationships--"fucking is done on paper" on film, and They
know all about it, conditioned pornography. 

Where is the loving sexual relationship in this novel? Roger
and Jessica? No modern Romeo and Juliet, right? A Hollywood
cute meet set up as an ironic almost that compromises the
Love that Roger longs for. Or does it? This is where I see
the escape, the "didactic" Pynchon if you will, more on this
idea later. 

No, if we go back to CL, V., the Slow Learners, we find that
Pynchon simply does not give us but Wasteland sex, be it
homosexual, pedophiliac, fetishistic, masturbatory, or even
when he gives us heterosexual, we are faced with expressions
of solipsistic desires,  the power ritual--the rationalized
synthesis and control, and most importantly, the attempt to
be free, to escape from the emotional/psychological
impoverishment of "postmodern" existence. The attempt to
escape the "postmodern" human predicament through violent
S&M acts in these chapters, points to the futile quest for
salvation from the impoverished emotional/psychological grip
of synthesis and control in the novel. The characters seek
to unite not with each other, but with some absolute. The
problem is that each is trapped in a solipsistic quest. The
characters in GR, as the narrator tells us, can not know
each other. This false or futile synthesis takes many forms
is GR, for examples see GR.88 "The act of injuring..." and
in most examples, the "synthesis" is ironically, a (multi)
religious one. 


Terrance