Tyrone's Race

[Terrance]

Richard Romeo wrote:
> >
> --------
> But, what's with Vaslav's enmity towards Enzian all about, if not some sort
> of taint he feels by being "related", his father consumating a relationship
> with a negro. doesn't this relate in some way to all of Slothrop's
> repression in the early parts of GR with blackness, to its flowering (or
> de-) in the 2nd half, his embrasure of the Other, typified, I think, by that
> dress-wearing surreal scene in the latter parts of GR, waiting on a black
> caller, if I'm not mistaken. Of course, Tchitcherine is only saved from sin
> by magic from Geli--who's to say if he'd transcend his positions when the
> potions wear off.
> 

The strange case of Rilke becomes very important in the
Counterforce section of GR. GR is loaded with references and
ironic allusions to Rilke's life and his major works. As
Paul reminds us, ONLY extra-textual information,
biographical studies for example, will guide and elucidate
what is now only a speculative and disquieting venture
through the carefully obscured and deliberately smudged
looking glass that is Pynchon's Rilke.  
However, we can identify many important affinities and some
very significant differences in the works of these two men.
In GR, as in Rilke's Elegies, Sonnets, Notebook, humanity is
in a desperate situation-emotionally, spiritually, cut off
from the earth, from the virgin, from the pristine
undiminished, undivided, totality, the "WHOLE" that Rilke's
and Pynchon's characters long for. In GR, characters long to
return, but such longing only exacerbate an already
unbearable condition. How did Man come to be cut off,
imprisoned, in this grave place or state? To use Blake's
terms, he forged manacles with his own mind. Not only are
humans cut off from the "whole", they are utterly and
hopelessly alone, cut off from each other and thus even from
themselves. Anti-paranoia is when nothing is connected-- not
a condition anyone can stand for very long.  And paranoia
(in one of its many forms in GR) is where everything is
connected and that is also a condition no one can stand for
very long. Unable to endure these states, humans adopt a
central perspective and impose a temporal grid on
experience, but this strategy strips, dispossesses, and
denudes the natural world by imposing and validating only a
human centered nature and reality. The human interpretation
is based on human desires and so Man corrupts the natural
cycle of life and death by rejecting the tension in
paradoxical movement, by wrapping the earth in a new
plastic, a static plastic at odds with the natural
paradoxical tensions of the earth. In this plastic, human
centered, projected reality things get more and more
hopelessly divided, and dualities multiply, multiplying the
inorganic and becoming increasingly antagonistic. Again,
this "German" tendency to divide is not a German thing, but
a human one, linked by Pynchon not only to the Nazis and the
Americans, the Argentines and Dutch, the Pavlovians and
Jungians, the Freudians and Catholics, the Pointmen and
anti-Pointsmen, but to the evolution of the species and the
psychic development of civilization and mind. So to go way
back to the a very good  example on page 48:

Pavlov was fascinated with "ideas of the opposite." 
Helping distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark,
dominance from submission
.

Pleasure and pain, life and death, lament and praise,
fulfillment and longing, rising and falling, possessive,
delusional love and true, unrequited love are the opposites
Rilke presents in his Elegies. Pynchon adds innocence and
guilt, black and white, masculinity and femininity. Man
divides and frightfully clings to one side or the other. By
externalizing, repressing, the other (Shit & Shinola),
holding obsessively to the side he determines is most
favorable, man steers civilization towards a technological,
rationalized, rigid, inorganic, pornography. The projection,
this technological rationalization, cause Man to, in
Campbell's terms, "lose his myths", the very things that
allow the antagonistic experience of Man to be lived (i.e.
that black death is in the intestinal oven-Shit, Death), in
"primitive" communities (i.e. pre-christian Herero) are
desacralized and transmogrified into nightmarish visions.
For Pynchon, the antagonistic relationship has evolved in
the mind itself. The bond of the subjective an the objective
experiences is a destructive one personified in GR in
homosexual, sado-masochistic, and most importantly
incestuous father child relationships.