Pornography & Technics & Death

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Wonder if "The Flying Dutchman" might be a good model. 

Paul, some really interesting posts, got me thinking and
re-thinking, again. 


Certainly Richard Wagner (1813-83) is important here for
lots of reasons.  And "The Flying Dutchman" might be a good
model, yes, better than "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" I
suppose, Wagner's works are being alluded to in these
chapters
quite a lot and Pynchon is also merging political,
historical,
biographical Wagnerisms/Ludwig II in here as well, and 
perhaps 
Wagner's life and his particular contributions are more the
model than any 
particular work.


Are these folks aboard a spectre ship doomed to sail
forever; has some captain, Vanderdecken, gambled his
salvation on a rash pledge to round the
Cape of Good Hope during a storm and so condemned his
crew to a course for eternity? 

Or is this a journey of the soul, brought after death by the
jackal-headed god Anubis into the Hall of Truth, where the
dead man's heart is
weighed against a feather. If the heart, made light by
goodness, does not outweigh the feather, then the soul is
brought before Osiris and granted immortality? 

In these Anubis chapters it is easy to recognize what
critics often call Pynchon's ontological subversion of the
traditional notions of character and plot and the old
"reader contract." The dream/cinema layered timespace
confuses and the reader can be  drawn into traps, where,
like Stencils conditioned by modernist text the reader will
experience some sort of rapture after attempting but failing
to find  the mysterious V. 

An orgy of Doubles and merging and mappings, of allusions,
major themes and their metaphors, some structural--  
calendars, mandalas, Rocket, Blicero reconfigures time 
and space. 


It's an orgy, welcome aboard. Some folks noted that Pynchon
is reworking earlier stuff, like V. in Love. I agree, and I
think Pynchon is outraged here, sons and daughters, mothers
and fathers pornographically / technologically conditioned
and conditioning for War and Profits.  

I don't know anything about Egyptian orgies, but Osiris was
associated by the Greeks, with Dionysus, Dythyramb, ecstasy,
mysticism, poetry, music, theatre, and this is how men
become divine by the death of a god after incest and rape. 

 Zeus rapes his mother Rhea-Demeter, sires Persephone, he
rapes her too, as a snake, sires Dionysos or Dyonysus, who
is given the throne, but Hera sends the Titans to distract
the child with a mirror, they kill him and eat him. Zeus
with his thunderbolt burns up the Titans, but  Men spring
from the rising soot, rebels against the gods who
nevertheless participate in the divine. From the remains
that were rescued and collected, Dionyses rises again and
the notion of the Psyche, a major Revolution in the concept
of the Soul, Transmigration, immortal soul, Athanatos, takes
place. This is the concept the West inherited, the ego, the
psyche, the soul within, not the powerless, unconscious
image of recollection in a gloomy Hades, as in Homer, it is
immortal, a Revolution, although it does not happen
abruptly, but in stages leading to the classical form of the
soul found in Platonic metaphysics and predominating for
thousands of years.

Perhaps Pynchon is also commenting on the "amoral ritualism"
of Orpheus that is  pilloried by Plato in the Republic, the
Phaedrus and in other dialogues.  Liberation from guilt,
images of blessedness and punishment in Hades--the symposium
of the HOSIOI and communality with the gods, the lying in
the mud, water carrying and OKNOS,  come from the Orpheus
books to Plato and Aristotle. 

Remember in M&D when Wicks and company discuss novels,
opera, and the like, more specifically,  Plato, Musick,
Dithyrambists, civil disorder, Religion, Science, Money, and
Revolution (M&D ch.26)? Pynchon comments on  1960s America
indirectly and here in GR, I think he is commenting on
America again, perhaps reworking themes from V. and "The
Secret Integration".  

Anyway, Plato's comments on books--Musaios and Orpheus-- is
a condemnation. In the Phaedrus we find Plato's comments on
technology-- writing is rejected. But more to the orgy
ritual use of books--Orpheus-- in Plato, the appeal to books
is indicative of Revolution. The ORPHIC literacy
revolutionizes the previous immediacy of rituals, oral
tradition. The new form of transmission introduced a new
form of authority to which the individual, provided he can
read, has direct access without collective mediation. This
is an emancipation of of the individual, and revolution and
the introduction of books go hand in hand in religion as
elsewhere. This a major interest for Pynchon, the bible, the
Alphabet and Oral tradition.   

Too many models? Too many identities? 

What is Pynchon up to, too much perhaps? Why? 

Technology and Pornography  


A film, what else, that what's They made of Daughter. 

Of Isle and Bianca.  They ran the film for Bianca and let
her pin the tail on the father. Who is the father? Pokler?
Max Schlepzig, or something? Slothrop?   

It was parthenogenesis, pure Margherita, Margharita the
Shekhinah,
queen daughter, Israel, and Lillith, murderer of children.


Pokler, guilty, will marry the woman of Dora, his S&M family
a failure. Bianca's  mother  is guilty, loves to be beaten,
will sell her to hollywood, an extension of her ego, an
exhausted soul, will beat her for the orgy, Slothrop will
enact Polka's fantasy, only it's not incest, it's sex with a
little girl and the staff of the Pope will not bloom, like
Slothrop, after all, among the Zone's lost, it will remain
barren. 

Slothrop is an Orpheus figure  (and his role as an Orpheus
figure takes radical and abrupt turns, like here where we
are told he is barren and beyond redemption, one of the
Zone's lost, but as we know he is also Orpheus of
transcendence and transformation--Rilke.