Theatre/theater?

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Seb Thirlway wrote:

> Wonder what you mean by "their narrative is reliable".  What
> strikes me much more in this section of GR is that the
> discoveries about Them, the great A-ha moments are becoming more
> and more inconsequential.  e.g:
> 
> (earlier)
> Slothrop discovers something at the Casino HG: therefore -
> Slothrop runs away (stopping at a great party on the way).
> (now)
> Enzian has a sudden realisation that this may be all theatre:
> therefore -
> nothing at all.  The realisation makes absolutely no difference
> to Enzian's course.
> 
> The realisation is reliable because paranoid realisations just
> feel that way - "at last I've got it - suddenly it all makes
> sense" - they carry a freight of "this way of seeing things is a
> way of seeing what is hidden, what is REALLY the case".  But by
> this stage in GR they've relaxed into paranoia, are quite
> sophisticated about it - the paranoid phenomenology is just a
> phenomenology, it means absolutely sod-all - Enzian writes a
> mental note to "cut down on the drugs and let's say no more about
> it".
> 
> seb

Yes, I come back to why I think Enzian's narrative
(theatre/theatre) is reliable. 


Motivation and Quests



"She had to find out for herself." 
		--Glinda, The Wizard Of Oz

'Tis better to be lord of men than of Waste: since neither
walled town nor ship is anything, if it is void and no men
dwell with thee therein."  

		--Sophocles, Oedipus The King, Priest of Zeus to Oedipus

Obviously, Pynchon has a penchant for quests: from
Sophocles' masterpiece Oedipus The King to The Wizard of
OZ,  Pynchon's satires seem to emerge as Modern parodies of
the age-old quest story. For Greek Tragedy see: "Greek
tragedy and political theory, edited by J. Peter Euben:

"Sophocles implies that incest and exile, too much unity and
too much diversity, are not opposites but are, literally,
two sides of the same coin. He also suggests, what the
audience believed, that incest and parricide are acts that
obliterate the distinction between man and beast, inside and
outside, the wild and civilization. What Oedipus lacks (and
Thebes as well) is some middle term, an Aristotelian Polis
that mediates between our divinity and animality, making us
whole in a community constituted by diversity."

 After ruminating over the hazards of interpreting Pynchon,
Euben states,    "If there is any hope in the novel, it
rests with Oedipa. She is the only one who does not give up
the quest
she is the middle term
." (302). 

J. Peter Euben in "The Road Home: Pynchon's The Crying of
Lot 49," the concluding chapter of his The Tragedy Of
Political Theory (1990). 

Many scholars agree that from a purely structural point of
view, Oedipus The King is practically unrivaled in dramatic
literature. Pynchon seems to have a fascination with the
"unrivaled" texts. In any event, Sophocles demonstrates his
remarkable skill as a dramatist by allowing Oedipus to
become aquatinted with His story incrementally, while at the
same time exploiting the total range of possible ironies by
allowing the audience to know more of His story than Oedipus
knows at any given moment in the play. Moreover, and this is
the "crust of the biscuit", in Oedipus The King we find
perfect motivation for individual actions. This is one of
the reasons Aristotle turns to this drama more than any
other Greek Tragedy to illustrate his critical theories. 

 The characters in GR are on quests. Slothrop, like Stencil
and Oedipa, is on a quest. The quest theme is a Pynchon
favorite and it is pervasive in GR: cowboy, detective, love,
picaresque, etc. and occurs in Sacral (Kabbalist, Masonic,
Gnostic etc), Mythic or Magical (Grail, Tarot, Astrological,
etc.), Scientific/Technological (psychology, mathematics,
aerodynamics, rocket engineering, etc.), and in variations
of these assimilated. The Scentific/Technological quests
(Faustian) are presented as Profane or corrupt versions of
the Sacred, Mythical, and Magical, while the Sacred,
Mythical, and Magical, are Carnivalized. So, sometimes
characters are not sure if they are on a quest or if they
are running for their lives (kinda like Dorothy--"I'll get
you my little Tyrone and your little Penis too!"). And like
Dorothy, the goal (spiritual and material) of the quest keep
multiplying ("some place where there isn't any trouble",
"get out of OZ", Emerald City, Home, Heart, Brains, Courage,
OZ, Wizard, WWW's broom, Kansas, and of course "the land of
E Pluribus Unum"). Some characters in GR, like Slothrop, are
on a quest for a whole bunch of things, like, Self or
Identity, lovers, relatives, ancestors, doubles, drugs,
information, money, technology (Imipolex G, S-Gerat)
discharge from the service ("ruptured duck" GR.61 and
GR.526), Jamf, and so on.

"Yeah! yeah what happened to Imipolex G, all that Jamf a-and
that S-Gerat, s'posed to be a hardboiled private eye here,
gonna go out all alone and beat the odds, avenge my friend
that They killed (Tantivy), get my ID back and find that
piece of mystery hardware but now aw it's JUST LIKE--LOOK-IN
FAWR A NEEDLE IN A HAAAAY-STACK...chances of ever
finding...determining your goals...concentrate...The S-Garat
now--O.K. if I can find that S-Garat 'n' how Jamf was hooked
in, if I can find that out, yeah yeah, Imipolex GR... 
--searchin' for a (hmm) cellar full o' saffron..."
(GR.561-562).  

Characters change their interests rather haphazardly,
abandoning one set of objects or goals and adopting new ones
as the story moves along, parody after fantastic parody.
However, and this is one of the reason I consider Pynchon a
traditional Modernist (GR has all 14 elements of Bakhtin's
formulation for Menippean Satire, including the quest motif
and parody of various genres), who mocks novelistic
conventions even as they make up large portions of the
narrative, motivation is an essential element in Pynchon's
fiction. Ultimately, I would argue that GR itself revolves
around a religious/moral axis, that although parodic (see
dwight Eddins' Gnostic Pynchon), motivates all the
characters in GR and, now I'm going to get into trouble, the
author reader relationship as well.  



Previously I suggested that GR is not a "traditional" novel
in that most characters
don't learn anything and those that do are not transformed
by their learning, but rather lapse back to their
conditioned selves after experiencing what would be a
transforming event or revelation of some sort in a more
"traditional" novel. 

For example, in Ensign Morituri's Story (GR.474). "We are
conditioned to forget" GR.474, "So Ensign Moritori committed
then the only known act of heroism in his career....His
conditioning, his verbal, ranked and uniformed self took
over again." (GR.478) 

See Fowler's 'A Reader's Guide to GR' where he notes that
"human motive as the most important fact in dramatic event"
(115) does not operate in GR. 

However, although Pynchon subverts traditional character
motivation, thus subverting both the quests and questers,
characters are not where we will find the "traditional"
maturation, evolution, learning, etc. as we do in say,  Pip
of "Great Expectations",  or Jude of "Jude The Obscure" or
Tom Jones of Fielding's masterwork, the protagonist's
journey to maturation or as Kai noted, bildungsroman, is
still represented, as is motivation, only what motivates
characters are various Forces. This is what Pynchon is
concerned with, the forces of consciousness, though
consciousness is not individualized nor is it separate from
the forces "outside" consciousness.  Again, Slothrop is our
best model. In these Anubis chapters, we are told that
Slothrop is to be counted among the zone's lost and as
individual character this is the case, but at the level of
force motivation, Slothrop is transformed and transcends.
Trouble again, I know. 

The single force motivation in GR does not change. All
quests promise some sort of redemption from an insufferable
predicament and characters try everything on Earth to
"transcend" the human condition. Most fail either because
they cannot get to their goal or when they do, they find
annihilation. What's interesting is that when questers
succeed in GR, they succeed only in protecting or redeeming
others, Geli, for example, prevents murder with magic. On
the other hand, when questers fail, they fail for all sorts
of reasons: they are late, they are on the wring track, the
wrong train, the wrong ship, moving in the wrong direction,
they forget, they are afraid (like Stencil is afraid to got
to Malta), etc. 

TBC