Friends of Dorothy

[jbor]

>   From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (Lorentzen / Nicklaus)
>   according to my ever so humble opinion there's one work of art which is for
gr
>   as important as the "duineser elegien". i'm talking about "the wizard of oz"
>   [1939], which seems to have a strutural function for the novel. furthermore,
>   it's a movie, & cinema is the epistemologically leading art form in gr.

While I don't wish to preempt Kai I think this observation is very valid.
The mottos for each section of GR operate (to keep the film jargon
rolling) extra-diegetically; or, in other, words, they function as they
would in a traditional realist or Modernist novel. Pynchon's
eclecticism, which is the eclecticism of much postmodernist art, means
that older traditions and modes are adopted and embraced at seeming
whim, almost-but-not-quite parodically, even when these modes would
appear to be mutually contradictory. (Both/and, not either/or). As in,
say, a George Eliot or Thomas Hardy novel, the mottos here are cues
referencing the themes and purport of the fiction; they are offered to
the reader, vouchsafed from the author, and are quite apart (and set
apart) from the fictional narrative per se. The mottos are often
ironicised or ironic-in-themselves, perhaps, as with those to Sections 1
and 4 (but this is nothing new); however, and this is new (though
precursors even for this exist in Sterne, Melville, Conrad et. al. as
well), these quotations have been taken (or counterfeited) from somewhat
unexpected and what we as readers of "literary" novels would hardly
consider to be "apt" sources, even though they function in the same way
as in traditional fictions. It is the old low art/High Art,
preterite/Elect substitution game, set here in a readerly context: the
reader is "conditioned" to expect profundity of these mottos which are
keys to what we hope and expect are this novel's deep and profound
themes, but what this apparently profound author and novel is flinging
at us instead is pap. Profoundly so.

Structurally, the narrative of *GR* describes four captive knight-questers
set adrift in some surreal Zone (Oz: n-e. An anagram, perhaps?); Slothrop as
Dorothy has been tumbled into its midst by a whirlwind of forces both
beyond his control and yet manifested of the very fibres of his own
being. The others -- Tchitchy, Gottfried and Enzian -- are already ensconced
there: Slothrop is the American innocent abroad, the new kid on the block,
escaping from and yet wanting to reclaim his own private Idaho, or Kansas,
or Mingeborough, Ma. Each of the seekers is on a separate though
strangely-correspondent path to erstwhile enlightenment, the routes
intertwining, simultaneous, and always magically intact. Resonances abound,
along with the direct references which Kai alerts us to. When, for
example, Tchitcherine's boots become Slothrop's ruby red slippers in the
glare of that Porsche's taillights it *is* as if Slothrop has suddenly
attempted to click his heels and leap, cape afly, across the autobahn (380)
and over into an altogether different realm. Later, in their rescue of der
Springer, Narrisch is described as a "leather scarecrow" (510.10), and
Slothrop is uncharacteristically courageous and decisive at this point. All
four protagonists seek after something which is both an externalised
ideality (a promise symbolised in the Rocket) and also a version of selfish
and petty carnal fulfilment. But this desperate or barely-envisaged craving
they each harbour is also revealed through the narrative of their travails
as an internal deficiency, a spiritual emptiness if you like, of their own:
the inability to love, to know, to have courage, to accept self and
heritage. The questers can't quite recognise it as such -- it is offset,
externalised, a vision denied -- but we as viewers/readers do. What they are
each seeking is demonstrated as something to be sought within rather than
without.

I wonder when the phrase "friends of Dorothy" was appropriated by queer
culture? Although I don't think that the topic of male homosexuality in
*GR* has been dealt with satisfactorily, either here or in the published
criticism, neither is it my contention that *GR* is in any sense a "gay
novel" in the faddish categorisations of contemporary literature which
the academy, publishers and commercial writers alike so relish. But along
with the graphic depictions of pederasty and elements of homo-eroticism
which figure throughout the narrative, the themes of preterition and
colonial exploitation and homosexuality are closely aligned. And I do
see a parallel in the subversiveness and self-mocking playfulness of the
appropriation of musicals like *Wizard* and *South Pacific*, and stars
like Garland and Mitzi Gaynor for ex., as gay icons, with the way Pynchon
embraces the same and similar items of cinema kitsch -- Rin Tin Tin and
Fay Wray and King Kong and Carmen Miranda and Mickey Rooney as Andy
Hardy, and Dietrich/Garbo (and Godzilla, Gilligan's Island and Star Trek
elsewhere) -- to undercut the "literariness" of his fiction. There is a
political edge too in this overt refusal to take oneself seriously, or
to allow oneself to be taken seriously, this repudiation of any claim to
cultural sophistication or "seriousness". It is a slap in the face of
the Establishment: High Culture become high camp.

Anyway, in the sense that the mottos are the author directly communicating
to his reader then with Slothrop we are also suddenly thrust into a
literary/historical "Zone" which our conditioning as readers and as
Westerners isn't quite able to recognise or come to terms with. We too
are being led along a yellow brick road towards some almost-glimpsed
moment of magical revelation somewhere up ahead, over the rainbow so to
speak; are Toto to Pynchon's Dorothy no less, or vice versa. Of course, like
the Wizard, it isn't quite what we expected when we do arrive. But within
the enigma of the narrative's close we suddenly become cognisant of the
fact that we have to seek within, that it has been us all along and we
actually *have* been looking within ourselves and our own history, that
this fantastic and terrible dreamworld and dire prophecy of what lays
ahead is something which is also a part of our very own heritage and
history and natures. And it is in this way that I think the novel as
didactic artefact, and these mottos in particular, are very explicitly
directed towards the American reader, but knowingly, self-consciously vainly
so. For, in a similar way Pynchon empathises with this implied reader, and
sees himself as Slothrop, gives Slothrop his own family history; he is
struggling, like Slothrop, as an American and as an American writer/reader,
to make sense of himself and his nation's legacy and of his own role as
artist within that legacy, trying to detach himself, stand outside and view
things objectively but always getting tangled up in it at the same time: the
Puritan conditioning, the hypocrisies and materialism, and the way that some
new and lurid plastic has gotten "under the skin" of American culture, as a
prosthesis, or simulacrum of what it is to be "human"; but still not quite
willing to let go (623). As well as Rilke, Melville, Eliot and so forth
Pynchon is reading the garish colours and esotery of *The Wizard of Oz*
through his narrative, as a component of the Western cultural tradition, a
fragment of the post-Modernist world, and as an emblem of the postmodern
worldview. And so it also strikes me that outsiders are better able to
envisage this aspect of Pynchon's literature, and to strike a rapport with
the vision he is striving to present. (It is perhaps germane to note the
worthy acclaim accorded *American Beauty* at this point.) Indeed, by
remaining aloof, choosing quietism and withdrawal throughout his career, and
relinquishing any personal role as celebrity or auteur within the culture,
Pynchon too is vicariously an outsider within American society (if such a
paradox can be permitted).

Anyway, happy Mardi Gras.

best


            "The end of Buddhism is illumination"
                                  Monkey Magic