Pynchon's "Pornographies" ...

[Dave Monroe]

... selected selections from: Micahel Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural
Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1992), commenting on "pornographies of flight" (GR 567) ...

Dwight Eddins has even suggested there is an antidote to poronographies
of flight, for "when we integrate, we return to integrity, to all taht
the original, unbroken arc means by way of momentary grace, momentary
freedom, and the natural triumph of gravity" ([The Gnostic Pynchon]
1983, 78).  But this "reintegration" is itself an already performed
illusion, already part of the structure of film and calculus: bith are
forms of dismemberment and reconstitution which are reassembled into
illusions of unity--in this case, unifie and continuous motion.  For as
Pynchon writes elsewhere in Gravity's Rainbow, the pornography of film
and calculus is not that they carve up originary unities, but that they
feign such unities: "There has been this starnge connection between the
German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit
movement, for at least two centuries--since Leibniz, in the process of
inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectory of
cannonballs through the air" (GR 407).  (MF/CC 247-8)

In my reconstruction, then, "pornography" in Gravity's Rainbow describes
a regressive anamnesia that recreates illusory, prelapsarian (or
preliguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of dismemberment and
reconfiguration; and since nostalgia itself works by much the same
dynamic, Pynchon's "pornography" gives us fresh purchase on the cultural
critique of nostalgia as well.  His novel offers us a veritable
miscellany of macropolitical nostalgia and fantasied "restoration": in
its American version, teh myth of the virgin land; its Argentine
equivalent, the "Argentine heart" [...].  Enzian's Schwarzkommnado are,
after all, devoting all their energies to piecing together a rocket,
liek a ntion of anamnesiac detectives, and the leader of the Herero
meta-metapreterite [Berube's double prefixes, or else a typo ...] of
racial suicides, the Empty Ones' Josef Ombindi, "at times self-conned as
any Christian, praises and prophecies that era of innocence he just
missed living in" (GR 321).  (MF/CC 248-9)

Whether Slothrop's realtion to the rocket is even causally or
statistically explicable [...] may be beside the point, for insofar as
his search for the clue to the rocket is coextensive with his search for
self-identity, it is amnesiac, pornographic, and better left
uncompleted.  (249)

If nothing else, Slothrop's unfathomable "scattering" delivers him from
the illusion of self-identity [....] his "scattering" claerly has its
advantages.  [...] was sent to destroy the Herero (GR 615) [...] "to be
presnt at his own assembly" (GR 738).  These, surely, are fates well
avoided.  Similarly, a disassembled Slothrop cannot be "normalized" in
Foucault's sense--or, as Pynchon puts it, "it's doubtful if he can ever
be 'found' again, in the conventional sense of 'positively identified
and detained'" (GR 712).  (MF/CC 249)

I suggest therefore that Slothrop's scattering is Pynchon's attempt to
imagine a dismemberment that does not configure itself into a vision of
retrospective totality: dissoultion works here in the by now routine
service of deconstructing supreme fictions of the integrity of the self,
and in the more difficult and problematic service of de-Oedipalizing
desire and narrative.  Of course, this dissolution has its critics, even
within Gravity's Rainbow; as engineer Kurt Mondaugen would have it,
Slothrop has lost "personal density," which, according to Monadugen's
Law, is "directly proportional to temporal bandwith ... the width of
your present, your now" (GR 509).  But then again, as Hite notes,
"Mondaugen is a Niazi colborator, and in exalting temporal bandwidth,
which is really the capacity of containing history, he may be upholding
Their idea of historical totality" ([Ideas of Order in the Novels of
Thomas Pynchon] 1983, 166 n. 18).  (MF/CC 249-50)

Infinite temporal bandwidth thus might look something like a Reich
without end; yet Slothropian dissolution is not the mere assertion of
anarchy over (personal or narrative) order, for a Slothrop who dissolves
into self-difference also dissolves into his manifestations--that is,
into diverse cultural uses, diverse reading effects.  (250)

... the "falsity" of Pynchonian pornographies lies not in their rituals
of dismemberment but in their fetishistic reassemblies, not in their
cutting up of organic (w)holes but in their recomposition of inorganic
wholes that fetishize the very idea of organic wholes.  At the very
least, we should be wary of endorsing teh book's various depictions of
nostalgia, return, "Diasporas running backwards" (GR 737); ideally, we
should also be wary of approaching Gravity's Rainbow as if fragmentation
were a problem to be solved by critical intervention ... (251)


... but speaking of bandwidth, not to mention my aching hands ...
anyway, this is all particularly interesting to me not only in re:
claims made here, elsewhere about Pynchon's alleged affirmation of
Rilkean and/or romanticist transcendence and/or the recuperation of
unity, wholeness (next up, David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality,
Disease and Death in German Romanticism and Idealism), but also in re:
Pynchon's own eminently deconstructable statements in re: lost unity,
wholeness in that Letter to Thomas F. Hirsch (again, cf. Derrida's Of
Grammatology of Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques on the "fall" into/as
teh result of writing among the Nambikwara).  Perhaps Gravity's Rainbow
performs said deconstruction itself ...?

By the way, anyone familiar with Eric Vogelin's Anamnesia?  I'm not, but
it is much referenced by Eddins in The Gnostic Pynchon.  Might it be
relevant to Berube's notion of anamnesia here?  And one might, as some
have, here, argue that Vogelin's characterization, devalorization of
gnosticism is off-base, but I do think Eddins makes a convincing case
for similarities with Pynchon's countergnosticism, perhaps even
Vogelin's influence thereupon ...

Also, anyone familiar with Ihab Hassan's The Dismemberment of Orpheus?
Said orphic dismememberment as a postmodern commonplace.  And, on
de-oedipalization, well, duh, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus, but perhaps also, as I recall, Mike Featherstone, Consumer
Culture and Postmodernism and, for the quick account, er ... well, can't
recall author/title, but it's in Cary Nelson and Lawrence  Grossberg,
eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.  Found the following
whilst searching for said author/title:

.http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/marxism/jbm.fascism.html ...

Let me know ...