No way out for this list

[Paul Mackin]

No one can blame Terrance for "rubbing it in" a little on the homophobia
and bigotry business. I made my own little attempt to cast out such
irrelevancies from the discussion but perhaps not very effectively. Anyway
I wanted at this point to ask the question: So what if there is no way
out? From repression, from identification with the repressor, from
whatever else plagues our mortal existences. Writers like Brown always
make a noble effort at the end of their analyses to point the way
forward, or the way back, to a more utopian state of affairs. But who has
any real faith in such possibilities? 

My only point in picking up on this is the bearing it has on the
present dissatisfactions people are expressing with the p-list. In truth
the p-list is merely a tiny microcosm of the human condition. Discussions  
of this type never have been and never will be what we might like them to
be--profound, selfless, inspiring, noble. There are simply too many
facts of human nature always getting in the way. So why not accept
it? Accept that there is "no way out for this list" any more than there is
a way out for poor fallen corrupt human nature. It was always thus, and
thus it will always be. So why fight it and why be overly sad about
it, I say. Rather I suggest we just all sit back and try to enjoy what 
pleasure can be derived from our interchanges--derive what we can from
our basically hopeless situation.

			P.

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, B/T uttle wrote:

> 
> 
> Otto Sell wrote:
> > 
> > So I can give no page numbers from the essays but all three include major
> > text passages from the novel explaining the "Death-trip" mankind is on.
> > According to Wolfley Pynchon believes (with Brown) that a change in society
> > is impossible because the slaves *love* their chains: "(...) wäre es anders,
> > hätte unsere Welt ein anderes Gesicht." (I ckstadt, p. 205). Pynchon
> > exemplifies this with Puritanism, not Marxism.
> 
> You mean to say that the 175s experience their "liberation"
> as banishment not because they are homosexuals but because
> they love their chains? So why were we discussing homophobia
> and the like? Oh right, this is the Pynchon list, where you
> must defend not what you say about a novel but your person,
> your snipped up bigotry and homophobia and all those other
> nasty crimes
> against humanity that WE are guilty of. 
> 
> I don't have Wolfey's essay in front of me now, but I know
> it well. The claim that Brown believes that change is
> impossible is not quite correct.   I think I mentioned that
> Part Six of Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death or "The Way
> Out" is a very valuable chapter, you might say, required
> reading for GR. Brown calls for the Utopian Speculations of
> the sort he quotes from Henry Miller's Sunday After the War. 
> 
> >From one of Jane's posts
> 
> 
> Brown twists Freud out of conflict,  we should not do the
> same with TRP. Why? Well, if we read Brown's views of
> secular humanism (following Plato and Descartes off the
> cliff) we recognize that TRP's agrees with Brown on the one
> hand,  but what of  the alternative Brown suggests-his way
> out and so forth? This  alternative --the Romantics and
> heretical mystics, sages of all ages, is the target of TRP's
> harshest satires. Sorry this is so jumbled, just  my
> opinion, but as I read Brown's brilliant loosening of
> Freud's knots, as he unravels Freud's Narcissus with
> Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Blake, Spinoza, and so forth, I
> can't help
> but feel that TRP knotted them back up. TRP, much as he may
> have experienced some fraternal feelings towards Brown,
> remained, at least when Gravity's R was written, locked in a
> struggle with the Father--Freud. 
> 
> Again, this time it was Terrance, we supported our posts
> with critics and Brown and tried to get the discussion back
> on track, but we  told to deal with our racism and
> homophobia. Pynchon, it was clear was talking to us (this
> time Jody and I got white
> washed and feathered), that is the
> homophobic/racist/american white boys. Why some insisted on
> emphasizing the white man's sin, an important theme no
> doubt, is a question  I won't answer but why some  also
> insisted that list members were bigots, racists, homophobic
> american Marvys, well, that we should not be silent about.  
> 
> Terrance replied to this  slander: 
> 
> On page 207 of his Companion Weisenburger says that Wolfey
> has demonstrated that Brown's Life Against Death is present
> throughout GR. See Wolfey, Lawrence. "Repressions Rainbow:
> The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel."
> 1978, In Pearce 99-123
> 
> Several critics have confirmed Wolfey's claim. I would go so
> far as to say (as I have suggested in my posts on the
> "strange case" of Mr. Rilke, Mr. Swift, and Mr. Blake) that
> Brown's (compare Brown's Bibliography with Pynchon's known
> sources) reading of Part IV of Swift's GT may be the most
> important work for understanding Part IV of GR. Moreover,
> Brown's explanation for why and how Swift's critics
> "misread"  Part IV of GT applies to "misreadings" of, or
> claims that, Part IV of GR cannot be read. 
> 
> This is the passage from the text: 
> 
> 
>    ... Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of.
> Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty
> character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse
> itself inside the whiteman's warm and  private own
> *asshole*, which is getting
> pretty intimate. That's what that white toilet's for. You
> see many
> brown toilets? Nope, toilet's the color of gravestones,
> classical
> columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain's the very
> emblem of
> Odorless and Official Daeth. Shinola shoeshine polish 
> happens to be the color of
> Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm's in the toilet slappin' on the
> Shinola, working
> Off whiteman's penance on his sin of  being born the color
> of
> Shit'n'Shinola. ... (688)
> 
> Terrance wrote: 
> 
> Red Malcolm (a parody of Malcolm X, when he had a  "slave"
> shining shoes at the Roseland State Ballroom) tries to
> sodomize Slothrop (GR.64). 
> 
> Now one of the  most disruptive tactics here. Look in
> the archives, well, who  jumped on my use of the word slave?
> The
> word is in quotes, it is taken from the text, but some 
> insisted that the use of the word, even in quotes, even
> though the word is taken from the text and means JOB, was
> further proof of our bigotry. They did the same thing with
> the
> word banishment. That's how he destroyed what would have
> been a very productive discussion. One has to wonder why. 
> 
> Terrance said, 
> 
> Sodomy is an important theme and metaphor in GR. Whappo is
> sodimized by  Crutchfield and of
> course the screaming when Blicero sodomizes Gottfried in
> order to break out and leave the cycle of infection and
> death is an orgasmic screaming that opens and closes the
> novel-the sado-masochistic coming together in death.  The
> victim and the oppressor define each other, the guilt and
> innocence of both is debunked by Pynchon and the
> behavior, "the long daisy chain of victims and victimizers"
> or the
> unity of "destroyer and destroyed" (V.) is founded on  the
> fundamentally antagonistic aspects of the human psyche. So
> the black/white binaries are not only useless in life, they
> are useless when reading GR.  In my opinion, Jody's  reading
> is confirmed by the novel.
> 
> 
> 
> Now it seems, they want to know Who are THEY? An important
> question,
> but do they really care or do they only want to jump start
> another argument with that Hollander's reading again? 
> 
> Remember back in July when I posted "Re: THEY 1-10?"  Oh,
> that's right I only posted 1-3 of 1-10 on this subject. Or
> maybe after I offended someone with my lectures I changed
> the Re: to L., see for example,  L.4 in July 00. At which
> point, after receiving an honoree doctorate, (see Dave
> Monroe you are not the only professor around here)the
> discussion took a plunge into the sewer with the discussion
> of Eminem and Race, then
> ostensibly Shit&Shinola and shit and more shit and
> Shhhhhhhhhhhh, but it only got louder and louder. How we
> plunged into the sewer each time the discussion seemed to be
> progressing towards a productive dialogue can be discovered
> by anyone willing to read the July postings. Why anyone
> should care if I post under 20 or even fifty names is
> revealing. I have posted under lots of names here and so I
> know what's in a name.  I have received e-mails off list by
> list members that were to careless 
> to realize I was playing at their game. It's no wonder some
> very excellent members have left and felt they had to voice
> their outrage at the way they were harassed here. 
> 
> 
> It has been altogether obvious to the participants here
> that the chief antagonists (also posting under various
> aliases) in this protracted war of words will give no
> quarter and that anyone foolish enough to attempt to improve
> the 
> discussion with textual support or stupid enough to suggest
> that surely some decencies ought to be observed even on this
> crazy list-serve or bold enough to attempt to respond to
> either extreme would end up sloshing about where angels with
> hip boots and pitchforks fear to tread. Even the pure
> entertainment value ("it's better than TV") was undermined
> by the tedious and often infantile wrestling in the mud.
> 
> "Terrance" & CO. and yes we can edit our posts but I chose
> not too. Ha!
> 
> In "The Way Out", Brown says of Freud, "Freud is trapped
> because he is not sufficiently 'dialectical.'" 
> 
> Brown would, I think, say the same of Pynchon. Pynchon's
> satire of Part Six of Brown's Life Against Death confirms
> this, imho.
> 
> "We're all in it together kid."
> 
>                 ---B/T uttle, Brazil
> PS jbor is not the problem, well, not exactly.
>