trauma in GR; "one big novel"

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug Millison quoted from the recent Pynchon Notes (#42-43):
Hanjo Berressem's 
> article, "Tristes Traumatiques:  Trauma in the Zone:s."

 In the novel's countless S and M scenarios, pain has
> become a source of sexual arousal; in this acting out, the stroke of
> the letter literally beomces the stroke of the whip. Pain has come to
> function as an erotic currency with Kryptosam and Imipolex the
> synthetic chemical atalysts under whose auspeces this unholy bonding
> takes place."


Read any good welts lately. Reading the whip welts on Great
Erdamn's back, Thanatz....It's a "far side" cartoon. 



Death, death with a capital D, big D, is not "organic" in
GR. It's a cultural product. The Capital D death of GR is
produced, in part, by "death transfigured." It is the
anxiety caused by Death with a Capital D that motivates the
characters in GR to personify Death so that may have some
source for their anxiety, some cause of their fear, some way
of converting death into a fear of Death because fear is
more manageable, it can be identified or at least that's
what some believe. 

Death with a Capital D becomes "the Angel" [164], "lord of
the Night" [49, 139, 413], "lord Death" [215], "Domina
Nocturna [232], "Christian death" [318], "an
arty abstract character with a scythe" [688],  "gnadige Frau
Death" [625], "mistress Death" [750], "JAMF" [S's story,
Erost Thanatos drive repressed and negated--to help him deny
what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love,
in sexual love, with his, and his race's death" [738]. The
alternatives in GR, well, submit to the death wish [can't
list them all and get into it--S&M, but we have done this
discussion] or challenge it with abdurate narcissism.

Morality & that Irish Law


What about those Puritan sermons denounced as 'the glozing
neuters of the world", the narrator says they "are just as
human as heroes and villains and suggests that in many ways
they have the most grief to put up. Yes, this is a narrator
and yes it is only his rhetorical question followed of
course by a song celebrating half-commitments, a jibe, not
unlike the one I leveled on the fictitious relativist's of
the P-list for vacillating and refusing to take a stand.
Taking a stand in life as in GR can be problematical. What
are you standing for? Who? What? M asked D or D asked M,
"Who are we working for?"  Do we have the information
necessary, the data, the perspectives, are we willing to
accept a Pluralism that accords respect to "relative truth?"
Can we do without cause and effect? In GR dogmas erect the
machineries  of isolation and murder. And it's not that we
are characters in this novel but it is not only the
characters that need to make moral choices here. The reader,
too, is implicated by narrative event, through the
narrator's statements directed at the reader,  and by the
nature of the theatre. 

Remember, the reader is cast by the narrator as belonging to
the cause- and-effect school and to certain extent, as rj
has explained, so eloquently, many times, assumes
responsibility for the creative process with the
narrator.The reader is subtly drawn into the Orpheus
Theatre. If we turn back, way back in this GRGR, we get a
hint-- von Gall's audience as a "nation of starers." What of
the surreal adventures of the Floundering Four? The Freudain
stuff, Fowler, but more important here, they  are watched by
spectators. "hundreds of thousands of them, sitting around
this dingy yellow amphitheater, seat after seat plunging
down in rows and tiers endless miles the monumental yellow
structure, out there in the slum-suburban night, the never
sleeping percolation of life and enterprise through its
shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too
fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have
much hegemony anymore."

Remember in CL Oedipa has to decide whether or not she is
experiencing the existence of a real Tristero, such a
distinction still being Possible in her world where Inside
and Outside are still distinct. That distinction hardly
exists in the theatre, where the audience is a group of
people divided by individual concentration on spectacle,
enthralled. [Rilke's performers are real important here] The
divisiveness of the theatre parallels the divisiveness of
"paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire,
will expedite such barriers between our lives." Because it
wants a machine of  many separate parts, not a oneness, but
complexity."  This is the theatre that the reader is
suddenly seated in, under the rocket poised at its last
delta-t. Unlike the ending of  CL it is quite certain what
the inevitable ending will be. The abstraction of delta-t, a
way to deal with Zeno's paradox of motion, confronts in the
theater the conscious life of the mind pushed to choose a
last action in a crisis of decision almost out of time. The
"angel of death" in its silence will shatter the image of
the film and be followed by a screaming like the one which
begins the book, a subtle and ironic return.

In the book, the options for escape from imminent
destruction have lessened to near zero. The analytical
assurances that nothing can go wrong are tempered by the
certainty that something , according to Murphy's Law, "that
brash Irish proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem." The
inevitability which waits beyond the last delta-t affects
characters, reader, and narrator simultaneously; there can
be no reportage past the moment of the last exhortation, for
the narrator who consciously shapes the narrative is also
affected by the action. 

Theater/Theatre, English spelling got Mad confusion.