more Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1446

[No More Diamonds in the Roughage]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> 
> > Millions? Have there been as many as that? How come I have still,
> > *still*, only ever met one single female human being who has ever
> > finished GR outside of an academic context? (And she's a peach, let me
> > tell you...) I think that P's sales are consistent because of folks
> > like you and me who buy copy after copy and give them away to people we
> > hope will read them but don't.  And in the context of a wild-ass
> > fiction like GR people don't so much "learn...ugly truths" as toy with
> > the possibilities -- tingle with joy at the very idea of our cozy
> > corporate "evil" loose in the world and rubbing shoulders with the real
> > article -- indeed, we are "dizzy with it's grandeur".
> 
> I like the way Mark puts it. Wild-assed fiction can open the
> minds of youth to the existence of "ugly truths" (or beaultiful ones)
> but youth would be ill-advised to take fictional reality, even if informed
> by or inspired by actual reality, to be the truth itself.  Not to put too
> much hope in ever finding the "truth"  but it seems to me a person who, to
> an excessive degree, filters what he hears or reads on a topic through his
> necessarily individual interpretation of a work of fiction is asking for
> trouble.
> 
>                         P.

Well said Paul, the ugly the beautiful and the Modern: 


There is wonderful scene, I'm feeling too lazy, to busy 
to look it up now, try GR.417 or there abouts, where Franz
sees Weissmann as
not so diabolical, but as the papered over bureaucrat of the
Nazi rocket project. The harassed civil servant with a paper
clip ear piece. The half of Weissmann that is clearly human,
not a villain, not a devil, just a prick. The narrator in
these scene, as elsewhere, calls for the reader's evaluation
and
judgment of Weissmann and Pokler and the positions
represented, the history, he calls for us to judge, thus
implicating US in the act of judging. The narrator also asks
another character, again too lazy to find it now,  "are you
going to judge this man?"  We judge, they judge,  and then
we discover that it was just a dream, a nightmare, just a
story, a history. 

But is it this or that? What do you want it to be? What do
YOU want Weissmann/Blicero to be? But it is as Enzian says
to Katje, the wrong story and the wrong question. But here,
on P-L, the Both/And reading is not permitted and so the
list has NO WAY OUT! 


What confuses Slothrop as he faces his, finally, losing
battle to discover how he is being controlled operates on
the reader and here as well. Fortunately, like Slothrop we
have our
hands on the clutch (again the page # in GR?), we can
disengage the mechanism he can't or won't.  As I have with
Terrance and Jane and the rest,  we lose our cyber disguises
and like Silk in Roth's book, we can grope towards
self-discovery.  
Slothrop's career is marked by role playing that gives way
to final disintegration. But Slothrop is the focus of
conspiracy. And he is an imperative in the "War." The
"War",  which is the clearest enactment and expression of
what is real in GR--that now famous bombed outness that is
"Reality" in GR, and The System, the Firm, Them, They that
seem to control it but don't. There is no doubt of Their
existence as there is doubt about the existence of The 
Tristero in CL, but who are THEY? Have they a name? Are They 
the complex of industry and governments?  Are They some evil
Empire? Some historical wrong that needs to b righted by
beautiful Art? Is that what TRP's Aesthetics allow for? 
Is GR a morality play? A Pynchon's Progress, A Revenge
Fiction? What does M&D "tell" us about "History? in GR? 

All the action in GR transpires beneath the Rocket's
parabola (the central metaphor), the structure of
containment in the book which becomes the proscenium of the
Orpheus Theatre, where the scenes and acts are ordered
according to "the present dispensation." The novel, the
story demands choices by characters. They are fictional
characters questing, they are on a fictional journey. The
old journey to knowledge we might say. But for the
Postmodernist/Modern protagonist of TRP's fiction at least, 
the Quest, the Journey to knowledge, to self-discovery, does
not offer the reward of a propitious return, a home-coming
and the reestablishment of harmony made possible through
action inspired by knowledge acquired on the journey. The
Prodigal Son can never go home again. He's not Wise or
tested and hardened or a MAN now, and you know all that, go
home quest rites and ritual archetypal, Sorry I mixed it up,
Jungian or Campbell stuff, use your own terms and names
dropped here, but it's religion/myth and feel free to  put
it in quotes if it's easier on your knowledge of these or
your politics or whatever).  The reader, while he/she is not
a character can never go home again either. A biblical and
Rilkean reference. Surprized?? What's keeping Slothrop from
returning Home? What if Odysseus never got Home? Or What if
Joyce died at age 25? Moral certainty has become difficult,
the Quest has been a secular one and  in a world bereft of
any deity, any god that we may be a Job to or a decedent of
Job to, a Moses to our people negotiating with a terrible
god,  a Prodigal Son to the Father (maybe that's why you
can't find a women that has read this book?), a Prometheus,
a singer of the song of King Lud, a culture that may rebel
against the machine, the V and not seek Death and
annihilation of US.  What ever we think of gods and
goddesses, of Christianity, of
Plato,  of Jesus, of the Pope, all is changed, changed
utterly and Personally I believe
that some beasts have been born in Bethlehem, the Bomb for
one, but a terrible beauty has been born as well. Yeats was
the perfect choice for Achebe's Modern Masterwork.  And he
right to consider HoD. As are we.  Marlow notes the
necessity for "a deliberate belief." It is Marlow's ability
to maintain a deliberate belief that allows him to face and
comprehend the meaning of his African experience. Although
his journey follows the classic, mythic cycle of departure,
initiation, and return, his vision is darkened by Irony (oh
that IRONY!) for the world he perceives and acts in has been
unremittingly brutalized by human abstraction and avarice. 
It is a world where "rootless idealism"  gives way to
brutality because of abstraction and where a deliberately
espoused morality opts for studied cynicism. Marlow's
accomplishment, the ability to maintain  self-control, is
more difficult for Pynchon's characters and more difficult
for US as well. Though Profane, Stencil, Oedipa and
Slothrop, among others,
make journeys and quests and manage to cover a great deal of
territory--inside and outside, the rules they might have put
Faith in have changed. It's as if gods caused men to stand
erect and then to fall and the loss of myth has reset way of
departure (Dorothy I have a feeling we are not in the Modern
world anymore), initiation, and return are no longer quite
distinct. Campbell or one of those guys, again. Moreover,
the boon, the knowledge to be sought after, the home to
return to, becomes
hazier and more questionable the more closely the characters
approach the knowledge they think they are seeking.
Characters are forced or conned into adventure rather than
called to it. There is no choice. 

Fausto Maijstral sums up the predicament faced by all the
characters in the novels
and by US too:  

The street of the 20th century, at whose far end or
turning--we hope-- is some sense of home or safety. But no
guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for
reasons best known to the agents who put us here. If there
are agents. But a
street we must walk.

If, Imagine If Dick Volkswagen's license plate was 25 IF. 

Mr. Joyce He Dead.