No way out for this list

[B/T uttle]

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." (Ickstadt, 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.