trauma in GR; "one big novel"

[Doug Millison]

Slowly working my way through the recent Pynchon Notes (#42-43).  It 
hardly needs any recommendation, much less mine, but I wanted to 
mention that I've enjoyed reading Hanjo Berressem's wonderful 
article, "Tristes Traumatiques:  Trauma in the Zone:s."

  He spends some time and effort coming to grips with the notion that 
"as _Gravity's Rainbow_ reminds us -- and this is part of why it 
didn't get the Pulitzer Prize -- in our society the psychosexual 
pathologies resulting from trauma have been eroticized, so that we 
have learned -- or have we been conditioned? -- to be in love with 
our own death. 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."

On another note, having spent considerable time and effort of my own 
in tracing out connections between Pynchon's novels, pointing out 
those connections here on Pynchon-L, and arguing here on Pynchon-L 
for the notion that you can read Pynchon's ouevre as one big novel 
(in part because it seems he was working on many of his novels 
simultaneously), I have also been pleased to see this notion taken 
seriously by a critic of Berressem's stature:

"If one can believe his letters -- I'm being frightfully logocentric 
here, but then, sometimes curiosity kills deconstruction -- it seems 
that Pynchon was already at work on _Mason & Dixon_ in 1975 (Gussow 
E8). With this in mind, it is of course tempting to read the novels 
as (maybe even hypertextually) linked. In fact, nowadays (if one is a 
faithful lurker on pynchon-l, as I am, one knows this) -- and I think 
it is a good thing -- in the treatment of the novels, chronological 
linearity and with it the concept of development are being discarded 
for complex topological mappings, structural superimpositions of 
texts that create (because they are now written at the same time) a 
field of many -- maybe up to a thousand -- plateaus, intersecting at 
many times and places, creating _points de capiton_ and transfers." 
Berressem goes in  a couple of paragraphs to note a few of the most 
prominent of these interconnections. It's a great article, and I'm 
glad he took the time and made the effort to write it.

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