Sure sign of madness, wasRE: globalization & Pynchon?

[Jane Sweet]

calbert at tiac.net wrote:
> 
> I have little interest in any rhetorical "victory", I'm far more
> concerned to see what I feel is a relevant element of P's
> "cosmology" debated.... and in MY view the search for "agency" is
> clearly a central theme in his novels, and I don't think it would be
> outrageous to suggest that P offers succor to neither character nor
> reader engaged in such an effort.....Where do the searches of
> Hugh Godolphin, Oedipa Maas, Stencil and others arrive? Certainly
> not at any satisfactory resolution.....

That's right. And it's not only that there is NO thing,
nothing to be discovered, learned, won, the quest itself is
the problem. 

Is  globalization the paranoid conspiracy that everything is
connected? 
Is a pro-global capitalist one that says nothing is
connected, it's all a paranoid trip? 
Have we cycled over from everything is connected
("paranoia")to nothing is connected ("anti-paranoia"). 

Remember Tantivy tries to convince Slothrop that
'operational paranoia' can be useful, "especially in
combat...you know PRETEND something like that." 

We have several forms of Paranoia at work. The trick, it
seems, is to find a center or a way to cope with "paranoia"
(the connections), the vast, differentiated, experiences of
war, of "peace", of life's flips and flops, but Pynchon's
characters (with few exceptions, Enzian being one, but he
only gropes and is confused, infected) can't abide such
vicissitude, bandwidth problems, too many personalities of
pretense, "mindless pleasures" that infect them, causing
solipsistic (his)tory. 

They try to escape, to transcend, to Return, to deny,
repress, imbibe, or otherwise
come to terms with paranoid existence and death. Most of
their attempts are some perversion of a religious quest, but
what they are looking for is lost in the Waste and they
stumble about oblivious to this fact, so they are constantly
with keys without locks or locks without keys.  

But there are forces, like the ones that Zoyd wakes up to,
the forces unseen and so on, say the paranoids. But is the
IMF, the World Bank or Free Trade forces unseen? Or is it
something closer to Home? Remember Zoyd gets his ass kicked
in jail--a real threat to his life, his liberty, not to
mention his daughter. Set up like a bowling  pin and knocked
down. Not by free trade or a corporation or profits and
losses, by a cop. Another human person with the power to
fuck with the paranoid pot smoker's head. 
Sure Brock Vond and RayGun are the targets of Satire, like V
and Fopple and Weissmann, not mere satire, corrective
satire, political satire, but Zoyd, like Benny is also the
target, as Slothrop is the target of satire. RayGun and
Brock, like the  colonial powers that treat Indians like
children in M&D, treat Zoyd and the flower children like
kids, but Zoyd acts like one.  

And in GR, we have the same. It's a dance, the paranoid and
the control. It is his ritual as much as Pointy that kills
Pudding. What does P say in that Hirsch letter about who is
to blame for the Herero genocide, the Incas? Same thing,
it's a dance, sorry, but it's a religious dance, an S&M
ritual. 

 I'm getting to that with the Wall, the interface, the other
side-Blicero's Imipolex Grail.  

But, clearly Pointy and Weissmann, remember Pointy wants to
cut Slothrop's skull open,  are able to control others. What
complicates things in GR and VL and M&D and V.,  is that the
daisy chain of victims and victimizers turns in both
directions.  For example, Pudding wants to be victimized, he
wants someone else to Control his pain, his guilt, but he
also wants the Truth. What does Pointsman give him? The
truth or Death. 


While Roger and Pointy attempt to net a dog, Pointy,
ordering the young man about, Roger thinking, "He's (Pointy)
not one's superior after all, both report to the old
Brigadier (Big Shit Brigade) at 'White Visitation' on, so
far as he knows, equal footing." So far as Roger knows, but
Pointy has other plans, he will not indulge the old
bastard:  

"This fighting
everyday, there's more to damned Pudding than
I can SEE, he's always springing his senile little
surprises, he's such a bastard, he never sleeps, he plots."

And Pointy won't take it lying down, no, it's "the position
he's working from" that Pointy can't abide, the "priorities"
of the old man, the chances he can take, the strange
smugness. 

The dance. 



Pointy's Pavlovian "secularism" includes the "the idea of
the opposite." And this belief includes, the difference
between life and death, innocence and guilt, but on page 48,
Pynchon omits these for the time being,  "somewhere on the
cortex of the brain," it distinguishes "pleasure from pain,
light from dark, dominance from submission
." (Pynchon's
ellipsis). 

Pointy needs money, he's not at Cambridge you know, hasn't
got all that research money for an Octopus tank, filter and
food, besides, the octopus is a visual creature and the
ultraparaoxical phase, as it applies to our boy Slothrop and
the Rocket, is auditory. (BTW, Paul, they also serve who
only stand and wait, that's the Octopus). Pointy may need to
branch out, one little Fox, but Old Pudding, or as Pointy
refers to him,
"old delusions of grandeur himself," is in the way, and with
that "damned Rundstedt offensive" chewing up all the cash,
an austerity measure is in place at Supreme Headquarters,
Allied Expeditionary Force's intelligence and propaganda
wing (Political Warfare Executive), Pointy needs to find a 
way to get cash to fund his project, but he can't justify
it. Not that he's concerned with the ethics of his work, no,
he's a Pavlovian Frankenstein with Faustian Hubris,
economically perverted by Utilitarian expediency, a parody
of Shakespeare's Richard III (his dog's name was
Gloucester), "his season of despair," his winter of
discontent (internal references date this episode, December
21, the onset of Winter) well upon him, as the war, "this
State he'd come to feel himself a citizen of," now being
reconstituted as a peace, is about to be adjourned, and
Pointy with nothing to show for it but a few dogs (ARF) and
Dr. Porkyevitch, co-ownership of The Book.  Not much for a
megalomaniac with great personal expectations. ARF is but a
"colony to a metropolitan war."  "A stingy dribble of money,
desperate paper whispering down the corporate lattice,
enough to get by on," even a little support from "Psi
Section, a colony degage and docile, with no secular
aspirations at all, but not enough for Pointy, "not enough
for nationhood." Moreover, Pointy cannot make a convincing
argument that his project will have some practical or
tactical benefit, near term. Therefore, Pointy will either
need to find money from some other bankers or find a way to
get cash from old Pudding, or both. Pointy is the mad
scientist not the British army or Loyds of London. It's men,
men and women, the dance is not with machines, with
corporations and machines  that have taken on life. Life is
not reversible, it is life, the business of life, of the
wind, of the earth and not a corporation, not the bomb, not
a trade agreement to murder and create. 

As I come and go talking of....

Jane