lit eco white

[Jane Sweet]

> 
>    6.This kind of degenerative cycle is what Eddins
>      calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, "modes
>      of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of
>      gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the
>      metaphysical force fields of Pynchon's cosmos: the
>      instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the
>      distinction between secular and religious
>      constructs" (23). In other words, Brock and Frenesi
>      and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the
>      logic of ecological runaway, what Joseph Slade
>      Thomas Pynchon 125) has called "excluded
>      middles and bad shit" in reference to the plight of
>      Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49: under the
>      Reagan-Bush version of the Entrepreneurial New
>      World Order, you must either become a pawn of the
>      new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into
>      preterition. And if you want to fight back, you must
>      also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the
>      mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake
>      of power, to switch roles from Oppressed to
>      Oppressor so that the original split in the human
>      ecology escalates in what Bateson called the
>      Romano-Palestinian System.4 This is the koan with
>      which many of Pynchon's worthy characters are
>      presented.
> 
> In other words epistemological and ecological error
>      are identical with the modernist paradigm and its
>      industrial project. The literary-ecological
>      correction of the error in Vineland is arguably an
>      extension of what Eddins calls "Orphic Naturalism"
>      in Gravity's Rainbow: "a counterreligion to the
>      worship of mechanism, power, and--
>      ultimately--death" (5).
> 
> This attribution of "mind" to "man" and
>      materiality to "nature," characteristic of the
>      Cartesian dualism of res cogitans as the human
>      cogito and res extensa as the objective world, and
>      further expressed in the masculine subject of power
>      dominating "mother" nature, as it is in the
>      entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his
>      "real estate," is arguably one of the principal targets
>      of the literary ecological critique. Thus literary
>      ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep
>      ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but
>      approaches them in terms of a postmodern
>      ecological rubric which steps past the traditional
>      either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed, Elite and
>      Preterite, Sacred and Secular, as deftly as Pynchon's
>      Ninjette DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) slips past
>      Brock Vond's guards.
> This is not unlike the feeling which drew the
>      "flower children" back to nature in the 1960's,
>      articulated and sustained in the writings of Edward
>      Abbey and Annie Dillard. Romantic writing was in
>      direct response to the urbanization and
>      mechanization of life effected by the Industrial
>      Revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a
>      response to what Mumford called the Megamachine
>      of modern technology, economy, society and polity
>      which has destroyed and displaced much of the
>      human lifeworld, of "Earth House Hold" in the
>      words of poet Gary Snyder. An incipient ecological
>      sensibility is also evident in the "persistent
>      modernist nostalgia for vanished axiological
>      foundations in the midst of vividly experienced
>      anomie" which Eddins finds in the work of Pynchon
>      and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in
>      ecological dimension, by T.S. Eliot in The Waste
>      Land. Here images of a fouled, poisoned
>      environment merge with those of human spiritual
>      and physical demise--
> 
>                                       Unreal City,
>                           Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
>                        A Crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
>                        I had not thought death had undone so many.
> 
>                         A rat crept softly through the vegetation
>                           Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
>                           While I was fishing in the dull> canal
> 
>                                     The river sweats
>                                     Oil and tar . . .
> 
>      --amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very
>      shards inspire hope of renewal: "These fragments I
>      have shored against my ruins." Additionally, the
>      fusion of human imagination with nature's images, as
>      well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of
>      Magical Realism, for example in Gabriel Garcia
>      Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch, is arguably an
>      important forebear, and Carlos Fuentes' recent
>      Christopher Unborn I might well have included
>      with Mile Zero and Vineland as an example of
>      literary ecology, except for its problematic
>      representation of gender. African literature is also a
>      likely ancestor of the genre, for example Chinua
>      Achebe's Things Fall Apart where the
>      fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of
>      European colonialism is explored, as it is in
>      American literature by Peter Matthiessen, with
>      regard to South American Indians, in another likely
>      progenitor, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Doris
>      Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell presents
>      a profound fusion of the human mind with nature's,
>      as her Golden Notebook reflects on feminist and
>      socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which
>      come together and are uplifted and transformed
>      (Aufhebung) in her Canopus in Argos: Archives,
>      especially Shikasta. Vonnegut's Breakfast of
>      Champions and Galapagos should not be
>      overlooked in the search for LitEcol ancestors and,
>      particularly where Pynchon is concerned, I would
>      look up from these printed artifacts and seriously
>      review the adventures of Tweety and Sylvester
>      Vineland 22).