Sure sign of madness, wasRE: globalization & Pynchon?

[Jane Sweet O' Flaherty]

> Wha. . .  Pokler is no victim. Pokler is the victimizer who
> participates completely in his own duping.



Richard, Terrance either had a dream that he was going to a 
Beckett Festival or he read about the Festival in a foreign
newspaper, maybe even the Times London and thought it was
the Times NY, or he is just torturing himself for my
amusement, or the Voice and all the papers and publications
are conspiring to make Terrance sane or I don't know what,
but is there such a festival planned for NYC in the near
future? 

Jane with straight jacket and not the patience of Job. 


Pokler is captivated by Alpdrucken and female sexual
submission, so it's difficult to read him as victim, but not
as Hard to feel for him as for Marvy, especially if you
happen to be a Modern profane feminist girls like me with
all parts in working order. 

Where us cfa today, I'm serious about having a baby and my
clock is ticking. 

Pokler, however, undergoes a change of view through the loss
of his wife and, more importantly, through his relationship
with Ilse  and a growing awareness that finally culminates
in his understanding that Blicero, has been saving and using
him. Yet this does not make Pokler immune to Zeitgeist
influences. Pokler experiences a Nazistic vision, in his
deeper excursions into the Mare Nocturnum. 

"He found delight not unlike a razor sweeping his skin and
nerves, scalp to soles, in ritual submission to the Master
of this night space and of himself, the male embodiment of a
technologique that embraced power not for its social uses
but for just those chances of surrender, personal and dark
surrender, to the Void, to delicious and
screaming collapse. ..." 

All are victims and victimizers, except Blicero. 

Slothrop wants to beat the women, it's deep in his mind and
soul and he wants to be a victim. All the characters, even
the dodo, the dogs, want it. They want to be beaten and 
abused, sodomized and raped. 


Pokler envisions himself as associated with elements of
technology characterized as masculine and superior which
provide an opportunity for the submission to the romance of
extinction.

To Blicero: 

As the characters begin to separate from Blicero's camp
(Enzian, Pokler, Katje), they also drift away from his views
concerning sexual symbolism, S&M. 

In Pynchon  there is a drive within his characters  As a
writer he wants
to expand the reader's point of view. He writes an
encyclopedic satire elaborately designed but he subverts his
own design. There is a sustained tension in Pynchon's texts.
We might call it the "PoMo-Mo Agon." Modernist conventions
and subversive Postmodernist techniques coexist without
invalidating each other so that if the subversive PoMO
really subverts, in the end it subverts the law of
contradiction. 

One of the important elements of Menippean
Satire is Carnival. One function of the Carnival in GR is to
cast-off what is according to Pynchon, a natural disposition
of the Modern Western Mind, that "A is B and A is not B
cannot both be true."  According to Pynchon, the drive to
establish systems at the expense of the other(s) or
differentiation, on the social level, and we can say, on the
aesthetic level, leads to repressive technocratic society
and an art that is only one tool of the repressive system. 

The "Counterforce and the "System" also exist in conflict
and nearly every relationship and every environment in GR
obeys an S&M pattern. 

 "We define each other." 

Even the narrators play parts in the S&M drama, both with an
imagined
reader (see naratee and the 2nd person McHale stuff), the
characters, each other, the author, and the reader.
Sometimes they are dominant and sometimes they play victim
to the naratee or another narrator or character, or even
their own stories. 

 Some of the narrators work for Them,
are henchmen or masters in the "system" and they will quite
frequently address an imagined reader, mislead him/her (I
think
he is male?) or tell him lies or tell tall tales, or tell
ridiculous paranoid parodies, or give bad advise, or insult,
or mock the reader's "bookish" reflexes and natural
proclivity for patterns and systems and, well,  "cause and
effect." Diversity is reduced to Binarity. 

"Ideas of the opposite"...pleasure from pain, light from
dark,
dominance from submission...life from death and guilt from
innocence. 

Also, in GR: 

We also have, in addition to the "YOU" that is addressed in
GR, the "WE" that is addressed. This "We-Address" often
makes the naratee and the narrators accomplices or
supporters of the Masters or Henchmen or System or a
defender of  character that has been a victim at some point
but is now a victimizer.

This is not the reader trap as it has been called. It is
Shakespeare's most powerful 
technique, the role of the audience,  and Melville's as
well. 


There is in P's fiction a desire to unite victim and
victimizer, it is the perversion of the Quest, the quest for
transcendental salvation, but the Sado-Masochistic
act betrays the promise of escape and is only a vain, blind,
power ritual, that perpetuates the infection of the System,
the System that perverts with its papered over definition of
the nature of synthesis and control and more importantly,
with its own definition of the nature of freedom. 

The struggle between the victim and the victimizer does not
involve synthesis in the religious sense, which is what is
desired and needed for escape.  It involves only a
complementary struggle, in which the participants do not
truly become one, but rather simply define each other to
serve their own solipsistic perversions of the "religious"
dialectic (note: Pynchon's use of the term dialectic and
dialectical is negative, but here I use it in the
affirmative Platonic or Neoplatonic/christian sense). P uses
this term in the affirmative only once in GR. The Jesuit!
The Devil's Advocate!  

It is telling, that Pynchon assumes we have read Mondaugen's
story--"destroyer and the destroyed and
the act that united them" and "the long daisy chain of
victimizers and victims, screwers and screwees." The
breakdown, of unity, of relationships,  Pynchon  tells us,
began "40 years ago" with the rise of Nazism.  What is also
important here,
is the Oedipal forfeiture, the estrangement from the primal
relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and
children, etc. and the politicization of the personal (how
do YOU like that postmodernism) and private
relationships--"fucking is done on paper," on film, and They
know all about it, conditioned pornography. 

Where is the loving sexual relationship in P's fiction? 
Roger
and Jessica? No modern Romeo and Juliet, right? A Hollywood
cute meet set up as an ironic Love/Death Romance. 



 The characters seek to unite not with each other, but with
some absolute. The
problem is that each is trapped in a solipsistic quest. The
characters in GR, as the narrator tells us, can not know
each other. This false or futile synthesis takes many forms
is GR, for examples see GR.88 "The act of injuring..." 


"The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings
and deeper connections...This implies they were thinking
target all along." 

                                        Delillo, Underworld