Gravity's Rainbow, A book about war?

[Dave Monroe]

... from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Trans.
Chris Lam Markham.  New York: Grove Press, 1967
[1952]):

There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily
sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity
where an authentic upheaval can be born. (8)

And note how Fanon's text begins ... 

The explosion will not happen today.  It is too soon
... or too late. (7; ellipses in text)

Cf. the opening of Gravity's Rainbow ...

   A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened
before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. 
   It is too late.

And, again, from Fanon, perhaps relevant as well ...

Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of
negation.  If it is true that consciousness is a
process of transcendence, we have to see that this
trnscendence is haunted by the problems of love and
understanding. (9)

I hope I may be forgiven for asking that those who
take it on themselves to describe colonialism remember
one thing: that it is utopian to try to ascertian in
what ways one kind of inhuman behavior differs from
another
kind of inhuman behavior.  (87)

Can't recall Fanon's epigraph (from Karl Marx's
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon?), but, in the
end, in the end ...

My final prayer:
O my body, make of me always a man who questions!
(232)

And, on those zones, those declivities, those
upheavals, see as well, more recently, Hakim Bey,
T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological
Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia,
1991)  ...


--- Eric Rosenbloom <ericr at sadlier.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Scott Badger wrote:
> > As I once suggested back in ye olde dayes of MDMD,
it seems to me, also, that Pynchon's interests are
drawn to the space opened up by a war - both as a rent
in the covering fabric, and as a landscape un-fenced. 
To paraphrase Squalidozzi, historical moments of
unlimited hope, and danger (shamelessly lifted from
Graham Benton's article on anarchy and Pynchon in the
OCU Law Review).  The Zone, of course, in GR but
perhaps even more so with the Revolutionary War in MD
and the zone they call America.  That we mark up the,
briefly, blank slate with the same old patterns
doesn't mean we *couldn't* come up with something new.
> 
> I too thought Mason & Dixon in America was similar
in spirit to Slothrop et al. in The Zone . . . a
moment of freedom and possibility for the preterite.
> 
> --Eric R
> 
> 
> 
>
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