White Rockets and Whales

[Phat Boyz & Black Pips]

Thank you Thomas and Thank you Mr. Perez. Again, thank you
Dave Monroe and Eric. 

Moby-Dick, all of Melville it seems,  continues to Influence
Pynchon after V. 

Hollander is a strong poet, his "misreading" is very
valuable. If he discounted 
Varo to emphasize Varro, I doubt that it had anything to do
with some troubling bias. 

I've posted much too much on Genre. It's helpful to some I
hope. 

In his characterization of the Encyclopedic narrative,
Mendelson links Gravity's Rainbow and Moby-Dick generically.

The Fatboy agrees with Hollander and other MS readings. 
I think, like Melville's Confidence-Man, critical arguments
about genre
do not box the text in so much as open all the boxes. 

 But Mendelson says that both M-D and GR belong to a genre
that has only
recently been identified and that although  "demonstrably
the most important single genre in Western literature of the
Renaissance and after" includes "only a few books in the
Western tradition." Among them are Dante's Commedia,
Rabelais's five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel,
Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust and Joyce's Ulysses. 

In the  archives, I traced this genre argument from
Hollander and Frye, 
Mendelson, Braha and Bakhtin, Kharpertian, 
to Weisenburger's book Fables Of Subversion. 

M-D and GR

Andrzej Kopcewicz finds striking structural similarities in
these two novels and he notes some affinities in the
function of their central metaphor, the use of color
symbolism, a teleologically presented reality, baroque
language, the admixture  of fact and fantasy, the usage of
myth, magic and ritual, the Yankee humor as well as the
method of linking images into one integral, autotelic whole. 

Richard Locke points to the same appetite for technological
data, the deliberate bookishness, the dense exalted prose,
and characters' obsessive quests.

Both novels, he claims, are "a voyage into space, time and
human consciousness, "an exploration of the Faustian
impulses that drive men's souls."  
In Blicero and Pointsman he sees two Ahab figures and in
Roger Mexico and Slothrop, Ishmael. 



A catalogue of such similarities would also have to
include the common concern for Man's ruinous exploitation of
nature,
for existential questions of life and death, good and evil,
as
well as the foregrounding of analogous epistemological and
ontological problems such as whether the phenomenal world is
merely a
"doubloon" reflecting the most diverse narcissistic
projections, a Gnostic "pasteboard" mask behind which hides
an archon or a 
mysterious processual reality. Also significant is the
pitting of a cyclic vision
of the universe against an entropic one. If M-D can be said
to celebrate the cyclical world view of Ishmael, in GR
presents cyclism is associated with "white consternation."
Ahab's entropism, or at least the subversive pleasures and
relief afforded by randomness and chaos, anarchy, even as
these may be locked in a paradoxical agon or even  trapped
or enclosed in a closed system, is celebrated in GR. We
remember, however,  that the cyclism of M-D is regenerative.
A vitalism, by which I mean, a  doctrine that life processes
arise from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and
cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical
phenomena, functions in M-D and that this vitalism is
infinite and non-terminal, whereas in GR we find the cyclism
is characterized, as is the novel, as a non-vital, terminal,
closure, determinism, rationalization, control, order,
synthesis, dialectic, apocalyptic teleology.  


The most obvious and by far the most important intertextual
link, however, is found in
the central metaphors of these two novels--the white whale
and the white rocket.

Eric, as you probably know, Gershom Scholem's Major Trends
In Jewish Mysticism is an important P source here. Again,
episode 18 of Beyond the Zero is worth digging into (I think
it's a critical episode in terms of how and why P is
deliberately, agreeing with Dave Monroe here, corrupting the
great traditions and the "minor" influences, mixing and
bending and distorting these not only as allusions but
thematically-Palm Sunday and the breaking of the vessels--
and then Scholem and then W's Tarot. On page 214 of
Scholem's book is a diagram of the ten Sefiroth. How the
Rocket penetrates the spheres of divine manifestation of god
is worth considering.