IG Farben & the French Shakespeare?

[Lear's Fool]

MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In the context of thise strings, it is worth noting that Pynchon most often
> doesn't specifically name names, despite claims to the contrary.  Usually
> there are allusions to various companies that may reward reader legwork, but
> actual connections aren't spelled out in the novel nor are specific
> allegations made.

He does name names. But why? The actual connections are also
there, but what does it mean that Pynchon names I G Farben
or Jay Gould & Jim Fisk, J.P. Morgan, Richard Nixon,
Rathenau, Dulles, JFK, Malcolm X? And what does it mean 
that he connects I G Farben to the U.S. Military Industrial
Complex, that screaming ICBM is come to America. 

And VL, as Doug notes, turns to the American war on drugs
and the very real connection that the text, not some
paranoid view of the text, but the author, and we can
identify the authorial voices in VL much easier than in GR,
makes.  Are there allegations being made? What allegations? 
We have to locate the narrative norm to make the connections
and determine what if any allegations, assertions are being
made. P has done the leg work. We know he has been
interested in Lefty politics from the very start and that he
does in fact make the connections that Doug points out, the
connection in and out of the text--Reagan and Hollywood and
war on drugs and Vietnam-- can't be brushed aside as so much
paranoid reading on the part of a particular reader or way
of reading. Take Malcolm X, isn't his presence, his
characterization in GR in part an assertion, a statement,
perhaps even something didactic (Dickensian even)? Race
relations in America is a theme in all of P's fiction. P
does not simply create Marvy for our amusement does he? 
Locating the narrative norm is important here. Otherwise you
can pull out any line or string selected lines of that big
fat encyclopedic text or pull them out from the bigger
fatter text that is often said to be one text,  that text
that certainly has been shown to have  the elements so
essential to Menippean Satire and Encyclopedic narrative in
its pardoic form, one being the overwhelming of the reader's
bookishness, another being the cataloguing of false opinions
and distorted and paranoid (by paranoid here I am referring
to P's most generalized use of the idea, humanities drive to
make sense of the world)  views of the world and history.
The BBH Bush book is the kind of stuff P makes fun of in his
book, but that doesn't mean he doesn't share some of the
concerns raised by that book or some of it's political and
or historical views.  

> 
> Re IG Farben, specifically--as to its history, GR's references are almost
> entirely cribbed. GR is correct exactly to the extent that its (in most
> instances) single source is correct, incorrect in the same degree.

I disagree, while you are correct, it's P's source and he
cribs, not only from Sasuly but from a lot of texts. He
mentions this in the SL Intro. Literary thief, that's our
man, but again I will use Wagner as my example, just because
I like it: 

"Wagner had indeed made liberal use of the poet's privilege
to deal with history in his own way for his own purposes. He
substituted the Tannhauser who was the lover of Venus for
Heinrich von Ofterdingen as the central figure in the
Wartburg Contest of Song, though by way of compensation to
the latter he gave his Tannahuser the Christian name of
Heinrich. He flouted history by making HIS Tannhauser one of
the singers at the court of Landgrave Hermann in 1207 or
thereabouts, when the real Tannhauser would have been only a
tiny boy." WO.59

THE WAGNER OPERAS, ERNEST NEWMAN, PRINCETON 1991, Knopf
1949.

Wagner was a thief, and he flouted history, so Pynchon, but
like all the great literary thiefs, Shakespeare, Melville,
two more examples I like, P makes was he takes his own. And
so we will not discover what use P makes of Tannhahuser or
Wagner or Frazer, or Graves, or Brown or Freud, or I Ching
or Sasuly, simply by discovering his sources and comparing
texts. Sure we can see where he ripped the pages and pasted
them right into his MS. We can find this in Melville
(Moby-Dick) and Poe (we noted Pym and other stories) and the
list is endless. But list members of a certain age and
generation, Dave Monroe (?)  and Doug, others,  having read
GR, I think, back when it was published, have a very
important contribution to make here, and we cannot, we must
not, discount that reading by stating that GR is fiction and
the reader brings this to the text and not the other way
round. That's a critical stance and it's been very popular,
but it's reading of P is but one reading or school.  You
read GR after having read the novels and poetry and
biography (Malcolm X is also ripped off, sure there is a big
difference when P is in parodic narrative and when he is
providing more technical and historical "information," but
these two modes are not so distinct) of the day, in the mood
of the day, the politics of the day, and you have something
that is very valuable. Sure, we need to go back to the text,
the characters of the text as Robert and Paul M. often
remind us, and we should not, imho, bring P's art down to
the political wrangle that includes the bashing of the Bush
family or other projects like it.  


> 
> Nor can Pynchon lay claim to any specific or extraordinary insight or opinion
> into the Holocaust.  Happily, desepite what might be inferred from what has
> been said on this list, he offers none.

I agree. 



> 
> GR is fiction and, given the extent to which it succeeds as such, one can, I
> think, safely assume P's goals in writing it were primarily esthetic, not
> historical or pedagogic.

Yes, it seems to safe to say this was his primary goal, but
his primary goal does not 
preclude these others. The two are in fact not incompatible,
but two sides of the same text. 

> 
> Much of what is being said on this string as to what P means or teaches are
> inferences drawn from the novel by its readers.  They have the worth of
> reader opinion, no more.  Mileage will certainly vary.

That may be true, but that doesn't mean that there are not
lessons there that P is responsible for. And I'm not talking
about the lesson about fiction itself or reading or the
critics lesson about fictionality. 


> 
> If there are lessons properly to be learned from GR, they are literary ones.
> Reading it as history is a fool's game.

Yes, a fool's game, but there more in P than a postmodernist
instruction on the reading process. What about Love and
Death and Technology? 



From: Lycidas@[omitted] 
Subject: Re: Pornography 
To: unlisted-recipients:; (no To-header on input) 
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 10:15:26 -0600 



Freud and his Psychoanalytic theories and concepts,
including,  Sex, aggression, and self-preservation, fathers
and mother, stages of sexual development, are all twisted
into Pynchon's encyclopedic orgy here. Pynchon does not
simply apply Sigmund Freud or Carl Gustav Jung or J.P.
Sartre, or Herbert Marcuse or Norman O. Brown. Pynchon
combines  theories and concepts, biography, history,
politics, science and technology myths, allusions, comedy
and tragedy, to satirize the state of the West and admonish
the Americans in particular. Pynchon is no moral relativist
spinning webs of complexity to delight and not instruct. .
Is there something didactic, instructive, here? Well, some
say Pynchon is instructing the reader: Instructing us on how
to read postmodern fiction. I think Pynchon does not so much
 turn the mirror from Nature to Reading (some S&M reader
author relationship), but as instruction, albeit by taking
the reader into the fun house, a  carnivalized and mirrored
world of human behavior,  to satirize, and instruct, and
present his moral position.   Humorous (cK)ute
(cK)orresepondences disruptive and subversive (for example,
Slothrop--Anubis, Osiris, Orpheus,  phallus, Freud, Jonah) 
are not simply calling attention to themselves here, but
rather indicative of Pynchon's distrust of the human
tendency ("fatally fallen"/doubly post-lapsarian)  to
establish systems that reduce "pornographically" perceptual
differentiation ("paranoia) by repressing and by denaturing
Nature and Humanity in the process. On a social level  this 
leads to a repressive technocratic system, a total and
totalizing System won away from the entropies of lovable but
scatter-brained mother earth. Mothers and Fathers, Family
surrenders to the state, and the state is an incestuous
sodomizing system in love with Death.

Anticipating the critical arguement: 


Brian McHale,  claims, "nearly everything is lost in the
translation. From first to last the reader's experience
proves that GR will not boil down quite so readily to
intelligible patterns of theme, or indeed to any of the
patterns which we have learned to expect from Modernist
texts." 

This claim would seem to undermine most studies of GR. 
Privileged? Any study that takes up, say, how pornography
functions in GR, or
religion or politics, or entropy,  comedy, satire,
paranoia,  or any part of the "indeterminate whole" is a
"(mis)reading" since any partial study depends
on prior assumptions concerning the central meaning of the
literary artifact. Critics that take this position assert
that the sum of the parts cannot be compared to the
indeterminate whole and  or that GR lacks a central subject
(vehicle) or even a hierarchy of subjects and it moves from
place to place without reason or purpose. 

All attempts to reconstruct are not going to work. Why?
Because GR destabilizes, among other things,  "novelistic
ontology." And "novelistic ontology" (the mirror-from Plato
to Postmodernism-- is turning) is an element where the
"conditioned readers" of Modernist
texts generally found their point of view. So, looking back,
with, for example, McHale's  way of looking at it,
while the pre-Modernist text would permit a reconstruction
through
mediation of an omniscient and usually a more or less
reliable narrator, Modernism complicated reconstruction by
employing narrators with a limited point of view or even
rendering them imperceptible. What's more, unreliability was
limited to the "fictive world" and was of an
"epistemological" rather than "ontological" nature, still
allowing for the reconstruction of an external fictive
reality. McHale's argument claims that in the Modernist
novel, where several mediating consciousness were
introduced,  "triangulation", that is, the movement from one
consciousness to another through coordinates in the 'real'
visible, audible, tangible, etc. remained relatively
stable, but in GR, the narrator disorientates the  reader of
pre-Modernist texts and the "conditioned" modernist reader,
since "triangulation" in GR does not permit the
reconstruction of the 'real' situation in which the contents
of one mind are accessible to another. Paradigm shift! 

Questions: 

How can a subversion of the narrative succeed without being
itself internally organized in certain ways? 

How can GR break the modernist rules without stating them
implicitly?


As David Lodge sez, "if postmodernism really succeeds in
expelling the idea of order (whether expressed in metonymic
or metaphoric form) from modern writing, then it would truly
abolish itself, by destroying the norms against which we
perceive its deviation." 


Is GR, in Barthe's terms, "beyond criticism altogether?

Beyond interpretation?

GR is still a book, words organized on pages, and if the
number of signifieds is potentially infinite, the number of
singnifiers is not. 


If interpretation is possible isn't it necessary that a text
provide
us with some indication as to which meanings are permitted
and which may be excluded?

 Can a reader of GR  determine how Pynchon's narrative
intricacies are internally motivated? 

Are we to understand them as mimetic reflections of the
complexities of the modern or postmodern
world or as particular intellectual assumptions implicit in
the narrative? 

Turn the mirror away from reading and back to writing for a
moment. 

Writing, David Lodge says, "especially writing of narrative,
is a process of constant choice and decision making: to make
your hero do this rather than that, to describe the action
from this angle rather than that. How can one decide such
questions except in terms of some overall design--which is
in some sense a design upon one's putative reader."

Lodge also notes, that it is in particular comedy which
"offers most resistance to post-structualist esthetics."