Cowart

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Tchaikovsy's R&J is but one of what Cowart says, is a direct
or indirect reference to composers representing nearly every
stage of the development of music during the past four
hundred years in P's first novel. Cowart argues that P's
allusions often demand a lot of the reader, he suggests that
P cannot expect his readers to have an equal chance at the
musical allusions as at the literary, pictorial, and so on.
Yet, Cowart says, the number of musical allusions increase
and become more difficult and more important.

Here in Chapter 4 of V. P includes
Tchaikovsky's R&J Overture, "the eternal drama of love and
death...", and as Cowart notes in The Art of Allusion, all
of the operatic allusions in V., with the exception of Don
Giovanni, are variations on this theme. P, as is his habit,
often with sardonic and subtle irony bends and distorts the
"texts" (poems, operas, dramas, ballets, and so on) to his
purposes and then after, almost like Homer or Milton, after
parading them all on stage, love-death Romantic, Love-Death
Tragic, and so on, the stage becomes the War, the great War
where all these love-deaths are multiplied ten million fold.
P's metaphor for the love-death theme is "a single melody."
In N the creative God is replaced by an eternal recurrence:
"the whole music box repeats eternally its tune which may
never be called a melody."

Just a note, Herman Melville had a habit of covertly
satirizing the authors of the books, articles, accounts,
biographies, etc., that he most shamelessly plundered.
Moby-Dick,  Confidence-Man,  and all of Melville's works,
his books, letters, his sox and his shoes have been studied
by critics. The subtle, often ironic and parodic ways in
which Melville incorporates the works, lives, ideas, etc. 
of others into his fiction has much in common with the
methods of Thomas Pynchon. Here in V., we see that Thomas
Pynchon has a lot more in common with Melville than critics
have noted. While reading these first three chapters note
that Pynchon is not only making use of the "texts" of
Graves, Adams, Eliot, Frazer, Nabokov, Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), De Rougemont, Baedeker, Freud,
Jung, Ornette Coleman and the Downbeat Magazines, Kerouac,
Machiavelli, Rand, Dante, Plato, Augustine, Old and New
Testament heroes and gods, Wittgenstein, Weber, Shakespeare,
Detective and Espionage fiction, and so on and so on, ( a
very good study is Cowart, David,  Thomas Pynchon: The Art
of Allusion Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1980) like Melville he often satirizes the author's
themselves,  making jokes, again like Melville, often
blasphemous or in "bad taste", about their sexual
proclivities, politics, religious or scientific or social
scientific beliefs, literary or other relations, aesthetics,
etc. 

In the end we should question what all of these
extra textual facts, biographies, histories, and so forth 
tell us about the fictions and how they have been written
and read.  

In my opinion, for both Melville and Pynchon, these things
alone simply don't tell us a hell of a lot. It does tell us
that both authors have, at least as part of their target
audience, a critical, intelligent, scholarly reader 

(even if this reader is mocked, as Modernism is mocked in
Pynchon and American Literature mocked in Melville, the
scholarly reader
deliberately overwhelmed by the pedantic use of ideas,
language, etc., one of the essential elements of the type of
satire both men have written).  

However, the critical industries discovery of the source or
sources of what may be a critical chapter in their
respective texts, even when this chapter can be
deconstructed or shown to be palimpsest or a touched up copy
of the original, once integrated and amalgamated into the
texts take on a life completely independent of their
sources.

PS in The Confidence-Man Melville, in part, plays on the
protracted 18th century argument about human nature--
Hobbesian cynicism against Shaftesburyean (shows up in M&D I
believe)  benevolism, this debate of course was an important
structural device (satire/sentiment) of English picaresque
fiction. Of course, like Pynchon's V., Melville's C-M is not
picaresque fiction, it's Genre is and always will be I think
a matter of debate, but it is clearly satire (MS I'd say)
and it subsumes a whole bunch of genres including
picaresque.

Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999) 600-620 "More Advanced
the Deeper We Dig": Ratner's Star by David Cowart 


That's part of it, right, good one old man, and it might
prove interesting to revisit Katje's conversation with
Enzian again with this in mind. Or any of the flights in the
novel, the "liberations" that are really banishments,
longings to be Home in prison or in the oven or aboard that
Anubis: a flight from experience, not denial as rj would
call it or futile grasping for  transcendence as some one
else called it,  but entropical, gravitational and
contingent flight into a spatio-temporal and cognitive
realm, the Anubis or a Siege Party or Weissmann's S&M games
or his realm of Blicero.  It is fitting that Thanatz slips
on vomit and falls in with the DPs, the prisoners because
this cognitive realm of flight in TRP's fiction develops
into a cultural and historical prison house and  in so doing
acquires apocalyptic momentum. 

I am convinced that Rilke is so important to these episodes
and I think he has to be accounted for here, more so than
Sartean Existentialism, Marxism, Marcuse, Norman O. Brown
and his readings of Freud and the so called Neo-Freudians,
Jung, French Structuralism and Jonas, Weber, Scholem,
combined. Rilke is the most important text here and not
accounting for his presence in GR is a mistake. One might
even make the mistake of reading Weissmann/Blicero as a
romantic hero venerated by the text if one disregards TRP's
use of Rilke in constructing Weissmann/Blicero. Besides
Rilke is a GREAT Poet, a giant, a master. If you can't read
German that's a great loss but try the Stephen Mitchell
Editio, either the Selected Vintage paperback, but it is
missing some of the poems critical to GR, for example
Sonnets to Orpheus XII Part II, but you can get it on the
internet the other Mitchell text may be more difficult to
find and more expensive, might not be available in
Paperback, it is, Ahead Of ALL Parting, The Selected Poetry
and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Modern Library 1995. 



In  1973 when GR was  published Richard Locke, in an article
in The New York Times Book book review contended that "the
most important cultural figure in Gravity's Rainbow" was
Rainer Maria Rilke and that "the book could be read as a
serio-comic variation on Rilke's Duino Elegies and their
German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture." John Stark,
D. Fowler and D. Cowart stress the Rilkean allusions in
their readings of the novel.  For Stark, Pynchon "includes
echoes of Rilke's "Tenth" elegy so often throughout this
novel that it sometimes seems like an expanded version of
that poem" and he consequently states that "[i]nformation
about Rilke is indispensable for a full understanding" of
Gravity's Rainbow. 

I start back teaching on Monday so my time here will be very
limited. I won't be able to engage in idle chatter and name
calling and silly songs and stupid poems and bigotry but I
will try to post something once a week--only on Rilke and
that degenerate Weissmann/Blicero the most venerated
character in the book.

Thank you gentlemen, it was a good debate, I learned  a lot.
The troll is paranoia and some bad history. Perhaps we all
need a labor day holiday. 

A close reading of TRP's use of Mandalas in the novel
reveals what we discover by a close reading of all Pynchon
adaptations of conventional acceptation of Mythological ( in
Grave's sense) symbolism. So, a close reading, IMHO
(following Paul's Capitalization here)  does not support
Thomas Schaub's (and others, Cowart and Stark, for example)
claim that TRP's use of the Mandala in GR invokes some
"integrating force which spars with the disintegrating
forces of analysis, and is itself a symbol capable of
uniting both (as it unites all oppositions)."  As I have
argued here for a while, religious or mythical forms of
integration, as is the case in all other matters where
regigion/myth  (this is why analysis of TRP's "formative"
readings of Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and
all those other "Catholics" is helpful) are invoked in GR,
have been secularized and profaned by analytic forms of
integration. In other words, THEY are secular/analytical
desecualrized avatars of the great big religious/mytholocial
history TRP builds his novel (not unlike Joyce) up from. The
problem is secular history, the postmodern if you want,
Modern condition. For Modern man, all attempts to integrate,
be it with Mandalas or social scientific theory--Freud to
Brown--do not provide what religion or myth once could. So
the integrative function of the mandala is now only a
secularized analytical mandala (Jung's mandalas, for
example) and is functions allegorically in GR, often to
expose Modern Man's inclination or disposition towards
Paranoid (there are several forms of Paranoia in GR, here I
mean Paranoia as epistemological process, the Modern Mind
with all its aggregated apocalyptic momentum)  processing of
experience. In other words it goes to one of the big themes,
the one that says that when Paranoid Modern Man attempts to
take refuge in myth or its symbols, rituals, and so on, his
attempts, his Quest, in counter distinction to the
historical questers (Tannhauser, Pig Hero and so on), is
secularized and leads to annihilation, first of the
self--scattered, community, and the Kingdom of Life. 

Theatre/Theater

I like McHoul & Wills and McHale on this theatre, cinema
stuff, though I think the "failure" (McHale) or the
"impossibility of sorting out" (M&W) cinematic and real or
real and hallucination or Mrs. Quoad(s) and Darlene and so
forth is ultimately more a fascination of critics (the "CLT"
"'exegetical drive'") than some conditioned reader's
problem.   Like M&W I find "McHales's "hang-ups" and his
notion of a "conditioned reader" something I simply can't
relate to. I think it's funny that McHale keeps arguing that
it's not his "hang-up" but the conditioned readers--That's
YOU!  

See: Cowart, Thomas Pynchon,pp. 31-62;  Stark, Pynchon's
Fiction, pp. 132-45; Simmon, Beyond the Theater of War: GR
as Film, in Critical Essays, ed. R. Pearce, pp. 124-39;
Clerc, Film in GR, in Approaches to GR, ed. Clerc, pp.
103-51, Grace, Fritz Lang and the 'Paracinematic Lives of
GR, Modern Fiction Studies, 9, No.4 (Winter 1983), pp.
655-70,  



M&W divide theatre into use and mention and I think this is
a good start (not in McHale's sense that M&W is good start
to reading GR).     



I'm not much interested in the "reading process" and how the
reader is trapped or deconditioned or victimized. I am more
interested in Pynchon's use of "use and mention" of film by
characters and as Universal conspiracy. This is obviously a
big topic. I like to dig into the merging of psychology,
religion, philosophy and history and look at the realms of
time and space that Pynchon separates but renders permeable
and what M&W don't reccommend--the "grand unifying theme" 
and another thing they don't recommend, Pynchon's
hermeneutic or the extra or out of the text "texts" and
sub-text. The principle reference text is Rilke. We could,
make a long list of books that are important to the theatre
of GR--Marshall McLuhan, Weber, Brown, so on and so on, but
Rilke is used (and used and mentioned by characters) in a
different way and more extensively than any we would put on
the list. Both Pynchon and Rilke ask the same age-old
questions about Man, his world, the cosmos and Man's place
in it. In both authors it is human consciousness that is the
cause of what we might call the second falling--a separation
from the "whole" and the resulting antagonistic
relationships that Man experiences. The answers that Pynchon
offers to these age-old questions is often an ironic play on
both the current state of affairs and the answers that Rilke
provides.  

Now to bring this back to theatre/theaeter I will begin
posting some of the Rilke stuff I have been putting
together. 



Well it's Plato Cave with a twist or two, but the direct
reference is to Rilke. 

During our theater/theatre discussion I noted that
Consciousness, as Pynchon portrays it in GR anyway, is a
kind of second falling-- postlapsarian Man on a quest to
Salvation is imprisoned in his own consciousness:  Mind (and
Mind is both Reason and Myth in GR) is cut off from the
world and is thus incapable of relating to the world
adequately or with any satisfaction and so with
pornographies (Faustian Science mixed with corrupt ions of: 
myth, mystery, magic, religious ritual, sacrament, oral
community rites, holy grail,  a plethora of quests for
"salvation" ) Man Narcissistically projects an Image of his
Solipsistic imprisonment onto the world. Pynchon never tires
of representing this narcissistic confinement, equating it
with history (mirrors in V.) and extending it to Solipsistic
history in GR (film). So Pointsman, the dogmatic Pavlovian,
is haunted by "the sound of the V-1 and V-2, one the reverse
of the other", because his spiritual mentor Pavlov
considered this type of association, which is manifest in
"irradiation" and "reciprocal induction", as the brain, in
the mind of history. (GR.144) Weissmann is affected by this
"pathology" since he holds on to a "Mirror-metaphysics."
"Self -enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish
symmetries..." (GR.101) 

In the Theatre/theater discussion I posted some stuff on how
and why I think Pynchon attributes this "pathology" to 500
years of metaphysics (although he also traces it back much
further) and presents the historical and psychological
"pathology" as the German sickness, but I said, 

In a broader sense, these woes are caused by the human
mind--the subjectivity, the inwardly trapped mind that has 
separated what was once whole or unified so that human
experiences have become antagonistic.    

I included what I think are a few very important Rilke
passages:  

Yours, 
A round bullet larger than buckshot and a shot of liquor and
a small metal disk for use in a vending or gambling machine,
especially one used illegally and a lump of metal and the
unit of mass that is accelerated at the rate of one foot per
second per second when acted on by a force of one pound
weight and a small, snaillike, chiefly terrestrial gastropod
mollusks of the genus Limax, slow-moving elongated, smooth,
soft,  larva like, striking heavily, but only with my pen.