VV(7) - 1

[Dave Monroe]

... hope you didn't have to actually type in that Golden Bough excerpt.
Which is, indeed, interesting and relevant.  As I posted a while back,
my inclination was to read the alligator hunt as an allusion to the,
even at the time of the writing and publication of V., escalating U.S.
"police action" in Vietnam, to the point where one might even read that
idiosyncratic (so far as I know) "coco" as "gook."

Hm.  Even that elision betwixt alligators and crocodiles is already not
unlike a slur, a stereotype.  A refusal to acknowledge, respect
difference, at any rate.  But the parallels with later U.S. actions in
Vietnam--esp. that "Operation Igloo White"--are striking, presciently
so.  If I might humbly refer the dear reader to my own post ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=227&sort=date

Pynchon apparently had a "SECRET" (albeit not "TOP") clearance at Boeing
(Cowart mentions this, based on an interview with a former coworker), so
who knows what he knew.  Or what he came to know.  But, in the era of
James Bond et al., OIW would not be so far beyond imagination, and
something similar might well have even been kicked around as possible in
popular science magazines, or the press at large ...

But I hadn't noticed the alligators' "weariness with existence" (your
phrase, don't have V. easily at hand here), which indeed resonates with
The Empty Ones among the Herero Schwarzkommando of Gravity's Rainbow.
Which reminds me of something which I've been perhaps hinting at, but
not addressing here lately.

Now, Pynchon's positing of a seemingly suicidal, genocidally so, sect
among the Herero in the fictional context--the fictional text--of
Gravity's Rainbow is one thing, but recall that letter to Thomas F.
Hirsch (8 January 1969, printed as an appendix to David Seed's The
Fictional Labyrinth of Thomas Pynchon [and that is that de Chirico
painting on the cover, by the way]), in which Pynchon gives not only
detailed information about his sources on the Herero and the German
occupation of SW Africa and how he used them in V., but also hints at
elements thereof which will a few years later surface in Gravity's
Rainbow.

Not only does Pynchon, in a context, in a text, we might all more
comfortably attribute to "authorial intentions," state that

    ... I feel personally that the number done on the Herero head by
    the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head
    by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist
    head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their
    advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and
differentiation
    on a culture that valued unity and integration (Seed, p. 241)

... which is already to elide, indeed, to equate--"same"--the
aforementioned "numbers" being done on those various "heads."  So must
we now object to Pynchon's elisions, equations here?  Maybe, maybe not,
I'm inclined to read charitably those "sames" as ("intended" to be)
analogical, but some might want to pursue rigorously and without
prejudice their own arguments about such equations here, who knows?  But
the question should indeed be raised.

One might also challenge, deconstruct, such schematically romanticist
notions as "unity and integration," and a consequent fall into,
imposition of, "analysis and differentiation."  The model here would be
Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of similar assertions by Claude
Levi-Strauss in re: the European encounter with  the Nambikwara.  See
the former's Of Grammatology, the latter's Tristes Tropiques ...

But one might find (even) more troubling Pynchon's further assertion
that

    I doubt it was only firepower and aggressiveness that beat the
Herero
    during that "complex and terrible" time.  I think the Hereros had as
much
    to do with it as von Trotha did.  For perhaps the same reasons as
the
    Incas, with everything going for the, let a crippled and hopelessly
    outnumbered one-time hog drover from Estremadura hand them their
    ass.  (p. 242)

... which displays both Pynchon's dry humor and his research, but also
more clearly makes possible a more analogical reading of those previous
"sames."  But ...

Discussing the attempt of one pamphleteer "to discount the notion,
apparently widely-held at the time, that the Hereros were deliberately
trying to exterminate themselves"--a notion which makes, at least at
first glance, and at quite a few glances afterward, the Herero willing
collaborators in their own genocide (a twisty reversal of that
Nietzschean take on the master/slave dialectic, slaves infected with
master mentality?)--Pynchon's not entirely convinced ...

    But I find that perfectly plausible, maybe not as a conscious
conspiracy,
    but in terms of how a perhaps not completely Westernized people
might
    respond  They had no concept of property in the European sense
before
    the missionaries came, they felt themselves integrated into
everything [...]
    their cattle had souls, the same souls as their own ....  But they
had no
    hang-ups sacrificing cattle, it was part of a universal scheme, and
so it's
    doubtful if they'd have any hangups sacrificing themselves, either,
given a
    unified concept of creation, which shows up in religions all around
the
    orld, Christianity being a glaring exception.  (p. 242)

One might also add Gnosticism to Christianity here if one does not
necessarily consider the former a subset of the latter, that dualism,
but perhaps what is again called for is a deconstruction of several
philosphemes in play here: "Western," "unified," "before teh Europeans,"
and so forth.  But then there's the next line ...

"And German Christianity being perhaps the most perfect expression of
teh whole Western/analytic/'linear'/alienated shtick" (ibid.).   Cf.
that "German mania for subdivision" or whatever in Gravity's Rainbow.
Are these stereotypes?  Slurs, even?  Or, at any rate, problematic
generalizations?  I do not believe they were intended as such, as if
each and every German anywhere and everywhere, anywhen and everywhen,
was/is/will be a, er, subdvisiomaniac, but ...

But one might also compare this to what Eddins, or Terrance, or myself,
in our various ways, refer to as "gnostic," as "gnosticism" here, a
perhaps problematic generalization, indeed, but also a certain scheme,
scehmatic, schematism in play (albeit seriously so) in those Pynchonian
texts.  A la "Romanticism," perhaps, as used generically in much
critical literature, not to mention by me.

Speaking esp. to you, here, kai, as I think that Eddins and Terrance and
myself are all, in our avrious ways, referring to gnosticism in roughly
this way.  Pynchon not necessarily taking issue with, or even having
read much of, specific gnostic texts, but, rather, partaking of that
general (and, specifically, Vogelinian) critique of
gnosticism--responsible or no to the actual texts--indeed, as you
pointed out, in the air, in the wind, at the time, and then some.

That may or may not be acceptible to you, kai, or to others, and I'll
have to wait for Terrance to let me know if he concurs with my
characterization here, but I do think it makes it clearer that no
criticism of, much less attack on, either any specific gnostic text or
figure, much less any personally held beliefs is intended, or even being
made.  And do note that even if one reads Pynchon as demonizing teh
archons, and not the gnostics (or, ather, "archonism" vs. gnsoticism?),
gonsticism, as a generalized cosmology, as a generialized system of
belief, of action, is nonetheless being put into play, and it might
indeed be that system which is being critiqued, rather than merely one
aspect thereof ...

In the meantime, cannot help but think that setting Elaine Pagels' Adam,
Eve and the Serpent in debate with Peter Brown's The Body in Society:
Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity might well
clarify some of the issues, esp. the political issues, that might be
involved here.  I think perhaps, kai, that you might read TP, GR as
siding with EP, AE&TS, whilst I, and, possibly Terrance, might rather
concur with, see TP concurring with, PB, TBIS.  But there is much to
recommend in both cases, and I do respect your learning and opinions,
esp. on these matters, kai ...