VV(11): Fugue Your Buddy

[jbor]

It's a very layered pun in Pynchon's text I think. On the one hand, there is
the euphemistic use of "fugue" in place of "fuck", a common slang idiom.
This  latter usage exemplifies those typically anti-social gestures of 60s
counter-culture: gratuitous obscenity, thumbing one's nose at High Art etc.
Of course, the musical denotation of the term is apt as well in the context
of McLintic's sublime composition and playing. But, insofar as a "fugue" is
also a state of oblivion, specifically, a psychological condition
characterised by "loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with
disappearance from one's usual environment" (Ayst. Oxf.) and, more
specifically, a type of Freudian dream-state, the connotations of flight and
psychic disintegration alluded to below are brought into play in the novel
as well. Music as distraction, escape ... music as a drug ... music as the
antidote to rational thought, stable identity etc.

Interestingly, Plato inveighs weightily against music as a force or source
of irrationality in the world. This is perhaps where the two derivations of
the term have a common ancestry. In one sense, then, McLintic, with his
music, will both "fugue" (i.e. play music to) and "fuck" (up ... the mind of
... ) his "buddy" by performing the piece. I think it's extremely
interesting the way that these anti-Platonic, anti-rationalist sentiments
creep into Pynchon's texts, both subtly, as here, and rather less so
elsewhere.

best


----------
>From: "Judy" <blarney at total.net>
>

> Taken from Martha Stout's "Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the
> Promise of Awareness" (2001) regarding fugue:
>
> "The somewhat old-fashioned term for Julia's departures from herself during
> which she would continue to carry out day-to-day activities is "fugue," from
> the Italian word fuga meaning "flight." A dissociative state that reaches
> the point of fugue is one of the most dramatic spontaneously occurring
> examples of the human mind's ability to divide consciousness into parts. In
> fugue, the person, or the mind of the person, can be subdivided in a manner
> that allows certain intellectually driven functions to continue - rising at
> a certain time, conversing with others, following a schedule, even carrying
> out complex tasks - while the part of the consciousness that we usually
> experience as the "self" - the self-aware center that wishes, dreams, plans,
> emotes, and remembers - has taken flight...Clinical fugue differs from
> common human experience not so much in kind as in degree. Fugue is
> terror-driven and complete, while the more recognizable condition is the
> result of distraction, and relatively transparent. As fugue, the car trip
> example would involve a driver who failed to remember not just the process
> of the trip, but also the fact that there had been a trip, and from where.
> Far beyond distraction, the more remarkable dissociative reaction of fugue
> would have been set off by something - an event, a conversation, an image, a
> thought - that was related, though perhaps in some oblique and symbolic way,
> to trauma." (pp. 34-35).