Pynchon's Badass

[Terrance]

Eric Rosenbloom wrote:
> 
> What I've found interesting since Rob brought up the Badass is how
> useful it is for viewing Pynchon's characters along a Badass-Pink continuum.
> 
> (I took the term "Pink" from the old Church of the Subgenius, whose
> "Slack" also has Pynhonian relations. Last night I re-read Pynchon's 3
> New York Times essays, on Watts (1966), Luddism (1984), and Sloth
> (1993). Pynchon described Watts as a pocket of reality in the white
> fantasy of L.A. The whites' fear of failure and their consequent comfort
> in submissive conformity is represented in Watts by "the little man"
> (such as social workers) and defended by The Man with a quickly summoned
> band of policemen. While white L.A. was expanding their fantasies with
> LSD, black Watts sought simple comfort after the indignities of each day
> in a shared pint of booze. Empowered by the civil rights movement and
> Malcolm X, however, Watts was able to create a Badass out of their
> opposition to the Pinks . . .)
> 
> "Choosing victimization" is perhaps better stated in this context as
> "choosing martyrdom," that is, in principle, however vague, refusing to
> live by The Man's terms, refusing The Man's control of potentially
> liberating technology, refusing to submit your mind and body's life to
> The Man's clock.
> 
> Sloth is a shutting down, an escape (to nothing) from The System.
> Luddism is a futile gesture in which some dignity may be experienced
> (like voting Green in the USA). Riot is the collective will to be The Badass.
> 
> Slothrop as a Badass can't be saved or Pynchon's Badass fiction would
> not work. Blicero looks like a Badass but he is a product of the German
> Imperial Reich -- the Pinks -- not the people. U.s.w.
> 
> --
> Eric R

One more on missing parts:

"When I was wounded by those children and sacrificed my
sight in one eye, so clearly a gratuitous sacrifice, I had
been endowed, if for only an instant, with the power to
perceive a creature that had descended from the heights of
my sky."
					"AGHWEE THE SKY MONSTER," Kenzaburo Oe 

Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled from
pieces - sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them,
like the hand, quite oversized - which fall from the sky or
just materialize here and there about the castle grounds,
relentless as Freud's slow return of the repressed. The
activating agencies, again like those in Frankenstein, are
non-mechanical. The final assembly of "the form of Alfonso,
dilated to an immense magnitude," is achieved through
supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of
Otranto's patron saint. 
						"Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?" TRP

NONMECHANICAL! 


A family curse, Hawthorne? 

Parts? missing or added?  "oversized" characters "assembled
from pieces," "that fall from the sky," "materialize,"
relentlessly as "Freud's slow return of the repressed," and
the "non-mechanical" "agencies," the "supernatural," "family
curses," and "patron saints." 

Freud's slow return of the repressed, this is King Kong not
Blicero. 

Always timely with his prose and fiction, in 1984, on the
25th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, Thomas
Pynchon published his essay, "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
Pynchon rejects Snow's "polarized" (literary versus
scientific) view of intellectual life in the West.  He says,
"Today nobody could get away with such a distinction." Neil
Postman tries to get away with it by shifting the dispute
from "art versus science" to "Technology versus everybody
else."  In Technopoly (1993), Neil Postman also rejects
Snow's  "implacable hostility between literary intellectuals
(sometimes called humanists) and physical scientists," but
Postman simply shifts the polarized view, so that the
opposition for Postman, is no longer simply between art and
science, but rather "between technology and everybody else."
Pynchon notes that what Snow sought to identify were "not
only two kinds of education but also two kinds of
personality." He dismisses Snow's polarized personalities
and he dismisses Snow's use of the term  "luddite." For Snow
and Company, "luddite" was merely  "a way to call those with
whom they (Snow and those like him) disagreed, both
politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same
time." Contrasting Pynchon's use of  Snow's opposition with
Postman's, we can clearly recognize a difference in method.
Postman's method rejects one conflict and replaces it with
another, while Pynchon views the problem as one of multiple
perspectives or cultures, specialization and education.  So
with "demystification" being "the order of our day,"  "there
are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has
really become how to find the time to read anything outside
one's own specialty." 

 

Pynchon asks if "there is something about reading and
thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn
Luddite?" 

As readers of his fiction, we are not surprised that Pynchon
turns to his trusty OED and Encyclopedia Britannica for
information on Luddites. He also comments on the phrase
"Industrial Revolution," distinguishing it from the violent
struggles of the French and American Revolutions-- "It was
smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage
in a long evolution." So Henry Adams falls off the shelf and
Pynchon's essay begins to sound like an addendum to Henry
Adams's "Dynamic Theory of History" and "A Law of
Acceleration," which are found in the last few chapters of
'The Education: A Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity."
Pynchon tells of the Rev. William Lee inventing a machine so
he can woo a woman and we get old King or Captain Ludd,
mythologized.  "Lud was now all mystery, resonance and dark
fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming
the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single
comic shtick." Moreover, when Pynchon considers Lud's two
basic virtues-big and bad-old Lud becomes a Pynchon
"Badass," and doesn't he seem rather familiar and
complicated. In fact Pynchon argues that old Lud the Badass
is not put together by a simple and unreasonable public
horrified by machines, but is something "more complex: the
love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery." 
This relationship can place humans in a frightful
predicament and when confronted by an amplified, multiplied,
more-than- human force, humans "in seeking some equalizer,
turn if only in imagination, in WISH (my caps), to the
Badass-the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero-who
will resist what other wise would overwhelm us." 

Pynchon's Badass, I think it is safe to say he is talkin
street here,  is a "bad ass mother fucker," and I can think
of no character in P's fiction, maybe Brock Vond in VL, that
is not a "bad ass mother fucker" than Blicero.