pynchon-l-digest V2 #1844

[Otto]

>
> >Doug partly answers that himself later on, but I would like to add a few
> >thoughts:
> >To write history is to take sides.
>

Not necessarily in my opinion, but a decision whose view was right or wrong,
'cause one side lost the war. Do we have to take sides when we read about
the Punic Wars for example, Cato vs. Hannibal, both electi. Better take the
historical lesson that after two long wars a shorter third one can bring
total annihilation.

>
> Is to write fiction not to take sides?
>

Yes, more than in writing history. It's obvious that TP's sympathies are
always with the preterite, of every asserted salvation.

> I've not read most of these posts, but again, I
> think Dave Monroe has been very, very solid on all this.
> Malign, has been less convincing, though personally
> I find that Malign's argument that Pynchon's political/historical
> elements can be a distraction, a compromise of the more
> aethetic elements, is also very, very solid. On that, I
> have suggested Booth's *The Rhetoric of Fiction*, see "All Authors Should
Be
> Objective," Chapter 3, of particular interest are the comments on
> Shakespeare's "objectivity" and Nabokov's "commitment."
> Irony, now there in lies the rub that doth make Plato's Postmodernism
> cowards of us all. Speaking of the bard upon Avon, Thomas Moore, in his
*The
> Style of Connectedness* compares Pynchon's knowledge and
> use of science to the great Grandfather of Pynchon's
> anxious and influential American Father, Melville, who said, perhaps
> it was in Mardi, that novel about fiction writing, that silence (thinking
> now of that Eastern influence on our man) is the
> consecration of the world, Moore says,
>
> "Pynchon means to propse that science, no less than
> other metaphorical systems, is a dynamic subjectivity
> interrelating the images, myths and sythetic methods
> of human experience."
>

This is important: "(...) no less than other metaphorical systems (...)" --
I agree and have always said that Pynchon treats science as a myth.

> After reading Norbert Wiener, after reading Moore, I am
> convinced that Moore is so close to connecting the style
> of connectedness, but so far away.  He is  as far away as Fowler, the
> critic Moore critiques, it seems, at least at  times, because he, like
> so much of the critical stuff and so much we read here,
> can't seem to make sense of the text, the Pynchon text that is.
>
> Moore's chapter on the gods of GR is a mess. A totla mess.
> A shame because Moore is so good.
>
> Otto, Moore goes directly for the heart, page 703 of GR.
> Everything is connected, everything. In these
> digital days of Zero and One, Moore would have better
> served by analogue, as he is in chapter 1-6, but in the 6th
> chapter, "The Gods of GR," he Opts for the ONE. He makes
> judicious use of Robert Sklar and then applies E. M. Forter's
> "fantasy" and "Prophecy." He's very close, music and magic,
> and I hope he will publish a study of M&D, but when he tries to
> explicate the text, tries to make sense of a long and difficult, but
> by no menas atypical passage from the text of GR(GR693-94), he stutters
and
> gets all foggy in his thoughts:
>
> "That I feel mysekf here growing even more vauge
> than usual means either that I am talking nonsense
> or that Pynchon is writing it, or indeed what is happening
> in the writing where I think I hear it is "song" in Forster's
> sense, the passage relaesing its flood, leaving mere
> words-as-counters behind."
>

GR 692-94 is in the "Streets"-part of episode 67 and Pynchon is definitely
not writing nonsense, but playing with binaries, other possibilities and
opacities as usual. If Moore gets foggy, well, there's a lot a fog in this
part, but "The farther north, the plainer things grow."

Note the repeated use of "as if" in the first paragraph. First the "moon
brightening and darkening as if by itself." Those wood poles, being cut
thirty years ago and treated with tarr (a death derivative as we all know
from Herr Rathenau), are dead wood but leading some kind of post-life
existence in the service of those electric zeroes and ones. The electric
current (just zeroes and ones) is still working: "(...) transformers hum
aloft. As if it will be a busy day." Being busy is an attribute we normally
see with living things, not with the inanimate.

While the time is given (morning fog) the place is a little bit unclear
'cause all those streets in those "Northern Zone" towns tend to look alike:
Stralsund, Rostock, Lüneburg, Greifswald. But we know from p. 281 already
that it's "Hafenstrasse in Greifswald," not the other street names the
author has taken from his Baedeker.

What has he got to say about "Clergymen, working for the army," talking to
"the men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption,
salvation."  No question that it was "quite common."

Why streets? In the original concept cities, thus streets and houses, were
meant to give man safety, not just being places "indifferently gray with
commerce, with war, with repression (...)."

The astrological text on the a-bomb drop is correct: Sun in Leo on August 6,
Ascendent Virgin, although my astrology-software gives me 17°42', but that's
neglectable.


> Moore, then turns to the danger of the ONE reading, the Zero reading,
> to Fowler, and ultimately to some vauger that usual Jungian
> vision of the ineffable inside/outside, turning away, it seems
> from Freudian religious agon and the war of the worlds reading
> of Fowler.
>
> In any event or in no event, why I decided to drag
> Moore into all this is for one word--historicist.
>
> Moore, as unsure as he is about the gods of GR, as good as he is on
> Weber/capitalism Film, the style of connectedness, as wonderful as his
> introduction (the best intro ot P's use of science in GR) to
> P's use of science, is very convincing when he argues that
> P is
>
> "the most dedicated historicist and most intense moralist
> among living writers."
>
> Pynchon is, almost beyond criticism, but I remain convinced,
> that the best stuff written about his fictions, do not
> take on the other critics, get caught up in the culture wars, the
> theoretical manifestos is the schools, but go right to
> the heart of the matter--you know what it is.
>

The mantric power of  THE WORD given by God on Whitsunday?

>
> Again, see Joseph Dewey's "The Sound Of One Hnad Mapping"
>
>
> "...like the sound of one hand clapping..."  Bob Dylan
>
>

Yes, the old zen-riddle which only makes sense if you jump across in a
Wittgensteinian (6.54) way, to escape the binary bound of logic. But the
sense cannot be expressed with words which are bound to the binary structure
of language. Like in language you only get a clap in getting both poles
together. The zen-quote removes on pole and deconstructs the system. If
words are mirrors of real things it's the empty mirror, the Om-sound with no
expressing qualities, no fixed meaning to be attached to. Deconstructing
means destroying and rebuilding at the same time to make sure the lesson
that the ability of language to express an absolute "truth" is limited and
the only way to escape the system of signifier and significate is silence.
Zen-people are busy trying to overcome even the "inner monologue," unspoken
but always humming like those transformators.


*everything is connected*
It's a symptom of paranoia:

"(...) the discovery that *everything is connected* everything in the
Creation (...)" (p. 703) and Tchitcherine asks on p. 704:
"But life after death . . ."
"There is no life after death." -- only for the inanimate, but is it life?

In this book everything seems to be connected with everything. But in real
life? In my opynchion he is an atheist. I don't think that he believes that
everything in the creation is connected with everything else in a
transcendental way, only in an ecological way -- which is true 'cause all
harm we do to the earth (justified religiously by the opening of the
Genesis) will come back at us some day. This is why Pynchon is no religious
writer, but he's warning of religious stories, made up of strict
hierarchical binaries, taken for real. We're not even a unique concept, an
original, just of "his" image:

001:026 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
        likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
        and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over
        all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
        upon the earth.

001:027 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
        created he him; male and female created he them.

001:028 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and
        multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have
        dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
        air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

001:029 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing
        seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree,
        in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it
        shall be for meat.

001:030 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air,
        and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there
        is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was
        so.
001:026 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
        likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
        and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over
        all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
        upon the earth.

001:027 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
        created he him; male and female created he them.

001:028 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and
        multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have
        dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
        air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

001:029 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing
        seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree,
        in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it
        shall be for meat.

001:030 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air,
        and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there
        is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was
        so.


Jah says: ... "every herb"

I would like to agree to everything that follows and would like to say that
it's very beautifully written:
>
> There is no such thing as an objective history/historian. Everything is
> always seen through a filter. Some filters are less opaque than others,
but
> still opaque. And why, pray thee, good sir, would Pynchon want to
synthesize
> a worldview, when he can shift between worldviews (which he does), thus
> presenting a much more complete and much less distorted picture (or,
rather,
> a multitude of pictures)? Besides, Pynchon uses history in order to reach
> way beyond it, to something much more universal, fundamental, timeless and
> interesting: human nature.
> >It is in that spirit, I believe, that Pynchon presents history as "at
best
> >a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud" (GR, 164) and "not
> >woven by innocent hands" (GR, 277).
> >
> >Cyrus
>

Yes, human nature, no need for a god here, just the lesson how the invention
of the god-concept is used again and again to keep up hierarchies and to
mistreat other humans.

A pleasure of  a post.

Otto