pynchon-l-digest V2 #2188

[Doug Millison]

davemarc  said, The screaming goes in multiple directions....

One of the things that suggests to me that GR might contain insights
pertinent to us today is that the rainbow's trajectory connects two spots
on the globe, the launching site and the target. The parallel doesn't
entirely hold (the September 11 launch sites were in the US and perhaps
this might tell us something, too), but of course we do see, and feel, the
terror at the target sites in New York and Washington.  Around the world,
people stopped and prayed and wept for the victims of the September 11
attacks in the U.S. Now, voices all over the world -- if not our own media
here in the US -- are trying to tell us about the terror and suffering that
we are causing at the other end of the rainbow, in Afghanistan.

I know that people can read GR from many different perspectives, applying
different kinds of literary-critical tools, and I enjoy many of them and
generally respect that work; I also read GR as a cry to stop the War before
it kills us all in that last delta-t.  In that respect I see parallels with
the current situation; already one U.S. Congressman has called for the use
of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan, Pakistan has them (hence the concern
about destablizing that country and letting its military fall into the
wrong hands), India has them and is already at war with Pakistan, Russia
and China have them, Israel and probably Iraq. How far might the world be
from a nuclear confrontation similar to that which is said to have made
such a strong impression on Pynchon in the early 60s?

davemarc:
>From what I can see, much of Pynchon's response is actually like that of
>most of the subscribers to this list:  A lot of silence and distance.  It's
>as if he sees that the world is so screwed up that the truest path may be to
>remove oneself from the general hubbub as much as practical.

This reminds me of Bersani's essay on paranoia in Pynchon.  Bersani argues
that Slothrop's dissolution is, in effect,  a strategy to escape Their
control and he seems to extend that as a prescriptive for a way that we can
be in the world. Well worth readin, although it seems a bit too passive and
fatalistic to me, but intriguing all the same.  Of course Slothrop can be
read in many ways -- in the mystical context of the novel, he might be said
to move to a higher level of consciousness; in the Freudian context, he
regresses; and so on.

davemarc:
> When he does
>commit his words to paper, he often writes a kind of surrealist fiction that
>enables him to raise many questions and portray complexities--the rampant
>lunacies--while not quite engaging in polemics.

Complex, certainly, to the point that serious critical approaches to
Pynchon so often meet or exceed the complexity and obscurity of P's texts.
They are so rich, they support so many different interpretations.

I'm not as sure that P eschews polemics.  GR makes a pretty firm statement
against the rape of the Earth for short-term corporate profits (the
Slothrop family and its short-sighted exploitation of natural resources;
oil and Their rupture of the natural cycle of return), and about the
horrors of war fought for short-term corporate profits.  If  you argue, as
many have, that many of Pynchon's characters are more ideas than people,
it's possible to see that characterizations can work in a quasi-polemical
way, too -- Bloody Chiclitz doesn't make the conquering Americans look very
noble or idealistic, while Blicero presents a multifaceted view of Nazism's
Romantic decadence and pathetic evil, just to mention two characters very
briefly.   It seems a bit more obvious in Vineland where Pynchon seems to
make a strong, explicit statement against the Reagan-Bush Administration
and against the reactionary forces that arrayed themselves against the 60s
rebellion. This is all highly debatable, of course, and I certainly don't
pretend that my view is the final or correct one, although all of these
arguments have been presented, and elaborated in some detail, in the
Pynchon critical literature.

Does Pynchon never answer the questions he raises?  Seems to me he affirms
a small set of positives again and again in his writing:  love, community,
family, respect for the Earth, the continuity of life after death.  Of
course some Pynchon readers don't see this affirmation, arguing instead
that Pynchon undercuts everything, but I don't agree with that reading of
Pynchon.  Again, the critical literature presents and discusses, these
responses to Pynchon,

Throughout his work, and especially so in M&D, I see Pynchon making a
powerful argument against the notion that we can identify evil with an
Other and by fighting against it, destroy it; it seems to me he clearly
shows that the tendency to evil resides in each of us and that if we seek
to kill it we kill ourselves.  Some of his characters manage to deal with
this tendency without acting it out: Zoyd resisting those incestuous
thoughts, and Pokler doing the same, while other characters -- Blicero,
Marvy -- surrender to the evil impulse and actively pursue it.  This is
worth thinking about in the context of the current geopolitical-spiritual
situation, in my opinion.  If we recognize that we each have a tendency to
evil, and that the consequences of our collective actions, through our
governments and military institutions, may help the evil tendency to
manifest in our fellow human beings to the point where they lash out at us,
what is the proper response?  We can't defeat evil by projecting it onto an
Other and killing the Other, Pynchon says, the evil stays with us. Do we
lash back, use the violence done to America as a pretext for war, continue
the same bloody cycle? Pynchon does show us that. Or, with the insights we
can gain from great literature such as Pynchon's, from the teachings of our
faith traditions, and our philosophers, might we stop and think and find a
better way to protect ourselves?  I'm not sure that Pynchon gives us a lot
of hope in this respect, certainly not in GR, perhaps more so in Vineland
and M&D, where we see the family as a haven and possibilities for learning
from those who have gone before us -- and still there's the tantalizing
possibility that Slothrop knows the way out.

But we are not characters trapped in one of P's fictions.  We have options
and can make choices.  It's worth observing that Pynchon continues to
write, continues trying to make sense of the world, continues to show us in
his fiction the many horrors and rare delights of this life.  That amounts,
in my opinion, to a kind of activist stance. Pynchon doesn't make like
Slothrop and dissipate.  He remains engaged, outraged and loving (judging
from the enormous time and energy he lavishes on his creations for us, his
readers), and funny.  In my view, that makes him brave, in the way that our
finest artists are brave.  It's so much easier to just sit back and enjoy
the mindless pleasures instead.

None of us on Pynchon-L would be the first to note Pynchon's distrust of
authority wherever it manifests.  His statement in support of Rushdie is
telling.  So is his comment about our leaders since 1945 being criminally
insane.

Thanks for your post, davemarc.  It's nice to have the opportunity to talk
with somebody who offers a contradictory opinion that is both grounded in
Pynchon's work and free of ad hominem attack.

-Doug