Late Imperial Romance

[Paul Mackin]

Well, it is certainly true that Pynchon "leaves nothing out" of
Gravity's Rainbow. And it is also true that any re-creation of a 20th
century  world war that includes more than the the bang bang of battle
(but in addition explores the colonial rivalries  that led to the war)
is almost ipso facto going to be a left critique of the 20th century
West. This is no reason to lose our way however. GR is (also, if you
will) a stupendous evocation of the very SPECIALNESS of WW II (WW I also
in a few passages) as those who lived through  it experienced and
remember it. Pynchon romaticizes the war (Roger and Jessica for
instance) in much the same way same we Americans on the home front did
when we sang cornball songs like

When the lights go on again
All the world
blah blah blah
There be time for things
Like wedding rings and
more blah blah blah

Of course, being Pynchon, GR's  romance with WW II is a mock romance.
That's quite OK. If something wasn't there in the first place, there'd
be no need to mock it. And P is such a gentle mocker.

Ho, ho, ho from Santa.

P.



On Tue, 2002-12-24 at 22:26, Dave Monroe wrote:
> >From John McClure, Late Imperial Romance (New York:
> Verso, 1994), Ch. 6, "Resisting Romances: Pynchon's V.
> and Gravity's Rainbow," pp. 152-76 ...
> 
>    "Reading V. ... one becomes sharply aware of how
> much has been left out of other fictional treatments
> of imperial struggle.  Where Didion and Stone
> dramatize these struggles almost exclusively in terms
> of limited engagements between single metropolitan and
> Third World nations, Pynchon sees imperial ambitions
> structuring both this kind of violence and the great
> power rivalries that threaten to explode again into
> global war....  In V., then, colonial and metropolitan
> history are viewed together, as different aspects of a
> single global imperial history.  And the history of
> the first half of the twentieth century is represented
> as a matter not just of escalating violence and
> inhumanity--the familiar story--but of escalating
> imperial struggle.
>    "Pynchon is writing back, in other words, against
> traditions of thought that reproduce Western biases by
> isolating mere colonial struggles from the great
> events of the times.  And he is writing back as well
> against the familiar Western representation of the
> great wars of the century as isolated events of
> mysterious origin.  'We're at peace,' proclaims a
> character in Gravity's Rainbow, as World War II ends. 
> 'No, we're not,' thinks another character.  'It's
> another bit of propaganda.'  He sees 'the same flows
> of power, the same impoverishments' and includes that
> 'There's something still on' [GR, p. 628].  'The real
> War is always there.  The dying tapers off now and
> then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of
> people' (645).  This repudiation of a 'propanganda'
> that denies the ubiquity of deadly international
> competitions is articulated in V. as well.  The First
> World War, one character insists, 'was fundamentally
> no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the
> Sudanese wars, even the Crimea.'  To represent it (as
> Henry James did in his famous letter) as a 'Nameles
> Horror, the suden prodigy sprung on a world unaware,'
> is to see it incorrectly.  'There was no innovation,
> no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar
> principles.  If it came as any surprise to the public
> then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly
> teh war itself' [V., p. 459]." (pp. 154-5)
> 
> --- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:
> > 
> > The 60s was like Pynchon's War. A seeming Presence
> > with a Life of its own, but . . .
> 
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