Playing in the Dark

[barbara100 at jps.net]

>   "Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America
> her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the
> metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in
> the restless Slumber of these Provinces. [ ]" (M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345)

I wonder what those Expressions are in America?  It reminds me of a passage
from Africa in GR?--

"....Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more.  Colonies are the outhouses of
the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy
the smell of his own shit.  Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as
loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy.  Eh?  Where he
can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive
darkness of limbs, of hair as wooly as the hair on his own forbidden
genitals.  Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and
not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and
fungus native to Europe.  Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and
repression.  Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and
sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to
soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts....No word ever
gets back.  The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior,
no matter how dirty, how animal it gets...."  (GR 368)

He does seem to carry his themes from book to book, doesn't he? Even the
wording is similar: metropolitan Wakefulness and Metropolis. What's he
saying about us, though, when we're free to Express ourselves?  Without
having to answer to the Metropolis in its Wakefulness?  I wonder if Pynchon
would agree with Camille Paglia that we crave hierarchy, and the more it's
absent from society, the more decadent we become in finding ways to replace
it. Or maybe it's more like Toni Morrison says,  "Power--control of one's
own destiny--would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class,
caste, and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and
punishment to disciplining and punishing ."  Or maybe they're all the same
idea just written in different ways?

Barbara



----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Monroe" <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 04, 2002 11:36 AM
Subject: Playing in the Dark


> From Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and
> the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993
> [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992]), Ch. 2, "Romancing
> the Shadow," pp. 31-59 ...
>
>    "Young America distinguished itself by, and
> understood itself to be, pressing toward a future of
> freedom, a kind of human dignity believed
> unprecedented in the world.  A whole tradition of
> 'universal' yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled
> phrase, 'the American Dream.' [...] it is just as
> important to know what these people were rushing from
> as it is to know what they were hastening to.  If the
> New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality
> that whetted the appetite for them?  And how did that
> reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?
>    "The flight from the Old World to the New is
> generally seen to be a flight from oppression and
> limitation to freedom and possibility.  Although, in
> fact, the escape was sometimes an escape from
> license--from a society perceived to be unacceptably
> permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined--for those
> fleeing for reasons other than religious ones,
> constraint and limitation impelled this journey.  All
> the Old World offered these immigrants was poverty,
> prison, social ostracism, and, not infrequently,
> death.  There was of course a clerical, scholarly
> group of immigrants who came seeking the adventure
> possible in founding a colony for, rather than
> against, one or another mother country or fatherland.
> And of course there were the merchants, who came for
> cash.
>    "Whatever the reasons, the attraction was of the
> 'clean slate' variety, a once-in-a-lifetime
> opportunity not only to be born again but to be born
> in new clothes, as it were.  This new setting would
> provide new rainments of self.[...]  In the New World
> there was the vision of a limitless future, made more
> gleaming by the constraint, dissatisfaction, and
> turmoil left behind.  It was a promise genuinely
> promising.  With luck and endurance once could
> discover freedom; find a way to make God's law
> manifest; or end up rich as a prince.  The desire for
> freedom is preceeded by oppression; a yearning for
> God's law is born of the detestation of human license
> and corruption; the glamor of riches is in thrall to
> poverty, hunger, and debt.
>    "There was very much more in the late seventeenth
> and eighteenth centuries to make the trip worth the
> risk.  The habit of genuflection would be replaced by
> the thrill of command.  Power--control of one's own
> destiny--would replace the powerlessness felt before
> the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution.
> One could move from discipline and punishment to
> disciplining and punishing [...].  One could be
> released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into
> a kind of history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be
> inscribed.  Much was to be written there: noble
> impulses were made into law and appropriated for a
> national tradition; base ones, learned and elaborated
> in the rejected and rejecting homeland, were also made
> into law and appropriated for tradition.
>    "The body of literature produced by the young
> nation is one way it inscribed its transactions with
> these fears, forces, and hopes.  And it is difficult
> to read the literature of young America without being
> struck by how antithetical it is to our modern
> rendition of the American Dream.[...]  For a people
> who made much of their 'newness'--their potential,
> freedom, and innocence--it is striking how dour, how
> troubled, how frightened and haunted our early
> founding literature truly is." (pp. 33-5)
>
> Cf. ...
>
>    "Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America
> her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the
> metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in
> the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on
> West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written
> down, nor ever, by the majority of mankind, seen, --
> serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes,
> for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise,
> Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's
> Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next
> Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd
> and tied back in, back to the Net-Work of Points
> already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into
> the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to
> declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities
> that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away
> from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by
> one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that
> is our home, and our Despair." (M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345)
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html
>
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