SLSL Intro: "if...I were...him"

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: Mutualcode at aol.com
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sunday, November 03, 2002 5:47 AM
Subject: Re: SLSL Intro: "if...I were...him"

> It's only lately that it occurred to me one reason the Intro
> is hard to swallow is that maybe it's just Pynchon being open,
> and, well, sincere. It disarmed me, at first, to hear the great mystery
> man, who had had such an impact on me, come out and so
> matter-of-factly discuss the flaws in his technique. Is this what
< he's really like? I asked myself.

I agree that he's open and sincere here. I don't read the intro as a story
and don't believe that there's another narrative agency but the author
himself. No "old handwriting", no Cherrycoke. He's very precise about what
he dislikes (and likes) in the stories.

> One wonders how this narrator would appraise the Katje/Pudding
> communion scene in GR.
>

Of course I can't tell how he would appraise it but I've read the
Katje/Pudding-scene always as a reversal of binary oppositions that
shows a deconstruction of the usual hierarchy.

> Perhaps that's what he intends for us to
> wonder.

No idea what intentions he had. I don't speculate about that.

> How did he get from here to there?

Through considering the post-war situation as an obscenity. The situation is
described later in the intro where he sets up the dichotomy between the
"criminally insane" (18) elect and the "rest of us poor sheep" (19), the
latter including himself. It's not a genuine Pynchon-idea but was widely
believed in the 60s and 70s among the Left that not the hippies but the
establishment (complaining about juvenile obscenity) with its war-machinery
& rocket-system threatening the whole world was/is an obscenity itself -- a
system molesting the youth. At the end of the intro he refers to Zappa (an
obscene master for the same reason himself) from the liner notes of "We're
Only It For The Money" -- another quote from that album could be the famous:
"All your children are poor unfortunate victims of systems beyond their
control" ("What's the Ugliest part of Your Body") which can be applied to
Katje, Slothrop, Bianca, Ilse and some other characters in the novel as well
as to the children in "The Secret Integration", where we already find
several elements very prominent in GR: statistics (142), racism (147,
151-52, 169), the map upon the wall (148-49), luddist concern about the
future (150), a kind of counterforce (Operation Spartacus, 155) bound to
blow up the boys' latrine as an act of revolution: "It's symmetry we're
after" (153). The director's office would be a much more worthwhile target,
but the latrine has a higher symbolic value: it's shit what you're doing
and: here we are all the same.

The Katje/Pudding-scene shows that there is no real reason for the elect to
consider themselves intrinsically of a somewhat "higher" value than the
rest, it's only a constructed fiction in a stable power-relation. Pudding
as part of the ruling British elite uses his power over Katje (who could be
his daughter) to subordinate himself in a play-situation where above and
below are reversed. Katje, who has been the Gretel in Blicero's black
fairytale, advances to Pudding's Domina Nocturna-fantasy, none of all of
this by her own free will or intention, in both cases only a tool of the
system's agents.

Of course the reversal here is only a game and only meant temporarily like
every carnival but it shows that the poles can be reversed and it reveals
that the higher pole of a binary opposition only "receives" and maintains
his assumed superiority through the existence of the pole considered to be
the subordinate one.

We may be weak and unimportant, just like children in relation to their
parents, but there's no need to believe either that any elite really is
better or to think there really could be a way out of of the system.

Nevertheless, resistance may be futile but it's not worthless. I think he's
content with some of his early material (22) because it already has got
glimpses of this special quality worked out to full orchestration in his
later novels. He defines his own role:

"Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it"
(19) -- a good reason to write.

Otto

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