SLSL "TSR" - Hollander's article excerpts, continued

[pynchonoid]

Again, hoping that SLSL participants can keep the
focus on Hollander's intepretation, and avoid the ad
hominem attacks that have been the predilection of a
handfull of P-listers in the past.....


http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm
Charles Hollander, Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of
an Absence
originally published in: Pynchon Notes, 26-27
(spring-fall 1990, pp. 5-59 )

[...] To understand what's up, readers must,
rhetorically speaking, look for (or already carry in
mind) the enthymeme —the unexpressed principle or
unstated premise of an abridged syllogism, the part
left out, to be supplied by the hearer or reader. If I
say, "All men must die; Socrates is a man," the hearer
fills in, "Socrates must die." In terms of music,
readers must carry with them a humming knowledge of a
particular set of variations (say, Charlie Parker's or
Paganini's), so when another musician (say, Miles
Davis or Rachmaninoff) quotes the first,
reader-listeners can understand what is being done
—what amplification or inversion of an idea is being
implied. Pynchon corroborates this analysis of his
technique in "Integration," where the kids pass a joke
among themselves, a joke with a punchline withheld:
"Tim knew as well as Etienne, the professional comic,
when your listener had guessed your next line, so he
didn't say anything else." Thus Pynchon alerts us that
we will sometimes have to fill in the blanks, guess
the unwritten answers to camouflaged and abridged
syllogisms as well as jokes, historical allusions,
political references. Enthymematic technique is —has
been from the first— the essential Pynchon.

In this instance, Pynchon alludes to Pinafore (a light
and charming romance of confused identity, while "The
Small Rain" is a ghastly story filled with death)
after paraphrasing part of one of Jesus's most
enduring parables:
 	Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not so
much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had
no depth of soil: and when the sun rose it was
scorched, and since it had no root it withered away.
(Mark 4.5-6)	 

Further on in Mark is a passage about secrets being
revealed, and that is what Pynchon means to signal his
readers all along. As if to confirm, to say "Yes,
that's what I mean," Pynchon gives us "Little
Buttercup," who also reveals secrets. Pynchon leads us
from something in the text (the parable and "I'm
called Little Buttercup") to things related (secrets
revealed and "Things Are Seldom What They Seem") but
outside the text —often the most important message.

The title Gravity's Rainbow provides a similar
example. Much as Pynchon leads readers from items in
the text to nearly adjacent items in extra-textual
sources, he also leads us from English to other
languages —in this case German, then to German
synonyms or homonyms (usually thematically loaded
ones), and back to English. If "rainbow" is der
Regenbogen and "gravity" is Gravität, then Gravity's
Rainbow becomes Der Regenbogen von Gravität: not too
gripping. But it happens that an idiomatic synonym for
"rainbow" (according to Cassell's) is Parabel, as in
"parabola"; and schwer is also "gravity," as in
Schwer-punkt, "center of gravity." It seems we are
getting somewhere, except Parabel von Schwer is not
exactly arresting —until we substitute for schwer its
alternative meaning, "grave, serious, weighty," and
find that Parabel also mean "parable." So for
Gravity's Rainbow, in-and-out-again of schwer parabel,
we get A Grave Parable. Style melds with substance in
a quintessentially Pynchonian penchant, the
polylingual pun.

Pynchon himself indirectly confirms this way of
looking at word-play through other languages. In the
introduction to Slow Learner, discussing his story
"Entropy" and describing the historical use of the
term "entropy," Pynchon writes: "If Clausius had stuck
to his native German and called it [Entropy]
Verwandlungsinhalt instead, it could have had an
entirely different impact." The literal translation of
Verwandlungsinhalt is the "halting" or "stopping"
(Inhalt) of "transformation" or "metamorphosis"
(Verwandlung). We see Pynchon's familiarity with and
sensitivity to jumping in-and-out-again of various
languages, his understanding that an idea presented
via its German synonym can have "an entirely different
impact" —in this case the evoking of Franz Kafka,
which would be inappropriate. So Pynchon is selective,
also knowing when not to use this technique.

Pynchon constructs his parables out of rather
straightforward tales. In "The Small Rain" Army
Specialist 3/C Nathan "Lardass" Levine attaches
himself to a work detail and helps find and collect
the corpses of flood victims. After some byplay with
the other men in his unit, he makes love with a
college girl (identified only as little Buttercup). He
wears a baseball cap and smokes a cigar throughout
their strangely ritualistic coupling. He returns to
barracks, takes a shower, and sets out on his delayed
leave after commenting on the rain. At the story
level, this is all that happens. But with Pynchon, the
tale is never all.

Baxter, the name of one of the men in Nathan's unit,
is also the name of a Nonconformist English clergyman
of the 1660s, Richard Baxter (1615-1691). Capucci,
another soldier's name, reminds us of the order of
Franciscan monks, the Capuchins, who were a major
force in church activity during and after the
Counter-reformation, and who were early arrivals in
French Canada. And Levine is a member of the ancient,
hereditary Hebrew priest cast, the Levites, who date
back to Solomon and Zadok. So among apparently random
names, we have old Protestant, older Catholic, and
ancient Jewish clergy. By selecting such historically
resonant names, Pynchon evokes religious rituals.

Of the Levites it is proscribed, "none of them shall
defile himself for the dead among his people"
(Leviticus 21.1). So to cleanse himself after handling
the dead, Nathan takes a lengthy shower, one that
begins in sunlight and ends after sundown. When he
couples with little Buttercup, he does so with his
head covered, a sign of the Jew's humility before his
creator. Though there are hints that "the past [is]
beginning to close in," his ritual is not a Hebrew
one. In Buttercup's eyes, Pynchon writes, "there was .
. . something that might have been a dismayed and
delayed acknowledgment that what was hazarding this
particular plowboy was deeper than any problem of
seasonal change or doubtful fertility." Levine's
ritual is a pre-Christian, pre-Hebrew, pagan one.
Pynchon hints at Minoan culture with a casual
reference to Buttercup as "a never totally violated
Pasiphae." Then Nathan says, "'In the midst of Life.
We are in death.'" The various ancient rituals Pynchon
evokes are meant to insure that life shall triumph
over death on the heels of the hurricane. Levine plows
little Buttercup and sows his seed into her at a bayou
shack, serenaded by frogs, in an attempt to placate
the gods who have grown somehow angry. Pynchon
superimposes pagan, Hebrew, and Christian culture on
this one mimetic act of a hereditary priest. 

A few grace notes in this story barely want comment
but illuminate other thematic concerns that are
Pynchon's fingerprints. The first is a political note.
The destroyed town in the story is Creole, and the
victims of the flood are largely Cajuns. Cajuns are
descended from dispossessed Acadians, French Canadians
captured by the British in 1755 during the French and
Indian War, removed from their farms in Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick by force of arms, and forcibly
resettled on Bayou Teche. These folk, romanticized in
Longfellow's Evangeline, are the first of Pynchon's
subcultures of the dispossessed, not unlike the
Ojibwa, the gypsies, the Annamese, or the American
blacks who appear in the other short stories.

Another grace note is Pynchon's perception of the
affinity between Yankees and Jews. Levine confronts
his C. O., Lieutenant Pierce, to whom Pynchon
attributes "a precise, dry Beacon Hill accent." While
Levine is Bronx, CCNY, and an enlisted man, and Pierce
is Boston, MIT, and an ROTC officer:
 	There was an implicit and mutual recognition of
worth between them whenever things like this cropped
up. Outwardly neither had any use for the other; but
each had the vague sense that they were more alike
than either would care to admit, brothers, possibly,
under the skin.	 

By naming the C. O. Pierce, Pynchon evokes Franklin
Pierce (Hawthorne's Bowdoin College schoolmate),
fourteenth President of the United States, whose term
(1853-1857) marked continued attempts to avoid civil
war. This ties in with the quotations from Sherman, a
Civil War general, and Bradford, who died amidst civil
strife in England, and with the biblical Nathan, who
averted a civil war by mediating a succession
conflict. Pynchon appears particularly sensitive to
the consequences of civil war, as we will see.

So in his first story Pynchon tries out techniques he
will use later: misdirection, indicative naming,
fragmented quotation, emphasis on parables,
enthymemes, and layering of pagan, Hebrew, and
Christian mythologies. He also introduces some
thematic material he will return to: subcultures of
the disinherited, fraternizing of Yankees and Jews,
oblique references to American politics, and
sensitivity to dynastic succession and civil wars.
[...] 
 


-Doug


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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