Pynchon and War

[pynchonoid]

Mr. T:
>An example. Robert says that currently there is no
>actual war to stop
>and you disagree. Why not define war first. 


I did provide a rudimentary definition in my response,
of course (fighter planes, bombs and rockets, death
and destruction). And, I'm hardly the only person who
sees war happening in the Middle East, within and
without Iraq's borders; I also agree with those
peaceloving people who would like to stop the war
between Israel and the Palestinians. 

>No, you say, define it as
>you like because you can resist delivering another
>newspaper and two
>scoops of poop. 


Flamebait.  Where are the Netiquette Police when you
need one?


>we don't need to read and reread the newspapers 

You're against examining an issue from multiple points
of view?  

I know (because we talk about it offlist) quite a few
of us could do without Mr T's endless -- and generally
unintelligible -- rehashing of Congressional politics
and War-related stuff, huge chunks of whatever Mr T's
reading currently (Melville, Burton, etc.) with no
connection to anything currently being discussed on
Pynchon-L. If you're worried about the discussion
drifting away from Pynchon, take your own medicine,
Doc, and keep the focus on Pynchon.


War is also what Pynchon calls the War that Never
Ends; an article about Pynchon and Clausewitz is worth
reading on this topic:

http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/4E/Spencer.html

Clausewitz and Pynchon: Post-Romantic War in Gravity's
Rainbow
Nick Spencer
Emory University


"[...] In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow,
technologization and bureaucratization further
threaten the romanticist components of Clausewitz's
definition of war. Khachig Tölölyan, in his `War as
Background in Gravity's Rainbow,' discusses the
routinization of war in the context of both the V-2
program and the IG Farben cartel, which represent the
interfacing of science, business, the military and the
political hierarchy and bureaucracy within the Nazi
military-industrial complex or any other modern war
state. The program and the cartel are, for Tölölyan,
the means by which Pynchon evokes war as a state of
power which is designed to endure beyond the limits of
total war. War is utilized by those power structures
embodied in the program and the cartel "to blind us to
their own existence" (Tölölyan 60), an existence which
remains precisely the same in periods of war and
non-war. [...] 

Since war in Gravity's Rainbow refers to a
post-military phase, the romanticist notions of the
individual military genius and the nation-in-arms have
clearly become redundant. The agency of the political
has also been undermined in Gravity's Rainbow. Power
is invested in the increasingly autonomous
multinational corporations and supra-military rather
than in national governments or political leaders.
[...]  In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon represents the
transpolitical by extrapolating the implications of
historians' speculations, and suggesting that both war
and politics are ruses or fronts for the
reconfiguration of power. Both Joseph Borkin and
Richard Sasuly, two of the most prominent historians
of the IG Farben cartel in the Nazi era, make
reference to the possibility that IG Farben was
pursuing a "transmartial" policy whereby war was
simply a means of preparing and reconfiguring power
which was to be attained in the postwar phase.[...] 

The textual hypothesis of Gravity's Rainbow is that
war structures are not simply extended into the phase
of pure war, but that they are fulfilled in the
absence of combat. Actual war may be declared, but as
some form of alibi, aimed at suggesting that war is an
exceptional rather than a typical state of affairs. In
Gravity's Rainbow, this dynamic is exemplified by
Enzian's illumination in the disused and decrepit Jamf
Ölfabriken Werke AG (a Nazi oil refinery), an
experience which intensifies Sasuly's ruminations on
the IG munitions installations and Motor Works in
Bavaria. Enzian realizes that the factory has in fact
been reconstituted in perfect working order rather
than destroyed by the Allied bombing, and he concludes
that the functioning of the refinery during wartime
was simply a preliminary operation which is now
facilitating its true, intended functioning in the
postwar phase. Accordingly, total war is not `war' at
all, it is, for Enzian, the preparation for the
ultimate state of war, the state of simulated war:


This serpentine slag-heap he [Enzian] is just about to
ride into now, this ex-refinery...is not a ruin at
all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for
the right connections to be set up, to be switched
on...modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that
was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides -
"sides?" - had always agreed on [...] if what the IG
built on this site were not at all the final shape of
it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to
call down special tools in the form of 8th AF
bombers...the bombing was the exact industrial process
of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly
in space and time, each shockwave plotted in advance
to bring precisely tonight's wreck into being (GR
520). [...] 














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