Bongo's Aesthetics

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/26/2003 2:45:54 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
isread at btopenworld.com writes:


> Sidney Webb was a leading fabian socialist of the time. I don't know the
> book Pynchon refers to, but I imagine it would have addressed trade unions
> rights, social reform etc. Parliamentary representation for working people
> (in Britain the Labour Party). HBS reading a work of socialism makes 
> perfect
> sense - apparently, the bright young things in the CIA used to read Marx 
> and
> Mao to better understand what the free world was fighting against. Hence,
> the story asks who the enemy is, who is said to threaten national security 
> -
> colonial rivals in Paris and Berlin (or, conversely, London)? Or working
> people, whose allegiances are, by definition, class-based? The Second
> International never recovered from the support given by many socialists to
> the war effort in 1914: up to that point, it had been argued, within
> socialist circles, that war was impossible because workers would refuse to
> fight other workers. So once again questions of identity challenge national
> boundaries: working people have a shared experience/identity, as do
> Porpentine and Moldweorp.
> 
> 

Fascinating. And maybe an early example of Pynchon's technique of 
referring to multiple cultural processes (tendrils) on multiple levels all 
evolving together- as an organic whole- but just out of reach of any one
particular approach's ability to describe, understand or otherwise control 
(Give, Sympathize, Control?). One (although I'm not prepared to) 
could substitute Smith and Elliot for Porpentine and Goodfellow, and, 
Boas and Graebner for Moldweorp and Lepsius, and be talking about 
the English /German turn of the century battle over HIstoricism, 
Diffusionism, &c.

       http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/histor.htm

I suspect that the difficulty orchestrating all these cultural referents 
might be
part of what Pynchon is criticizing in the intro regarding his apprenticeship 

as a sorcerer. But one thing is clear, and which you refer to by noting the
challenge to arbitrary "national boundaries" by deeper (subrosa?) shared 
elements of "identity/experience," and that is: Pynchon's desire to explore
the inevitable dualities that arise when trying to understand history from 
both the individual and the statistical perspectives

The invention (or re-discovery) of the schlemeil may have been one
answer to that artistic dilemma for Pynchon. His discovery of Surrealism 
mght have been another useful technique for managing the burgeononing
dualities blossoming in all directions. Together they would add a
counter-weight to the huge ambition of the apprentice.

At any rate, this rose is becoming iridescent.

respectfully


     
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