Bongo's Aesthetics

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/27/2003 2:06:27 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
isread at btopenworld.com writes:


> Nostalgia locates a golden age somewhere in the past, close enough to recall
> without being so close it is recognisable as now. This is certainly
> Porpentine's position. His reluctance to acknowledge that Alexandria is "no
> conceivable Europe" (113) is realpolitik as ethnocentric myopia. Difficult
> to know how much the young Pynchon knew about, or was interested in, global
> politics. But he was a careful reader. The spy novels he cites as a source
> were another way of thinking globally. And his reference to the "idealised
> colonial Englishman" (113) echoes (to me, anyway) a similar description in
> Heart of Darkness, from which he might also have borrowed the idea of going
> native (114) and the journey into some kind of otherness (the train to
> Cairo

Your perspective continues to enlighten. A major conflict for 
Porpentine the spy, I'm convinced, is his need to develop and 
depend upon a sixth sense, while maintaining emotional distance, 
even from those closest to him. He wants have his femininity and 
to deny it (in the name of action), too.

Your comments bring to mind the attempt to conceptualize whole
cultures as individual entities, to rationalize: reduce and simplify 
"the other" in an effort to categorize and control them. I'm reminded 
of Rizzo ("I make bristle" in Italian) from "The Small Rain," and his
penchant for abstraction, and of Levine's distancing of himself from
Little Buttercup, while having sex with her. In _Hamlet_, from which 
Porpentine's name was pynched, the Ghost of Hamlet's father sez:


> I am thy father's spirit,
> Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
> And for the day confined to fast in fires,
> Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
> Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
> To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
> I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
> Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
> Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
> Thy knotted and combined locks to part
> And each particular hair to stand on end,
> Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
> But this eternal blazon must not be
> To ears of flesh and blood...

Maybe a subrosa suggestion that the technological superiority 
of the colonial powers, and the ratiocination on which it was
supposedly based, might lead to a special sort of hell- bad enough 
to make the "fretful porpentine" bristle. Maybe not.

But Porpentine, by circumstance, is forced to depend on intuition.

It might be some small measure of victory that he admits as much
to himself before his (inevitable?) fall. Goodfellow is not heir to it,
although we might be.

respectfully 

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