SLSL: Robert D. Newman on Low-Lands (part 1)

[Michel Ryckx]

From:
Robert D. Newman, 'Understanding Pynchon,'
University of South Carolina Press, Columbia  (South Carolina), 1986.

Chapter 2: Slow Learner: Establishing Foundations (pp. 12-33)

"While Pynchon self-deprecatingly refers to the narrative voice in 
"Low-Lands" (1960) as that of a "smart-assed jerk who didn't know any 
better" (12), the story is well structured and rich in suggestion.  It 
extends Pynchon's use of  Eliot's "The Waste Land," descending into a 
fantastic underworld to escape from the surface world's stifling 
rationality.  Tony Tanner calls "Low-Lands" a rewriting of Washington 
Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." [2] Ironically, however, Pynchon's 
protagonist enters the dream state through an awakening.

Dennis Flange, a former naval communications officer who is currently a 
lawyer, stays home from his office to drink muscatel and listen to 
Vivaldi with the local garbageman, Rocco Squarcione.  Much to his wife 
Cindy's dismay, his former naval buddy, Pig Bodine, appears on the 
doorstep.  Pig becomes Pynchon's archetypal anarchistic slob, and he 
brings him back for encores in V. and Gravity's Rainbow.  Having lured 
Flange away on his wedding night seven years ago for a two-week drunken 
debauch, Pig has been banished by Cindy, who throws the three men out of 
the house and tells Flange not to return.

Flange's home life foreshadows the stultifying domesticity that we find 
on the opening page of COL49.  His two-story home is perched on a cliff 
overlooking the sea; Flange calls it his "womb with a view" (57).  It 
contains concealed passageways and a network of tunnels in the cellar 
constructed foor whiskey-running during prohibition.  However, 
prohibition in an emotional sense has ascended upstairs, for Flange 
practices "Molemanship," regressing into fetal positions and inertia.  
His marriage has attained nothing but bourgeois sterility.  Cindy has 
convinced Flange to purchase a $1,000 stereo system that she uses only 
as a surface for hors d'oeuvre dishes and cocktail trays/  Her 
one-dimensional logic also extends to a fondness for the sharp angles of 
Mondrian paintings, whi she hangs inside a domesticated police booth 
around which she grows ivy and to which Flange is banished whenever they 
have a fight.

Flange indulges in two forms of escape from the constraints of his home 
life. His sessions with his ananllyst, Geronime Diaz, depart completely 
from the overreliance on rationality that defines his life with Cindy.  
Diaz is the prototype for Dr. Hilarius of COL49 and for the scientists 
of The White Visitation in GR.  He believes he is Paganini and has lost 
his powers because he sold his soul to the devil.  His sessions with 
Flange consist of imbibing martinis and "reading aloud to himself out of 
random-number tables or the Ebbinghaus nonsense syllable-lists, ignoring 
everything that Flange would be trying to tell him. (58)

Flange's other indulgence is his thoughts of the sea with which he 
withdraws from the monotony of his life, seeking a cushion for his 
emotional pain.  However, his perspective on the sea lacks the important 
spatial dimension that he acquires when he descends from his house to 
arrive at sea level in the dump.

Rocco takes Flange and Pig to the dump, which is presided over by a 
watchman named Bolingbroke (Henry IV) who wears a porkpie hat for a 
crown.  In Bolingbroke's shack they swap sea stories over wine in a 
scene reminiscent of the "Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses [3].  Ironically, 
the story that Flange tells bears no relation to the sea, but recounts a 
fraternity prank with a stolen female cadaver.  His reason for relating 
this type of story asserts his passivity as a metaphysic:

"But the real reason he knew and could not say was that if you are 
Dennis Flange and if the sea's tides are the same that not only wash 
along your veins but also billow through your fantasies then it is all 
right to listen to but not to tell stories about that sea, because you 
and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious 
contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the 
truth's extent but the minute you become active you are somehow, if not 
violating a convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of 
things, much as anyone observing subatomic particles changes the works, 
data and odds, by the act of observing.  So he had told the other 
instead, at random.  Or apparently so (69)."

Flange invokes Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which holds 
that the position of a subatomic particle cannot be precisely determined 
without disrupting the system, for the paired qualities of position and 
motion cannot be measured concurrently.  For Flange, life and fantasy 
are precariously balanced, a balance preserved by passivity.  To tell a 
story would be to bring the fantasy world to an active level and thus to 
disrupt the equilibrium of the duality.

[cont'd]