SLSL: Robert D. Newman on Low-Lands (part 1)
Michel Ryckx
michel.ryckx at freebel.net
Mon Jan 6 09:53:38 CST 2003
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]
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