Pynchon's Politics

[Dave Monroe]

>From Charles Hollander, "Pynchon's Politics: The
Presence of an Absence," Pynchon Notes 26-27
(Spring-Fall 1990), pp. 5-59 ...

"Low-Lands," Pynchon's third story, is partly a
playful Nabokovian parody of "The Waste Land." Some
critics have made overmuch of the Eliotic
correspondences .... Flange can be seen as a traveler
in the waste land, similar to Eliot's figure of the
man who draws the Tarot card of the Phoenician
Sailor.... In lieu of of Eliot's hanged man, we get
—in Flange's tale of a fraternity house stunt that
ends with a stolen female cadaver hanging out of a
window— the hanged woman. Flange is awakened by the
siren voice of a gypsy girl —Eliot's "voices singing
out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells." The gypsy
girl has a pet rat named Hyacinth, which evokes
Eliot's hyacinth girl.

But Pynchon is not out to one-up Eliot, nor to make
fun of him. He is using the most studied poem in
modern literature as a familiar point of departure,
like a well-known joke, to set us up for the twist,
the kicker, the inversion, the introduction of his own
thematic material. "The Waste Land" is the referent
which makes the enthymeme work. In this case, Pynchon
suggests that beneath the sterile wasteland of modern
America are pockets of vital culture that have been
thriving since the Depression.

Dennis Flange, who works in a New York law firm, is
"fortune's elf-child and disinherited darling, young
and randy and more a Jolly Jack Tar than anyone human
could possibly be" (my emphasis), now grown a little
older and living off a cliff overlooking Long Island
Sound in a huge rising out of a tumulus above a
catacomb of secret tunnels and passageways built by
rum-runners during Prohibition. Flange, Pynchon's
second stoic, expresses his philosophy by practicing a
form of "Molemanship," [6] burrowing into his house
with a passivity that verges on inertia....

[...]

Pynchon/Flange evokes Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle to justify, in pseudoscientific idiom, the
stoic outlook. To become active and intervene in
events (the old definition of virtu?) is to change
them. If things (objects, people, events) have a
nature, then they should follow the natural laws that
apply. To become active is to resist Providence as
well as to throw objects and observer into an
ever-changing motion for which there is no parallax
equation. So Flange is a stoic, believing the action
that action screws up the the perspective of things
and violates the truth.

Flange and Rocco Squarcione (Square chin?), the
Vivaldi-loving garbage man, are drinking and listening
to the hi-fi when who should arrive after a seven-tear
hiatus but Pig Bodine, Pynchon's lovable grotesque and
all-around pervert. Flange's wife is so incensed by
the three musketeers that she kicks Flange out: "'Out
of my life, is what I mean.'" So now Flange is an
actual as well as a metaphorical outcast, removed from
his property, dispossessed, Squarcione drives Flange
and Bodine to a junkyard, the realm of his pal
Bolingbroke, the Black nightwatchman, and leaves.
Bolingbroke welcomes the two to his castle, a shack
built from discarded trash of the civilization and
decorated "with photographs clipped out of every
publication, it seemed, put out since the Depression"
(my emphasis). They sit around. They swap sea stories.
Flange tells the hanged woman story for stoical and
Eliotic reasons. They sleep. To Flange the dump is "an
island or enclave in the dreary country around it, a
discrete kingdom with Bolingbroke its uncontested
ruler." Pynchon's choice of the name "Bolingbroke"
(the historical Bolingbroke became England's Henry IV)
for the night watchman signals some inversion.

The dump itself sits on another catacomb of tunnels
and passageways, this one built during the Depression
by the terrorist Sons of the Red Apocalypse in
preparation for revolution. After Federal agents
busted the Sons, the gypsies took over and have been
there ever since, for at least a generation. This
dump, this junkyard, this accretion of debris and
detritus, seems a frightening image: a literal waste
land, sinking lower and lower with accumulated
sterility, and ruled by an alcoholic nightwatchman
named, ironically, for British royalty. Bolingbroke
became Henry IV when his ouster of Richard II was
ratified by Parliament in 1399, so the nightwatchman
is named for the victor in a past civil conflict. Up
to this point, this is how it seems. But Little
Buttercup has alerted us: things are seldom what they
seem.

During the night Flange is beckoned by Nerissa, an
angelic gypsy girl, to come to her. He does. After
Flange is drowned in a sea of old tires and
resurrected by her kindness, Nerissa leads him ...
through a General Electric refrigerator door to the
catacombs. They wiggle down and around, through a
series of tight squeezes and through concrete sewer
pipes until they come to Nerissa's room:

[...]

The apparent waste land is actually teeming with life,
art, music, and the technological sophistication to
sustain itself. By day the gypsies remain out of
sight, but by night they forage for food and supplies
and manage to carry on a lively village existence.
This vital culture has thriven for decades, since the
Depression, under the noses of the authorities.

Bolingbroke is not the only Shakespearean name that
leads us beyond the text. Pynchon's gypsy girl recalls
Nerissa, handmaiden to Portia in The Merchant of
Venice, whose only memorable lines are:

  The ancient saying is no heresy
Hanging and wiving goes by destiny. (2.9.82-83)   

So here we have Flange, disaffected and dispossessed
by his wife of seven childless years, a "moleman," who
meets the gypsy Nerissa, a "molewoman." This is the
abridged syllogism we are to fill in, recognizing that
Pynchon has set up with the story of "the hanged
woman" and the evocation of Eliot —so readers will get
it: hanged man, hanged woman; moleman, molewoman. [7]
And since Flange is also a stoic, if he can recognize
Nerissa as his counterpart, the he should yield to
Providence. He does....

Flange sees Nerissa poetically, in fertile sea
imagery: "Whitecaps danced across her eyes; sea
creatures, he knew, would be cruising about in the
submarine green of her heart." And since he has
already identified himself as a man in whom "the sea's
tides are the same that not only wash along your veins
but also billow through your fantasies," he decides to
stay with her and get her with child —she is so
obviously fecund. The story ends on this note, and we
are never quite sure if this is meant as reality or
Flange's fantasy; but the whole story is so surreal it
hardly matters.

"Low-Lands" can be seen schematically as follows:
Flange is sick of his life in his "dreary country,"
sick of his marriage with only "now infrequent moments
of tenderness," sick of his psychiatrist's "random
sort of madness." By an act of Providence, Pig Bodine
shows up, and that triggers Mrs. Flange's similar
dissatisfaction: "'Out that door,' she said, pointing,
'over the hill and far away. Or over the cliff, I
don't care.'" Bodine's somehow
somehow-previously-established swinishness does little
else in the story but trigger these estrangement. Of
course Flange, the stoic, goes to the dump, passively,
not wanting to interfere with the course of events. At
the dump everything is inverted: instead of Eliot's
active society of busy but hollow men and barren women
concealing an arid and sterile wasteland, this land of
waste conceals a vital society and a fertile woman who
believes Flange is the Anglo husband Providence has
sent her to fulfill her prophesied fate; for "wiving
goes by destiny" (which could have served equally well
as the story's title).

The entrance to this secret world is through a G.E.
refrigerator door. G.E. is the only corporate name
mentioned among mountains of cars, tires,
air-conditioners, beds, mattresses, etc. Why G.E.?
Couldn't Pynchon have chosen a Westinghouse, Norge,
Kelvinator, Whirlpool, or Coldspot? Is this the one
thing, The One Thing, that is to trigger frantic
mental operations in the mind of the reader-detective?
Do Those Who Know, know.

http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_9

http://www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm

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