Bolingbroke Down in the Dumps

[tess marek]

Thomas Pynchon was born and raised on Long Island.
Low-lands is set there on the Island's North Shore
(see Gold Coast).  Long Island is a long, narrow
island of southeast New York bordered on the south by
the Atlantic Ocean and on the North by  Long Island
Sound, an arm of the Atlantic that separates the
island  from Connecticut.  The western part of Long
Island includes two boroughs of New York City-Queens
(Jackson Heights, where the Flange couple lived prior
to moving to Long Island, is a beautiful town in
western Queens) and Brooklyn. The Island has seen
tremendous industrial and residential growth since
1945 (see Levittown) , although there are still resort
communities along its shoreline. Long Island (see This
Fine Piece Of Water) has a garbage problem. More on
this later. 

The world P creates in this story is his imagined
world at times it is the imagined world of his
protagonist Dennis Flange. As in Small Rain,  Flange
is sort of a Fisher King-- mixing memories and
desires, Wasteland/Fertility and mock romance. These
elements can be attributed to young Tom's
preoccupation with the T.S. Eliot and thus The Golden
Bough and Weston's From Ritual to Romance. In both SR
and LL, the Fisherking is  Prufrockian. So, for
example, Flange is a Communication specialists with an
inability to say exactly what he means or communicate
fertility.  And, although the worlds in these tales
are pure fiction, P incorporates accurate details of
landscape, topography, weather, history, architecture,
so on. 

When the boys leave the Flange residence, they head
downhill and South to the dump. Although Long Island
is very flat, there are some samll hills and the 
highest lands are (for the most part) on the North
Shore where the Flange couple lives. You can ride a
century on LI's South Shore from Massapequa to Montauk
and never worry about hills. So with a tail wind it's
the perfect place to do your first hundered mile ride.
 The dumps on Long Island were in the lowerlands or
middle of the Island. That's where Bolingbroke would
live. That's where the industry was and that's where
most of Long Islands poor, Black, Latino, peoples have
lived and still do.  By the time we get to "The Secret
Integration" Pynchon has Learned something about these
things and by the time we get Marvy up on the
train/screen and Malcolm in GR and Dixon punching a
slave driver, he has learned quite a lot. I'm not sure
if Pynchon ever succeeds with a Black character. Not
sure if he ever succeeds with a female character or a
Latino. Maybe in VL. In any event, it's obvious that
Pynchon learns and his learning changes his characters
and his stories. Although McAfee (another vagrant,
alcoholic, infantile, stereotype)   is not a huge
improvement on Bolingbroke, that story and the Watts
essay, are indicative of Pynchon's seriousness about
saying something positive and meaningful about  race
relations  in the US. Pynchon's problem, to an extent,
is America's problem too--how literature can say
something about racial differences. Pynchon's anxiety
and influence are exposed in GR where he alludes to
several Black and Latino authors. IN these early
tales, Eliot, Hemingway, the boys adventure tales, spy
and detective fiction, (even in SI it is Twain), TV
and popular films and magazines continue to influence
young Tom. But young P, although never exposed to the
dumps (must have been quite a shock when he moved to
Mexico City) begins to recognize that his books and
magazines and music and so forth, are filled with
garbage. Being "a boy genius with flaws", he begins to
fill his world with stuff from down in the dumps. 




Fat of the Land. Garbage of New York: The Last Two
Hundred Years  by Benjamin Miller. Four Walls Eight
Windows, 2000

http://www.springharborpress.com/fat_of_the_land.htm

1955   With consumer prosperity at an all-time high in
the United States, Life magazine  heralds the advent
of the "throwaway society."

1958-1976 The amount of packaging produced and
disposed of in the United States increases by 67
percent, due to the increase in consumerism after
World War II. 

Milestones in Garbage
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/timeline_alt.htm




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