antw. Re: Is this Book just a book? (was re: Religious Fundamentalism in Orwelland Pynchon)

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 06:13, lorentzen-nicklaus wrote:
> Terrance schrieb:
> > I've never read a convincing critical reading of GR that argues that the
> > War in SE Asia plays a role in GR. Can you point me to one or can anyone
> > point me to a few passages in the novel and explain to me how these
> > passages support such a reading.
> 
> 
>   ach terrance, does this bring us anywhere?! wie auch immer: it has already   
>   been said here that some of the war scenes read a lot more like vietnam than  
>   like ww II. and last year i asked the list whether one could say that the   
>   schwarzkommando from gravity's rainbow is echoing the afro-american vietnam   
>   experience. the one answer i got was from paul mackin who seems to have no   
>   problem with this perspective.



I'm curious about what I might have said. No present recollection. :-)

I would have no problem with accepting that echos of Vietnam are in
Gravity's Rainbow. Even if (unlikely) Pynchon had deliberately tried to
avoid Vietnam it would have been impossible writing in the early
seventies to do so completely.  Somehow Nam would have seeped in.
Nevertheless I can't at the moment think of anyplace in the book that
evokes Vietnam for me.

Looking at it from a slightly different angle, can anyone imagine
Pynchon writing a novel that was expressly about the Vietnam war. It
seems to me it would be a terribly uninspiring thing to surround a novel
the scope of GR with. The war was such a disaster from start to finish.
What much more can be said than that is should never have happened. And
Vietnam was such a pale reflection of WWII. This is not to imply that
the suffering caused by it was less horrendous. But there were no great
forces pitted against each other. There was no suspense about the
outcome. The outcome didn't matter even though it was an ignoble defeat
of the U.S. It was said long before the end that the U.S. should just
declare victory and go home.  Let's face it, the protest movement
against the war was more interesting than the war itself. Perhaps the
protest is what some p-listers have seen in GR rather than the war
itself.

Unlike WWII there were things going on in the U.S; in the seventies that
rivaled the war in importance. The women's movement leading to Roe vs
Wade leading in turn to the Sexual Revolution affected the average
American as much or more than Vietnam. If someone were to ask me what
aspect of the seventies rubbed off the most visibly in GR I would say
the sexual revolution. I realize  Slothrop's map was a bit of a fantasy
but it did reflect the fact that during the seventies in America having
sex with an amicable new acquaintance became about as casual and meant
about as much as shaking hands. Even though people did have casual sex
in the forties it was nothing like the seventies.  Roger and Jessica are
a reflection of the seventies, not the forties. It's hard to realize now
but during the war people got married in order to have sex. It actually
happened.

What any of this means I don't know.

P.  






>  note also that the counterforce is, unlike in v 
>   and the early stories, not simply a beatnik crew from the 1950s but a 
>   metaphorical incarnation of the post 1945 countercultures in general which 
>   thus includes the anti-war movement. and then there's this guy asking what? 
>   yet most important here is the dimension of technology: 'rocket-gnosticism' is 
>   not limited to nazi germany, no, not at all ... in this context the modern war 
>   never ever stops. each 'new' war is just there to bring up the current 
>   technology to the next level without changing the real masters and this - not 
>   so much the war profits - keeps the whole bad thing running. "nur der krieg 
>   macht es möglich, die sämtlichen technischen mittel der gegenwart unter 
>   wahrung der eigentumsverhältnisse zu mobilisieren" (walter benjamin: das 
>   kunstwerk im zeitalter seiner technischen reproduzierbarkeit). as i said, you 
>   won't find the word "vietnam" in gr, but then again not even you will go for  
>   the thesis that the rainbow is a historistic novel about ww II, oder etwa    
>   doch? perhaps it helps to think of another author for a minute: thomas mann   
>   wrote, between 1926 and 1943, among other things (check out the goethe-novel  
>   "lotte in weimar" from 1939, perfect in composition and incredibly funny!), 
>   the novel-tetralogy "joseph und seine brüder" that deals with the biblical 
>   story of joseph and his brothers; its last volume "joseph der ernährer", 1943, 
>   is also - although you cannot find a direct hint - about FDR (whom thomas 
>   mann met and admired) and the new deal. so great novels can be short-cuts 
>   between places and times ... just remember that keith recently described here 
>   how well his first gr read fitted to the tv experience of the gulf war in 
>   1991. true, between the novel and our every-day-life there's no 1:1 relation, 
>   and pynchon is neither a historian nor a sociologist nor a philosopher. 
>   however, radical art matters, and if you just want some entertainment after 
>   your ninetofive you better take the grisham ... great art, in contrary to   
>   this, is always 'philosophical' which goes especially for great novels with   
>   their necessarily discursive nature. where everything is bad it must be good  
>   to know the worst, as an english hegelian once said. now it's your turn ---
> 
>  KFL +
> 
>    
>