Pynchon and fascism

[Paul Nightingale]

Michael Joseph wrote:

> 
> Paul, I'm tempted to agree with you, but I wonder if I might ask for
> clarification, so I can better understand your point. When you say
"real
> world,"  I presume that you are referencing what might be called
"material
> actuality," that you do not mean to imply a value judgment or confer
> ontological status upon it, and hence you do not mean to suggest that
text
> (broadly interpreted) occupies a one down position.

Yes. The world-as-text approach, to put it crudely, has often been
criticised for its failure to take into account material actuality, ie
the real world in which people suffer etc. Baudrillard was criticised
for saying the Gulf War (I think the quote is) only happened on
television. Well no it didn't, the bombs were real. His point (the
hyperreality argument) was that media images no longer have any obvious
connection to reality, they exist independently, the image has become
its own reality rather than being a referent. Hence people watching TV
coverage might make sense of the war through their familiarity with
Hollywood films (eg Top Gun).

> That's not a question,
> by the way, but an observation, although the 'clear goblet'
implication of
> the term "mediator" is problematical. Anyway, that's a bit of a sticky
> wicket, and beside the point, which is, what you mean specifically by
> "know." Do you mean that language, as a body of culturally constructed
> codes of signification, precedes the relationship between the self and
> experience? That seems to be how your respondants have interpreted
your
> statement, and runs smack into the "he never knew what hit him"
problem.

Yes, I've noticed that. I might have taken greater care to avoid that
confusion.

> However, another way of interpreting your statement, would be to
> understand "know" to signify an act of conceptualization in which
symbol
> making is essential. Thus, the only way we can understand, make sense
of,
> and communicate about the chaotic, evanescent, unpredictable and
> unrepeatable experiences of the world is through the mediating agency
of
> language.
> 

You have put it more eloquently than I did, although I have linked
'know' with 'make sense of'. I've just responded, in another post, to
the view that the victim of fascism knows it because they're a victim,
so I won't go into that again. Perhaps here I might put it this way. I
am being interrogated/tortured by the secret police in Nazi Germany or
Stalinist Russia. I know I'm an enemy of the regime, perhaps because I'm
Jewish or a Trotskyist, whatever. That my body is being abused precedes
my recognition of that abuse, insofar as I can only know something that
has already happened. However, the way I understand being tortured, the
form taken by my understanding, requires a broader knowledge of what
exactly is going on in society. Hence, my anticipation of being arrested
and tortured is based on what I have learned (since I'm not born with a
knowledge of torture, even if I'm born with the capacity to feel pain).
Hence I might be inclined to go underground/into exile or pretend I'm
not Jewish or a Trotskyist because I think it a good idea to avoid being
arrested, and so on. There's a lot of 'knowing' and 'making sense of'
there.

Now, as a way to start getting back to Pynchon, consider the political
prisoner in Elizabethan/Jacobean England, also a police state in which
torture was routine. I think Shakespeare deals with such political
realities, for example, and Middleton's A Game of Chess was a victim of
political censorship etc, but does it make sense to refer to that time
as a police state? I've just done so as a convenient shorthand, but the
word 'police' and the word 'state' didn't have the same meanings then.
Let's agree the body being abused in both cases experiences the same
pain: does it make sense to apply the term 'fascist' to the Elizabethan
torturers? Pynchon isn't referring to Shakespearean England, but ...

Anyway, thanks for your lengthy response, and I hope I'm making sense
here.