Buber: Congealing the Whirl of Doom

[Dave Monroe]

Cont'd ... 

Slothrop. How about Slothrop? He surrenders the
ego-resistance that locks us up with our angers and
fears and protects us from our needs. 

Another romantic. Another Emerson, gazing deeply into
Nature and becoming what he sees: "I become a
transparent eye-ball. I am nothing [that's Slothrop,
all right, nothing]. I see all [a lot of good it does
me]. The currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God" (10).
Slothrop with Geli Tripping on the Brocken. But it
doesn't last, in Pynchon--"But the
Brockengespenstphänomen is confined to dawn's slender
interface, and soon the shadows have come shrinking
back to their owners" (330-31)--or in Emerson--"Man is
the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and
dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his
overflowing currents. . . . But, having made for
himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no
longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a
drop. He sees that the structure still fits him ['I
see all,' remember?], but fits him colossally" (Nature
42). Slothrop's scattering into the Zone is an
Emersonian apocalypse as loss: "Never to be carried by
a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it
might go on forever. No trees to climb, no long
journeys to take . . ." Slothrop escapes Their
clutches by escaping his masculine ego--and ceases to
exist. 

He ceases to exist as an ego, which Pynchon says is
the Man's local rep anyway. He ceases to exist as an
autonomous liberal subject, which is what the System
would like us all to believe we are--but we aren't.
We're enslaved through our egos to the System.
Slothrop loses himself into the Zone, loses awareness
of himself, dissolves out of human (especially
masculine) self-consciousness back into the chain of
life. His scattering feels terrible to us--because
They want it to feel terrible. They've trained us to
abhor the idea of self-loss, because the self is the
channel of Their control. 

You've bought into Pynchon's programmatic paranoia? 

There are other ways of saying it.... 

[...]

To the extent that Derrida associates all liberation
from what he calls the metaphysics of presence, and
what Marx calls capitalism, and what the feminists and
their masculist colleagues call patriarchy--to the
extent that he associates liberation from these
systems with the fulfillment of deferred desire, he
conspires in the systems he attacks. 

And Buber doesn't? 

Don't listen to Buber, then, listen to Deleuze and
Guattari again....

I think I prefer Emerson: "Thou shalt have the whole
land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and
navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods
and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess
that wherein others are only tenants and boarders.
Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow
falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and
night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is
hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms
with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into
celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and
love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for
thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over,
thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune
or ignoble" ("The Poet" 46). Emerson's ideal makes
Slothrop's failure so clear: he does have the whole
land for his park and manor. He is it. But what is he
to do with it? What is it to do with him? If Blicero
tries to incorporate the It into the I, Slothrop
allows the I to dissolve into the It. The "forms with
transparent boundaries" become the countries in the
momentarily fluid (Deleuze and Guattari would say
"deterritorialized") European Zone; the "outlets into
celestial space" become the rocket, Slothrop's true
father and true love. But his opportune condition will
never yield itself fully to him, never yield him up
the Text that he seeks. His only truly opportune
moments are his repeated ignoble and accidental
escapes from Them. 

"Danger, and awe, and love"--Slothrop loves every
woman he meets. His love for the treacherous Katje
brings her (well, arguably) into the Counterforce.
Arguably, too, his love for Geli Tripping gives her
the witchy power over her lover Tchitcherine's
brother-hatred, so that Enzian passes by him unharmed.
Enzian survives his demonic-You Ideal-I Blicero, and
his rival-sibling Tchitcherine, to become one of the
novel's only fully alive characters--dialogically
connected to his community. 

Not thanks to Slothrop. Slothrop connects, I guess,
but only indiscriminately and impermanently--which is,
of course, his salvation. A committed love would tie
him to place and time, would fix his connective
options, and that would obviously allow Them to
reincorporate him into Their designs. But the mobility
and indiscriminacy of his connections is also a
failure and a loss....

[...]

Running down, Pynchon's critics say, entropy, is the
great theme of his work. But Pynchon fights entropy
wherever he finds it.... 

To reverse entropy would be to reverse time. 

[...]

A movie run backwards as salvation from time, decay,
death. This is an aestheticist withdrawal into pure
fantasy. 

Quantum physicists say that at the subatomic level
"time irreversibility is an artiface of the
measurement process" (Zukav 239n). What if that could
work in history too? What if it's in Their interests
to have us believing that time is irreversible?
"Springer," Slothrop protests at one point, "this
ain't the fucking movies, now, come on," and Springer
replies, "Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better
enjoy it while you can. Someday, when the film is fast
enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and
selling at people's prices, the lights and booms no
longer necessary, then . . . then . . ." (527). Then
the artist's dialogue with the universe may make it
possible to reverse time, control entropy, avert the
apocalypse. "Nothing can doom man but the belief in
doom, for this prevents the movement of return." 

[...]

http://home.olemiss.edu/~djr/pages/writer/books/html/3dialogs/buber.html

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