conservative P

[Dave Monroe]

>From Charles Hollander, "Pynchon's Inferno," Cornell
Alumni News (Nov. 1978): 24-30 ...

   Pynchon’s family is traceable back to the eleventh
century....

[...]

   In more recent times there was a rather prominent
stock brokerage called Pynchon & Co....  They were one
of the largest brokerages in the country, if not the
world. When Pynchon & Co. talked, people listened;
they were, in a word, influential. 
   In April 1929, Pynchon & Co. announced they would
be opening a new Chicago office. By December 1929,
after October 24 or the Black Thursday of the stock
market crash, the firm had had noticeable
reversals....  The Irving Trust Co. took charge as
receiver. According to the respected financial
historian, Ferdinand Lundberg, the Irving Trust Co.
was a bank in the Morgan-DuPont sphere at the time.
   According to the Times, Pynchon & Co. was the
largest brokerage ever to have been suspended from the
NYSE. The day after the Exchange announced the
suspension of Pynchon & Co., the Times noted a drop in
the value of US Steel and Johns Manville stock, two
firms closely associated with J.P. Morgan.

[...]

   We can only infer from the reaction of the stock
market to the failure of Pynchon & Co., the use of the
Irving Trust Co. as receiver, that the firm was a
Morgan satrap. The Pynchons appear to have used to
advantage all of their family associations with the
J.P. Morgan group, with whom they had shared common
interests since the founding of the colonies in 1630.
Yet as the J. P. Morgan influence ebbed, the Morgan
associates suffered as well. Once again the Pynchon
clan had thrown its lot in with the loyalists and
lost. 
   The Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. with whom we are
concerned wasn’t born until the sordid and humiliating
drama of the Pynchon clan had been played out,
1937....  Apparently Pynchon Sr. was never in the
high-finance circle of the Pynchon family....
   Although Thomas Jr. enjoyed the felicities of a
middle class upbringing, in his art Pynchon's
sympathies are repeatedly with the losers, the
victims, the disinherited, and this preoccupation
began with his earliest writings....  In Pynchon’s
shorter works, where brevity forces his concerns to
the surface, he seems more explicitly interested in
the victims of the Great Depression, which he hardly
mentions in his novels, and their secret plans for
return. 
   In Pynchon’s works railroads and tracks and
particularly deserted railroad track beds, become an
image of the old industrial order. It is the losers,
the disinherited, who people the old railroad tracks,
creating hobo villages, whole communities of the
dispossessed....  Disinherited all. 
   We have seen that in Pynchon disinheritance leads
to paranoia leads to apocalypse, or at least a wish
for retaliation. We have groups planning for their
moment of opportunity such as The Sons of the Red
Apocalypse, The Schwarzkommando, The Tristero, etc. We
have seen that Pynchon’s family was aligned with the
old order, the J. P. Morgan group, and that Pynchon. &
Co. was brought down at the time of the stock market
crash in a way that cast some suspicion on the Chase
National Bank, one of the Rockefeller banks. We find
Pynchon, not in the mountains leading insurrection, a
modern "El Desheredado," an American Che; but at his
typewriter seeking revenge.

[...]

   Oedipa’s concern for the Tristero leads us to the
relationship of the Thurn and Taxis with the
Rothschilds. Further reading of the Rothschild history
reveals that they were frequent banking allies of the
Morgans from the 1870s through the 1920s and perhaps
to this day. 
   The Rothschilds cooperated with the Morgans in the
refinancing of the New York Central Railroad
(railroads again) in 1877, and in 1895 the Rothschilds
were instrumental in stemming the "free silver" panic
which nearly bankrupted the US government. Together
with the Morgans, they formed a syndicate of
international bankers who came to the rescue, with a
tidy profit for themselves of course. In 1918, there
was a currency raid on the French franc. In order to
stem the tide, the French Rothschilds formed a secret
combine with J. P. Morgan, who reasoned that if France
were allowed to slide into an economic slump America
would suffer as well.

[...]

   Pynchon ... highlight[s] the curious reality that
somehow the Germans, whose population was decimated,
whose industrial capacity was crippled, recovered to
become the strongest economic force in postwar Europe.
Conversely, the Rothschilds, presumably on the winning
side of the war, never regained their former
preeminence in European finance, as the Morgans never
regained theirs in the US. How did this happen? In
Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon tries to answer, or hint at
answers to, the questions implied in Lot 49. He
vaguely identified the “ultimate Plot Which Has No
Name . . . The Big One, the century’s master cabal” in
V. (210). He pointedly led us to the Rothschilds and
the Morgans in Lot 49. In Gravity’s Rainbow he will
repeatedly suggest secret industrial and economic
liaisons, interlocking conspiracies, paranoia
accelerating as we go toward our enlightenment which
takes place at, of all places, a petroleum refinery.
(520)
    For Pynchon, World War II was a monstrous
holocaust, a cataclysm of 40 million souls, resulting
from a competition among technologies. The old
dynasty, the J. P. Morgan dynasty, was built on the
technologies of coal, steel, and railroads; the newer
Rockefeller dynasty on the technologies of oil
(petrochemicals, plastics), aluminum, and aircraft.
Pynchon says that World War II was a corporate war
reflecting those technologies, that for many their
“first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate
[corporation] she represents. Not to our boys in
uniform [the nation-state], however gallant, whenever
they died” ( Lot 49, 53).

[...]

   By referring to this multinational liaison as "the
century’s master cabal," Pynchon is suggesting more
than corporate cooperation. He is suggesting that
World War II was part of the "Plot Which Has No Name,"
the concerted effort by the new dynasty to bring down
the old dynasty. This is hinted at again and again in
the book....

[...]

   Pynchon’s bitterness and fearfulness come in again,
as he discusses the winners of the competition, the
disinheritors, "human elite with no right at all to be
where they are." He sounds like his own character, El
Desheredado, too strident, too petulant. He would have
us believe that the losers are somehow the true
nobility, that losing is, itself, ennobling. 

[...]

   Pynchon, by having Slothrop as Rocketfellow
disintegrate, implies the oil dynasty will go the
parabolic way of all history’s dynasties, and by
arguing for Return suggests that maybe the coal and
steel boys, the Morgans and the Rothschilds, might be
there at the end to pick up the pieces. In the
meantime, "Their entire emphasis is now toward
silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as
allegiance." 
   While Pynchon has fun at the expense of the
Rockefellers, he also fears them ....

[...]

Apparently the dynastic conflict rages on. We may be
living through another installment in an American War
of the Roses, complete with spies, double agents,
agent provocateurs, and the like.
   At the time that Pynchon began writing Gravity’s
Rainbow, paranoia may have been the appropriate
response for all of us to the events of the day. Given
Pynchon’s family background, we can see how paranoia
came to be a driving force within Pynchon’s writing.

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm



	
		
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