Pirate "pixilated" GR Part 1 Section 2

[Dave Monroe]

And then once for once you agree with a guy ...

--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> On 11/11/2005, at 10:56 AM, Michael J. Hußmann
> wrote:
> 
> > Given that "the firm" is a common euphemism for
> > an intelligence agency, I think this is a bit
> > far-fetched.
> 
> You're probably right ...

I wonder what provoked Robt.'s gracious demurral here,
though, again, I don't think Pynchon's target is quite
the same as say, Marx's, but, again, more along the
lines of someone not quite so left of center ...

http://www.eisenhower.utexas.edu/farewell.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

Nor was Ike's solely the military (I mean, he was a
five-star general an' all, so ...).  Key word:
"complex."  But in the "I'll take the Bleeding Obvious
for $500, Alex" sweepstakes ...

> And I think it will pay to keep an eye on whether
> "The Firm" and "They" are one and the same in the
> text. I think that "They" in GR is much more than
> just an intelligence agency.

Among other things ...

http://www.bartleby.com/59/3/wehavemetthe.html

"The Man has a branch office in each of our brains,
his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local
rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in
this world is Bad Shit.  We do know what's going on,
and we let it go on." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 712)

Cf., e.g., ...

This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. 
Let it unfurl." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 150)

But WWMBD?  Well ...

>From Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers:
Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), Chapter 4, "Against
the Avant: Pynchon's Products, Pynchon's
Pornographies," pp. 207-66:

Alec McHoul and David Wills ... have argued that
Gravity's Rainbow deconstructs the distinction not
only between elect and preterite but between "use and
mention, serious and parasitic, normal and citational"
as well, creating in place of these distinctions a 
"material typonymy" by which "a material equivalence
between the signifiers replaces a rhetorical
difference between them" ([Writing Pynchon] 1990,
53).... McHoul and Wills call [GR] "post-rhetorical,"
in that it "handles or plays with dualistic
differences such that they are overcome by making any
dilemma's dual aspects appear identical, these then
producing, cojointly, a new 'first' term for a
further, and qualitatively distinct, duality" ([WP]
54).... these are some of McHoul's and Wills's
examples:

    use/mention//material typonymy
    parable/parabola//rocket trajectory
    rocket/penis//Jamf
    penis/polymer//Imipolex
    reality/fantasy//cinema
    us/Them//Slothrop

The last two of these, I think, are the most "useful,"
in the sense that they are capable of being
reinscribed elsewhere; and to them I will add two of
my own:

    elect/preterite//cultural artifact
    production/consumption//transmission

For what is important about "fictions" in Gravity's
Rainbow is not that they can only mirror themselves as
tehy attempt to represent a world, nor that they give
equal space (an apparently equal gravity) to the
Duino Elegies and King Kong, Tannhauser and
underground comix .... ....  Rather, what is
distinctive about Gravity's Rainbow's postsomething
(-modern, -avantgarde, -rhetorical) treatment of
culture is that its emphasis is not on artifacts but
on their transmission and reinscription; not on
overturning the hierarchy between canonical and
apocryphal but on examining how the canonical and
apocryphal can do various kinds of cultural work for
variously positioned and constituted cultural groups.  (229)


	
		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com