ATDDTA (6) 166 - 170 a

[John BAILEY]

Great post.

Those Pynchonian moments of kindness unrewarded - as well as wickedness unpunished - seem really important when considered as alternatives to the closed systems P seems so suspicious of. Political, social, and increasingly (I'd argue) religious: if a kind of variant of Buddhism seems to underlie some of these later novels, I think that the idea of karma is always treating warily, since isn't it very much one of those closed systems that work to exclude and generate (human) waste? Compassionate acts performed so that that kindness will come back to you, well, they're still part of an economy of expenditure and return.

Just thinking of this stuff in relation to Bataille and Baudrillard's notion of symbolic exchange/economies, which seem to be attempts to establish an economy which isn't closed, and incorporates (celebrates?) waste rather than denying it. 
"For Bataille, human beings were beings of excess with exorbitant energy, fantasies, drives, needs, and heterogeneous desire" which seems to describe well humans in P's novels, too.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#2

I've also long thought that the structural excess of Pynchon's novels, the fact that they're so damn overstuffed with concepts, characters, references etc is an attempt to echo in form that thematic interest in recovering the remaindered elements, allowing the reader to become aware of their own role in the production of waste (forgetting, ignoring or "writing off" certain aspects of the novel in favour of others).

For me of course (thanks Dave) this all ties in with the concept of machinery and the automaton in Pynchon - early on, machines as self-sufficient or self-regulating things which convert energy to waste are treated with suspicion, but pretty soon (by COL49, maybe; GR definitely) it's not machines but the idea of the Total Machine which is pinpointed as the problem, and the only possible Total Machine is in fact something like a conceptual system, an ideology, maybe society itself. Actual machines are eventually treated with much more fondness, being the dumb, fallible, erratic things that we, er, they are.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Tore Rye Andersen
Sent: Friday, 6 April 2007 6:44 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Cc: bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net; monte.davis at bms.com
Subject: RE: ATDDTA (6) 166 - 170 a

bekah quoted:

>167: 20   Fleetwood:  "I used to read Dickens as a child. The cruelty
>didn't surprise me, but I did wonder at the moments of uncompensated 
>kindness, which I had never observed outside the pages of fiction. "

- and Monte commented:

>Perhaps setting up an echo for the book's last page? "For every wish to 
>come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and un- 
>compensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more access- 
>ible to us."

This uncompensated kindness/good is put into practice by Stray and others during the strike in Colorado. Doc Turnstone tells Frank that:

"There's a sort of informal plexus of people working as best they can to help the strikers out. Food, medicine, ammunition, doctoring. Everything's voluntary. Nobody makes a profit or gets paid, not even credit or thank-yous." (997)

And in the tent camp we hear of this little credo which Stray has taught her son Jesse:

"She had taught him never to claim credit for anything if he could help it." 
(1008)

Kindness has always been an extremely positive force for Pynchon, and one gets the feeling that the author puts more stock into small. local kindnesses than in over-arching and idealistic political projects. Kindness may not be as radical a force of political change as, say, fully fledged Anarchism, but it's something, and if universally practiced, the world would be an infinitely better place.

In his afterword to 'Lolita', Nabokov defined art as "curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy", and I've always felt that this definition was a pretty good definition of Pynchon's art as well. One of the most beautiful instances of kindness in Pynchon's work has for me always been the relationship between Slothrop and Tantivy. During an awkward moment in a conversation between the two friends, we hear that "kindness is a sturdy enough ship for these oceans", and that "when it's really counted, Tantivy hasn't ever let him down" (GR, 21; and when Tantivy disappears, "Slothrop misses him, not just as an ally, but as a presence, a kindness." (GR, 210). 
Even the official obituary speaks of Tantivy's "kindness of heart" (252).
At another point in GR, during the singing-duel witnessed by Tchitcherine, kindness is described as some sort of glowing force:

"Now and then he glances over at the old aqyn, who only appears to be sleeping. In fact he radiates for the singers a sort of guidance. It is kindness. It can be felt as unmistakably as the heat from the embers." (GR,
357)

Kindness - or more precisely, what one of Pynchon's disciples David Foster Wallace calls "raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness" (Infinite Jest, 203) - is a seemingly modest and innocuous force, but in the wise words of Darth Vader, one should never underestimate the power of this Force in Pynchon's (or Dickens', Nabokov's, and Wallace's) work.

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