Wood review in LRB

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

--------What the ghost still doesn't get is what the rest of the book is 
trying to tell us, in more ways than I have yet managed to count: that 
anger is only one mode of resistance, that resistance itself is not 
always the right term for whatever it is that takes us out of the day or 
sets us against it. One way of approaching an understanding of this 
mood might be to take two or three key terms from Pynchon’s earlier
novels: ritual reluctance (from The Crying of Lot 49); the company of 
the preterite (from Gravity’s Rainbow); the concept of the subjunctive
(from Mason & Dixon). There is something of all three of these in 
Against the Day, but there is more too; and the combination itself 
makes a difference.

'It is at about this point in the play,' Pynchon writes of the production 
of a Jacobean tragedy in The Crying of Lot 49, 'that things really get 
peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among 
the words . . . a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be 
called a kind of ritual reluctance.' The preterite are the non-elect of 
Puritan theology, those who are passed over, abandoned by God 
and history, and in the first pages of Gravity’s Rainbow the bombed 
population of London during World War Two is already discounting 
its chances: 'Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was 
talking only to him, say, "You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. 
Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to 
take the trouble to save you, old fellow." ' Mason & Dixon is full of 
evocations of the subjunctive, memorably described as an 
alternative to 'our number'd and dreamless Indicative', and as a 
point of projection for dreams that will not die, 'some great linear 
summing of Human Incompletion, – fail'd Arrivals, Departures too 
soon, mis-stated Intentions, truncations of Desire'.--------------------


It's in the first meeting of Webb and Merle that we first encounter the 
aforementioned "Ritual Reluctance", and curiously it's at the juncture
of alchemy and high explosives in the realm of pure anarchy. It 
seems that reviewers of AtD have their own "ritual reluctance", a 
reluctance to talk about Anarchy as the overarching theme of AtD. 

One of my P.O.V.s of AtD is of Oedipa Maas looking into a collection of
anarchist stamps into an anarchist world that terrifies her, an outsider
looking in. In AtD we are inside that world, anarchists looking into
the world of the privileged with terrors of their own, on the other side
of a fixed equation.



 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Paul Nightingale" <isread at btopenworld.com>

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/wood01_.html