AtDDtA1: Darby Suckling

[Dave Monroe]

>From Charles Hollander, "Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of an
Absence," Pynchon Notes 26-27 (Spring-Fall 1990), pp. 5-59 ...

   Of all his stories, "The Secret Integration," written after V.,
exemplifies Pynchon's most mature style.  It does not, as the other
stories do, obey the "rules" of short fiction: unity of person, place,
time, and action. It sprawls over a year or so, with flashbacks; a
story within the story introduces new characters, and it moves from
place to place. It is also longer and more discursive than the others.
Taken purely on Pynchon's own terms (as articulated in his Ford
Foundation proposal) as a narrative in which each detail sustains a
central metaphor, it may be the most successful. It is more
accessible, the characters more human, their behavior more clearly
motivated, and the political references not so thoroughly camouflaged.

   The story is easy to follow: A group of rebellious kids, led by
"the Inner Junta" (yet another secret revolutionary group), plan to
undermine the adult world by sending an "infiltrator" with a smoke
bomb into a PTA meeting, simultaneously exploding a barrage of sodium
grenades in the school's toilets, and mucking up the water supply of
the local paper mill. Just as they are about to execute their scheme,
one of the group is called on an Alcoholics Anonymous mission of
mercy, and goes to help a stranded musician, disrupting the scheduled
insurrection. Unamuno would have liked the kids for dropping
everything to help another, single person. The kids are so taken with
the plight of the black musician they try to help that, when a
childless black couple (the Barringtons) moves to town, they invent an
imaginary son, named Carl for the musician, and admit him to the Inner
Junta. When the black family is harassed by having garbage dumped on
their lawn from the kids' own households, the kids come to realize the
mean-spiritedness of their own parents. They learn the meaning of the
word "racism," and, as far as that goes, lose their innocence. To
oversimplify, "The Secret Integration" is Pynchon's loss-of-innocence
story.

   Grover Snodd ("a boy genius. Within limits, anyway") has been
transferred by "them" from his school to a "college patterned on
Williams." Williams is distinguished among our nation's colleges by
having the first "Institute of Politics," and Grover and Mr. Snodd
"used to discuss foreign policy . . . until one night they'd had a
serious division of views over Berlin." Just as Pynchon directs us
beyond the text in the second sentence of "Entropy" with the name
Rojas, he alerts us to recent political history in the second
paragraph of "Integration." And he seems less fearful, more secure (at
least artistically speaking), in how he goes about it.

   Grover believes he is the object of a plot by which "they" (his
parents? his school? some nefarious force not to be named?) mean to
instruct him in the interracial behavior proper to a boy genius:

He kept coming across these Tom Swift books by apparent accident,
though he had developed the theory lately that it was by design, that
the books were coming across him, and that his parents and/or the
school were deeply involved.
. . . Every time one of them popped up, as if from an invisible,
malevolent toaster, he'd devour it. It was an addiction; he was
haunted by Aerial Warships, Electric Rifles. . . .
"You know this colored servant Tom Swift has, remember, named
Eradicate Simpson? Rad for short. The way he treats that guy, it's
disgusting. Do they want me to read that stuff so I'll be like that?"

   Here Grover is the detective trying to make sense of the data, to
separate routine from highly charged messages, and he is a little
paranoid about it. [...] And if the reader stands to this history as
Grover stands to his Tom Swift stories, then we should be alert, not
by Spanish history this time, but to our contemporary political
history -something to with Berlin.

   A discussion of historical method, another of Pynchon's pet
concerns, soon follows. Grover has a short wave radio which he often
leaves on all night. Tim and the others often fall asleep while it is
playing, and when they awake, they cannot sort out bits of radio
broadcast from their own dreams. To complicate matters, each of them
remembers different bits of broadcast. They cannot agree on what has
happened, much as a conference of historians often cannot agree on
"facts." It is Stencil's problem in V. It is our problem confronting
the text.

[...]

Together they are planning "Operation Spartacus," or the uprising of the slaves.

   "Operation Spartacus" leads us beyond the story to the Howard Fast
novel Spartacus (1951), the basis of the Kirk Douglas movie the kids
have taken as their model. (In Pynchon's fiction, art has the power to
alter life.) Fast is best known for historical works dealing with
freedom and social justice. He was also a member of the Communist
Party who served a prison term rather than cooperate with the House
Un–American Activities Committee during the McCarthy period. So
Spartacus leads to H.U.A.C., and to Howard Fast, another writer run
afoul of politics. Later in the story Tim Santora wants to go swimming
in the pool at "Lovelace's estate," and we are reminded of Richard
Lovelace (1618-1657), the Cavalier poet. An ardent royalist during the
political turbulence of his day, he served with the French army in the
English Civil War. After the war his properties, or "estates," were
appropriated by the government, and he was imprisoned. He is best
remembered for the lyrics "To Althea, from Prison" and "To Lucasta,
Going to the Wars." Another writer victimized by political forces.
Let's see: Rojas, Unamuno, Fast, Lovelace (Nabokov and Fariña). The
list of politicized writers is getting longer, becoming a motif, along
with civil war.

[...]

So now we have clues to reconsider: Grover has fought with his father
over Berlin; he is a little paranoid; there is something to do with
"the Old Estates"; but Pynchon is fearful lest he wind up in prison
like Howard Fast or Richard Lovelace, so he must write in code — if we
stand to the text as the kids stand to the information about the
cataclysm — about these things, about "the ultimate Plot Which Has No
Name," "The Big One, the century's master cabal." (pp. 44-5)

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_10

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm

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