photography

[Dave Monroe]

>From Micahel Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992)
...

Dwight Eddins has even suggested there is an antidote to pornographies
of flight, for "when we integrate, we return to integrity, to all that
the original, unbroken arc means by way of momentary grace, momentary
freedom, and the natural triumph of gravity" ([The Gnostic Pynchon]
1983, 78).  But this "reintegration" is itself an already performed
illusion, already part of the structure of film and calculus: both are
forms of dismemberment and reconstitution which are reassembled into
illusions of unity--in this case, unifie and continuous motion.  For
as Pynchon writes elsewhere in Gravity's Rainbow, the pornography of
film and calculus is not that they carve up originary unities, but
that they feign such unities: "There has been this strange connection
between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to
counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries--since Leibniz, in
the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up
the trajectory of cannonballs through the air" (GR 407).  (MF/CC
247-8)

In my reconstruction, then, "pornography" in Gravity's Rainbow
describes a regressive anamnesia that recreates illusory, prelapsarian
(or preliguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of dismemberment
and reconfiguration; and since nostalgia itself works by much the same
dynamic, Pynchon's "pornography" gives us fresh purchase on the
cultural critique of nostalgia as well.  His novel offers us a
veritable miscellany of macropolitical nostalgia and fantasied
"restoration" ... (MF/CC 248)

... the "falsity" of Pynchonian pornographies lies not in their
rituals of dismemberment but in their fetishistic reassemblies, not in
their cutting up of organic (w)holes but in their recomposition of
inorganic wholes that fetishize the very idea of organic wholes.  At
the very least, we should be wary of endorsing the book's various
depictions of nostalgia, return, "Diasporas running backwards" (GR
737); ideally, we should also be wary of approaching Gravity's Rainbow
as if fragmentation were a problem to be solved by critical
intervention ... (MF/CC 251)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50144

Cf. as well, e.g., ...

"He ordered the Health Food Enchilada Special and Hector had the soup
of the day, cream of zucchini, and the vegetarian tostada, which upon
its arrival he began to take apart piece by piece and reassemble as
something else Zoyd could not identify but which seemed to hold
meaning for Hector."  (VL, Ch. 3, p. 25)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0308&msg=84627

And see perhaps as well, e.g., ...

The Cinematic Imagination in Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"
by Anotonio Marquez

http://www.jstor.org/view/03611299/ap040019/04a00040/0

Physics and Film in Postmodernism
Demystifying the Created Art in Gravity's Rainbow
by Jessica Durgan

http://www.synoptique.ca/core/en/articles/durgan_physics/

Serres Reads Pynchon
by Hanjo Berressem

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v011/11.3berressemsrp.html

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.501/11.3berressem_srp.html

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.501/11.3berressem_srp.txt