A Mirror in the Roadway

[Dave Monroe]

--- Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dickstein, Morris.  A Mirror in the Roadway:
>    Literature and the Real World.
>    Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007.
> 
> http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7984.html

>From Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The
Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002 [1999]), Ch. 2, 
"War in the Novel: From World War II to Vietnam," pp.
21-52 ...

"... cartoonish elements can be found in the ingenious
reversals and doublings of Vonnegut's Mother Night, in
the Candide-like hero and teh science fiction
trappings of his Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The
Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969),
and the dizzying multiplication of bizarre plots and
oddball characters of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow, which wraps up the war in comic and paranoid
versions of pop-culture myths.  This is a novel
in which the new technology, including the U-2 [sic]
rocket, has reduced the characters to ciphers and
rendered them almost irrelevant.  Pynchon's book is
more abstruse and yet more like a comic book view of
the war than anything in Heller's and Vonnegut's
works.  Those older men belonged to the same
generation as Mailer and Jones, though they told their
stories much later; Pynchon (born in 1937) was not a
witness to the war but an inspired, occasionally
kitschy fantasist whose overdetermined plots fasten on
rocketry and technology as a nexus between sex,
extinction, and apocalypse.
   "Like Vonnegut, Pynchon is interested less in the
conduct of the war than in the Nazis, whom he sees
through the lens of German Romantic kitsch and
post-sixties paranoia and apocalypse, as filtered
through writers like William Burroughs, with his
dangerous twilight world of the 'Zone.'  What we learn
in reading his book is that 'this War was never
political at all, the politics was all theatre, all
just to keep the people distracted ... secretly, it
was being dictated by the needs of technology ... by a
conspiracy betwen human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war'
[ellipses in original].  The lesson to be learned from
the Germans is that 'love, among these men, once past
the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with
masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning
and losing.'  For Nazis like Weissmann, the war,
embodied in rocketry, is simply an erotic
Gotterdammerung, 'a love for the last explosion--the
lifting and the scream that peaks past fear,' the last
big bang.  This has little to do with World War
II and everything to do with the high-tech war in
Vietnam and the sexual-conspiratorial fanstasies of
the 1960s.
   "The galloping disillusionment with the Vietnam War
all through the 1960s made a revisionist view of World
War II inevitable.  As reports of atrocities like My
Lai began filtering out of Vietnam, survivors of the
Holocaust also began to break their near silence of
two decades....  the holocaust narrative would
eventually displace the combat narrative as our
principal vision of the Second World War.  As these
and other wartime atrocities--and the irrationality
and insanity of war in general--became central, as
Vietnam shattered our own sense of purity, it was
inevitable that our own behavior in World War II would
also be brought into question.  The popular view of
the war as a simple struggle between good and evil
would lose much of its credibility."

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DICLEX.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0210&msg=72007


 
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