AtD: ICH BIN EIN BERLINER! (626)

Fri Nov 23 23:26:04 CST 2007

Side reading right now, Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path. He seemed to
know everything about everything. Including 
the influence of the Wall Street Lawyers on Eisenhower, and spells it all
out so neatly. Like Fuller, I don't get the 
feeling you can really easily characterize him as a left liberal...  P
seems like he just knows how the world works, and 
it sort of makes him blue, and that's the source of something too dark for
the left right continuum. 

There is that idealism, and the hope for kindness, the revolutionary acts
of kindness...

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Tore Rye Andersen torerye at hotmail.com
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:21:55 +0100
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: AtD: "ICH BIN EIN BERLINER!" (626)

Kai wrote:

> [...] the JFK passages in GR (pp. 65, 682, 688) ooze with aggressive
sarcasm. Any thoughts?

I'm not so sure about that sarcasm, actually. Pynchon is certainly critical
of JFK in his foreword to 'Slow Learner', as 
you point out, and in 'Vineland' Kennedy is bitterly mentioned in the same
breath as Hitler, Nixon, and Hoover (VL, 
372). In GR, however, the tone seems different - maybe because as far as
JFK is concerned that novel, as Pynchon 
says in a different context in the book, was written "before the
revisionists moved in" (GR, 210).

Take the passage on p. 65, for instance: Slothrop drops his harp down the
toilet, and as he goes after it, he thinks 
of:

"Jack Kennedy, the ambassador's son - say, where the hack is that Jack
tonight, anyway? If anybody could've saved 
that harp, betcha Jack could. Slothrop admires him from a distance - he's
athletic, and kind, and one of the most 
well-liked fellows in Slothrop's class. Sure is daffy about that history,
though. Jack... might Jack have kept it from 
falling, violated gravity somehow? Here, in this passage to the Atlantic,
odors of salt, weed, decay washing to him 
faintly like the sound of breakers, yes it seems Jack might have. For the
sake of tunes to be played, millions of 
possible blues lines, notes to be bent from the official frequencies, bends
Slothrop hasn't really the breath to do... 
not yet but someday..." (GR, 65-66)

I may be a naive reader, but I certainly don't detect any sarcasm in that
passage. Take the description of Jack as 
"kind", for instance. "Kind" is one of the most positive words in GR, not
to be taken lightly. Tantivy is often described 
as kind, for instance, before his death which is signaled by an ellipsis
just like the one after Jack in the quote above 
(for Tantivy's poignant ellipsis, see GR, 252). And how about the question
"might Jack have kept it from falling, 
violated gravity somehow?" For Slothrop, this question merely concerns his
harp, of course, but for us readers the 
question has another meaning: "might Jack, if he had lived, have stopped
the ICBMs from falling, violated gravity 
[also not a word to be taken lightly in GR] somehow, saved us from that
dark theatre on the final page? Yes, it seems 
(or seemed in 1973, before the revisionists moved in) that Jack might
have." This isn't sarcasm, it's a wistful elegy for 
lost opportunities and roads not taken, much as !
 we find it on p. 556: 

"Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular
point she jumped the wrong way from? 
Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper?
Might there have been fewer crimes in 
the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems
to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a 
route back [etc.]"

or on p. 693:

"At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be
found for every street now indifferently gray 
with commerce, with war, with repression... finding it, learning to cherish
what was lost, mightn't we find some way 
back?"

Note the recurrence of the word "might" in all these passages. Even back in
1973, Pynchon was too disillusioned to 
truly believe that we might find our way back and keep it all from falling,
but the lament for those lost opportunities 
is nevertheless an important part of GR, and I believe that JFK was seen by
Pynchon as just such a lost opportunity 
when he wrote GR. 

When Jack and Malcolm X are last mentioned on p. 688 we hear that:
"Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got 
murdered." On the very next page, after the King Kong poem, we hear of
"these dames whose job it is always to 
cringe from the Terror... well, home from work they fall asleep just like
us and dream of assassinations, of plots 
against good and decent men..." (689). From our late, late vantage point,
after revisionists like Seymour Hersh 
moved in, this may sound like sarcasm, and Pynchon was already wised up to
some of the darker sides of JFK in 
1984. Back in 1973, however, I tend to believe that he still counted JFK
among the "good and decent men." 

_________________________________________________________________
Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger 
http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/default.aspx?locale=en-us&source=w
lmailtagline

--------------------------------------------------------------------
myhosting.com - Premium Microsoft® Windows® and Linux web and application
hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting