AtD: "ICH BIN EIN BERLINER!" (626)

[Tore Rye Andersen]

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." 

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