Re: AtDtDA23: Right Back in the Ol' Caldo Tlalpeño

[Dave Monroe]

On 11/26/07, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> "a zone ... where runners of contraband operated freely" [p. 637]
>
> Cf. GR, Pt. III, "In the Zone" ...
>
> http://english2.mnsu.edu/larsson/gr3.html
> http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/map1.html
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_episodes_in_Gravity's_Rainbow#Part_3:_In_the_Zone
>
> "There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid
> region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be
> born."
>
> --Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952, trans. 1956), p. 8
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48748
>
> Cf. ...
>
> http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/taz.htm
> http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html
>
> And see as well, e.g., ...
>
> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/gr/finnished.html
> http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v007/7.2raudaskoski.html

"'In ordinary times,' [Squalidozzi] wants to explain, 'the center
always wins.  Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed,
not by ordinary means.
Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times ...
this War, this incredible War--just for the moment has wiped out the
proliferation of little states that's prevailed in Germany for a
thousand years.  Wiped it clean.  Opened it. [...]  It won't last, of
course not.  But for a few months...[...] We want it to grow, to
change.  In the openness of the Zone, our hope is limitless.'  Then,
as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door,
but up at the ceiling--'So is our danger."  (GR, Pt. I, pp. 264-5)

>From Heikki Raudaskoski, "'The Feathery Rilke Mustaches and Porky Pig
Tattoo on Stomach': High and Low Pressures in Gravity's Rainbow,"
Postmodern Culture, Vol. 7, No. 2 (January 1997) ...

What comes out of the struggle between these centripetal and
centrifugal forces that always already, even internally, show
themselves to be conflictual? The centrifugal low elements may well be
as such, as the working title Pynchon and for the novel goes,
"mindless pleasures"; uncontrollable plebeian here-and-now desires.
Anyway, these forces are seldom alone or pure in the novel: they are
set against centripetal elements. What is more, They-systems seem to
be oozing through into every We-system: as Derrida has written, it is
impossible to get totally outside of the logocentric metaphysical
tradition. What can you possibly make of it?

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White insist that the division between
carnival and normal life was internalized from the "early modern"
period on. From the "licenced event" that was distinguished from
normal life carnivalesque changed into the low suppressed area within
four symbolic domains: psychic forms, the human body, geographic
space, and social order. Pynchon's Zone can be seen as a 20th century
version of the carnivalesque market place, where the suppressed low
elements of bourgeois, modern, "realistic" subjectivity keep surfacing
in constant motion, blurring boundaries between these four symbolic
domains when doing so. There is no hope getting back distinct,
autonomous categories, which, most probably, never existed in the
first place. (Still, borderlines are not canceled once-for-all; how
could they, tense traffic between insides and outsides growing
continuosly?) The late Allon White writes directly about Pynchon
elsewhere:

The "high" languages of modern America -- technology, psychoanalysis,
business, administration and military jargon -- are "carnivalized" by
a set of rampant, irreverent, inebriate discourses from low life [...]
In Gravity's Rainbow history is referred to as a 'St. Giles fair'
[sic], and the symbolic pig, the carnival animal par excellence,
wallows everywhere in Pynchon's writing as the foul-mouthed but
irrepressible subvert of prissy WASP orderliness. [Pynchon] produces a
dialogic confrontation whereby power and authority are probed and
ritually contested by these debunking vernaculars.

The low symbolic pig wallows everywhere in Pynchon's writing all
right, but it often gets hybridized with high elements within the
subjects of the novels. Among Gravity's Rainbow's approximately 400
characters you may run into one "Andre Omnopon, of the feathery Rilke
mustaches and Porky Pig tattoo on stomach" (711), who is, moreover,
going to play a hybrid, apocryphal classic with his Counterforce
chamber orchestra: the Haydn Kazoo Quartet in G-Flat Minor -- 'kazoo'
being this fart-sounding mouth harp that provides cheap thrills....

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.197/raudaskoski.197

And see, e.g., ...

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White.
   The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986.

White, Allon. "Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction."
   The Theory of Reading.  Ed. Frank Gloversmith.
   Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984.  123-146