AtDTDA: 18/19 C.o.C. P.O.V. 505/ 547 Master Narratives

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

              "Of course not, it's in code, isn't it," said Bevis. 
           "Fiendish code, I might add. Right off I noticed 
           it uses both Old and New Style alphabets---quite 
           pleased with myself until twigging that each letter 
           in this alphabet also has it's own numerical value, 
           what was known among ancient Jewish students 
           of the Torah as 'gematria.' So, as if there wasn't 
           quite enough threat to the old mental balance 
           already, the message must now be taken also as 
           a series of digits, wherewith readers may discover 
           in the text at hand certain hidden messages by 
           adding together the number-values of the letters 
           in a group, substituting other groups of the same 
           value, so generatting another, covert message. 
           Furthermore this particular gematria doesn't stop 
           at simple addition."

                "Oh, dear. What else?"

                 "Raising to powers, calculating logarithms, 
            converting strings of characters to terms of a 
           series and finding the limits they converge to, 
           and---I say Latewood, if you could see the look 
           on your face. . .  ."
            
                "Feel free, please. As there's little enough 
           hysterical giggling out here, why we must 
           snatch it wheree'er find it, mustn't we."

                "Not to mention field-coefficients, eigen 
           values, metric tensors----"
           AtD 799/800

I'm in the process of getting a handle on this "Postmodernism" 
business—whether or not it's OBA's intentions, it is what he 
cooks up in Against the Day—so I'm reading material concerning
the Postmodern threads in Pynchon:

         Totalizing Postmodernism: 
         Master-narratives in Pynchon's Vineland

         By Bruce A. Sullivan
         sullybaby at hotmail.com
         In his work entitled The Postmodern Condition: A Report on 
         Knowledge, Jean François Lyotard defines "postmodernism 
         as incredulity toward metanarratives" (72). This postmodern 
         "incredulity" results in skepticism and distrust of the systems 
         that attempt to explain cultural phenomena in terms of a 
         single, unifying principle; the search for truth and order in 
         human experience collapses. Other authors, such as Henry 
         Giroux, have also defined postmodernism in such terms; Giroux 
         states: "postmodernism rejects . . . [g]eneral abstractions that 
         deny the specificity and particularity of everyday life, that 
         generalize out of existence the particular and the local, that 
         smother difference under the banner of universalizing 
         categories" (463). According to Giroux, universalizing 
         categories are the trademarks of "the Enlightenment and 
         Western philosophical tradition" (463), and he refers to 
         them as "master-narratives." As a postmodernist work of 
         fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland exhibits suspicion 
         toward master-narratives. . . .

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_sullivan.html

. . . .and if there is a particularly disorenting collection of dislocations  in
Against the Day feel free to extend Bruce A. Sullivan's exegesis into Pynchon's 
"Master Narrative" of dislocation, exile and slavery. For here, in the Heart of 
Darkness of a rather dense and confusing novel [tried the hot-glue gun today to 
get 463—572 back into the spine and recommend that technique for those of you 
whose copies of this massive tome have begun to shred and splay] we find the 
counterforces to the great hidden holocaust of the era of colonial expansion—
King Leopold II's blowback in the Congo, what with as many as 10 million souls 
exterminated in the names of greed and brutality—"hidden" in the same place that 
yields up the gassing of British soldiers on the battlefeilds of Flanders.

From:
          "The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness": 
          Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

          Bernard Duyfhuizen 
          University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
          pnotesbd at uwec.edu
          © 2007 Bernard Duyfhuizen. 
          All rights reserved.

          All pretense of innocence is finally lost as they fly over           
          Flanders during the war. Miles Blunden, who among the
          Chums most often displays the clearest insight into the           
          real world, puts the scene in perspective:

          "Those poor innocents," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, 
          as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him 
          at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. "Back at 
          the beginning of this...they must have been boys, so much 
          like us.... They knew they were standing before a great chasm 
          none could see the to bottom of. But they launched themselves 
          into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand 
          'Adventure.' They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative
          --unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into 
          those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, 
          those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves 
          posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they 
          were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and 
          smelling of shit and death." (1023-24)

          The passage clearly echoes Brigadier Pudding's battlefield 
          trauma at the Ypres Salient in Belgium from Gravity's Rainbow 
          as well as the war poems of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, 
          and Isaac Rosenberg. . . .

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.2duyfhuizen.html

          "As if parties to a secret whose terrible force was somehow,
          conveniently, set to one side---as if to be encountered only in a 
          companion world they did not quite know how to enter or, once 
          there, to exit. Here in this sub-sea-level patch of strategic ground, 
          hostage to European ambitions on all sides, waiting, held 
          sleepless without remission, for the blows to descend. 
          What better place for the keepers of the seals and codes to 
          convene?" 542

On my initial read, racing through as to absorb the "plot" in a novel full of 
interweaving, interacting plots, I was blown off-course to Trieste [Dally and 
the Zombini's point of debarkation], while Flanders is every bit as self-
referential for our beloved author. Because, of course, it was in Flanders 
that Brigadier Pudding commited his great folly, unwitingly co-conspiring 
in an atrocity that foreshadowed [as much much as anything in GR] 
Zyklon B and Auwschwitz.

http://www.spectacle.org/695/zyklonb.html

          Hence, one of the largest munitions makers in Nazi Germany 
          was funded by Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of 
          two future US Presidents.

http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/bushies.htm

You can rail about the website proffering up this Bush/Nazi connection all you 
like [it's backed up by better recognized sources, I recommend Kevin Philips' 
"American Dynasty" for more on the Bush/Walker backstory], but all I have to ask 
is—really, how long has TRP been on to the Bushes? As far as I can tell, they 
are lurking throughout Gravity's Rainbow, as IG Farben hovers over the Novel.
Charles Hollander points out in Pynchon’s Politics: The Presence of an 
Absence:

          . . . .Pynchon will hint throughout Gravity’s Rainbow at the Nazis’ 
          relation to IG Farben and IG Farben’s to Standard Oil, hence the 
          Rockefellers. In 1929, IG Farben sold the international rights to its 
          hydrogenation process to Standard Oil for two percent of the 
          Company. This made IG Farben the largest single stockholder in 
          Standard Oil after the Rockefeller family. As early as 1932, Hitler 
          understood the war potential of the hydrogenation of coal into oil 
          and promised preferential treatment for IG Farben, Germany’s 
          largest Corporation. The IG supported Hitler in the election of 
          1933 to the tune of 400,000 marks (Joseph Borkin, The Crime 
          and Punishment of I.G. Farben [1978]). Just as Pynchon must 
          have known the story of the fall of Fox Films, and how his family’s 
          brokerage house, Pynchon & Co., fell as well, he obviously knew 
          of Standard Oil’s connection to IG Farben, and how the IG helped 
          bankroll the Nazis, who in turn helped the Falange in Spain and 
          the Iron Guard in Rumania. He identifies with Rojas, Unamuno, 
          Richard Lovelace, Klee, Bartók, King Carol, Magda Lupescu, and 
          Howard Fast; that is why they people his work. And it has all been 
          there, in the text, from the very beginning. . . .

          . . . In Lot 49 Oedipa will experience a dizzying paranoia, a sense 
          that things are never as they seem, that there is a secret, perhaps 
          sacred, meaning behind ordinary events. She spends her 
          energies trying to determine if there is, or is not, such meaning. 
          The book ends as she is, perhaps, about to find out. In Lot 49 
          Pynchon uses the interface between sacred (secret) and profane 
          (apparent) to raise an epistemological question: Is there another 
          reality behind this reality? l believe he means the question to be 
          taken politically as well. In any event, the question is the linchpin 
          of the novel. . . . 

          . . . .Pynchon is, and has been from the first, a political 
          consciousness in the tradition of the satirists Varro, Juvenal, 
          Dante, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Voltaire, and Hugo. His family, 
          friends, and significant others were often involved in notable 
          political activity. Pynchon’s politics drive his aesthetic, his 
          satire, his sense of humor, his choice of friends — to some 
          extent, even his choice of wives. . . .

          . . . .Among the numerous proper nouns Pynchon mentions are 
          many with highly charged political associations, and these 
          political charges are, on one level, the energy that drives 
          Pynchon’s fiction. If we fail to recognize them, and to weight 
          them adequately, we risk confusing the Christmas tree with 
          its Ornaments.

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/ppolitics.htm

While Charles Hollander doesn't mention the Bushes, there are multiple 
sideswipes on our current administration sprinkled throughout "Against 
the Day". But I have to wonder how far back the Bushes' greasy 
palms find their way onto Pynchon's writings. Prescott Bush
is central to both IG Farben and the creation of the CIA, seeming
to be some invisible gray eminence behind Gravity's Rainbow.

I have to think about the Master Narratives of Bush (Rove?) and 
of theRepublican translation guide mentioned earlier in the book.