Going Down the Tubes

[Dave Monroe]

"Going Down the Tubes: Thomas Pynchon's Narrative Digressions into the
Realm of Sewage"

Abstract: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is littered with scenes
of toiletry and figures of excrement.  While critics of GR focus on
the role of obscene language, few have explored his narrative
digressions into bodily waste, which reveal practices of excretion as
the key to understanding the violence of contemporary subjects. Moving
past eco-critics who outline the impact of sewage, Pynchon
investigates why we destroy the world with waste by allowing readers
to sink into the national effluent and to focus on that which we deny
in narratives of identity.  Thus, Tyrone Slothrop's journey down the
toilet of the Roseland Ballroom is not merely a comic adventure that
displays a complicit critique of wasting but also calls us to learn
about our subjectivity in light of the abject.  A student of Freudian
theory, Pynchon reveals that our violence lies in our obsession with
separating ourselves from the "organic," "natural" world.  Secondly,
he shows how we reiterate difference in a fecal and urinary bombing of
the environment, by saturating the "natural" world with our excreta.
Thirdly, fearing the power of the world united with excess to disrupt
a narrative of civilization's difference from "organic" matter, we
engineer order.  Pynchon also connects scenes of toiletry to the
construction of racial difference; an association with the excess of
whiteness creates multiple Others.  In order to alter this violent
process, Pynchon encourages us to plumb our sewage systems and to
explore our bodily digressions in order to find "freedom in the wastes
of the World" (588).

http://www.nyceanews.org/graduate-student-prize.html

The complete paper IS @ that URL ...