Let's think about Byron the Bulb

Sat May 10 11:17:11 CDT 2008

A-and "light is the secret determinant of history"----[maybe not exact]---AtD

  And, in Bryan's terrific post below,  light is information and then I read this in Matthew Arnold's "Culture & Anarchy", 1869.............
  'To complet rightly my design, it evidently remains to speak also of intelligence, or light, 
  as a character of perfection. ------Chap 2, "Doing as One Likes"

  "What if our urgent want now is...to lay in a stock of light for our difficuties"---C & A. 

  which reminds me that, of course, light meant that....still does (in a dimmer [sic. groan] way).    (anyone have an OED for the last century's nuances of definition re 'light"? 

  and there is an aside, another brilliant aside in GR, about intelligence in/of history.........

  So, is part of the meaning of AtD almost Hegelian, i.e. History is Spirit/mankind becoming aware of itself?......with Cyprian/Yashmeen but especially with the Chums??

Bryan Snyder <wilsonistrey at gmail.com> wrote:
  And the Colonial's haircut...

Thanks to Erik for inspiring me to take the time to type out and share this.

This is long BUT SOOOO WORTH THE READ... Awesome material (OPINION ALERT)

The Byron scene always had me scratching my head, I understood the
failure-revolutionary, sad, used blub idea... But it never really... I don't
know ... Made real sense to me besides those throw away themes (At this
point in GR, that is).

But this really, I think... nails Byron.

I went back and re-read the scene after reading this and there is a palpable
horror-like feel to the tent narrative... The scene (not the Byron
narrative, but just the tent material) is now very ghastly to me, but this
passage is pretty brilliant I think.

Not too mention the unintentional nods to ATD...

Enjoy!

This is from The Style of Connectedness by Thomas Moore, ppg 146-147:

**all quotes are from GR, except for the McLuhan quotes**

The story of Byron the bulb itself, in the Colonial's Haircut frame-passage
that encloses it, reminds us that naked light bulbs have been burning all
along, sub rosa, in quiet corners of Gravity's Rainbow; here for the first
time explicitly, Pynchon identifies their eerie light as a major element in
his symbolic design. The story is first, and obviously, a parable of
preterition, like the earlier stories of Fran van der Groov's dodos and
William Slothrop's pigs. Each of the dodo/pig/light-bulb preterite
populations is imagined - in sadly unreal fantasies within fantasies - as
giving rise to a charismatic figure (articulate dodos, Messiah-pig, immortal
bulb) whose election for subversive, redemptive purposes is set against the
debased neo-Puritan sense of "election" to serve entrenched power: in
Babybulb Innocence, Byron dreams of large-scale mass subversions, "gonna
organize all the bulbs, see, get him a large power base in Berlin, he's
already hep to the Strobing Tactic... Gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley
Baldwin, all of them, right in the face with one co-ordinated blast." But
of course he learns that the preterite have been too much divided by Them,
and charisma itself is too ambivalent, ever to affect such mass heroism.
Byron in the end feels himself "condemned to go on forever, knowing the
truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off
the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will
find himself, poor preterite bulb, enjoying it."
He remains, though, awake, aware and watchful: as he burns over the
colonial's haircut and secretly guides its course, he has burned, we are now
told, over Franz's Pokler's bunk at Nordhausen, moving among and perhaps
giving shape to the black and white dreams of rocket-transcendence. There
is no telling where else he has been in the novel, where incandescent light
generally comprehends and encloses the human net:

Franz now will be home from the rocket-field, blinking under the
bulb as Frau Silberschlag delivers Leni's last message. Messages
tonight, borne on the light of Berlin... Neon, incandescent,
stellar... Messages weave into a net of information that no one
can escape.

Here Pynchon owes much to Marshall McLuhan:

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without
a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal
ad or name... It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale
and form of human association and action. The content uses of such
media are as diverse as they are ineffectual... Indeed, it is only
too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the
character of the medium.
[*This is from McLuhan's work: Understanding Media]

Pure media for McLuhan are thus continuous, "contentless" information,
"totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized"; what happens "under" or
"in" their light is merely projected human contents. The poor Neukolln
glassblower who is afraid of the dark keeps Byron burning all night because
[end of McLuhan quotes], "Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic,
mortal hope." but Byron himself is indifferent to this "symbolic" content.
And thus electric light may, in Pynchon's terms, carry, comprehend or
symbolize the great message, the secret: that all reality may be continuous,
that all things may connect, below the net and behind the Word. Bernie,
Brenda and Benito the Blubs, and the human preterites who keep rescuing
Byron from Phoebus, share wordlessly, this most vital of information: "The
light bulb... Has become one of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the
multitudes who are passed over by God and history. When the Dora prisoners
went on their rampage, the light bulbs in the rocket works were the first to
go..."
During the haircut at which Byron presides, Eddie Pensiero, the
amphetamine addict, models the colonial's hair in obsessive patterned
"frequencies." Eddie is constantly shivering and can pick up and respond to
- cf. Pirate Prentice's gift - the shivers of other people as well. It
seems the shivers here, and therefore the Colonel's hair patterns, respond
to the movie-frame-like "succession of electric peaks and valleys" of
Byron's burning, which depend in turn on the speed with which Paddy
McGonigle, another enlisted man, cranks the generator. But all the time
Byron is "dictating the muscular modulations of Paddy McGonigle's cranking
tonight, this is a loop here, with feedbacks through Paddy to the generator
again." Meanwhile someone invisible out in the night - we can hardly doubt
this is Slothrop - is playing a blues on a mouth harp. Blues notes as
"bent" through the harmonica holes and through the feedback loop establish a
ground continuity and sympathy with Byron's secret "pain-radiance", and, as
the colonel tilts his throat up, "Eddie Pensiero, with the blues flooding
his shaking muscles, the down, mortal blues", prepares apparently to stab
the jugular - and the frame suddenly ends. The whole feedback loop, the
"net of information that no one can escape," is secretly intruded by
influences from outside, and the haircut ends, or probably ends in this
violence because it obeys the urgings of Preterite Blues: the secret
communion of "invisible" beings, Slothrop on the harp, and Byron, now at
last striking the subversive blow that he had dreamed of back in Babybulb
Heaven.

Hope it was enjoyable as I hyped.

B

On 5/9/08 6:41 PM, "Erik T. Burns" wrote:

> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lightbulb5-2008may05,0,3217216,full.st
> ory
> http://www.bunnweb.org/centennialbulb/index.htm
> 
> think we've seen this one before ... but still it's good to know he's
> still burning bright....
> etb

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