Let's think about Byron the Bulb

Sat May 10 15:25:42 CDT 2008

Can anyone point me to a place where Harold Bloom stuff is accessible?
He¹s one of the Pynchon-authors/critics I¹ve been skirting around... His
stuff seems harder to get than the others I¹ve found.

If anyone can point out a star for me to follow... That¹d be awesome.

Thanks,
B

On 5/10/08 8:45 AM, "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Harold Bloom has (rather) recently elevated the Byron the Bulb episode to his
> Highest
>   
> praise----one of the few American Sublime touchstones..........he seems to
> think GR is 
>   
> 'imperfect' but he says he rereads Lot 49 and Byron the Bulb..................
>   
>  
>   
> GR "Imperfect"----almost has no meaning when applied, imho.....
>   
> Who wants perfection if GR does not have it?........
> 
> 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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>> DtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ > 

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