IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

> I don't think it's a matter of  Pynchon ascribing agency to the technology

Then, as Taylor sez in Planet of the Apes, "How do you account for
[the Rocket]?

Or V.?

How can any reader of V. and GR and M&D and AtD say that P's texts do
not ascribe agency to technology? Or that it's not a matter of his
ascribing agency to machines?

This is, as Zappa sez, the crux of the buscuit.

Dudes, you guys have fallen off a cliff now. Come back to the texts.

There are matters that, while they remain mysterious, still matter.
THEY, for example, matter mucho.

Another gnosticising factor is present, ironically, in the mere existence of the
epistemological question. To suffer the constant anxiety that mysterious powers
may be manipulating human life is to be de facto, haunted by demiurgic
phantasms, and thus to suffer the oppression that characterizes cabalistic
gnosticism, even while the question of its basis in reality remains open.


Even if a habitual “middle” (see my note) appears---e.g., Roger’s
sustaining intimacy
with Jessica in Gravity’s Rainbow—it is quickly crushed by the churnings of
metaphysical force fields that are either indifferent or hostile to human
constructs. In the very act of privileging moments of communion, Pynchon reminds
us of their fragility and transience in the face of massive dehumanizing force.

Note: The “middle” is the way out of the Gnostic Trap, critics have all sorts of
avenues out of this dead end zone: Euben, in another fine study, for example,
draws on Greek drama for his “middle term.” Eddins complains that the “current
critical consensus” and in particular, the “postmodern secularity” of such
readings “does violence to the complex religious dialectic that serves as the
fictions metastructure.”

If there is a solution, a way out of the gnostic trap, it involves locating a
metaphysic of religious potentiality in which these moments can be grounded, and
then obtruding this metaphysic as a benevolent term into the malign dialectic
that dominates the cosmos of Pynchon’s fiction.

He then explains the paradoxical rebellion against Gnosticism and HERE WE GO
NOW, brings Eric Voegelin into his exposition.

To be human is, for Voegelin, to occupy a middle ground between the poles of
raw, undifferentiated natural process and perfectly refined spirituality.
Adopting (and adapting) Platonic terminology, Voegelin refers to these extremes
respectively, as APEIRON {“the indeterminate”} and nous {i.e., “divine
intellection”}, while the middle ground is the metaxy, the In-Between (see  my
note ). Nous is associated with the transcendental ground of values embodied in
such concepts as the Judaeo-Christian God or the Platonic Good-in both cases, a
mysterious and inaccessible Beyond in which psychic participation is nonetheless
possible  for man. This participation takes the form of asking what Voegelin
calls “The Question.” According to Eugene Webb,…this is “a term for the tension
of existence in its aspect of a questioning unrest seeking not simply particular
truth as such: ‘not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious
ground of all being.

Note: The world of Pynchon’s fiction, according to Eddins, as he applies
Voegelin, “operates as a radical perversion of a humanizing metaxy.” For
example, in V. it would involve Stencil’s quest for Henty Adams’ Virgin—now a
dynamo of life denying force or the dialectic between Oedipa and Tristero or the
quest for the rocket in GR. In each case, Eddins maintains, “the sense of cosmic
well-being dependent upon the metaxic tension between the pure immanence of the
apeiron and the pure transcendence of nous is shattered by attempts to destroy
or usurp this transcendental status.

Pynchon's use of sexual acts and or the failure of sexual
acts are complicated. The empty ones for example, have all
sorts of sex, none of them procreative. If we go back to V.,
we have the story of various young people getting together.
What happens? Do they get it on? No, Benny I'm Cherry, she
says, but Benny simply rests a drink on her naked body, as
if the girl desperate for sex, was only another coffee
table. How about Lowlands? What's
happening with the moon and sterility and that little elf
girl?

These are the Waste Land Stories.

On one level in GR,  sexual activities are part of a larger  political or
cultural critique and Pynchon is given a little life to the
waste land. In Small Rain, Lardass makes love to Little
Buttercup in the Waste Land Sun after the Farewell to Arms
Rain. Both the rain and the sun are signs of sterility and
death in this story. No escape, no love making, the
temperature will not change.  How about Blicero's "love" and
the Rocket? Here love and sex and the rocket are associated
with Blicero and by extension technology and control. This
Rocket seems, like that mad bus driver of the System to run
on its own. Pynchon, I think, is  critiquing a technology of
war which is so far out of control that it seems to be
serving purposes of its own. It's serving its own purpose
because society has become so dumb, so routine, so
mechanized, so technological, that technology is now
controlled by a System that controls the citizens.  But it
is also a critique of 500 years of history. The stakes are
high, what is to be real and who is decide what is real. Who
will give the System its new Virgin? People would die for
the Virgin or build cathedrals to glorify her Virginity.
Tchitcherine says, ""The basic problem…has always been
getting other people to die for you….That's where religion
had the edge, for centuries…" And Pointy says soldiers are
very useful, like foxes, dogs, old men, children, but first
control is required and Virginity is not going to work, not
when the Symbol of the new religion is a Rocket. So how does
one sexualize the machinery of death? How can we get all the
citizens to work for the new Virgin? I know, how about a
little S&M, a little dominance and submission. Pynchon is a
funny guy, not rigid and preachy like a church sermon, more
like the bible---do people still read the bible for its
stories, it wild stories, its grotesque, eroticisms? Anyway,
Pynchon likes these wild, grotesque erotixcisms and so we
find the  Rocket: "fifty feet high, trembling . . .     and
then the fantastic, virile roar . . . Cruel, hard,
thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky . . . Oh, so
phallic" says Thanatz . Katje  learns from those that "use
her" that the Rocket has been "programmed in a Ritual of
Love.. at Brenschluss it is done-the Rocket's purely
feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its
target, has submitted." Paradoxically, this emblem of sexual
violence and death promises a kind of eternal life, by
transforming nature, where death and decay are the normal
course of things, into something not in nature's sphere.
What's the problem with Blicero's reading of Rilke? This is
a key to the novel. How can the fecundity of scatter brained
mother nature be conquered by the Rocket? "Beyond simple
steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away
from the feminine darkness,  held against the entropies of
lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature . . ."  An
imitation of life, a pornography. Pornography is the tool of
the system and it gets people to work and die for the
Rocket. Like the sick crew in V., sex is best with a machine
or in some non or anti procreative way, so the system, like
the Nazi propaganda system deflects sexuality away from man
and towards an economy of objectified images. Remember, "an
army of lovers can be beaten." What is an army of lovers?
What is love? I don't know, but I think lovers want to live,
have children maybe, make love, keep cool and care, be kind,
those kind of things, but these lovely things, like great
art and beautiful music and Pynchon novels are not useful to
the system. "It's true . . . look at the forms of capitalist
expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic
love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of
sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of
deduction -- ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer --
all these novels, these films and these songs that they lull
us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so,
to that Absolute Comfort. . . . The self-induced orgasm.

The self induced orgasm, is physical and emotional,
intellectual, metaphysical, in the system. The monkey
spanker is the perfect citizen of the system. He or she is
alone, or if they are not they can be, why with the film
running, the images give all that is needed to everyone,
spiritual, "Christian love", aesthetic "sunsets", and
intellectual "ah, that sigh when we guess the murderer". So
who needs a warm lover? Why reach out and touch someone in
that cold theatre and threaten the effectiveness of the
"structures favoring death" by affirming the value of life.