IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

>
>> Dudes, you guys have fallen off a cliff now. Come back to the texts.
>
> I never left them -- and offered from GR 521 a very explicit pointer to THEY
> -- the actual (and always human) agents of the world

"The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings
and deeper connections...This implies they were thinking
target all along."

					Delillo, Underworld

As the Mushroom to Alice sitting on a hookah waiting for the marching
brand and cornflakes to come sez, Who Are YOU?
I am HEAD as you are Dead and We Are Wed and We are ALL in it Together
Kid . . .Brazil ....Brazil.... Brazil ...

According to P-texts  there is a drive within us to
establish systems at the expense of differentiation. He has
it, and we have it, and They have it. As a writer he wants
to expand the reader's point of view. He writes  an
encyclopedic satire elaborately designed but he subverts his
own design. There is a sustained tension in Pynchon's texts.
We might call it the "PoMo-Mo Agon." Modernist conventions
and subversive Postmodernist techniques coexist without
invalidating each other so that if the subversive PoMO
really subverts, in the end it subverts the law of
contradiction.

One of the important elements of Menippean
Satire is Carnival. One function of the Carnival in GR is to
cast-off what is according to Pynchon, a natural disposition
of the Modern Western Mind, that "A is B and A is not B
cannot both be true."

According to the P-texts, the drive to
establish systems at the expense of the other(s) or
differentiation, on the social level, and we can say, on the
aesthetic level, leads to repressive technocratic society
and an art that is only one tool of the repressive system.

The "Counterforce and the "System" also exist in conflict
and nearly every relationship and every environment in GR
obeys a S&M pattern.  "We define each other." Even the
narrators play parts in the S&M drama, both with an imagined
reader (see naratee and the 2nd person McHale stuff), the
characters, each other, the author, and the reader.
Sometimes they are dominant and sometimes they play victim
to the naratee or another narrator or character, or even
their own stories. .

Some of the narrators work for Them, henchmen or masters in the
"system" and they will quite
frequently address an imagined reader, mislead him (I think
he is male?) or tell him lies or tell tall tales, or tell
ridiculous paranoid parodies, or give bad advise, or insult,
or mock the reader's "bookish" reflexes and natural
proclivity for patterns and systems and, well,  "cause and
effect."

This is one reason, and there are too many to list, why P-texts are
Connected to his Bookish New England Puritan Roots and to the
so-called Dark Romantics, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe & Co.


Diversity is reduced to Binarity.

"Ideas of the opposite"…pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance
from submission…life from death and guilt from
innocense…GR.48

We also have, in addition to the "YOU" that is addressed in
GR, the "WE" that is addresses, and this "We-Address" often
makes the naratee and the narrators accomplices or
supporters of the Masters or Henchmen or System or a
defender of  character that has been a victim at some point
but is now a victimizer.

"Now the best established of all principles
may be stated as follows: The same attribute
cannot at the same time belong and not
belong to the same subject in the same
respect ... This I repeat, is the most certain
of all principles..." (Aristotle in Metaphysics).

"There is a principle in existing things about
             which we cannot make a mistake; of which,
             on the contrary, we must always realize the
             truth -- that the same thing cannot at one and
             the same time be and not be, nor admit of
             any other similar pair of opposites..."
             (Aristotle in Metaphysics).
             "The most certain principle of all is that
             regarding which it is impossible to be
             mistaken; for such a principle must be both
             the best known ... and non-hypothetical. For
             a principle which every one must have who
             understands anything that is, is not a
             hypothesis; and that which every one must
             know who knows anything ... Evidently then
             such a principle is the most certain of all ...
It
             is, that the same attribute cannot at the
             same time belong and not belong to the
             same subject and in the same respect."
             [Aristotle in Metaphysics]

         Aristotle is reported to have written this in his
         Metaphysics. Aristotle further said that "everyone
         in argument relies upon this ultimate law, on which
         all others rest." He said this principle or law of
logic  "must be known if one is to know anything at all."
         He also said, "if everything is and at the same
time  is not, all opinions must be true."


RATIONALIZATION OR ROUTINIZATION AND THE CHARISMATIC HERO

The world of modernity, Weber stressed over and over again,
has been deserted by the gods. Man has chased them away and has rationalized and
made calculable and predictable what in an earlier age had seemed governed by
chance, but also by feeling, passion, and commitment, by personal appeal and
personal fealty, by grace and by the ethics of charismatic heroes.

Weber attempted to document this development in a variety of
institutional areas. His studies in the sociology of religion were
meant to trace
the complicated and tortuous ways in which the gradual "rationalization of
religious life" had led to the  displacement of magical procedure by
wertrational
systematizations of man's relation to the divine. He attempted to show
how prophets
with their charismatic appeals had undermined priestly powers based on
tradition;
how with the emergence  of "book religion" the final systematization and
rationalization of the religious sphere  had set in, which found its
culmination in the Protestant
Ethic.


Bookish Puritans Meet Enlightenment Founding Fathers, Desist,
Rationalists, List makers--Franklin.

American Romance is response to this Meeting.


Eco-They: Kartell, Firm, Syndicate, Management,
Political-They: Empire, Corporate state, Ruling Elite-the degenerate
aristocracy.
Allusions and Personifications: The Elect, The Studio, the octopus,
adenoid, Dracula.

THE ECONOMIC THEY

Soldiers stand every few yards, a loose cardon, unmoving, a
bit supernatural. The Battle of Britain was hardly so
formal. But these new robot bombs bring with them chances
for public terror no one has sounded. Jessica notes a
coal-black Packard up a side street, filled with dark-suited
civilians. Their white collars rigid in the shadows.

 "Who're they?"

 He shrugs: "they" is good enough. "Not a friendly lot."  [GR.40]

Does GR pin down or name an unequivocal source for the evil it
portrays? Who are THEY?

"From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley
Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, I'n't it
now…behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like
rats 'n' mice….But who watches from above, who
notes their responses?"  This terrible description, dark and grim is
subverted by a
sill song-PAVLOVIA. [GR.229]


There is a universal conspiracy in GR. They appear under every
imaginable manifestation of power. Ultimately, all of
these are subordinated to the "the needs of technology… a conspiracy
between human beings and techniques…these needs
are understood only by the Political They or the "ruling elite."


THE ECONOMIC: The Kartel, The Syndicate, The Firm, The Management

In economic terms, They are "the growing organic Kartel", the "IG"
that Smarargd says is "ours" but which Herr
Rathenau, from the expanded, though not perfect view from the "other
side" says is "only another illusion."

Rathenau seems to know more about who They are, but he can't tell. He
can only tell what the questions are: "You must ask
two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis?  And then:
what is the real nature of control?" [GR.166-167]

Pointsman, the profane Pavlovian Knight, knows that the "agents of the
Syndicate… wait in the central chamber" of
the labyrinth, that "its only a job they have…." And to fund  his
project and keep Mexico, he will do a job on Pudding and
R&J.

Funding the War and the Laboratory is expensive. Men and women can be
very valuable assets to The Firm When the
Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit argues that the MMPI only "tests for
whether a man will be a good or bad soldier," and
not any "human values," Pointsman, a Utilitarian, replies, "Soldiers
are much in demand these days, Reverened Doctor."
[GR.81]

Of course,  The Firm is particularly interested in any soldiers that
possess special talents or "gifts." Brian
McHale says the opening dream scene of GR is a "paradigm of
problematic passages throughout Gravity's Rainbow: the
reader, invited to reconstruct a 'real' scene or action in the novel's
fictive world, is forced in retrospect -
sometimes in long retrospect - to 'cancel' the reconstruction he or
she has made, and to relocate it within
a character's dream, hallucination, or fantasy." And, more important
to our current concerns, Pirate's gift for
"getting inside the fantasies of others…is a gift the Firm finds
uncommonly useful."  The Firm's or Their control
over the narrative is another subject, but for now we can see that
They control the funding with the War, and that
although Pirate saves Europe from the Balkan Armageddon, the Firm only
allows him "tiny homeopathic doses of peace" and
he does not save Europe from World War II. The Firm uses men or women
to get what They want. Roger Mexico (Weber / Mill)
knows that the War is his mother and that the business of the War "is
buying and selling."