rubrics (I like that word), wrecking crews and hugfests

[kelber at mindspring.com]

In GR, there are explicit scenes of occultism, i.e. the seance scenes, but there are also scenes that involve the overlap of the occult and the spiritual: thinking specifically of Pirate's channeling of other people's thoughts.  Then there's brigadier Pudding's tome [excuse me if I don't have it quite right], "Things That May Happen In European Politics," and the uncertainty of exactly where those V-2s will land.  What all of these aspects have in common, whether based on silliness, spirituality or the scientific method, is that they're desperate, failed attempts to predict what will happen in the future.  The one tried and true, always right predictor is Slothrop's libido -- no wonder THEY're after him.  

Seances, mental sensitivity, historical analysis, the laws of physics (based on probability, not certainty) -- it all reads like a catalog of our failure to fully understand where we're headed.  I don't take it, though, that Pynchon's laughing at Pirate -- aren't we meant to take his abilities at face value? - or downplaying the ability of rockets to inflict mass destruction.  By extrapolation, is he really laughing at the seances or even Pudding's attempts at prediction [even the latter's eating habits are connected to the war he's lived through]?

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Ray Easton <kraimie at kraimie.net>
>Sent: Nov 25, 2009 11:53 AM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: rubrics (I like that word), wrecking crews and hugfests
>
>Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>> I would argue the 'duality' thus: TRP likes most of the occult ways of trying to get us out of the linear mental structure of scientific cause-effect YETdoes not himself necessarily like many "occult" conceptual options he puts in his works. Some, though? 
>>
>>   
>
>
>Does Pynchon offer us a critique of "the linear mental structure of 
>cause and effect"?  Yes, with that I agree. 
>
>
>The occult provides an elaborate and esoteric view of the world, as does 
>modern  physics.  Some human beings use the world view offered by the 
>occult in an attempt make sense of the world, just as some others employ 
>the rational, scientific view in the same attempt.  Does the author 
>endorse any such alternative to rationality?  I see no evidence for that 
>in the texts.  What I do see in the texts is a critique of the occult 
>world view, and other such alternatives, as trenchant as the one he 
>offers of "rationalist" thought.
>
>
>My only small contribution to the AtD read was the observation that the 
>actual content of the mathematics in AtD is irrelevant to the novel.  
>There's no secret, hidden, below the surface meaning to fact that the 
>characters discuss the zeta function, say, rather than some other 
>obscure and esoteric bit of modern mathematics.   Any mathematical 
>concept will do, so long as it is obscure and esoteric, so long as it is 
>the sort of thing that can be obsessed about, so long as it possible for 
>human beings to see it as the sort of thing that can hold some most 
>secret and important meaning.  What matters in AtD is not the 
>mathematics, but that the characters are doing mathematics and the way 
>they go about doing it.  Pynchon does not write about mathematics.  He 
>writes about human beings doing mathematics in an especially obsessive 
>way.  There is no hidden meaning to the mathematics.  Everything is on 
>the surface.
>
>
>In an entirely similar way, it seems to me that Pynchon does not write 
>about the occult, he writes those obsessed the occult.   He does not 
>write about conspiracy theories, but about those obsessed with 
>conspiracy.  There are no hidden, "deeper" meanings in these cases 
>either.  Everything is  on the surface.
>
>
>The notion that these hobbyhorses are anything but hobbyhorses, the idea 
>that Pynchon writes about such thing in order to point us towards some 
>truth  in which he believes -- this is, to Richard Fiero's description, 
>a trap.  A trap deliberately laid for us by the texts, to be sure, but 
>still a trap.
>
>
>Ray
>