IVIV Hope Harlingen: ( spoilers)

[alice wellintown]

GR.B.627 DEVIL’S ADVOCATE’S what the shingle sez, yes inside is a
Jesuit here to act
in that capacity, here to preach, like his colleague Teilhard de
Chardin, against
return. Here to say that critical mass cannot be ignored. Once the
technical means
of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being
connected one to
another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have
meaning. It’s a potent case Father Rapier makes here, not …what hep
humorists here
are already calling “Critical Mass” (get it? Not too many did in 1945,
the Cosmic
Bomb…not yet revealed to the People…
Return…

Father Rapier: Perhaps another 19th century
political/subtextal allusion to James T. Rapier,   Rapier,
James T.  b. Nov. 13, 1837, Florence, Ala., U.S.  d. May 31,
1883, Montgomery, Ala.

His office on Beaverboard Row; Southern, Hell, Alabama. Your Cadillac
has got a Karmic Wheel in Toad Sprocket and a Wheel with a Glitch.

JAMES THOMAS RAPIER, black planter and labor organizer who was a
member of the U.S. House of  Representatives from
Alabama during Reconstruction.  Born in affluence—his father was a
wealthy planter--Rapier was educated by private
tutors and later studied at Montreal  College (Canada), the University
of Glasgow (Scotland), and Franklin College
(Nashville, Tenn.). Rapier returned to Alabama after the American
Civil War and became a successful cotton planter.
He began his career  in public life by serving as a delegate to
Alabama's first Republican state convention; he was a
member of the platform  committee. In 1867 he participated in the
convention called to rewrite the state constitution,
and, after losing a  campaign in 1870 to become Alabama's secretary of
state, he won a congressional seat in 1872. In
Washington he  worked for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
although he was defeated for reelection in 1874.  Except for
service as collector of internal revenue in Alabama's second district,
Rapier did not again hold public office.  But he
continued as an active labor organizer, seeking to unite poor urban
workers and rural sharecroppers, and he  wrote
pro-labor editorials for the Montgomery Sentinel, of which he was the publisher.

Rapier is a Devil's Advocate, a carping or adverse critic, but he is
at the service of the "System"
(note that his use of the word "dialectic" is the only positive use of
the term in GR, but is undermined by his
fear and disclaimer) and, I think he is ironically or as is Pynchon's
familiar treatment of "religion," a satiric
inversion of Advocatus Diaboli

Wouldn't that make him Advocatus Dei for the radical Jesuit Teilhard
de Chardin? No, probably not.
Now, the word Return is a tricky one in GR. Here (GR.539) we are told
that Rapier is preaching against Return in the
sense that de Chardin wrote against it.

"Life itself-Life is Irreversible." --de Chardin

"This is not a return to primitive and undifferentiated cultural
forms..." -de Chardin

"In the passage of time a state of collective consciousness has been
progressively evolved which is inherited by each
succeeding generation of conscious individuals, and to which each
generation adds something."

This is part of his idea that social heredity is an evolving progress
and Mankind cannot go back or Return to
his primitive and undifferentiated cultural form since he is
progressing, by divine purpose, towards a wholeness of human
collective consciousness united with Christ.
--de Chardin's Christian Humanism.

"We cannot recapture the animal security of instinct." (sounds
familiar, eh Rilke?)

"When it has passed beyond what we called the beginning of its
'critical point of socialization' the mass of Mankind,
let this be my conclusion, will penetrate for the first time into the
environment which is biologically requisite for the
wholeness of its task."

The "critical mass", and "the word has ceased to have meaning"
(GR.539) are de Chardin's ideas and Rapier/de
Chardin makes an eloquent and moving argument, but Pynchon (this
narrator here doesn't like the "loss of freedom." The
narrator puns into jokes, get it, critical mass, 1945, criticizing  de
Chardin's "critical mass", "progress", and
"socialization". The terrible (terrible is again given a duel meaning
here) possibility is de Chardin's idea that we
are at a critical time and it is also the bomb. Rapier goes on to
advocate the System and all the most terrible lies and
dirty trick the System plays on critical masses.

How depressing is the spectacle of the scattered human mass! A
turbulent ant-hill of separate elements whose most evident
characteristic, excepting certain limited cases of deep affinity
(married couples, families, the team, the mother
country) seems to be one of mutual repulsion, whether between
individuals or groups. Yet we nurse in the depths of
our hearts the conviction that it could be otherwise, that the chaos
and disorder are 'against nature' inasmuch as they
prevent the realization, or delay the coming, of a state of affairs
which would multiply as though to infinity our human
powers of thought, feeling and action. Is the situation really
desperate, or are there reasons for believing,
despite appearances to the contrary, that Mankind as a whole is not
only capable of unanimity but is actually in process
of becoming unanimised? Do there exist, in other words, certain
planetary energies which, overcoming the forces of
repulsion that seem to be incurably opposed to human harmony, are
tending inexorably to bring together and
organize upon itself (unbelievable though this may seem) the
terrifying multitude of milliards of thinking consciousness which
forms
the 'reflective layer' of the earth? My object here is to show that
such energies exist. They are of two kinds: forces
of compression, which by external and internal determinisms bring
about a first stage of enforced unification; and
subsequently forces of attraction, which through the action of
internal affinity effect a genuine unanimasation by free
consent.
				--De Chardin

"The town is saved for another year." GR.663 Bantam

"Within minutes, the area was sealed off by officers of the Emergency
Response Team."
			NY Times, Sunday, April 16, 2000

"Materializing from their own weird silence, the coppers show up
now...go at busting these proceedings the way they
must've handled anti-Nazi street actions before the War, moving in,
mmm ja, with these flexible clubs...jumping
little kids three-on-one, shaking down girls, old people...Beneath the
efficiency and glee is nostalgia for
the old days...But now, with the White Market to be protected, here
again are the whole streets full of bodies
eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat are happy
with it."  GR.664 Bantam

"Has the morning been only a dress rehearsal? Is Slothrop expected to
repel REAL foreign invaders now?"   GR.665
Bantam

Such innocence cannot be preserved, cannot prevail, though it is
rewarded, applauded, by Pynchon, it is a "mindless
pleasure" and thus infected with the sickness of paranoid
self-transcendence, eternal youth, rebellion, so just as
Isle as she grows from small child to youth creates escapists
fantasies about a paradise on the Moon of all
places (oh, the bitter irony) or the children in the Hansel and Gretel
play sing of the polytheme home again on the
Moon, in the grown-up world, the Moon is where  Rockets are sent. "We
choose to go to the Moon" said JFK, the cold war,
WWIII, Major Weissmann's kingdom of death, where the quest for
childhood and freedom is a quest for the oven. But the
old aqyn's advise to learn the world as children do offers a little
solace, a little respite from the War, a little hope
against hope, a little grace, and a little Return to the mystery that
is mother earth.

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
>From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
And go round and round and round
In the circle game....


On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 8:18 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tore Rye Andersen:
>>
>> Pynchon and others like him, according to McLaughlin, don't merely
>> point at themselves: they point at themselves pointing at the world.
>
> it's like the "hipster" motif in GR, where "hipsters" know about atomic fission
> and are already making jokes about it ("critical mass" - which could also
> be a ceremonial celebration of critics, come to think of it)
>
>> So Pynchon's fiction points at itself, yes, but it also points at the world.
>> I guess I'm just more interested in the finger pointing at the world.
>>
>> McLaughlin makes his points in the essay "Post-Postmodern Discontent:
>> Contemporary Fiction and the Social World," Symploke, 12.1-2 (2004), 53-68.
>>
>
> and Pynchon's extended middle finger graphic makes a similar point in GR...
>
>
>
> --
> "A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a
> month of total revolution." - Paris graffito
>