Photos in IV

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:

> After being slapped in the face repeatedly about film and TV in VL, we have
> in IV for starters:
>
> Pg  3 this isn't just a couple X-rated Polaroids
> Pg  6 a Southern California beach that never was
> Pg  9 Bigfoot showed up on camera wearing getups
> Pg 14 a rendering of a giant bloodshot eyeball
> Pg 32 have to look in through and past all that depressing detail
> Pg 38 She handed Doc a couple of Polaroid baby pictures
> Pg 42 I'd like to have one for every minute. Rent, like, a warehouse
> Pg 58 Do you like the lighting
> Pg 59 It's that Ida Lupino
> Pg 61 reflected in the screen of a mammoth TV
> Pg 63 hand-painted silk ties
> Pg 73 blurred telephoto shot of himself

from Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1992), commenting on "pornographies of flight" (GR 567) ...

Dwight Eddins has even suggested there is an antidote to
poronographies of flight, for "when we integrate, we return to
integrity, to all that the original, unbroken arc means by way of
momentary grace, momentary freedom, and the natural triumph of
gravity" ([The Gnostic Pynchon] 1983, 78).  But this "reintegration"
is itself an already performed illusion, already part of the structure
of film and calculus: both are forms of dismemberment and
reconstitution which are  reassembled into illusions of unity--in this
case, unified and continuous motion.  For as Pynchon writes elsewhere
in Gravity's Rainbow, the pornography of film and calculus is not that
they carve up originary unities, but that they feign such unities:
"There has been this strange connection between the German mind and
the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for
at least two centuries--since Leibniz, in the process of inventing
calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectory of
cannonballs through the air" (GR 407).  (MF/CC 247-8)

In my reconstruction, then, "pornography" in Gravity's Rainbow
describes a regressive anamnesia that recreates illusory, prelapsarian
(or preliguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of dismemberment
and rreconfiguration; and since nostalgia itself works by much the
same dynamic, Pynchon's "pornography" gives us fresh purchase on the
cultural critique of nostalgia as well....   (MF/CC 248-9)

[...]

... the "falsity" of Pynchonian pornographies lies not in their
rituals of dismemberment but in their fetishistic reassemblies, not in
their cutting up of organic (w)holes but in their recomposition of
inorganic wholes that fetishize the very idea of organic wholes.  At
the very least, we should be wary of endorsing the book's various
depictions of
nostalgia, return, "Diasporas running backwards" (GR 737); ideally, we
should also be wary of approaching Gravity's Rainbow as if
fragmentation were a problem to be solved by critical intervention ...
(251)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50144