V-2nd Dopplegangers

[Joseph Tracy]

Alice's words delve well and thoughtfully into the complexity of this  
issue as regards Pynchon's writing. I have to admit that I have mixed  
feelings about Romanticism and it too often veers into a place where  
emotion trumps both reason and ethical  boundaries. But  I do think  
there is a propriety and wisdom expressed in the history of  
Romanticism that has to do with seeking a tonic counterbalance to the  
sheer momentum of technological change. We feel the need for that  
tonic because we know he dark connection between that technical  
prowess and the resulting warlike assault  on the wild places and on  
the cultures and lifestyles that are being bulldozed down.  One of  
the failures of  America is the relegation of this need for the wild  
to fragmented symbols, to parks and personal adventures and private  
spirituality. Instead of holding onto this urge to keep alive within  
ourselves the wildness of the world , we are caught in a battle  
between violent fundamentalisms, playing out apocalyptic showdowns  
while the earth sickens with oil slick and millions entertain  
themselves  with TV lies.  I still  don't listen to much Beethoven ,  
but these days I have been listening frequently to the music of John  
Luther Adams and feeling a healing power in his musical evocation of  
wild open spaces, and the forces of weather, light and geology.

What troubles me about referencing the ugly aspects of the cultures  
being destroyed is that this comparison serves as a lame excuse for  
discounting all that is valuable, wise  and needful in those  
cultures.  It also becomes a pattern that continues. The "winners"  
armed with steel lances, computer guided drones and missiles,  
chlorine gas,  drilling rigs and text messages are always able to  
convince themselves that what guards the hoard of unlimited wealth is  
a vile primitive dragon/ alligator/  idolatrous heathen/islamo- 
fascist whose death will make the world safer for decent folk like  
you and me. We after all are clearly the ones most qualified to  
straighten things out; we who, though perhaps not perfect, are far  
better than bloodthirsty Talibans tossing acid in the faces of  
schoolgirls. ( our  bright yellow cluster-bombs are so much more  
civilized and communicate in their shiny plastic allure the high  
standard of living that is the glory of the west .)

I don't feel compelled in any way to accept this reasoning, and I  
don't think Pynchon accepts this either/or premise. The evil in his  
fiction is real and pretty accurately depicted, but in contrast he  
doesn't offer heroic revolutionaries but characters we come to love  
despite their complicity because despite the pressure to be a  
cardboard cutout they question and resist the demands of the empire,  
they change, their tolerances grow, their worlds expand to include   
worlds within worlds.  The romance is a romance of inner and outer  
frontiers , wildernesses of soul, time and place both modern, post - 
modern, and ancient.  He crosses borders from from hilarity to deep  
soul shaking sadness, surrealism  to nose jobs.. The beauty is that  
the reader must also  cross boundaries , and is persuaded to do so.

That said, I have a hard time seeing the change in Benny Profane.  Is  
he Mafia's stereotyped  weak Jew uselessly resisting the robber baron  
Gods of Capitalism?  I am wondering if my feeling for him will change  
as I read on.


On Aug 22, 2010, at 8:41 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

>> Rich sez:
>>
>>> let's not overemphasize how integrated and united these "primitives"
>> are/were. I think Pynchon gets all hung up on his romantics at times,
>> particularly w/r/t to native americans. that was a strong vibe in  
>> the 60s in
>> leftist circles for sure... I can't say ultimately that some huge and
>> beautiful perfect society was laid waste...
>
> I'd say that vibe is still strong and, while it is a naive and
> ill-informed and mostly lazy vibe about the complex history of the
> peoples who have lived on the north and south american continents and
> the island lands about them, I don't think this vibe can hang on P or
> his romantics. The Seed Letter we discussed, a letter written after
> V.'s publication and before GR's publication, makes this point:
> Imperialism & Colonialism & Genocide are not the slaughter of
> innocents. Native Americans,  Herero, Jews, Vietnamese Buddhists,
> slaughtered were not Saints. P doesn't slide to the other end of the
> Devils & Saints continuum either, making the white man's burden blames
> the victim argument. Indeed, what makes P's fictions far more
> intersting is his romantics. Now, to be fair to Rich, I've used this
> word, "romantics" not as he does above, but as a literary term. P's
> romantics include an ambiguity, an irony, and a bunch of other
> romantic texhniques that, as Hawthorne sez, hit on the human heart.
> This hammer blow on the human heart does not wash the blood off Lady
> Macbeth's hands or silence the voices in Mason's skull. it does not
> make Dixon a cartoon Quaker, wakebrim tilted toward God, confiscated
> whip tightly clenched in a rightous fist. People like James Wood, who
> don't much appreciate American Romance, who claim Pynchon has
> inherited Melville's Broken Estate, miss the point of modern and
> postmodern allegory. It's not cartoons and Speilberg cameras and
> computers showing off and reducing the complex human heart to a ticing
> clock. In fact, to take one example from the current discussion of V.,
> when Benny notes that the Gator's heart will continue to tick like a
> clock, the allusive parable (I forget who this fine study of P?) under
> the street is not Captain-hooked off the stage, but remains on stage
> as it fills up with more Peters and pans. It's not that the political
> P is a 60s Lefty who falls hook pan and silver into the mine of save
> the Gators and Tibet. Although he, like any honest, though not
> necessarily Left, student or scholar od history, notes, with some
> outrage and fear, the pattern of mass murder and culture destruction
> visited upon heads by those who have the current advantage of being at
> the head of the caravan, moving inexhorably, and seemingly in a unit
> or with unity, toward some telos or point in time and space, he is a
> student of history and not a naive, ill-informed, or lazy one.
> Moreover, as a post-colonial writer, he is not intersted in the simple
> devils and saints settle the score hornbook of history we get from,
> say, Howard Zinn's graphic novel, wonderful as it is. P is intersted
> in the forces, the forces that attract us and that, as they are
> harnessed with greater and greater machines, extend our faculties, our
> propensities. Unfortanatley, we are killers, and, we are all now like
> Adams or like Taylor in Planet of the Apes. What are you afraid of
> Doctor? ....Damn you all to hell!
>
> How much its character had changed or was changing, they could not
> wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the land
> itself knew no more than they. Society in America was always trying,
> almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself;
> to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its
> tail. Society offered the profile of a long, straggling caravan,
> stretching loosely towards the prairies, its few score of leaders far
> in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in
> the rear, somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage
> over Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction,
> while Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several contradictory
> movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or
> oriented towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead.
> Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the head
> of the caravan as possible, and needed most to know where the leaders
> could be found.
>
> One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten
> years had given to the great mechanical energies -- coal, iron, steam
> -- a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements --
> agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution
> on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm;
> he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no
> longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam
> of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew
> Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or
> Cracow -- not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto,
> snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs -- but had a
> keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he --
> American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots
> behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He made no
> complaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse off than
> the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their heritage by
> his own people; but he vehemently insisted that he was not himself at
> fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet to any superiority of
> his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out of the track, and must get
> back into it as best he could.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfs5E7IjvE