More Misc. V-2nd. The profaning of The Street

[alice wellintown]

Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I think in V., he would see even the Brooklyn NY streets you describe as
> profane-----------maybe because they are so full of multiplicty
> and NOT small town, community unity-----to use Adams' distinction.............

Not exactly.

Of course, even the small towns of Pynchon's fictions are subjected to
the dehumanization of modern and post-modeern forces. So, the boyz in
The Secret Integration resist racism, from their parents, their
schools, the community organizations, the religious institutions, the
books they read, the monuments and statues and museums and
architecure...and their resistance is Romantic, they use their wits,
their imaginations, to construct an integrated society, they construct
Carl from their encounter with the real Carl, and from the waste, what
the modern consumer cult tosses away, refuses to integrate, much as
the artists young P so admires, both the romantic and gothic ones he
describes in his luddite essay and the ones he admires out in Watts,
who, through imagination and some "primitive and natural" magic (these
are two essential elements of romantic art) create something sublime.
So, the Unity (Adams's 11th-14th century cult of the Virgin force
Unity, and the whitebread homogenious suburban Levit Long Island unity
turned suburban sprawl is not favored over the multiplicity of the
City Street.  Young P hasn't quite worked this out in V., but in CL49,
he begins to work this out. By GR, he finds his place. Rilke, not
Adams, provides the solution. Now, when I say Rilke, just like when I
say Adams, I am using shorthand...and yes it is reductionist, but if
I'm to say anthing with coherency in this rediculous forum, I need all
manner of short hands.  The Secret Integration is set in the Military
Industrial Complex. If you look everything up, Mr. Reed, all the
propper names, Mr. Hollinder, you will discover that The secret
Integration has a subtext or under the tapestry or what Moore (in his
full length study of GR) calls, the multiple parody of allusiveness or
something like that..that points to the bomb and the forces that built
the cold war kartels. But, anyway, young P is caught, early on,
between Ben Franklin, who leaves Boston and goes to the CITY of
brotherly love, to find himself, his fortune, and to get up early and
do all the things on his schedule or list and Charles Brockden Brown's
romantic heros who leave the country and come to the CITY to find
corruption, filth, crime, quaker city sin. Of course, P knows his
Gatsby; all of the characters in Gatby are WESTERNETRS wgo come east
to NYC. The narrator, Nick, comes from a family of HARDwear sellers.
Not SOFTwear or anything else abstract or intangible, but he goes into
the BOND business. Bonds are wall street calculations, complex
formulas, intangibles. So, a tool maker man from the west (Fitzgerald
read Adams and Adams has a profound influence on GG) goes East to sell
wall street abstrations. The dream gets wrapped around the City, where
Jay Gatz, a list maker and schedule man, has the second great FALL of
One Dimentional Man (Marcuse). But what of the Trees? Prairie? The
Woods, dear Henry (not Adams, the Walden Guy)? The Sea, Herman? Malta?
The Rock and Soul? Is the land, America, that great green breast in
dutch sailor's eyes that was stripped to make room for gatsby's house,
haunted? The house of the seven gables? Read The Devil and Tom Walker,
and AGTD, if you dare.