Back to the past....riffing on THE PRESERVED

[Mark Kohut]

Brown's major work, Life Against Death is subtitled a Psychoanalytic View of History. It was quite popular in the sixties.

Whether we add the Unconscious to the cargo the Preserved carries--as the introducer Ian even suggested maybe the associations are more historic than psychoanalytic, TRP was suggesting in his allusice way, i think, don't you? that some cargo ship (of values?) got sea-changed into The Golden Fang in the 20th Century...........

Your question re Brown is the one I asked aloud as I spoke to whether the "inherent vice' might be in the Unconscious......

I did read Life Against Death long ago, remember 'polymorphous perversity'
and his arugment that the death instinct concept of Freud's was a failure of imagination--it was NOT an instinct that created our neuroses and evil.

Money and shit is a famous chapter in it which surely helped TRP's characters travel through--and look into---toilets. 

--- On Mon, 1/25/10, Keith <keithsz at mac.com> wrote:

> From: Keith <keithsz at mac.com>
> Subject: Re: Back to the past....riffing on THE PRESERVED
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Monday, January 25, 2010, 12:23 AM
> On Jan 24, 2010, at 8:59 PM, Mark
> Kohut wrote:
> 
> We have learned that N.O.Brown shaped a lot of TRPs
> thinking in GR, so my riffing on 'the unconscious' from the
> cargo on the IV should have been Brownian not Jungian, nor
> Freudian....Yes?
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> I don't know Brown's work, but after a quick glance at it
> online,
> it does seem that your thoughts fit better with his view of
> things.
> He thought everything was fucked up, but it looks like he
> blames
> societal structures and repression for messing up what in
> its
> original condition was pretty good. That doesn't make sense
> to me,
> since if our original underlying substrate was all good,
> where did
> the creation of the messed up societal structures and the
> need
> for repression originate.
> 
> I like what Pynchon does with all of his paints. He doesn't
> pose
> any solutions. He just gives them all a nice place in his
> paintings.
> People who like certain colors say Pynchon is fond of those
> colors.
> But, all the colors in all of their harmony and opposition
> are
> there. I think he's the Pollock of words and concepts.
> 
> But, of course, that's because that's how I see the world
> and
> the menagerie of conceptualizations of it.
> 
> There's no way out except death. Now or then. Both the
> same.
>