V-2nd C4 The Eternal Drama of Love and Death

[Mark Kohut]

laura writes a mini-essay:


Still, I don't see a lot of evidence that Young P's interested in the excluded 
middle in V. - that comes later.  In V., he weighs down on the side of the 
humans in any human-inanimate interplay.  Rachel's car, Bongo-Shaftsbury's arm, 
Godolphin's allografts, the disconnected music that exits the transistor radio, 
and Esther's nose, chiseled and sliced with metal instruments to become 
something fraudulent - none of this is exactly a love song to the "new space-age 
technology" that P was immersed in at Boeing.  P. thinks humans should stay far 
away from the inanimate.  He's not talking about natural inanimates, of course, 
but human-made inanimates.  But he's still developing the deeper anti-industrial 
critique.  Nature and the non-human natural don't make much of an appearance in 
V.

Later in the book, he segues into his first of many condemnations of imperialism 
and militarism, as he recounts the Herero Genocide.  So he's expanding his theme 
from Inanimate vs. Human to Industrialized Human vs. Indigenous Human.  This 
leads us from GR all the way to ATD.  But along the way, he also starts 
developing the Human vs. Nature theme.  By Inherent Vice, it's "Under the 
cobblestones, the beach."  Despite the students vs. authorities (human vs. 
human) origins of the phrase, it also has the connotation of even lower-tech 
human activity being an affront to Nature: roughly-hewn stones covering up the 
natural (non-human).  So somewhere along the line, as he's matured, then aged, 
he's displaced his human victims with Nature-as-victim.

Laura

I would only suggest that as he matured, aged, his vision of the human [victims] 
included Nature more deeply than ever. 


-----Original Message-----
>From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jul 31, 2010 12:51 PM
>To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>Cc: kelber at mindspring.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: V-2nd C4 The Eternal Drama of Love and Death
>
>Well, yeah, and what about his favorite, "excluded middles"? Seems to
>me he sets up poles to emphasize the connections as much as the spaces
>between them. The inanimate is not entirely so, nor is the animate
>entirely so. Materialist v. idealist, whatever, matter and mind seem
>ultimately inseparable when we allow for complexity. It seems to me
>that only by way of reductionist argument is it possible to say that
>one thing or another is what it is alone and without external
>influence or interpretation. The thing is the thing it is until
>someone says it is so. Or, as CG Jung suggests, maybe we project the
>world in such a way there might be a soul in every stone.
>
>On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 1:51 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It isn't fair, and Pynchon would have to be an idiot to literally
>> think in these terms.  Far too many people take Pynchon's tropes and
>> metaphors literally.  In fact at its deepest level this metaphor has
>> to do with consciousness versus pre-consciousness,
>> thought/analysis/language versus pure unmediated experience/"just
>> being."
>>
>> All of this is much more thoroughly developed in GR, a book deeply
>> immersed in Freudian (and Jungian) psychology.
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 2:45 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>> Maybe I'm reading Pynchon wrong here.  But we know that he has issues with not 
>>>just sound recording, but photography, film, and even the written word 
>>>[hypocrite!].  In the long journey through all those vibrating tubes and 
>>>electronic devices, some of the original gets sloughed off, deposited as waste, 
>>>never to be recovered.  The objects that impart perfection to Godolphin's face 
>>>now, will cause it to cave into something monstrous and inhuman later. 
>>> Inanimate doesn't mix with human.
>>>
>>> Of course, this isn't really fair.  The music reaches more people when it's 
>>>(first) played out loud and (second) recorded.  And Godolphin's face was going 
>>>to look pretty hell-ish anyway.  But these quibblings will get lost in the 
>>>shuffle as Pynchon starts to move from dissing the inanimate to dissing the 
>>>industrial, and the military-industrial.
>>>
>>
>
>
>
>-- 
>"liber enim librum aperit."