Beyond the Rainbow

[alice wellintown]

The type of satire has been the subject of decades of debate, but that
Pynchon's masterwork can be read as satire is difficult to dispute.
That the novelist makes his narrator complicit, guilty, Fallen, a man
who snitches, sells his story to Their Newspaper, is clear ividence of
what is sometimes called the self-conscious narrative, but in simple
terms is an essential element of the satire. Again. Moby-Dick and not
some European model, is the souce and the trandtions, so Pynchon's
narrators function, in this capacity, as the pale usher, not Nixon,
but the plae usher to the librarian:

ETYMOLOGY.
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him
now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer
handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the
known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it
somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

The obsession, recall the linguist in GR, who reads the Rocket parts,
as the linguist in M-D eads the head of the sperm whale? There are
thousands of such common tropes in these two works. The fact that P
and M overwhelm the reader with an encyclopedia on rockets/whales is
the problem. A brillian white hot prblem. Solve it if you must.


And although Pynchon, there's no question about this, is intentionally
writing furiously against
> the military-industrial complex, the book's high level of poetic energy also
> results from Pynchon's fascination, even obsession with destructive hightech
> air engineering. The novel ascribes to the Rocket "a Max Weber charisma" (p.
> 464), but for Weber charisma is strictly personal. This can, of course, be
> read as satire, but I think those critics who spoke re GR of "the
> technological sublime" were right. So were the readers who considered it to
> be a 'cyberpunk' manifesto.