Beyond the Rainbow

[Mark Kohut]

Call me very old-fashioned but I can only 'understand' the Rocket as protagonist analogously.......... old-fashionedly, a protagonist is a 
character, the author's presentation of a human being to whom we can anchor ourselves....indentify with (or hate)...to ground
our inevitably moral experiences of a novel about the world.....that Slothrop disappears matters a lot....not the case w minor characters usually
that meaning of protagonist still rules, in my opinion, or we have drifted toward accepting the non-human more than we should
 
the V-2 is the subject of the novel.....as Moby Dick is of that one...and a protagonist also only by analogy to its metaphoric largeness
of meanings
 
We are just being analogists to call the Rocket a protagonist.....
 
And, whatever we think P says about technology in Vineland, and I am with the presentation of its pervasiveness in the Tube, movie surround
echoes and the film collective, P's even deeper, maybe metaphysical exploration of technology in Against the Day shows, in my opinion, that
there is only one Pynchon................................
 
 
 
 

From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 9:53 AM
Subject: Re: Beyond the Rainbow

I don't think the fetishization is unconscious - it seems a crucial element in the book.  The eroticization of violence, always present, exemplified by the reported Rita Hayworth pin-up on the Hiroshima bomb, must have been a contributing factor - probably the main theme - that inspired Pynchon to write the book.  I agree with Kai that the V-2 is the real protagonist of the book.  Maybe GR is the story of it's erotic awakening?

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: eburns at gmail.com
>Sent: Nov 2, 2011 9:33 AM
>To: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>, owner-pynchon-l at waste.org, pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Beyond the Rainbow
>
>"By such an anachronism Pynchon intentionally avoids the (unconscious) 
>fetishization of destructive up-to-date technology, which might have 
>been the problem with GR."
>
>The problem!? That's the best part!!
>
>
>Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>Sender: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org
>Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 14:26:55 
>To: pynchon -l<pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Beyond the Rainbow
>
>
>The problem with GR might be, that the Rocket is the novel's master 
>significant, so to speak. You could also say that inside the 
>international socio-technical network in the final days of WW II Pynchon 
>pictures, the V2 takes the role of the main protagonist. While we lose 
>Slothrop along the way, the Rocket stays with us from first to last 
>page. 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. From the perspective of Pynchon 2 (the one since 
>VL), Gravity's Rainbow thus may appear to be infected by the 
>avantgarde's fascist involvement with techno-rapidity, especially in 
>Italian Futurism, which gets dissed in AtD. And that's, imo, the reason 
>the question of technology is played down in VL by making a simple 
>pistol the crucial weapon of the book. Do also note that the the balloon 
>travels of the Chums of Chance are, inside the historical timespan of 
>AtD, already a little anachronistic. New and fresh such a setting was 
>around 1800 when narrations like "Des Luftschiffers Gianozzo Seebuch" by 
>Jean Paul appeared on the market.
>By such an anachronism Pynchon intentionally avoids the (unconscious) 
>fetishization of destructive up-to-date technology, which might have 
>been the problem with GR.
>
>
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