AtD-related? "the abstraction of non-imperial art"

[Joseph Tracy]

For me the difference has to do with a moral versus an analytic/practical argument. S5 and C22 deal with moral equivalence and the assertion of personal moral resistance.  Gravity's Rainbow goes after a satirization that humanizes the self-destructiveness of fascism, showing its weird poetic romance with death and godlike power. It also shows the pragmatic transition to a planet ruled by corporate interests, for whom war is a mobilizing strategy and a a high stakes investment  facilitating the continued ascendance  of the  technocratic corporate power structures that gave rise to fascism. In some ways he treats the war as a conflict between external and internal mechanisms of social control. At any rate he describes an ascendant model that is independent of who wins and that relegates moral issues to the periphery.
Both satiric approaches use humor to allow us to observe the naked emperor, but Pynchon goes into anatomical detail. This loses some moral intensity but gains intellectual intensity. 
The hero is not an individual representative of a new vision/kingdom but a return to nature, a disappearance into nature, a choice of animal, rain, sunlight, grass, circular versus parabolic  rainbow. He escapes the map and what is left is the thing itself. 

On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:16 AM, jochen stremmel wrote:

> I think Gravity's Rainbow is a better novel than Slaughterhouse 5 or
> Catch 22 but I think the latter ones are both more savage anti-war,
> and more satirical as well.
> 
> 2012/4/20 Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>:
>> So, I'll double down or up, whatever...'
>> 
>> Yes, I think GR is one of the most savage anti-war works ever written
>> 
>> And, I think AtD may be satirizing Swiftianly the whole world since .................
>> at least the Industrial Revolution...............................
>> 
>> Savage? When one is not laughing but thinking.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>> To: jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
>> Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2012 9:22 PM
>> Subject: Re: AtD-related? "the abstraction of non-imperial art"
>> 
>> I think Pynchon in many places can be compared to the Swift of
>> Gulliver's Travels....Not least AtD as I have suggested....
>> Candlebrow U and the Lilliputians....
>> 
>> And if P has never written something like A Modest Proposal,
>> I do think many scenes/sections of Gravity's Rainbow are
>> in the same vein....many of the subversive and savage sexual
>> scenes for example, which led those morons at Candlebrow--Columbia
>> University to call it obscene....---"My husband is an idiot but he is a very well-educated idiot"
>> says someone in Gulliver, if i remember aright and
>> P plays with idiot a lot in TRP---just an aside....
>> 
>> But If I overrate TRP, so be it. Haven't reread A Modest Proposal in
>> a long time mostly because it seems seared into my head.......
>> I have tried to imagine its effect on many but I have never looked
>> anything up about it............................
>> 
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
>> To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2012 5:31 PM
>> Subject: Re: AtD-related? "the abstraction of non-imperial art"
>> 
>> Would you really say, Mark, that Pynchon writes "savage Swiftian
>> satire" like the Modest Proposal? A text that I would call subversive
>> and savage all right.
>> 
>> 2012/4/19 Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>:
>>> "The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular
>>> public or audience."
>>> 
>>> From an online tweet and NO link.....but we plisters don't need no stinkin'
>>> link to a real
>>> essay to have a good discussion, do we?
>>> 
>>> I would, many of you have in various ways, see Pynchon's art as
>>> anti-imperialistic, yes?
>>> 
>>> If his irrealness, surrealism, savage Swiftian satire, or whatever we
>>> want to call his style is labelled
>>> 'abstract' for purposes of this discussion---basically, not realistic and
>>> full of ideas---
>>> 
>>> any thoughts on the quote?