Gravity's Rainbow in depth on Studio 360

[Keith Davis]

Thanks. Another one to add to the list.
On Mar 10, 2012 7:46 AM, "alice wellintown" <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 10:33 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Could paranoia be considèred as the sensing that there is an order beyond
> > the capability of our minds to understand, not as wonder, or awe, but as
> the
> > sense of losing the connection to our usual perception of a self located
> in
> > a particular time and space. A challenge to who or what we think we are.
>
> see Seed's Review of Tanner's brilliant book:
> http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk/tanner.htm
>
> a handful of excerpts from the Review here.
>
> How most of the West moved toward a monotheistic male cult is not down
> to violence and greed and all that bad shit;  it is tanglesd in the
> lines of integration and enlightened by Man's capacity to wonder and
> wax nostalgically. Not to mention a truck load of other capacities and
> remebrances.
>
> "For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in
> the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
> contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the
> last time in history with something commensurate [with] his capacity
> for wonder."
> - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.
>
> The recurring difficulty which Tanner finds in American writers could
> be put like this. If they reject discredited European ways of
> positioning the self according to hierarchies of class or rank, how do
> they avoid the dangers of either a loss of identity or, as Tanner puts
> it in relation to Melville’s The Confidence-Man, a ‘self-sealing
> solitude’? Individuality becomes an elusive aim rather than a clearly
> achievable state for the self. Social identity becomes problematised
> in that masquerade extends through so many aspects of The
> Confidence-Man that, as in The Blithedale Romance, nothing can be
> authenticated. Once again, an avenue to
> independence—self-parenting—confuses identity with a whole series of
> guises.
>
> These are the stylistic signs of Nick’s search for wonder and Tanner
> once again brings out the typicality of his instances by proposing a
> whole tradition from the Puritans up to contemporary writers like
> Thomas Pynchon where writers are searching for some special dimension
> to America. This almost visionary impulse is ironically reified in the
> famous hoarding of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg whose commercial gaze
> confronts Nick in the Valley of Ashes. The materiality of modern
> American culture provides us with a strong link between The Great
> Gatsby and DeLillo’s Underworld.
>
> In his final essay Tanner considers how Mason and Dixon fits into
> Pynchon’s and characteristically focuses in on how America is
> conceptualized. It is at once a ‘symbol for boundlessness;
> historically boundaried’. It is impossible to overestimate the
> importance in this novel of surveying. As Tanner points out, it is a
> far from innocent act but rather signals the appropriation of the
> terrain for commercial and imperial purposes. To use Tanner’s own
> phrases, surveying imposes the most dominant set of human signs on the
> scene of Nature. He reflects on the associated symbolism of lines and
> boundaries here, showing a continuity between Pynchon’s concerns and
> those of Fenimore Cooper, among other American predecessors.
> Boundaries imply oppositions between what lies on either side and also
> open up the possibility of transgression in its most literal meaning
> of going across. Tanner recognizes the special historical moment of
> Mason and Dixon, the moment just before the Declaration of
> Independence. Just as the term ‘preterite’ occupies a special position
> in Gravity’s Rainbow denoting the human casualties of power groups, so
> in Pynchon’s latest novel ‘subjunctive’ privileges the imagined or the
> speculative over empirical fact. Thus as America shades into material
> being away from dream and myth, it gradually ceases to be subjunctive.
>
> Tony Tanner, The American Mystery. Cambridge: Cambridge University
> Press, 2000. Pp. xxiv, 242. £13.95. ISBN 0 521 78374 7.
>
> Reviewed by David Seed, University of Liverpool
>
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