Pynchon & Math (Aristotle vs. Plato)

Tue Jan 29 17:29:29 CST 2013

Yes, I fully agree, all nits nullified when it is all read. Lacey's article/paper is excellent. 
Thanks Joseph for making me take a second look. And, Alice, more thanks to you. (Do you get enough
Thanks? Enuff)

Here's the general reason I like it. It treats GR/Pynchon as a deep writer about our world, one we as citizens 
should and perforce do think about, if seldom this well. AND, it is written without lit jargon and straightforwardly.
Citizens, readers could read it and get it. If not Orwellian, Academic Orwell at its best. 

And, it hews to the text! So well, so steadily, seeing it steadily and seeing it whole. It has made me order that
Arendt. It has said "reread GR again". 

What I liked best and was newest and most interesting to me: going deeper into P's use of paranoia and showing how
THAT is not an ideal or even necessary default belief. But most, his wonderful analysis of Slothrop's disappearance. YES! I think I shouted. That explains a few things in the text. And, Not least, P's willed avoidance of a public life. I've argued that (in a different way).

Isn't having Slothrop as good as disappear an incredibly brilliant piece of genius? And it isn't just another trick, Mr. Wood,
it is not even a trick but part of a coherent vision.
 Non-sequitor: It is why Measure for Measure ends as it does. No cheap tricks despite those who thought so.  Another Problem play/work of genius.

I would add this to his stuff about Slothrop. Those last memories of his childhood, his growing-up, are relevant too to
Slothrop's disappearance. No, P doesn't believe in Back to the GArden; No, P doesn't believe in the "innocence' and 
paradise of a childhood garden of eden. P believes in we human beings when we were so much a part of our 
family/community that our selves, formed by same, were coextensive--this is mostly a metaphor but not totally if you 
remember and can see how children in a family, or village community are akin to folks in the ages of belief in some sense.
 They just live, the world is real, adults explain it when asked, god is everyone. 

I would add and elaborate that P extends this in many senses in AtD when he offers deep village life in Olde Europe as some
kind of comparable ideal, mostly lost or declining. Life within same is, in general, one of self-disappearing.
(In AtD, he goes far toward incorporating a vision of bad shit handled within as well. ) 

Moved.

Mark

________________________________
 From: Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> 
Cc: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2013 7:44 AM
Subject: Re: Pynchon & Math (Aristotle vs. Plato)

I had to stop,last eve. Yes, I may be quarreling over gnats. It is one way I challenge a text. I will encounter it all, whole. 

I did like his perspective and his use of Arendt's book so far. One of us pointed to this before on our own or thru a pubbed article in the time that is the timeless plist.

yeah, falling asleep, I did think I may have been wrong on Lacey's remark on Nietzsche. Nietzsche did think the will to power was real, inevitable. And he was notoriously anti-the morals of his time. Whatever, my words Are irrelevant to his on P's work, I now think. 

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 27, 2013, at 8:49 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> 1)I think the complete elaboration of Lacey's article is better than the sum of its parts
> 2) I too think ATD can be seen as richer in ideas and it is my personal favorite. But GR sets itself a more difficult task as far as the mythic forces he is challenging, and perhaps the sustained intensity of the writing.
> 3)
> 4)I don't get Nietzsche nor am I a big admirer of the Nietzsche I have read though he has some great zingers.  I guess I just think in terms of Nietzsche's observable effect  on others and in that sense I think the writer makes a reasonable argument. Worth a bit of discussion? The writer goes at the same issue using Arendt as sounding board.
> 
> Does anyone else think Friedrich has at least one too many consonants in his last name?  
> 
> On Jan 27, 2013, at 7:50 PM, Markekohut wrote:
> 
>> Okay, I'll read it all...
>> 
>> 1st nitpick: why would he even throw out the " possibility" that P's vision may be NIHILISTIC?  ....Nihilistic? Des he know what the word mean and how has he read the "spiritual" and positive stuff in Pynchon? ...sop to Wood? 
>> this is where I stopped earlier.
>> 
>> 2) I would Argue that Against the Day is richer in "ideas" even than GR, even though it may not harbor them as artistically.......IT IS HUGER than GR and almost every line is rich with some kind
>> Of idea.....
>> 
>> 3) But, OK, GR is the one, the dark one, full of ideas of power and politics.  
>> 
>> 4) I think he might not get Nietzsche's will to power if he contrasts it with P's explorations. N saw how we all, from the personal to state level, feel the enacting of 'power', our need and as others use toward us. I suggest P sees that too and tries to show how it ...is wrong. P tries to find the spaces where we are--can be---powerfully human without trampling others with our " will to power".  Ya know, like LOVE, say. Caring for a child, etc. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPad
>> 
>> On Jan 27, 2013, at 7:14 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> The Lacey article is excellent. Thanks for that reference. I do think he overstates the black hole interpretation of Pynchon's worldview- the idea that a point has been passed beyond which light may never again bring hope of a more peaceful and potentially meaningful and sustainable life for the talking monkeys. In Pynchon's nonfiction and book reviews we hear a man who offers  friendly criticism and corrective ideas to dangerous intellectual, social  and political directions; that must mean something. Lacey also backs away from this argument as he considers Slothrop's rainbow disintegration.
>>> 
>>> But Lacey makes an excellent case in a very rich attempt to understand P's political and philosphical vision. I would love to see a group discussion of this article if others are interested.?
>>> 
>>> On Jan 26, 2013, at 10:06 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I would argue this sort of naturalism, nature as a series of
>>>> convenient but contingent truths, is a staple of american fiction more
>>>> generally. For example, look at how Pynchon handles the feud between
>>>> the Quaternionists and the Vectorists in AtD.
>>>> 
>>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> American Fiction Generally.
>>>> 
>>>> “The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical
>>>> disputes that otherwise might
>>>> be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material
>>>> or spiritual? – here are
>>>> notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and
>>>> disputes over such notions are
>>>> unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret
>>>> each notion by tracing its
>>>> respective practical consequences. What difference would it
>>>> practically make to any one if this
>>>> notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference
>>>> whatever can be traced, then the
>>>> alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
>>>> Whenever a dispute is serious,
>>>> we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow
>>>> from one side or the other’s
>>>> being right” (James).
>>>> 
>>>> Thinking, ideas, produce practical consequences, and the value of
>>>> these toughts, these ideas, is, here I'll dither with the word
>>>> "convenient" but Not the word, "contingent" because it is not a matter
>>>> of what is convenient, but what the value of the idea is when used,
>>>> what the consequences are, in Thought, Action, and Passion (McKeon).
>>>> What difference does it make if this or that is true? Well, none if
>>>> there are no consequences of this or that idea. For ideas derive their
>>>> significance from our use of them.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> As mentioned, Pynchon and American Pragmatism has been much discussed
>>>> in the critical literature, sometimes in a note, as in the example in
>>>> the essay on Percy & Pragmatism linked at the bottom of this post,
>>>> where I provide an excerpt, the note that includes a ref. to Benny and
>>>> V., and the link for the full text.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Others include:
>>>> 
>>>> "Thomas Pynchon on Totalitarianism: Power, Paranoia, and Preterition
>>>> in Gravity’s Rainbow" by Robert J. Lacey
>>>> http://americanaejournal.hu/vol6no2/lacey
>>>> 
>>>> Jeffrey S. Baker on the Radical Critique of American Imperialism in
>>>> the 1960s (in Thomas Pynchon, H. Bloom, ISBN 0794170301)
>>>> 
>>>> Baker, Jeffrey S. “Amerikkka Uber Alles: German Nationalism, American
>>>> Imperialism, and the 1960s Antiwar Movement in Gravity's Rainbow.”
>>>> Critique 40, no. 4 (summer 1999): 323-41.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> The American Evasion of Pragmatism: Souls, Science, and The Case of
>>>> Walker Percy
>>>> By Rob Chodat, Boston University
>>>> 
>>>> Pragmatism, too, has often seen itself is such world-historical terms,
>>>> yet it has never been readily capable of, or interested in, the
>>>> fevered all-or-nothing visions that such authors express. The “soul of
>>>> Western man,” for Rorty and Dennett as much as for James and Dewey,
>>>> has occasionally experienced vertigo in its transition to modernity,
>>>> but to say it is “in the very act of flying apart” is both to simplify
>>>> a complex set of historical developments and to ignore the very real
>>>> compensations that for them these developments entail. None of which
>>>> means, of course, that pragmatists could never respect or even
>>>> treasure the work of Percy and his literary descendents. They
>>>> certainly could.54 But to do so would require that they treat these
>>>> texts more as cautionary tales or thought experiments than as viable
>>>> predictions about what could or should come to pass. Pragmatists, that
>>>> is, will be inclined to follow Kenneth Burke’s lead and treat these
>>>> texts as extended proverbs: vivid, protracted warnings about what to
>>>> avoid when describing the mind, what dark fly-bottles we can enter
>>>> when we’re not careful in our accounts of cognition and intention. The
>>>> texts will seem to be primarily what Burke referred to as proverbs of
>>>> “admonition,”55 and pragmatists could appreciate them much in the way
>>>> that devout Christians might appreciate the thoroughly fallen worlds
>>>> of Poe or Cormac McCarthy. But like such a Christian, pragmatists will
>>>> have trouble accommodating any claim that these texts depict the most
>>>> important truths about us, or what things are really like, or what we
>>>> essentially are or have become. An author, they will say, isn’t
>>>> mistaken for writing a book like Love in the Ruins, only for believing
>>>> too strictly in what it says: seeing it as more than an occasional
>>>> satire, the expression of a mood, something to cast aside when it no
>>>> longer serves. To read in this way, to see Percy’s dystopian visions
>>>> as mere conceits or his picture of mind as misleading and fanciful,
>>>> will seem to some readers to ignore or diminish the claim that his and
>>>> similar texts make upon us. Pragmatism will seem to be merely
>>>> shrugging off our most urgent questions—are we fundamentally material
>>>> creatures or are we something more?—with a casual “It all depends.”
>>>> And it will seem, in turn, curiously unresponsive to the drama of
>>>> intensity and obsessiveness that so much modern art articulates,
>>>> substituting potent ideals of spiritual perfection and salvation for
>>>> weaker, meliorist ideals of intellectual growth and social progress.56
>>>> How we understand the pragmatist revival of the last few decades, and
>>>> whether we want it to shape the fiction of the future, depends on
>>>> which of these ideals we ourselves prefer, or which we find
>>>> convincing, which we think we need to believe in order to live, and
>>>> how prepared we are to choose one.57
>>>> 
>>>> note 57:
>>>> One could cite earlier texts that ontologize the mind in similar
>>>> ways, even before the pragmatist revival of the early 1970s. Early
>>>> Pynchon, say: midway through V. (1963), Benny Profane, struggling with
>>>> the increasingly “inanimate” world of cold technology and warfare,
>>>> timidly offers up the term “soul”—but is summarily dismissed by the
>>>> automaton SHROUD, who scoffs, “What are you doing, getting religion?”
>>>> Such an early case, however, only helps illustrate part of my point,
>>>> which is that little seems to change in American fiction after
>>>> pragmatism returns to the intellectual scene.
>>>> 
>>>> http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-3/the-american-evasion-of-pragmatism-souls-science-and-the-case-of-walker-percy#foot_src_52
> 
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