Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[Joseph Tracy]

Some corrections for clarity of my last post
On Jan 29, 2013, at 1:56 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> Couple 3 thoughts. 
> 1) I didn't get the impression that Lacey was saying he was the first to look at Pychon politics, only that the bulk of criticism is literary, and some  political writing was, according to him, over-concerned with conspiracy/paranoia.  Making an issue of this is  too nit-picky to interest me, though I  agree that there are other political Pynchon essays.
> 2) the "richness that Lacey ignores" is inherently necessary  in an attempt to narrow his focus say something worth saying about the politics of GR. Also,  he does delve into P's psychological treatment of totalitarianism, and at least for this reader of the essay, I found his illucidation of how Pynchon shows that systemic and structural totalitarianism invades the individual psyche and even begins to incorporate resistance as a kind of gyroscopic guidance to the system  to be  a clarifying insight and troublingly persuasive. 
> 3) (thought cont.)One question it brings up is whether this idea of the inevitable co-opting of resistance is tainted by Pynchon's own sense of cowardice, moral taint, whatever you want to call it. We all struggle with that tendency to stop when the cost of confrontation is high and the first and perhaps last defense we offer ourselves is something along the lines of "you can't change it so why try".  This is that question of whether we act according to how we think or think according to how we act.
> What certain characters in P's writing seem to get that liberates them from this dilemma is something along the lines of a transcendence of the fear of death. In GR this seems to happen as Slothrop moves toward his disintegration/disappearance, and it seems to come as a tonic  and question mark to the rest of the development of the essay and even to the overall tone of the novel. His reading of this does correspond to my own. 
> 4)  Alice asks below if this political construct  continues in later works. I find the thematic critiques of the pervasive cultural colonialism of capitalism (with technology as the core capital)  to be continued throughout his writing, especially ATD where technologies of resistance ( Tesla) are subverted, where the logic of competition for markets leads again and again to the logic of war. In contrast, the logic of resistance leads to fun, escape, sexual liberation, spirituality or anarchy or some merging of those principals. Sex has become distinctly friendlier than in GR.( Pynchon does change) This pre WW1 era is, however,  teated as more wide open, more critical as a turning point, more alive with the remnants of the spirit of alchemy and revolution. In ATD Michaelson Morley  is a major empirical nail in the magic that is still alive despite the ravages of Euro colonialism. Interestingly Einstein re-invoked the aether. But confirming the bleak political vision lacey finds in Pynchon and  despite the fact that Einstein  always tried to speak for peace, his theories were also weaponized by the logic of the process Pynchon describes in GR.
>>> One of the ideas in ATD concerns  reptilian aliens, possibly going back to  the genesis story.  The implication is that a kind of scientific/industrialtechnological marriage( Vormance expedition)  discovers and wakens an uncontrollable reptilian appetite which begins to devour civilization just as the tree of knowledge initiated the loss of paradise. 
> In this story and hundreds of others Pychon is asking these political questions as multidimensioanl spiritual /philosphical/literary  questions but  Pynchon himself is pragmatic enough and historically based in such a way that his political story can act as a lens for these larger questions without taking over and diminishing what are much more difficult areas of inquiry.  
> In Vineland ( an American 1984 with escape clause) the methodology of totalitarianism is the tube, secretly backed by prisons and the 80's story line of big brother as sexy protective cop ready to defend us from the  vast destructive power of  shamanic herbs, secret ninja feminist armies, college professors, rock and roll, and karmic adjusters.  

I also like the way Lacey handles the issue of preterition, not new, but very strong clear exposition and used to shed light on political options.
> 
> 
> On Jan 28, 2013, at 6:23 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
> 
>> Claim A
>> "totalitarianism, albeit in a subtler form, has permeated Western
>> democracies since the mid-twentieth century"
>> 
>> AND
>> 
>> Claim B
>> 
>> "capitalism, in collaboration with the automatizing forces of
>> technology, has become the new totalizing ideology with which human
>> beings must contend."
>> 
>> Yes, both claims, be they true or not, are made in GR, if not in the
>> texts that follow GR.
> 

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