Review of Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom

[Mark Kohut]

Seems from my broad---cause of knowing about popularly-selling books, even/esp " intellectual ones----
but thin as spread compost understanding of intellectual streams in the US there was much discussion of ' character types' --in America, anyway, back in the day. Wilhelm Reich, C. Wright Mills ( I think) , Philip Rieff [ Mr. Susan Sontag then] , others. 

Pynchon's detractors have long---and rightly in some sense ( sez even this fanboy) --said he thinks many of his characters ( as ideas) rather than draws them in the round from bits and bits of observation and self-reflection like, say, Tolstoy. 







Sent from my iPad

> On Aug 21, 2014, at 9:28 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yeah, not too may either-ors in Pynchon's imagination. Nod to, use of Adorno? Maybe. ( not knowing Adorno well, I just took the fetishism remark In GR as in the Freudian tradition.
> 
> I suggest Fromm because of his taxonomy of ( and insights into) character types created by modernity.....just look at the Table of Contents in ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM. 
> 
> I think the argument against Fromm by the example of Dr. Hilarious is misguided. To satirize practitioners of a type- as to satirize practitioners of religion ( or most anything) ---is NOT necessarily to think the insights from the leading thinkers of a tradition are wrong. 
> 
> Pynchon satirizes aspects of Marxisms, lotsa religionists, lots of " intellectual traditions" while, of course learning, seeing with, rethinking and refining his own vision with the insights of geniuses ( like him)
> 
> I might add that I think maybe Fromm because he was so popular in America, so popular with
> Some Americans in trying to understand themselves; because he, Fromm, believed in the social understanding he wanted to explore, not necessarily the originality of key new constructs; because Pynchon too wanted THAT. 
> 
> Because of The Art of Loving too? MILLIONS sold. 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Aug 21, 2014, at 6:25 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> > I see that these two first-rate Pynchon understanders also found Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM a very possible source, which I was lucky enough to know and be led back to.<
>> 
>> Why Fromm? Of all the Frankfurt School folks he was the one who actually worked as a psychoanalyst. His sociology, if one can speak of this, is hardly more than the rediscovery of the early - more 'humanist' - writings of Marx. Perhaps it's possible to say that Fromm's social psychology resembles in its diagnosis - "the necrophil character", "the marketing character" etc - some of Pynchon's artistic insights. But we shouldn't forget that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are not trustworthy institutions in Pynchon's world. Just think of Dr. Hilarius! And it was Pynchon who coined the term 'shrink'. So I'm sceptical about Fromm being a source for Pynchon. Is there a proof he's read him? A library list? A letter? 
>> To me it always seemed plausible that Pynchon - if he found inspiration in the Frankfurt School at all - got it from Theodor "of psychoanalysis nothing is true but its exaggerations" Adorno. In Adorno's sociology you find a mix of Marx and Weber which indeed looks similar to the social world as it is unfolding in Gravity's Rainbow. And the "dialectic of enlightenment" (Adorno/Horkheimer) can also be found in other books of Pynchon, especially in Mason & Dixon. 
>> The earliest sign of the possible Pynchon/Adorno connection is chapter fourteen in novel numero uno: "V in love". Here Pynchon pictures the scandalous opening night of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, and he does this to exemplify the European decadence and death drive. The incident itself is well known, right, but in most history books this is just another art scandal in the wake of the avantgarde like there were so many around those years, also in music (--- when Alban Berg got his first works performed in Vienna, his teacher Schönberg, who sat in the audience, got slapped by furious visitors who were completely shocked by the       music). But Pynchon chose Stravinsky's big one and perhaps Paris isn't the only reason for this. In Philosophy of New Music which got published simultaneously in Germany in America in 1949, Adorno draws a sharp distinction between Schönberg whom he connects to "progress" and Stravinsky whom he connects to "reaction". And this in a definitely political sense! Adorno's key words and sub titles for the work's second part about the reactionary Stravinsky are telling enough: "Intentionlessness and sacrifice", "Archaism, modernity, infantilism", "Permanent regression and musical gestalt", "The psychotic aspect", "Fetishism of the means", "Hebephrenia", "Catatony", "Dissociation of time", "Illusion of objectivism" etc pp.   And this is, in Adorno's theory as well as in Pynchon's novel, not just something aesthetic or marginal. Actually it's the prelude to the downfall of European civilization! 
>> Well, OK, you might now say, but does Pynchon's text give us any hint at Adorno? It does, it does! In the chapter's last but one paragraph we read the following sentence: "ADORNED [emphasis added] with so many combs, bracelets, sequins, she might have become confused in this fetish-world and neglected to add to herself the one inanimate object that would have saved her" (p. 414). If (if ...) this is Tom's way to say "Hello!"  - Adorno still lived and read US novels when V got published  - and "Thank you!" to Teddie, there is a prominent model for this. In "Doktor Faustus" Thomas Mann says "Thanks!" to Adorno for all the help with the music by describing the particular sound of a musical motif several times with the phrase "Wie-sen-grund" (Wiesengrund = meadow ground), and Wiesengrund was the name - it's still visible in the middle initial W. - of Adorno's father. PKD read Doktor Faustus with great enthusiasm, and I could imagine that Pynchon at least heard about that book and the musical philosophy therein. 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 18.08.2014 19:36, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>> I see that these two first-rate Pynchon understanders also found Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM a very possible source, which I was lucky enough to know and be led back to. I did a fair amount of posting about and for it, I remember. started with the title. 
>>> 
>>> Although I haven't yet read the book, from the review summary, I think they are wrong about how a few publishing years might have kept GR from being published as is....Most of the " porno" charges had been fought and won by publishers before the sixties, and a writer such as Pynchon, at a House like Viking, with an editor like Cork Smith would have published what he/they knew made thematic sense. They would have loved, at publication (probably) to have had the book called " pornographic as the Columbia Candlebrows overseeing the Pulitzer judges/readers did.....
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>> 
>>> On Aug 18, 2014, at 11:11 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Thanks, Martin Eve!
>>>> 
>>>> https://pynchon.net/owap/article/view/114
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/gravitys_rainbow_domination_and_freedom
>> 
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