Thomas Pynchon Explained In GIFs Form

[Monte Davis]

I'm just finishing Against the Day again: recall that circa 1919 (p. 1024)
we see "... the old *Bolshai’a Igra*... The Romanoff crest had vanished
from its envelope, which instead was now all a single chaste expanse of
saturated red, and the ship’s name had been changed to *Pomne o
Golodayushchiki. '*Remember the Starving,' explained Captain
Padzhitnoff...these days his ship and crew flew everywhere across Europe
and Inner Asia, no longer dropping brickwork but sending food, clothing
and— since a great influenza epidemic the boys had not till now been aware
of—
​
medical supplies, gently down by parachute to whatever populations below were
in need of them.
​"

The Russian dirigible, while pointedly "red," is floating out of the new
government's control, just as the Inconvenience is becoming independent of
the shadowy (capitalist? imperialist?) Chums of Chance headquarters. We
have seen the tsarist state almost entirely in terms of 1) Its "Great
Games" in central Asia and the Balkans, and (2) its barely acculturated
Islamic and shamanic reaches; we will see nothing of its successor.
Similarly in GR, we see the rocket-hunting great power game of the Zone and
the remote Kirghizhstan of the 1920s, but only glimpses of the USSR of 1945.

I'm not saying that either book conceals (let alone excuses or favors) the
authoritarian communism of the USSR, but it's not unfair to say that it
elides the matter compared to its treatment of authoritarian forces in
20th-century Europe and the US. AtD both celebrates anarchism and trade
unionism and explicitly foreshadows the death of the former in WWI: "Industrial
corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if
not more powerful. But in a general war among nations, every small victory
Anarchism has struggled to win so far would simply turn to dust." (Ratty
McHugh, p. 938)

What Pynchon *doesn't* do is engage in any depth with the theoretical
communism of pre-1914, which coexisted and at times overlapped with
anarchism and the union movement, or with the actuality of state communism
after 1917. The latter managed to co-opt enough of the workers' hopes and
rhetoric of the earlier period to seem a desirable alternative to many for
decades to come, although it was as top-down, controlling and brutal. That'
betrayal -- and reluctance to see it -- was long a sore spot for the
American left (which may be why Pynchon elides it), and an all-too-easy
avenue of attack for the American right.

You mention the relation of "the intellectual lineage of fascism" to "the
project of objective scientific inquiry." In the spirit of double
refraction, we (if not Pynchon) we might also contemplate the intellectual
lineage of "scientific socialism," i.e. Marxist-Leninist claims of
historical inevitability (shepherded by a vanguard party elite, of
course)... and decades of prominent Soviet (and then Chinese) enthusiasm
for  science, heavy industry, vast infrastructure projects, collective
farming, etc. I think both have the same roots not only in the
Enlightenment, but also in the "ancient forces of greed and fear" (IV 130)
behind *all* ideologies of control and domination.





On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 5:06 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> >> It would be fair to say, though, that Pynchon is obsessed with the
> relationship between reason and authoritarianism, and specifically with how
> the intellectual lineage of fascism—both its roots in the Enlightenment,
> and the way it informs present-day social and political structures—is
> intimately related to the project of objective scientific inquiry.<<
>
> This sums it up for me.
>
>
>
> On 09.05.2014 21:23, Dave Monroe wrote:
>
>> http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/gif-explainers-explained-
>> in-thomas-pynchon-explained-1573696149
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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