BtZ42. History, Cold War, point of no return.

Tue Apr 5 02:24:08 CDT 2016

Although it is "too late", there are "alternate routes that might have 
been taken" in Gravity's Rainbow.

In another April, I wrote/quoted:

*Subject: grgr (25): the fork in the road america never took*

*Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 09:35:30 -0500 *
  "... memories of the blue hills, green maizefields, get-togethers over hemp and
  tobacco with the indians, young women in upper rooms with their aprons lifted,
  pretty faces, hair spilling on the wood floors while underneath in the stables
  horses kicked and drunks hollered, the starts in the very early mornings when
  the backs of his herd glowed like pearl, the long stony and surprising road to
  boston, the rain on the connecticut river, the snuffling good-nights of a
  hundred pigs among the new stars and long grass still warm from the sun,
  settling down to sleep ...
  could he [the colonial William Slothrop] have been the fork in the road america
  never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? suppose the
  slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? might there
  have been fewer crimes in the name of jesus and more mercy in the name of
  judas iscariot? it seems to tyrone slothrop that there might be a way back ---" (556)

  great passage of high lyrical density. must be read out loud like a poem.

  with m&d, if not before, it became clear, i think, that the "fork in the road
  america never took" is the historical field of force, which inspires pynchon's
  whole work.

  perhaps naumann was thinking of this, when he said in that radio
  debate that trp "deserves it to be honored as an american patriot".

  and "the whole space of the zone cleared, depolarized" (556) is echoing this
  single historical call ...

" ... and somewhere in the waste of it [the Zone], a single set of 
coordinated from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, 
without even nationality to fuck it up." (p. 556)

But while "the fork in the road America never took" was a real historic 
(and political!) opportunity, the depolarized space of the Zone is - 
"maybe that anarchist he met in Zürich was right" - not only an utopian 
pipe dream but also - "maybe for a little while all the fences are down, 
one road as good as another" - just a temporary thing. Finally, the 
Zone's "waste" was, although war and holocaust were over, in terms of 
human suffering such a terrible time - millions to be fleeing -  that in 
reality, despite the black market, very few people will have breathed 
easily in absence of control. So, the Zone is a mere echo of the fork in 
the road, not an extension. Note, however, that Tyrone Slothrop's 
rendezvous with Frieda the sow enacts his ancestors' memory of "the 
snuffling good-nights of a hundred pigs among the new stars and long 
grass still warm from the sun, settling down to sleep ..." But this is 
the 20th century, these are the times of V. So Tyrone needs a mask 
"'Wait. How about this?' He puts on the pig mask. She stares for a 
minute, then moves up to Slothrop and kisses him, snout-to-snout" (p. 
573), and the character of their relation - "Lustful thoughts come 
filtering into Slothrop's mind, little peculiarity here you know, 
hehheh, nothing he can't handle" (p. 575) - seems not to be that of 
creature and good herder. Their beautiful encounter - "Both of them are 
dripping with dew. He follows her on down to the stream, takes off the 
mask again [sic!] and throws water at his face while she drinks besides 
him, slurping placid. The water is clear, running lively, cold. Round 
rocks knock together under the stream. A resonant sound, a music [sic!]. 
It would be worth something to sit day and night, in and out, listening 
to these sounds of water and cobbles unfold ..." (pp. 573-574) - is 
nevertheless an uncharacteristically peaceful moment in this otherwise 
not so peaceful book. Oink!

On 04.04.2016 16:05, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Laura wrote, kindly asking me directly a question 'cause I keep 
> bloviating about AtD: (please all,
> this question is for all of us)
>
> Laura:
> "I see GR as Pynchon's attempt to find that point - zero point, point 
> of no return, Brennschluss - where the Cold War was set in motion. He 
> knew, of course, that he'd have to go back much earlier. In GR, it's 
> already too late. In ATD and M&D he digs deeper. I can't offhand think 
> of any examples, but it seems to me that in ATD, he's presenting 
> alternate routes that might have been taken - Tesla, the Quaternions - 
> Mark K., can you help here? Even in Bleeding Edge, there's at least a 
> vision of what might have been."
>
> I would say that Yes AtD offers many thematic branchings of possible 
> alternate routes--by breadth of embodied themes. Perhaps not so 
> localized in time nor place but in a kind of Iceland Spar of Alternate 
> History, such as different sources of energy, a different world if 
> there were no imaginary numbers (metaphorically ), much other kinds of 
> world richness (and justice)...all presented conceptually, not via 
> much arguable real history, as I think of it.
>
> But AtD is also, as we have all said, a presentation of modernity, 
> (some of) its global effects and the consequences of. I have always 
> thought 'around 1870" as the earlier time in question, and I found 
> this for this post:
>
> Wikipedia:
>
> Charles Baudelaire 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire> is credited with 
> coining the term "modernity" (/modernité/) in his 1864 essay "The 
> Painter of Modern Life," to designate the fleeting, ephemeral 
> experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art 
> has to capture that experience. In this sense, it refers to a 
> particular relationship to time, one characterized by intense 
> historical discontinuity or rupture, openness to the novelty of the 
> future, and a heightened sensitivity to what is unique about the 
> present (Kompridis 2006 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#CITEREFKompridis2006>, 32–59).
>
> As an analytical concept and normative 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_%28philosophy%29> ideal, modernity 
> is closely linked to the ethos 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos> of philosophical and aesthetic 
> modernism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism>; political and 
> intellectual currents that intersect with the Enlightenment 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment>; and subsequent 
> developments as diverse as Marxism 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism>, existentialism 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism>, modern art 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art> and the formal 
> establishment of social science 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science>. It also encompasses 
> the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, and 
> shifts in attitudes associated with secularisation and post-industrial 
> life <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_life> (Berman 2010 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#CITEREFBerman2010>, 15–36).
>
>
> Regarding the direct Cold War question: I don't see it at all in AtD 
> since we know of
>
> the huge balloon-based Russo-US Chums' 'State' or Whatever--, a 
> transnational Alliance of some kind--- that the book builds to.
>
>
> But, one smart reader, David Cowart, I think, in a lit essay I once 
> read----which is probably in his book or reworked into his book, which 
> I have not read---did argue this: V is not set in the middle of the 
> 50s for nothing, at the tail end of McCarthyism---where national 
> 'spying' on the other was patriotic--and around the Suez Crisis for 
> nothing. He argued that as we thought about Pynchon's vision of 
> America (the US of A, as Jochen more precisely prefers), we must start 
> there not with*Lot 49 *nor even /The Secret Integration/.  Because 
> Cold War fifties, the Bomb and Everything Else.
>
>

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