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

Tue Apr 5 02:39:07 CDT 2016

Please change "coordinated" into "coordinates" and "ancestors'" into 
"ancestor's"!

On 05.04.2016 09:24, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>
> 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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