"Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite Subversive" (Molly Hite)

[David Ewers]

Speaking of bananas (in contrast to rockets...) their curve is due to negative geotropism (or negative gravitropism); they start pointing down and grow up, against gravity.

On Mar 28, 2016, at 10:33 AM have a nice day, violet wrote this message:), David Morris wrote:

> I see the whole scene as Nature's power to thrive amidst adversity, chaos and death.  The intricate chemistry is a form of magic.  They are sort of supernatural bananas.  And the breakfast scene is a slow-moving slapstick.
> 
> David Morris
> 
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 12:27 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> I don't see much fun in the description of the Banana breakfast - the tone is more of a surreal, desperate attempt to forget what's happening outside. It's not Pynchon who's saying fuck off, but "the high intricacy of the weaving of its [the musaceous odor] molecules.
> 
> Earlier, on the roof: "Pirate has become famous for his Banana Breakfasts … the politics of bacteria, the soils stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of, having seen the fruit thrive to lengths of a foot and a half, yes, amazing but true." These are unnatural bananas, grown in the shadow of the power station and the gasworks.
> 
> Why the references to molecules here? They're the first of many references to organic (i.e. unnatural) chemistry. Similarly, I don't think the Adenoid appears as a random, comic incident. Pynchon isn't going to write about the holocaust directly, but it hovers in the background. At least that's how I read it.
> 
> LK
> 
> 
> -----Original Message----- 
> From: Monte Davis 
> Sent: Mar 28, 2016 11:11 AM 
> To: Mark Kohut 
> Cc: Kai Frederik Lorentzen , pynchon -l , kelber 
> Subject: Re: "Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite Subversive" (Molly Hite) 
> 
> "...a wonderful breakfast... the scent alone is enough to ward of[f] death, Pynchon famously says “Fuck Death.” So by indulging in this pleasure, they are able to escape death, they are able to escape the trajectory of human nature even if just for a morning.. maybe by not denying these pleasures we might be able to get out of the arc of human nature..."
> 
> This is more or less how I read the banana breakfast, too: Bakhtin's carnival, Brueghel's land of Cockaigne, a celebration of excess mocking wartime austerity. Yes, it's anomalous in the novel's larger world: an island or oasis or refuge, just as the rooftop bananery is an artificial enclosure against December chill, just as its bananas are luxuries available only to these officers with connections. Still, "a spell, against falling objects" seems to me as good as it gets in that world.
> 
> Which is why I respectfully disagree with part of Laura's discussion last week:
> 
> LK> The musaceous odor. Anyone who's ever taken organic chemistry (did Pynchon? Anyone know?) has probably synthesized banana ester in the lab. it's a standard lab exercise, and it's easy to know if you've got it right, by that musaceous odor ... So even when Pynchon is talking about Nature (in this case, unnaturally growing bananas), he's reminding us how easy it is for science to mimic it, or to tear apart and exploit the delicate molecules.
> 
> There are certainly many places in GR where industrial organic (and inorganic) chemical technology has an unmistakably evil, negative, anti-human or even "anti-life" context and emotional affect. BUT NOT, I mildly demur, HERE!
> 
> Pynchon gives us "peculiar alkaloids" in the bananery's long-composted soil... "the politics of bacteria, the soil’s stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of"... "musaceous odor..." 
> "taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules"... "genetic chains... labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations"
> 
> But does he, HERE, say or imply anything about artificial synthesis (as contrasted with life's proliferating variety)? Does he say anything about a "mimicked" smell as distinct from the real smell of real yummy 'nanas? Are there any "delicate" molecules being "torn apart" and "exploited" here -- other than as life has routinely, "by its nature" done so 24/7 for a few billion years before IG Farben came along? No.
> 
> I'm fine with Laura writing about her associations, which I believe were brought on by Pynchon's uses (above) of chemical and biological vocabulary and concepts. In fact, I share them: I've made isoamyl acetate and isopentyl acetate, too. But that's quite different from "Pynchon is reminding us" of "science" doing any such thing. In fact, I read those phrases above as integral to the unmistakably positive, celebratory "flavor" of the banana breakfast -- not as a coded warning that exploitive synthetic technology is lurking beneath. The weaving and unweaving of molecules *is*, explicitly, "a charm, against falling objects."
> 
> Here's a reader I respect and admire, and a stock response that runs through fifty years of Pynchonology: "Everyone knows that Pynchon mistrusts and fears and warns us about science and technology, so wherever their vocabulary and concepts crop up, he's on the attack."
> 
> This matters to me, as I wrote at length in the exchanges here in June of 2013: https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1306&msg=174066 , etc etc etc... 
> 
> It leads, again and again, to systematic ignoring and misreading of positive, mixed and ambivalent  contexts and associations for P's uses of scientific and technical vocabulary, concepts, and perspectives. Fair warning: I'll be coming back to this throughout the BtZ42, and throughout GR if we continue.  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 5:24 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> "having evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing"---p.19 Miller edition
> 
> I believe Ms. Hite is the one who also said, when encountering the claim that the Whole Sick Crew were 'hysterical' caricatures
> said: "I knew these people' IRL. 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 4:13 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> > Molly Hite’s critical work with Pynchon published in 2004 has the title “Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive.” It is an interesting title, because it originated somewhere completely different than Gravity’s Rainbow, in fact it came from the 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven, a group of young men from antiwar and revolutionary groups accused of disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention. This was considered a very important trial in the counterculture movement, something Pynchon famously embraced in his works. The exact quote originated from the testimony of Abbie Hoffman and reads “fun was very important… it was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and morals that were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a rate race.” Hite uses this to introduce her interpretation of Pynchon. She argues that “the idea of fun could subvert an oppressive capitalist structure is central to this novel of excess.”
>             Molly Hite uses Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 culture synthesis Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud to help frame her argument, and plainly states that this work must have influenced Pynchon. Marcuse claims that the period of time, which this book was written in, was a period of great productivity and excess, and with the technological advances, it became economically feasible to have a “leisure culture.”  However with this culture of leisure comes a raising of standards and consequently a “surplus-repression.” This is repression is the repression of Freudian pleasures, conceding or flat out rejecting the gratification of many desires which Freud saw as necessary for a society to organize and survive. Marcuse argues that by denying these pleasures principles that “advanced civilizations are in danger from a second group of instinctive impulses striving for death.” This, Hite states, is where we get the dramatization of the destruction from the rocket, as it becomes global. She argues “The V-2 Rocket rises under human guidance..” and this is where we understand the “death drive.” This is the natural tendency of society, to progress to a certain point, and then fall into the death drive; the arc of human civilization not unlike the arc of the bomb.
> 
>             Hite states that Pynchon understood Marcuse’s possibility of escape from postindustrial destruction, and encoded it in his book, however slight this chance might be. By not becoming individuals we are doomed to, as individuality in Gravity’s Rainbow is synonymous with disrupting the productivity and subsequent regression of human nature. This is where the overt sexual tones of the book come from, especially the more risqué ones. These sexual acts are done not in hopes of productivity, or reproducing, but simply out of pleasure. By not denying these pleasures and becoming individual of the society, we can escape the trajectory of destruction. Hite does acknowledge that these chances are incredibly small, that betrayal and self-defeating tendencies are built into the system, that “every revolution has been a betrayed revolution.” So for Hite’s interpretation, humanity is at stake, the trajectory is annihilation, and Pynchon offers a way to escape that trajectory.
> 
>             I would like to agree with Hite in her thinking. In the very beginning of the novel, we are introduced with a very dark image of the concentration camp, with people being ushered into a bleak hotel. At that hotel, they wait quietly for the bomb to drop without any hope left. Right after we get that dark image, we are given one of the most colorful scenes in the novel, the banana breakfast. After a night of indulging in alcohol to excess, Pirate wakes up and picks bananas, something that was rationed during the time period. He then begins to cook a wonderful breakfast consisting of banana everything, and the scent alone is enough to ward of death, Pynchon famously says “Fuck Death.” So by indulging in this pleasure, they are able to escape death, they are able to escape the trajectory of human nature even just for a morning. I believe scenes like this are a clear road map that Pynchon gives us, that maybe by not denying these pleasures we might be able to get out of the arc of human nature, or in Pynchon’s work, the literal bomb. The chances are slim however, these people are protected only as long as the scent of the banana breakfast wafts over them, but the chance does exist.    
> 
>  
> 
> Hite, Molly, “‘Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite Subversive’: Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 51.4 (Winter 2010): 677-702. <
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> https://englit0500.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/fun-actually-was-actually-becoming-subversive/
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> 
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 

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