The antidote?

[Joseph Tracy]

I don’t remember where I came up with my reading of place. Snoxall’s it is - for both Mexico/Prentice and the seance.

 I  do wish we knew more about what that meant. What is Snoxall’s. Could it be a private mansion given over to one of these agencies as a less formal setting for the intelligence crowd?  I guess if that is all Weisenburger came up with it will have to do(I haven’t read his book, but he seems very thorough on these issues). It does seem that the seanceis more than anentertainment.There is a sense of some formality and attempt at scientific observation with Gloaming, the wife, the control( whatever that is). Later we find that Eventyr remembers nothing of what he conveys and also that he is among the most accurate as a provider of information. There is the occasional very persuasive hit among psychics. Ingo Swann described the rings of Jupiter via remote viewing 7 years before scientic observations confirmed this. 

One aspect of the focus on paranormal 'spies' is the resemblance to  prayers in a foxhole. The war effort has enormous resources, including many with talents that seem unlikely to be useful. What do you do with a Pavlovian researcher during a high tech war? Maybe you just loosely let them do their thing and make proposals or bring information which you then test. Any help will do when threatened, and who really knows? 
““It(PP's grin)’s as useful to him as he is to the Firm—who, it is well known, will use anyone, traitors, murderers, perverts, Negroes, even women, to get what They want. They may not’ve been that sure of Pirate’s usefulness at first, but later, as it developed, They were to grow very sure, indeed.”(p. 33)  What PP’s main usefulness proved to be I can’t recall,(???) but  in my memory of his development it seemed to be more about unscrupulousness as an agent than dream stuff. 

Another aspect is psychological. Fascism is like a nation entranced by a cult. "“For God’s sake, next you’ll be consulting horoscopes.”
“Hitler does.”
“Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees,”(p.33) 
Even the supposed anti-fascists are impressed with Hitler and it has been hugely forgotten in popular acounts of WW2 how many admirers Hitler had throughout Europe and the US. There is a nasty magic at work that taps into myths of destiny and is a force in most civilizations. One of the questions Pynchon seems to me to be asking, and he seems willing also to send this question out in every direction including the paranormal, the Jungian, Freudian, technoloogical, spiritual, moral, philosophical economic, sociological, is what is the antidote for fascism. Fascism not just as in the Axis, but the whole colonizing imperial madness so clearly manifest in WW2 and still with us at the time of GR and today.

One of the things that the psychic research does is open basic questions about how things work. There is some parallel in that to what investigative reporting does, bypassing the comforting sense of control offered by authorities and mainstream media to find things that often directly challenge that story. This is not a defense of clairvoyance etc.. I would personally like to stay away from that, but a defense of the pursuit of uncomfortable truths that may, if really faced and understood and addressed, bring about less imperialist and more humane way of living. 

“Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees,”(p.33)  The problem with this rationale is addressed  by H Arendt. But she is little remembered while Trump is winning primaries in the US, as Nixon before him. 


> On Apr 12, 2016, at 8:13 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Weisenburger says that the seance is at "someplace vaguely identified as 'Snoxall’s'" (some sort of club with bar, dining, meeting rooms etc?)
> 
> That would put the Roger-Pirate microfilm handoff "transacted in some distant room" of the same building. I read it that way because on 33 Pirate thinks of "these bookish sods and rationalized freaks here at Snoxall’s, so dedicated to Science" and later, in the car (37), Roger says of Pointsman & co. "They’re as difficult as the lot back in Snoxall’s.” Both  fit the odd lot present at the seance.
> 
> Does the sensitive flame leap high again (31) because the distant V-2 just heard has ushered a fresh batch of souls from life to death?
> 
> Is Jessica's bulls-eye at that moment a commentary on the rocket strike, and if so what sort of commentary? There's a lot of oscillation between the rockets as randomly distributed (Mexico, coming up) and as personally targeted (Pirate on the roof, then Slothrop confiding in Tantivy). That will be knotted later in the historically accurate anecdote of A4 testing in Poland, with Peenemunde staff sitting at the aim point because impact there was not significantly likelier than anywhere else in a circle of many square km.
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 1:17 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Here is a summary of key events in the chapter. Disagreements with anything?
> 
> At the opening of Chapter 5( 30-38) we enter a seance conducted in some space of  SOE aka the Firm, a space lit by a sensitive flame in which a medium, Carroll Eventyr, seems to have entered the spirit of Roland Feldspath expert on control systems, guidance equations (a concept which haunts the novel in various forms: rocket guidance,determinism/calvinism/fascism/gnosticism ). Roland has " transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero”, but Roland gets distracted from Blicero by lights moving as in a  dance and  particularly by the  wind as a kind of ecstatic force he never knew. He calls out to his wife Selena ,who assures she is listening; he starts talking about the difficulty of control and  about replacing the invisible hand of the market  with self creating control, dispensing with God, then counters that this is only a more harmful illusion that A causes B when they are part of same….
> The seance is almost over as the sensitive flame that responds to sound and movement retreats then soars up as a new rocket falls  and Jessica Swanlake throws dart  which hits dead center .  Selena ,  the dead Feldspath’s wife is there. All is recorded by Milton Gloaming trying to develop statistical analysis of psychic and other events( death is the most frequent word he records). Jessica and Gloaming converse, he asks about Roger Mexico, her lover, who she says is with Pirate Prentice.  We move to conversation in Snoxall’s (pub,club?) between Prentice and Mexico; Prentice is more ambitious and more paranoid than first impression.  Mexico thinks the project with psychics is endangered by the revival of witch laws . Prentice is delivering microfilm to Mexico from Bloat. We find out about PISCES under the larger White Visitation. Pirate is concerned about the non-war/post-war related schemes arriving with the  Americans and obscuring Germany and war, thinks Mexico is being used in one such indecent plot, notes Mexico’s growing enthusiasm for microfilm being sent. Beautiful Jessica triggers Prentice's memory of affair with Scorpia Mossmoon, now long over. PP longing for real love, friendship, jealous of , but hoping Jessica and R M stay together. As chapter fades into maudlin with memory of Mossmoon’s inevitable departure Pynchon brings in the merry midgets but it falls a bit flat.
> 
> 
> We think of WW2 as a particularly modern and technological war and that gets much attention in GR, but from the start Pynchon is diving into a less respectable aspect of the pursuit of information. Psychic or paranormal phenomena . Why is it so prominent? We know it played a role in the war, but is it standing in for something larger in the Novel? In some ways it allows P to introduce nonstandard economic and political information into the War history. Is there more?-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 

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