BtZ42: on the road to Greenwich

[Monte Davis]

MK> Pirate's... gut... feeling of solitude and self-distancing from his
mates

This is not my beautiful feast of gallant comrades!
This is not my beautiful "Derring-Do of WWII" scenario!

When I was getting my cultural bearings in the 1960s (very much shaped,
natch, by Big Names of the 1940s and 1950s), "alienation" was THE master
term. Starting a century earlier with Marx's formulation in terms of
capitalism, class, and loss of autonomy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

It had permeated every corner of sociology, psychology, literature and
cultural studies (with a lot of changing inflection along the way, but
that's Big Ideas for you).

Pynchon gathers all those flavors of alienation, distills them, and
mainlines the result into the brain and heart simultaneously. Every one of
his important characters has these signature moments: Not only do I "not
belong,' but I no longer know whether the context I thought I belonged in
is terribly random and meaningless, or terribly controlled and purposeful.

Which prompts doubts that any revolution, Marxist or cultural or sexual,
could restore my "belonging."

The personal is the political is the paranoiac, and thrice versa.





On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 7:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> page 11.
> This seems the place where we can't leave Pirate's possible freelancing
> without pointing out how
> Pynchon, surprisingly, has him hit spontaneously--possessively, in the
> gut, by a feeling of solitude and self-distancing
> from his mates.
>
> Alienation from a group, a psychological precondition for
> freelancing---and an early P clue?
>
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:27 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> A-and what if that dreaming fantasist-surrogate were an *unreliable
>> narrator*, eh? [insert Groucho business with eyebrows and cigar]
>>
>> One reason I keep pulling at ontological threads is that Duyfhuizen's
>> "Starry-Eyed Semiotics" hit me like a truck in 1981. There's a big
>> difference between the version that >90% of GR summaries still use:
>>
>> "Slothrop's erections/sexual encounters anticipate the location of every
>> V-2 strike, arousing the interest of a bunch of espionage and
>> psychological-warfare types"
>>
>> ,,,and "A bunch of spies and PR types *convince themselves* that
>> Slothrop's map proves that, although demonstrably it doesn't." For me, the
>> latter shifts my entire reading a considerable distance from "conspiracies
>> in history" toward a more Oedipa-like  "our need/fear of conspiracies,
>> because their absence is worse."
>>
>> Which reminds me: the other day I pointed to Pirate's reading of the
>> V-mail, and joked about it being "tantamount to an order from the highest
>> levels." In fact, "there's a time given, a place, a request for help" -- so
>> in point of [fictional] fact, it seems to be a "pull me out" message from
>> Katje, who presumably slipped the message into (or had it slipped into) a
>> V-2 near the Hague. It's Pirate's own sense of duty to his people (what
>> John Le Carre would call an agent's "joes") that makes it tantamount to an
>> order -- which it isn't. I don't think there's any evidence either way to
>> show that SOE HQ concurs, or even knows the contents of the capsule.
>>
>> Which suggests, in turn, the possibility that well before the emergence
>> of the Counterforce late in the novel, Pirate may be freelancing. And that
>> for all the IG Farben-Shell-GE linkages, for all the capitalized "They" and
>> "the Firm" and "the War," for everything in the book that encourages grand
>> unified paranoia,we might do well to be alert also for clues to
>> cross-conspiracies, failed conspiracies, and seeming conspiracies that
>> aren't.
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 4:25 PM, Ray Easton <raymond.lee.easton at gmail.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> I am unsure how meaningful 'ontological questions' about fiction are in
>>> any case (and by this category I mean to include even such apparently
>>> straightforward questions as "How old is Gertie McDowell?"), but surely
>>> here, in a novel that begins with a dream dreamt (apparently) by a
>>> fantasist-surrogate, 'ontological questions' would seem to be especially
>>> difficult to answer.
>>>
>>> On March 25, 2016 3:10:55 PM Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> >  GR has so many dreams, fantasies, and more or less
>>> > explicit hallucinations that the question "Did X 'really happen' or did
>>> > character Y imagine it?" doesn't carry the binary implications it does
>>> for
>>> > most fiction.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent with AquaMail for Android
>>> http://www.aqua-mail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>
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