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

[Monte Davis]

"...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. <
>>
>>
>> https://englit0500.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/fun-actually-was-actually-becoming-subversive/
>>
>>
>>
>
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