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

[Smoke Teff]

I like what you're saying, Laura. Maybe the scene is so *iconic* that every
time I go back to it I am excited to do so, and so am applying my own
positive feelings, which is predisposing me to categorize this as good
loving fun. Because you're right, lots of shit that we might expect the
book to view as, well, not good, makes its way into those bananas,
overshadows them. But then, also, I don't know. It does seem fun. I am
inclined to view it generously. Not just as a willful negation (repression,
affirmation) of the death that is always at the fucking door, but as a sort
of miraculous thing to occur in the universe--the miasma forming at the
shithole of the world is somehow transmogrifying into life, fun, play...

Yes, it's fantasy (we see this in the way that, like fantasies, it is
interrupted/burst: "The phone call, when it comes, rips easily across the
room, the hangovers, the grabassing, the clatter of dishes, the shoptalk,
the bitter chuckles, like a rude metal double-fart, and Pirate knows it's
got to be for him."), but let's take what we can get, man. These are trying
times.

Grabassing sounds fun; bitter chuckles sound fun.

But then there is a desperate surreality to axis of banana-centrism that
runs through the menu. It does seem like an at-least-neurotic response.

The scent is "flowery, permeating, surprising" (10). I believe that these
are all good things. Flowery seems self-explanatorily life-affirming.
Permeating, given the title of this first section of the book, given the
recurring motif of distance, of separation, of membrane, seems to be a good
thing. Surprising--this is somewhat complicated, maybe. I don't have my
Brown with me but he does say something about how the ego (in an attempt to
heal itself, to re-achieve infancy) seeks novel, surprising pleasures. But
how this is just one step in the process--how eventually the healed ego
seeks the stasis of pleasurable repetition. I'm sure that's shoddily
paraphrased.

p. 8: "[Pirate] knows he's already stopped believing in the rocket he saw.
God has plucked it for him, out of its airless sky, like a steel banana."
Maybe the banana yins the rocket's yang. If the rocket seems to be a
life-destroying, unnatural thing that is made of an uncountable number of
natural things, maybe the banana is the opposite. The life-affirming,
natural thing that is made of an uncountable number of unnatural things.

"Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent
blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects...."

This seems unambiguously good. The scent is so expansive, the good-feeling
so ebullient, it creates spontaneous generosity. The cup runneth the fuck
over.

But then do they open the windows? Why not? Are they afraid? (Here I think
of Jessica and Roger being too afraid to light a fire in their secret
rendezvous point.) They sense, instinctively, that the world outside--the
War, the cloud of death--would not allow this. Or maybe they feel guilty.

If the holocaust is always there, then do we think differently about the
breakfast? Is it just gluttony?

Not to be a boner but I think--excited to hear you go deeper with this,
Monte--this question relates to one of the book's most
fundamental/persistent questions. If the book takes on the one hand a sort
of broad, historical, Manichean view of things (in addition to its
other--life's other--great dualisms, light v. night, nature v. artifice,
aggression v. peace, love v. hate)--though of course the book is too smart,
too dialectic to think dualistic thinking really tells the whole
story--then how do we know how to categorize ambiguous things like 18-inch
bananas grown of the city-sky's waste? Maybe the usefulness of the
distinction has a limit. Maybe we need to believe death can transform into
life, that play, fun, life can be--must be--achieved anywhere.

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 12:33 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> 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. <
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://englit0500.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/fun-actually-was-actually-becoming-subversive/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>
>
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