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

[Smoke Teff]

But even if the bananas are unambiguously good, are 100% on the side of
life, they begin the procession toward death immediately.

p. 17: "Teddy Bloat's on his lunch hour, but lunch today'll be, ack, a
soggy banana sandwich in wax paper."



On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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