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

[Mark Kohut]

My vote is for Monte and Kai on this one. Life Against Death. The Buddha
and the Tiger parable.
That breakfast is presented as a wonderful embodiment of 'organic',
earth-bound--a good word for our naturalness in life---
 enjoyment. .......of plenitude beyond reality out of rich soil amidst the
bureaucratic death-wishing surroundings.......
....like the rich 'fish and plants' ending of M & D.....

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 1:27 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/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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