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

[Monte Davis]

Ray: Bring on the nuance -- sincerely. In the terms of the Levi-Straussian
structuralism of my undergraduate days (already mutating into
deconstruction), the first eight pages ring multiple changes on a fistful
of dualities:

dream - waking
night - day
disruption & alienation - morning routine & fellowship
warm - cold
edible banana in the hand - steel banana in the sky
outside - inside...

A-and they're *nested*: the bananery is a piece of faux summery jungle
outside, inside a glass shell, on the wintry outside of of a building, etc.
We used to draw up elaborate grids -- parallel columns, quadratures,
matrices -- to keep track of where each story element stood in relation to
which dichotomy.

So yes -- as ol' Claude hisself would say, donnez-moi an Amazonian tribe
around
 a fire, and I'll give you at least deux count 'em (2) mythical narratives:
one about our how our heroic forebears got us fire and cooking to make us
warm and safe... and one about how the surrounding night is dark and full
of terrors. No surprise that modern and postmodern narratives have more
unstable or "oscillating" elements.  Pynchon's got a million of 'em.

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Ray Easton <raymond.lee.easton at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Even though I completely agree with the bigger point Monte is making, I
> too tend to read this particular scene in Debbie Downer fashion.  I find,
> as Laura said, an air of desperation about it all.
>
> Sent with AquaMail for Android
> http://www.aqua-mail.com
>
> On March 28, 2016 3:19:47 PM <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm sympathetic to anyone who's able to read this as a fun comfort-food
>> fest. No demands that anyone adhere to my glummer view. Won't be the first
>> time I've been accused of being a party-pooper. Guilty as charged!
>>
>> Debbie Downer
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Mark Kohut
>> Sent: Mar 28, 2016 3:47 PM
>> To: kelber
>> Cc: Monte Davis , Kai Frederik Lorentzen , pynchon -l
>> Subject: Re: "Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite Subversive" (Molly Hite)
>>
>> 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/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?liston-l
>
>
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