BtZ: Some more banana molecule stuff

Wed Mar 30 11:11:12 CDT 2016

http://www.amazon.com/Pynchons-Mythography-Approach-Gravitys-Rainbow/dp/080931357X

Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow

The exhausting plenitude of loosely connected detail in*Gravity’s
Rainbow *makes
it a favorite of postmodern critics, who claim it describes a modern,
random, unknowable universe. Hume expands the possibilities as she
discloses a mythic structure that underlies Pynchon’s work and provides
easier access to his world.

“Myth turns chaos into cosmos,” Hume explains, describing how the profuse
detail of Pynchon’s book allows for the creation of a “world humankind
shapes out of chaos by means of ritual and myth. . . a set of interlocking
stories. . . [that] fit into a narrative sequence or mythology that
conveys, supports, and challenges cultural values.”

Pynchon’s “mythology is not rigidly consistent,” Hume notes, but “several
strands of mythological action. . . serve a stabilizing function in this
chaotic book.” Pynchon creates his own “unheroic” hero to show the way for
making sense of the fragmented experience of life in the postmodern world.

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 10:44 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> "Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn’t
> born from fear of thunder,
> dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming
> up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary
> interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a
> myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage-pepper booths
> of Mulberry Street." (V., chapter six)
>
> Ish nails it this post-Easter morning, re Pirate saving Teddy Bloat: what
> better link between preterite doom and "peasants dreaming of their certain
> resurrection" than a Fortunate Fall?
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_culpa
>
> Weisenburger and many others have worked the topsoil thoroughly, digging
> out P's many many allusions to and inflections of religion and myth. Deeper
> strata remain: he mints not just new myths but new mythologies in each
> book. And who dares speculate on the Grand Canonical Pynchon Myth that
> brings them all together?
>
> (and in the galleys binds them)
>
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 5:30 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I will bet if we explore deeply around P's very words and scenes, judging
>> sometimes a molecule is a molecule and margarine was just there, Pirate
>> couldn't get butter since he couldn't make THAT, we can see lots of
>> positive encoding around lots of 'nature is good' stuff. Look at time so
>> far, the wine tasting like summer, etc.
>>
>> P himself has said 'the meaning if all there on the page' and ALL
>> associations can be too many. (Take it from Mr. Speculation and
>> heavy Association Thrower, trying to pin down better)
>>
>> For one example, I have read the ritual embedding of the Herero
>> woman---such a vile act---as an example of the despoiling of the Good Earth
>> (as well as his repeated historical example of colonial rascist
>> misogynistic genocide and what else?).
>> I think he willfully subverts the notion of a justice-dispensing Sky
>> Father from the opening scene, his 'cosmic harmony' (from Shakespeare's
>> time) gone, gone utterly but
>> the warm Earth, the tropical earth, our ground of being still what we
>> have to stand on, so to speak.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 4:22 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I've sought but not found coherence and consistency in how GR's symbolic
>>> geology, biochemistry, etc.  link life, death, and various layers of the
>>> earth. That scumbled bananery topsoil, the soil in which a Herero woman is
>>> ritually embedded, the hot radioactive mud at Bad Karma, and the deep
>>> strata of metals and hydrocarbons all have different symbolic freight, and
>>> each bears a different relation to natural life and assorted unnatural
>>> analogues of life. Likewise, flight gets a few good vibes, but its
>>> extension intso pace travel is clearly nixed and __nicht_ed as a route to
>>> Good Transcendence.
>>>
>>> Sometimes I think Pynchon never got the memo about the fruitful,
>>> nourishing, ever-rebirthing Earth Mother and the wise, justice-dispensing
>>> Sky Father -- or even the one about the brawny dumb earth god and serene
>>> Queen Selene. He's just a suspicious cuss all around.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 1:34 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Here is the spirit of Herr Rathenau on p. 169 on steel, coal,
>>>> transformation, the interface between death and...life? Maybe this supports
>>>> Laura's reading of the source of the bananas a bit.
>>>>
>>>> "We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed
>>>> over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite
>>>> dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of
>>>> mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth's light from its
>>>> grave miles and aeons below. There is the other meaning... the
>>>> succession... I can't see that far yet...
>>>>
>>>> "But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not
>>>> from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best
>>>> you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not
>>>> resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor."
>>>>
>>>> This last section, behind enemy territory, seems to yinning the yang of
>>>> a bunch of stuff from the novel's opening chapters. Sort of obvious dark
>>>> matter--though of course that's the limited, first-order response. These
>>>> things are obviously inextricable.
>>>>
>>>> So I'm inclined to believe the distance between how Rathenau might
>>>> describe the bananas and how I might be more comfortable thinking about
>>>> them is maybe not as vast or distinguishable as I want to think. This seems
>>>> to be a fundamental question. And to have always been. Is it death v life
>>>> or is that an illusion--is it death v (really death w/) death-transfigured?
>>>> [Optimistic spin: can we make the same lateral move in our understanding,
>>>> to see the binary as life v life-transfigured? Or to see beyond the binary
>>>> entirely?]
>>>>
>>>> Imagine you live in that maisonette. How do you know if it's good to
>>>> eat the banana. What factors do you consider. All causes have, in turn,
>>>> their own causes. Eventually the question gets hopelessly entangled, and
>>>> far from you. It is probably wrongthinking to imagine we should be able to
>>>> really get to the bottom of it. On some level, our decision-making, our
>>>> categorization, has to rely on some sort of instinct. Instinct, at least,
>>>> leads me, for now, to do my best to choose to understand life as beyond a
>>>> real thing, whose value is self-evident. And if the bananas make me want to
>>>> share their scent with the whole desperate city, for free, I'm gonna call
>>>> that the good thing, even if it's not a stainless lineage. Steel, on the
>>>> other hand, is stainless, and rarely moves its handlers to share it for
>>>> free out of good feeling. I'll call that a different thing, a bad thing.
>>>> Maybe the distinction between the two is not rational, but I'm mortal, and
>>>> the categorization helps me.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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