48-54 The Problem of the Pavlovian Penis

[Mark Kohut]

P. 50. He's out there and he can *feel them coming, *days in advance.

Decades later we read Against the Day and Pynchon put the feeling of
impending war
into the text of the history that was happening in Europe weeks and months
in advance
of WW!.....

Not quite the same thing at all, but an interesting pattern of his mind.

On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 10:49 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> One of the major functions of this chapter is to expose, almost literally,
> Pointsman.
> Particularly we see  his pedophilic fantasies or habits as the underside
> of his ambition to make a scientific name for himself. It is hard to tell
> if he really waits at St. Veronica’s bus depot for lost little girls but he
> is clearly occupying a very dark and lonely inner life to which these
> images correspond. The fact that he hunts his own dogs seems to me to make
> this pedophilia likely to be literal if mostly unsuccessful. His scientific
> prestige seems more a function of intense raw ambition and clever
> rationalizing theories than any consistent or important experimental
> scientific work. He reminds me of the relatively recent experiments on
> hemispehric brain research showing how people with only a functional left
> brain will invent unlikely bits of logic to predict an outcome when a
> simple ratio would have more predictive success. These left brainers will
> stick to their inventions no matter how logically disproved they are.
>   Thomas has suggested the connection of Pointsman's pursuit of
> experimental subjects to MK Ultra which was clearly drawing upon  ideas
> emerging from behaviorist research. Those MK Ultra scientists also had
> wacky and unproven notions of reducing human experimental subjects to "a
> clean slate”. They sold these ideas to the CIA on a remarkable scale with
> nothing but theorizing and scientific sounding mumbo-jumbo.
>   Part of P’s point in contrasting the psychics with the behaviorists is
> to show how easy it seems to be to seduce the powerful into any scheme that
> might afford greater control, no matter the moral or metaphysical
> implications.
>
> There is something sadly and miserably humanizing about the murk that is
> Pointsman’s inner life. How can one who knows so little of his own inner
> logic imagine himself a force for scientific explanations of behavior?
>
> The fact that this grasping, desperate human, a key figure in the cult of
> Pavlov, is given a single giant octopus for further research is wackily
> contradictory to Spectro’s objections concerning Slothrop as subject.
>
> Talk about a multitvalent image from the subconscious depths.
> Any thoughts on Grigori? His  arrival reminds me of one of those dark
> nights in the dockyards from A Sherlock Holmes story.
>
>
>
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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