BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): before the war

[Joseph Tracy]

Very Busy lately, so missing a lot. Garden needs planted, an exciting show of glass artists in Manchester, VT, and prep for Open Studio where people visit craft studios throughout the state.

So I have some breathing space this morning and am reading some recent p-list. This parting host-post by Monte is particularly intriguing: "a change in the relationship of history and memory"? I would like to hear more. It almost sounds like a change in human nature, which I am frequently admonished is impossible- that we are all no damn good and will stay that way. Obviously there are some changes that connect us in a more instantaneous web of information. But does it result in more informed thinking? It does seem to me that since the 60s and 70s I have seen an increasing shortening of the attention span that seems to go beyond the shorter news cycle. It seems to  change people’s sense of historical priorities and realities. For example in the 60s there was still a large discomfort with the US role as the dominant empire. Imperialism was a loaded charge that riled people up, bit of a contradiction with the American anti-colonialist revolution. Nixon’s fall confirmed some of the worst fears and even seemed for a while to mark an end to police-state style overreach. 

 For the image makers of the post WW2 it was a small glitch in image management.  We had to get over the "Vietnam syndrome”.  No worries about actual shell shock , not much media attention to  50,000 suicides among vets or the many anti-war vets who came away with a narrative where we were the stormtroopers.  Now imperial dominance is often celebrated and embraced and is at minimum accepted as the norm. Is this an informed embrace?  I think most Americansin the 60s&70s at least knew where Vietnam was, even if the distortions about the importance of Vietnam were much the same as those about Iraq which most cannot locate.  It is all more and more like a dream , squeezed into smaller and smaller boxes. Boxes designed as feedback loops to tell you what you are inclined to hear and make you the center of your world. Your world only in the sense that you choose from the ever increasing channels available, feed in your likes and dislikes.

One of the themes of GR which is not often discussed in my critical reading thus far is shell shock, PTSD, the internalizing of terror.  This is a universal in human history but the degrees of exposure and trauma are extreme. They shape the different characters in GR as they shape so many lives. And what is the world shaped by the world-shaping narrative of the great war against fascism, against communism, against terrorism, against the enemy? What happens when you get home? I s there a home in the homeland?

To my mind Slothrop is the person inside us that doesn’t buy this shit, who isn’t willing to be someone’s signal transmitter for annihilation, and isn’t willing to defend one set of bullies aginst another.  His trajectory arcs away from every collective endeavor toward the open skies. In the end he cannot serve any narrative but the shimmering rainbow circle where light moves through rain and we stand in the grass knowing it is both real and untouchable and there is no contradiction.






> On May 16, 2016, at 9:59 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> pp. 58-60
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> The broadcast "Frank Bridge Variations a hairbrush for the tangled brain" -- creating smooth, traceable contours like the waves of cortical activity Pointsman envisions in his mosaic of off/on cells?
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> Mark K has noted Jessica's prevision of children and domesticity. It's followed by one more memory of an earlier moment with Roger, and the nested reflections pile up: that conversation was itself a comparison of their pre-war memories, five or more years back. We might have a memory, too:
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> "Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, anyway. A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember the first Blitz only as a long spell of good luck..." (21.6)
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> There's a measure of realism, simple truth to experience, here. The war has been a rush of vivid, intense experience, with your whole environment telling you you're part of a great world-shaping narrative, so of course what came before is foreshortened into an old scrapbook, and you can't quite remember what mattered about the things that mattered then.
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> Is there more, though? Is it only the effect of the war on the personal narratives of  Jessica and Roger (and Slothrop) and a billion others? Is Pynchon laying the groundwork for a larger claim to come: that something was changing in the relationship of history and memory? Even if it has happened before, is there anything to compare it to now?
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> The question hangs as "the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed..." There's a train (as there has been, as there will be), there are dogs (ditto), and there's a question whether lust or even love will be enough.
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> Thanks for your attention. Take it away, Janos!
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l