Red the Negro shoeshine boy

[ish mailian]

Weisenburger "Hysteron Proteron in Gravity's Rainbow" (1992) argues
against what he claims are dominant interpretive strategies of GR. Not
so sure about that. Just friction get his essay going, really.

 "First, Pynchon's critics often quote it to legitimize reading the
novel under various rubrics of fantasy: as existentialist fantasy or
gothic narrative, as oneiric or "paracinematic" text.  These have been
the dominant interpretive strategies since the novel was published.
But I shall argue that such moves are always turned aside by stronger
energies in the text, energies we should ascribe to a radically
degenerative satire whose practice disrupts conventional ideologies of
writing. The modalities of this satire, so different from that of such
Enlightenment writers as Pope, need to be specified."

In any event, while his focus on satire, surely one of the dominant
interpretive strategies from the reviews through to 1992, and his
knowledge of satire and its development in the American novel ( he
wrote a book on satire: Fables of Subversion:  Satire & the American
Novel (1995) ) is the key to his brilliant reading of the puzzling and
confounding elements of P's satire, including the reversal
complexities, he goes to school on other non-dominant interpretative
strategies, citing Eddins on the Gnostic Science in the book.

 "Slothrop's journey is virtually opposed to the Rocket's. He moves
toward Earthliness, as well as beyond the orbit of conventionally
determined narrativity. This contrast is incisively revealed in Dwight
Eddins's study of Pynchon's Gnostic allusions, though he is much more
optimistic than I am about the stability of norms in Gravity's
Rainbow. Ed- dins argues that for Western metaphysics after Plato,
primordial Nature is the cave from which human reason must emerge if
it is ever to locate the Good. For Pynchon, though, it is Nature alone
that ensures any hope for the Good; and this is why the art of
Gravity's Rainbow paradoxically seems to demand a certain artlessness.
Its kind of "naturalism" entails the unlearning of cultural
conventions devoted to sustaining man's Gnostic- Scientific dominance
over and transcendence of Nature.22 I would add that this effort must
include unlearning the conventions of causal seriality that have
enabled (or "naturalized") Western narrative, and also that this
effort must lead to the dismantling of narratives about human
subjectivity and norms, including those conventional satires whose
project it is to reconstruct (or generate) normative behaviors. "






On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 4:54 PM, János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com> wrote:
> 63 (Viking): Malcolm has (at least semantically, as his hair was just
> reddish brown) Enzian's colors: red and brown (black). Pynchon new this, and
> incorporated it in Enzian's figure (as well as his homosexuality) while the
> fictive Enzian's youth predates the real Malcolm's. A case of hysteron
> proteron, as Weisenburger would put it?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l