BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

But if JFK is the quasi-messianic Anti-Nixon here, --- what happened 
that Pynchon decided to diss him in some of the following books?

"John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to make his name by 
kicking third-world people around, another extension of the boy's 
adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading." (SL intro)

To make the point Pynchon is making here it is not necessary to mention JFK.

"One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began --- some 
shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours 
of contention, stomach distress and insomnia --- Hitler, Roosevelt, 
Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection 
of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above 
in any nightwide remotenesses of light, but below, diminished to the 
last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again 
and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting 
leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all 
that lived, virulent, waiting, just below." (VL, pp. 371-372)

Now, maybe you could argue here that Kennedy, perhaps along with 
Roosevelt, is the good guy in this list of questionable persons and 
organizations. Or you could say that, by mentioning the Mafia and the 
CIA, Pynchon is uttering doubts about the official theory on the JFK 
assassination. But I don't think that the text itself calls for such a 
reading. Kennedy is not pictured as a victim or counterpart.

And the little joke from AtD --- "'/Ich Bin Ein Berliner/!' (...) 'He 
has come to believe that he is a certain well-known pastry of 
Berlin---similar to your own American, as you would say, 
/Jelly-doughnut/.'" (p. 626) --- is, in my understanding, not exactly a 
respectful reference, too ...

Perhaps Pynchon had the Jack-violating-gravity-motif installed early on 
in the writing process and was,  for reasons of artistic construction, 
not able to change it later on, although his enthusiasm for JFK had 
already been gone?

Or maybe the critical passages from later books have, as Robin suggested 
in 2007, something to do with the history of Pynchon's family?

 > I'd look deeply into Joe Kennedy's film investments. This was 
happening during the very start-up of the era of the talkies and the 
Kennedys could have had a hand in taking down Pynchon & Co. <

https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0711&msg=122984&sort=date

Questions upon questions ...



On 23.05.2016 16:31, János Széky wrote:
> 65 (Viking)
>
> "If anybody could've save the harp, betcha Jack could (...) might Jack 
> have kept it from falling , violated gravity somehow?"
>
> One of the secret topical games in GR, left there to discover:
>
> Slothrop loses his "silver harp" here (and descends to the underworld 
> like Orpheus; one of P's tacit, non-naming cultural-historical allusions).
>
> Jack Kennedy, one of the very few faultlessly Good Guys in the novel 
> (belonging to the Catholic/Mediterranean side by the way) might have 
> kept it from falling, violating gravity (the central concept).
>
> He finds the harp in Part Four, Section 1 (622V), and here Pynchon 
> comes a step closer to naming, quoting from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus 
> ("And though Earthliness forget you").
>
> And near the very end the harp reemerges again, now complete with the 
> name, in the subchapter Orpheus Pits Down His Harp (754V). And here 
> the protagonist is Nixon, Kennedy's antithesis, the Absolute Bad Guy 
> at the time of writing. Gravity prevails, the Rocket falls.

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