BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

[János Széky]

I see no reason why his vision of Kennedy as a martyred political saint (or
Anti-Nixon) should have changed by 1972. After all, he wrote GR *within*
the cultural and political cloud which he mourned/satyrized in Vineland as
a thing of the past by 1984.

In between, yes, his enthusiasm might have been (or was) gone.

2016-05-24 12:08 GMT+02:00 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>:

>
> 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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