BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

[Ray Easton]

Perhaps it should be pointed out that "within the cultural and political 
cloud which he mourned/satyrized in Vineland" JFK was far from being seen 
as a martyred political saint.  This view of JFK was certainly widely held 
by what we in the US call "liberals", but most certainly not by the Left.


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On May 24, 2016 5:57:07 AM János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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