BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

[Mark Kohut]

I think we have to remember it is 1944 in this scene, with P's subtle way
of anachronistically predicting, satirically, the future, in lots of ways
in this book.

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 7:39 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> "say, where the heck is *that *Jack tonight".....I think Pynchon may
> already have slyly dissed the war hero Camelot-Fisher King
> President-to-be with this line....JFK, the great swimmer who saved his
> men, is not there to help Slothrop. Slothrop, an admiring classmate is the
> one who thinks he could have saved the harp, Slothrop, who here is on
> drugs. Like other resurfaced thoughts, there is lots of wish-fulfillment
> and fantasy here, I would argue.
>
>  "Might Jack have kept it [the harp] from falling?" is only a question,
> answered I think as Yes then as a war hero but No later
> as a Cold War warrior
>
> And Slothrop does call him 'daffy about history"...in what way? His ideas
> about America's ways of being in History, played out when he was President?
> I would suggest Yes.
>
>
> On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 6:55 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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