BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

Tue May 24 15:03:23 CDT 2016

The book satirizes martyrdom and hero worship and the followers of
political systems and charismatic  leaders. I love the fact that
Slothrop 's messianics are directed at a Catholic water walker.

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 8:38 AM, János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, from my angle (my memory may cheat me but as far as I remember it's
> not alien from Monte's angle) there was nothing wrong with being a Cold War
> warrior until the Vietnam War. I was 9 back then, and Americans were the Bad
> Guys in communist propaganda but still I remember our teacher saying the
> morning after the murder that it was bad news, as "he wanted peace".
> Kennedy, in fact, handled the situation in Berlin perfectly. signed the
> Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and his conduct in the Cuban missile crisis was an
> example of great statesmanship. It was he who proposed the Civil Rights Act.
> And, don't forget, the Camelot myth was only reinforced by Robert Kennedy's
> assassination in 1968 (who was more of a liberal than John). It took a long
> journey in the wilderness for the myth to begin to fray.
>
> "Daffy about history" might refer to "Profiles in Courage".
>
>
> 2016-05-24 13:52 GMT+02:00 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>:
>>
>> 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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