BtZ42/10 Jack violating gravity

[Joseph Tracy]

Part of me is trying to follow the logic of the core story, the plot. In that context the trip down the toilet is( to my current thinking) a false memory, possibly part cannabis part sodium amytol.

 But it must also be seen as Janos is developing it  the emergent multi-layered image of a real memory of Slothrop’s point of departure into a mythic landscape instigated by fear , music, drugs, sexual desire. Likely it is giving form to something in Pynchon’s own youthful experience. It is also a recurrent theme of all P novels: the mythologies of Orpheus. When most of us are introduced to ancient myths we hear one or 2 non-contradictory stories and don’t realize that Orpheus or Hercules or Theseus have many versions of who they are and what their stories are; they are adopted and adapted to many places, and represent historic-mythic- poetic  memories,variations on a theme . Often they are wildly different: Opheus as pederast, Orpheius as Lover of Euridice, Orpheus as healer/prophet. Always music is central, the watery flow. For Pynchon this variability makes the Orpheus myth adaptable and puts music in a very central role as many have noted in this section. Slothrop loves music,  and women, and he longs for a freedom from fear, from the control of others. Orpheus is connected  to all these things. The pursuit of the harp is key to understanding what carries Slothrop through the shit and away from those who would use him, make him part of their machine.  GR is telling a very dark version common in Orpheus stories of the attempted and still possible obliteration of the human song. Sort of, because Pynchon and Slothrop are singing it. The death-machine and the music are still here.  Slothrop, like Pynchon is not dying but disappearing with the appearance of a natural rainbow. becoming larger than individual, the song itself. 

Section 3 “They jump Slothrop among the trees, lean, bearded, black—they bring him in to the fires where someone is playing a thumb-harp whose soundbox is carved from a piece of German pine, whose reeds are cut from springs of a wrecked Volkswagen. Women in white cotton skirts printed with dark blue flowers, white blouses, braided aprons, and black kerchiefs are busy with pots and tinware. Some are wearing ostrich-egg-shell necklaces knife-hatched in red and blue.”

Section 4
“Slothrop moseys down the trail to a mountain stream where he’s left his harp to soak all night, wedged between a couple of rocks in a quiet pool.”….
“Through the flowing water, the holes of the old Hohner Slothrop found are warped one by one, squares being bent like notes, a visual blues being played by the clear stream. There are harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves. Like that Rilke prophesied,
 
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
 
It is still possible, even this far out of it, to find and make audible the spirits of lost harpmen. Whacking the water out of his harmonica, reeds singing against his leg, picking up the single blues at bar 1 of this morning’s segment, Slothrop, just suckin’ on his harp, is closer to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and he doesn’t even know it.”





> On May 23, 2016, at 10:31 AM, János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com> 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.

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l