pynchon-l-digest V2 #12854

[Doug Millison]

Good points, Mark.

If the novel is ending in 1970 (and not during or just after WWII ends ),
as it appears to do, with a rocket falling on the movie theater with only
time for the viewers to touch their neighbors, themselves, or follow the
bouncing ball and sing, it seems to be too late for much of anything,  when
the rocket strikes they will die, without knowing what hit them.  Until the
rocket completes that last delta-t, we live in the shadow of that death
that might come at any time, as a result of decisions made by people in
power we have no ability to stop. In the meantime, we pursue any number of
mindless pleasures or find a way to fight back, but GR seems to be saying
it's too late to do anything to stop the System from killing us, first our
souls, then our bodies, and in this I read the novel as a dark (echoing
Herman and Wiesenburger's descriptor), warning that we have set in motion a
Frankenstein's monster who has turned on us and stands poised to destroy us.

I find it difficult not to read the final page in the context of the
novel's publication in 1973 (or at any time since the novel's release to
the public), when we in the USA knew  - and still know today - that this
instant destruction by missile, a screaming across the sky that has
happened before but with nothing to compare it to now (because it's my
personal death which comes but once at the end of a lifetime) - could
strike at any time, the threat is not symbolic, I would agree, but a
possible outcome of an insane  (M.A.D.) foreign policy.  We have more to
fear than nuclear-tipped ICBMs  and mutually-assured destruction now, too:
 remotely-piloted drone aircraft that can appear out of nowhere and strike;
untrackable and undetectable terrorists carrying suitcase "dirty"and other
bombs that may strike and kill without warning, or, worse, leave cities
full of the sick and dying, to waste away until their end.

As you know I'm influenced by Gravity's Rainbow, Domination and Freedom by
Luc Herman and Steven Wisenburger.  They have taken the time to work
through all the novel's storylines with special attention to the strange
and previously not-well-explained bits, and present the most comprehensive
and convincing reading of the novel I've yet encountered.

The novel they describe doesn't leave us much room for hope, nor does it
leave us with many good options for action.  We can give ourselves over to
mindless pleasures that perhaps can for a while take our minds out of the
threat zone, but the world described in GR -- our world, I believe -- does
not seem to leave us any way to avoid being co-opted and used by the
System, except perhaps by suicide.  We might as well sing along on the way
to the fire that will consume us.  We can try political protest and revolt,
but will be rendered useless, punished severely such that we will stop, or
be killed by the System as a result (many examples of this in GR). Or write
novels (or create other works of art) that show how this came about and the
range of responses we might make while waiting to die, as some writers of
novels and creators of other kinds of art work continue to do. But,
basically, it's too late, this is all theater -- that seems to me the
novel's emphatic point, from its first page to its last.


On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 4:30 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> OR, A character in White Noise suggests “all plots end in death”.
>
> On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 5:42 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> [....]
>> But if the Rocket was launched in WW 2, then THAT end will always be the
>> rocket above the head. P sets up up that way; it is in symbolic form
>> [Burke] not in actuality. Not yet in actuality.  (The doomsday clock of the
>> Bulletin of Atomic Scientists did move back after GR was written.)
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 12:34 PM, Doug Millison <dougmillison at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> "Might Jack have kept it [the harp] from falling?"
>>>
>>> I would answer No, based on what the novel tells us in its third
>>> sentence, "It is too late" and in its fourth sentence:  "[...] it's all
>>> theater"  and other evidence in the novel. The System killed JFK and is
>>> killing/will kill the rest of us, too - all we can do is wait for the final
>>> rockets to fall.   See Gravity's Rainbow, Domination and Freedom by Luc
>>> Herman and Steven Weisenburger for an excellent discussion of this and
>>> other possibly optimistic readings of GR
>>> http://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Domination-Freedom-Herman/dp/0820345954
>>>
>>
>>
>
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