pynchon-l-digest V2 #12854

[Joseph Tracy]

Interesting exchange on a vital topic. I think both points of view concerning Pynchon’s take on our global status have some merit. GR  clearly clearly presents an intentionally grim picture. But I would like to make some observations.
The fact that nuclear annihilation hangs over the globe because of the fucked up sytem that puts that power in the hands of a few and that it is very hard to imagine the political changes needed to address that problem, has had many historic parallels on a personal level. All through history many people have been subject to mass violence, and disasters and had little say in big decisions. Also, even if you escape those things everyone dies and might therefor adopt extreme pessimism about life. The trouble I see with pessimism is that it rarely has much to do with any specific problem no matter how large or global. It looks to me to mostly be an excuse to do little, and almost always inhibits positive activism and generosity. Yet Hope is something that people have made in more difficult circumstances than most have faced. Often that hope fails to solve the problem but always it seems to show a way of being that I find admirable and aspire to internalize. I see that effect in others too. It isn’t reliant on faith in some transcendent meaning either. It is just that there is a power and beauty and peace in courage, in just embracing the moment. I think that shows up powerfully in GR too and I was talking about it in my last post so here is that:  

   For Pynchon this variability( variations in the Orpheus Myths) makes the Orpheus mythology 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, and 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 still singing it, laying down jokes and music as death falls. 46 years after the book was written, the death-machine and the music are still here.  Slothrop, like Pynchon is not dying but disappearing into nature with the appearance of a natural rainbow, becoming larger than individual, becoming 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.”

Anyway I think that Pynchon is not in this dark satire offering easy, false hope, but his warning is neither absolute nor final. His work as a writer fills out in other directions while never abandoning his realism, cynicism, humor or musicality. 

> On May 25, 2016, at 3:58 PM, Doug Millison <dougmillison at gmail.com> wrote: 
> 
> (This looked as if it was cut off, when I looked at it in the P-list archive, so I'm reposting it )
> 
> 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:
>  P said in Slow Learner that the writer has to come to terms with death in his writing or remain a juvenile. And, (most?) critics argue and the judgment of history (maybe?) sez, all GREAT books do--and as we all must ourselves or we can't even read them aright. BUT that the overarching theme of GR IS 'This One"-- death, death by rocket, does not mean all optimistic, positive Pynchonian values in GR have no existence. The Banana breakfast begins immediately. They are everywhere. The book is not a one note sledgehammer, we know; The book is not Nihilistic, as we've agreed, I think. 
> 
> I think the sentence shows Slothrop, a privileged, white,  military WASP , is having the nation's fantasy about JFK under truth serum---as his  observations about blacks contain the nation's prejudices and stereotypes. 
> 
> Jack as Camelot-like President might have handled that buried "Excalibur" better,--pulled it out and thrown it in the lake (see the story variations)-- P implies and the story would have been different, esp regarding Nixon the Schlubb maybe. Seems Pynchon thought JFK started "kicking third-world people around" from the beginning. 
> 
> 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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