pynchon-l-digest V2 #12854

Thu May 26 01:14:39 CDT 2016

Great post, Joseph, great quotes! "[...] squares being bent like notes, a
visual blues being played by the clear stream." That's music too, indeed.

2016-05-26 0:05 GMT+02:00 Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>:

> 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
> >
> >
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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