pynchon-l-digest V2 #12854

[Mark Kohut]

In what we've learned from Pynchon, readings can be BOTH/AND. As Joseph
just as good as stated.

We're reading the same book but with different emphases, different foci,
here, I think.

 Of course, everything is theater is a major, *the *major theme, maybe and,
as Herman and Weisenburger also do, there are a lot of lesser local, as it
were, themes. My remark about Slothrop's line about JFK was a banal one
about it being another of Slothrop's almost-mythic national fantasies in
keeping with the repressed stereotypes and prejudices about blacks. More of
what the nation,  presented thru Slothrop on truth serum, believes.

Once again, a brilliant touch by TRP to make the drug truth serum.



On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 2:00 PM, Doug Millison <dougmillison at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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