pynchon-l-digest V2 #12854

[Doug Millison]

Both/and is my preferred approach to reading Pynchon, and my intention is
never to assume that my readings of Pynchon take precedence over any other
reader's.

I like the interpretation that Herman and Weisenburger offer in Gravity's
Rainbow, Domination and Freedom, for a simple reason: the authors have done
the hard work necessary to produce a comprehensive discussion and
interpretation of the novel that affirms much of what I've been saying
about the novel for decades. I have also enjoyed what many other scholars
and other readers have written about GR and the rest of Pynchon.

JFK's role in GR is worth studying, and may elicit any number of responses
from readers. Certainly one of the things JFK represents in USA culture is
a hope that died when the System cut him down and replaced him with other
leaders, his assassination seen as a turning point when things went from
bad to worse. What the novel does with him as a character caught up in the
story that GR seeks to tell, may be less straightforward.




On Thursday, May 26, 2016, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>>>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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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