Work in TRP, 2nd try

[Joseph Tracy]

Labor,  Democracy, America, Escape in P-land

He is a master juggler. His storied story  of American History acts as a challenge to easy aceptance of existing social myth and interpretation, and follows the un chronicled paths of those born within and living within the grand mythos  of the emergence of American Democracy as a beacon of light and a turning point in human history. Few myths have greater sway.  To consider that myth Pynchon specifiically follows the paths of the preterite, those whose experiences don’t fit that grand scheme, those unhappily colonized, those  lost discontents as well as the counter- movements, and those successful and unsuccessful true believers. 

What do we find out about this mythic American story and where does it fit into americans' sense of who they are  and where they came from.?
		Work
Start with P’s consideration of the role of work: the arrangements that determine who works for who, what gets made, what doesn’t get made, and how the fruits of labor move through the society. We are also forced to consider what and who the work of the American experiment destroys, attacks, and ignores both internally and externally. Pynchon himself is an intellectual workhorse who reads more eclectically than anyone I can think of, and appears to retain large volumes of information. His layered approach to the creation of his “fiction” demands intense work but also displays a Jazz like intuitive improvisational ease and Zen-like, aloof playfulness. Descriptions are inevitably inadequate hence a large body of criticism/interpretaion has followed. 
  Work in Mason & Dixon takes us the furthest back in the American story starting with M&D contracting to work for the Royal Society(?) traveling toward Sumatra but ending in Dutch East India controlled South Africa.TMason and Dixon  observe corporatized colonial power structures and the impact on white colonizers, Indonesian and African slaves, and those who work outside the control of the Company. What we are seeing is hierarchies imposed by maps, weapons, navies, and racial/religious myths, but the human result is full of complexity, outposts of freedom, raging hypocrisies and appetites. M&D are hard working, smart, personally non-violent middle class workers  whose labor serves the mapping part of the colonial enterprise( in this case mapping the solar system).  The arbitrariness of  maps and the lines created and divisions resulting are further emphasized when they survey the straight lines that separates Maryland from Pennsylvania and Delaware. Here we see lines that defy geography and the social landscape, and abstractly denote ownership/control. Both in South Africa and St Helena M&D have observed the corporate trade in slaves, rum, spice,  prostitutes, and the reader knows that the M&D line is to become a division between slave states and non slave states.  In the new world as M&D move west we see the continuing colonial enterprise directed at the native people of “america” and the work of democracy includes murdering indiginous people.. 
  The most important work for M&D themselves and the most redemptive work  is the work that goes into their friendship and imparts humanity to an enterprise profoundly fraught and not particularly friendly. I see this collegiality as a humanizing force throughout P’s work and for me it confirms personal experience of how work occasionally  becomes democratic, peaceable, and as internally rewarding as it is externally. 
  The next chronological era in P’s history of America is Against the Day moving from 1890s through WW1.   The most extreme forms of theft, killing and exploitation of the native peoples of the Americas( parallelled by Leopold’s racist exploits) is in the past and haunts the narrative through memory and altered states..The  largest ongoing cultural battles are directly or indirectly connected to labor issues: organized labor vs. capitalists, investors/bankers vs. utopians, techology vs. nature. These are set in the historical context of  the approach if WW1 and  the competition among capitalists, nation states and the remaining monarchies in the lead-up to that war.  Amongst the workers there are also internal struggles: male privilege, status, escape versus struggle, violence vs persuasion, religious judgementalism.  These internal struggles embodied in the Traverses  are set against the internal struggles of the Capitalists embodied in Vibe and family.   Again, we don’t get a simplified morality struggle even though the moral dimensions are a powerful component of the storytelling. Everyone comes up for satiric or tragic review.  

But throughout his work P offers no excuse for the exploitive history of colonialist empire building and capitalism. It is hard to think of writing where the impact  feels at a gut level more oppostional to Ayn Rand, Miton Friedman etc. and more sympathetic to the struggles ( both lost and successful) of organized labor, of colonized people,and of  inspired visionaries of shared abundance like Tesla.  Pynchon seems to hold up to  the light the question of whether capitalism and colonialism and its political and economic leaders are by nature conspiratorial against  America’s stated values: justice, freedom of thought/speech/privacy, equitable legal system, unbiased meritocatic economy. There is no easy answer here; he satirizes "the people”s addiction to TV, conformity, uniformed protector/saviors, junk food, and other self-numbing habits, along with the abuses of powerful oligarchs.  These abuses are also not treated only as a   economic morality  tale ala Marx, but an inheritance of and a  favoring  by America of  certain lines of binary philosphic choices;  1)tribalist  monotheistic Judaism to Paulist theology to Calvinism/colonialist catholicism, 2 )warlords to Kings to constitutional balance between private enterprise/ the state to the dominance of corporate entities/  markets (now including war, media and politics) 3)a favoring of mechanistic science wedded to control mechanisms of the state and to ecologically blind consumer markets . Inevitably Pynchon explores these choices on an individual level and shows alternative choices: multivalent sexuality, Pyhtagorean mutidimensional shamanic and non monotheistic approaches to transcendance, karma as a guide to human choices ( karma is not just binary morality; it can also be understood as what you sew practicality),  perceiving the rainbow wisdom of millions of years of biological evolution. 

One of the visceral ways P examines culture is through detritus, shit, architecture, ships, rockets.  His world is as cluttered as the real world and the stuff in it has stories that he frequently follows. This is the stuff made by labor and it isn’t always so flattering to human workers or work. It can be as suffocating, dangerous and confusing as it is useful. It begs the question as to whether all labor is ennobling, practical, enriching. Is it OK to manage a concentration camp, build nuclear weapons, frack, drill in the arctic,fill the oceans with plastic and chemicals, revive the devil?

  One could go on and on with the permutations of the theme of labor in Pynchon and how he uses it to explore the balance of power in economic, political, spitual/philosphical, and personal relations.  I do think that as a theme labor is a goldmine for thinking about Pynchon’s body of work in detailed and textually specific ways.  I, for one,  would enjoy a continution of  that theme despite the dangers of real world political affinities. Sorry for the long posts. 

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l