Pynchon & Wagner

[David Morris]

I think Hume had it right.  Slothrup as Sacrificial Lamb was very overt at
the beginning of GR, in a very beautiful way.

David Morris

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 11:43 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> Had to think of Wagner, too, when I re-read the following the other night:
>
> "A number of critics have discussed Pynchon's presentation of history as
> mythopoesis. Kathryn Hume, for instance, has identified a mythic pattern
> in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW consisting of an initial paradise (the North
> American New World), a fall (the colonization of that world by
> Slothrop's forebears, serpents in the Garden), a central symbolic action
> (immachination, which creates a symbolic marriage between human beings
> and the gods defined as machines and thereby creates a 'new order'), and
> a predicted apocalypse (either holocaust or paradise, depending on how
> one evaluates this wedding of man and machine). In PYNCHON'S
> MYTHOGRAPHY, Hume illustrates how this general theme is filled by
> Pynchon with value-laden concepts drawn from numerous mythological
> systems, from ancient pagan myths, Greek and Christian mythos, and
> postsecular religions. Using a different schema, Catherine R. Stimpson
> interprets Pynchon's presentation of women in his novels as a variation
> of the 'white goddess' myth elaborated by Robert Graves. Jungian
> interpretation of Pynchon's mysticism or mythopoesis, such as that by
> Thomas Moore, are variants of this kind of reading; from this
> perspective, the Jungian 'archetype' would provide the tropes by which
> reality is organized. Furthermore, Debra Moddelmog has discussed the
> significance of Oedipus myth elements in LOT 49, while John McClure has
> discussed syncretic myth as postsecularity in Pynchon's work. These and
> other critics take pains to understand the odd mysticism, spirituality
> and religious allusions that are always a part of Pynchon's fiction.
> Pynchon's novels include symbolic references to Judaism and Christianity
> as well as pantheism, animism, Tarot and Blavatsky-like channeling,
> Orphism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, Buddhism, various scientific mysticisms,
> metempsychosis, gnosticisms, Native American dream-vision and
> Intelligent Design. These do not appear as ornamental images in his
> novels but rather as integral to Pynchon's historical vision, a mystical
> counter-history to the rationalistic, monovocal Anglo-European history
> of technocratric capitalism."
>
> Amy J. Elias: History; pp. 123-135, here 132f., in: The Cambridge
> Companion to Thomas Pynchon, ed. by Dalsgaard, Herman & McHale.
>
> For Ernst Cassirer myth is a SYMBOLIC FORM, the earliest form of
> meaningful structuring of the world, from which all the other symbolic
> forms - like art, religion, law, science/technology & also (elaborated)
> language - historically originated. Important to Cassirer, who did not
> intend to create a synthesis or system, is the irreducible plurality of
> the different symbolic forms. The symbolic forms - functionally
> identical insofar as they're all offering expression, presentation &
> meaning - must always be understood on their own terms. Which means in
> the given context, among other things, that myth, according to Cassirer
> operating upon the principle of similarity (dt. Ähnlichkeit; remember -
> if not: Scroll down! - Wagner's dictum that the myth "is always
> right"?), can, in its contextual validity, never be explained or
> debunked by science (be it STEM, economics, sociology or psychology). Of
> course this also is true vice versa -
>
> Pynchon & Wagner are  both practicing mythopoesis in order to challenge
> the one-dimensional understanding of modernity.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ReY89_fM0g
>
> Wagner - Lohengrin (Bayreuth 1972)
>
> Am 18.09.20 um 01:42 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
> >
> > Not in terms of social psychology but in those of art & politics,
> > cinema & its soundtrack might be more interesting than rock/pop music
> > when it comes to Wagner's legacy in late modern culture:
> >
> > + ... “The Birth of a Nation” set the pace for a century of Wagnerian
> > aggression on film. More than a thousand movies and TV shows feature
> > the composer on their soundtracks, yoking him to all manner of
> > rampaging hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming
> > evildoers ... Action sequences are only one facet of Wagner’s
> > celluloid presence. A colorful—and often shady—array of Wagner
> > enthusiasts have appeared onscreen, from the woebegone lovers of
> > Robert Siodmak’s noir “Christmas Holiday” to the diabolical android of
> > Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant
> > <
> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/alien-covenant-bursts-with-pomposity>.”
>
> > The composer himself is portrayed in more than a dozen movies,
> > including Tony Palmer’s extravagant, eight-hour 1983 bio-pic, starring
> > Richard Burton. But the Wagnerization of film goes deeper than that.
> > Cinema’s integration of image, word, and music promised a fulfillment
> > of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” which
> > Wagner propagated at one stage of his career. His informal system of
> > assigning leitmotifs to characters and themes became a defining trait
> > of film scores. And Hollywood has drawn repeatedly from Wagner’s
> > gallery of mythic archetypes: his gods, heroes, sorcerers, and
> > questers. / This contradictory swirl of associations mirrors the
> > composer’s fractured legacy: on the one hand, as a theatrical
> > visionary who created works of Shakespearean breadth and depth; on the
> > other, as a vicious anti-Semite who became a cultural totem for
> > Hitler. Like operagoers across the generations, filmmakers have had
> > trouble deciding whether Wagner is an inexhaustible store of wonder or
> > a bottomless well of hate. But that uncertainty also mirrors the film
> > industry’s own ambiguous role as an incubator of heroic fantasies,
> > which can serve a wide range of political ends. When Hollywood talks
> > about Wagner, it is often—consciously or not—talking about itself. /
> > When the lights went down at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876, for
> > the première of the “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle, a kind of cinema
> > came into being. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, no friend of
> > Wagner’s, felt that he was looking at a “bright-colored picture in a
> > dark frame,” as in a diorama display. The composer had intended as
> > much, saying that the stage picture should have the “unapproachability
> > of a dream vision.” The orchestra was hidden in a sunken pit known as
> > the “mystic abyss”; its sound wafted through the room as if it were
> > transmitted by a speaker system. The inaugural performances took place
> > in a near-blackout. From the Festspielhaus, according to the media
> > theorist Friedrich Kittler, “the darkness of all our cinemas derives”
> > ... Wagner’s influence is nowhere more enduring than in the realm of
> > myth and legend. He manipulated Teutonic and Arthurian myths with
> > consummate dexterity, understanding how they could resonate
> > allegorically for modern audiences. “The incomparable thing about myth
> > is that it is always true, and its content, through utmost
> > compression, is inexhaustible,” he wrote. Wagner’s master array of
> > borrowed, modified, and reinvented archetypes—the wanderer on a ghost
> > ship, the savior with no name, the cursed ring, the sword in the tree,
> > the sword reforged, the novice with unsuspected powers—lurks behind
> > the blockbuster fantasy and superhero narratives that hold sway in
> > contemporary Hollywood ... The chief lesson to be drawn from the case
> > of Wagner is that the worship of art and artists is always a dangerous
> > pursuit. In classical music, the slow, fitful learning of that lesson
> > has had a salutary effect: contemporary European productions of
> > Wagner’s operas routinely confront the darker side of his legacy.
> > Perhaps it is time to contemplate the less fashionable question of how
> > Hollywood films and other forms of popular culture can be complicit in
> > the exercise of American hegemony— ... +
> >
> >
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/how-wagner-shaped-hollywood
> > https://www.goethe.de/ins/es/de/kul/mag/20758663.html
> >
> > + ... Auf Wagners Einfluss auf moderne Kultur kann im Gegensatz dazu
> > gar nicht genug aufmerksam gemacht werden. Dieser ist direkter
> > erkennbar als beispielsweise der eines Mozarts oder Beethovens... Die
> > Filmmusik, die eine breite Hörerschaft auch der jüngeren Generation
> > anspricht, greift viele Methoden des Deutschen auf: Die majestätischen
> > Bläser und die dynamischen Streicher in den Soundtracks bekannter
> > Komponisten wie John Williams (vor allem/Star Wars/), Hans Zimmer
> > (/Fluch der Karibik/,/Gladiator/) oder Howard Shore (/Der Herr der
> > Ringe/) lassen sich auf die Stücke Wagners zurückführen und sind von
> > diesem hörbar inspiriert. Auch seine Art der Verwendung von
> > Leitmotiven gehört zu den handwerklichen Grundlagen der Filmmusik ... +
> >
> > I like the way Lars von Trier works with the prelude from "Tristan und
> > Isolde" in his movie "Melancholia".
> >
> >
> > Am 17.09.20 um 18:26 schrieb Gary Webb:
> >> Every time Wagner comes up lately I’m reminded of Allen Bloom’s
> >> comparison of the frenzy induced in the youth due to Rock/Pop music(
> >> ...this was in the 80s) to the frenzy Wagner’s music induced in
> >> Germany almost a century later...
> >>
> >>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/06/07/is-rock-music-rotting-our-kids-minds/a9f3e90a-f31f-41b3-921e-0041e40fa9f2/
> >>
> >>
> >> I don’t agree with Bloom, and I wonder what he would think of the
> >> things currently occupying our obsessive youth... probably that the
> >> souls he was intent on saving from the dread Walkman, have long since
> >> been lost, and mysteriously converted to 1s & 0s...
> >>
> >> Sent from my iPhone
> >>
> >>> On Sep 17, 2020, at 12:07 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> of course, Wagner's family had much to do with the reactionary
> >>> beliefs even
> >>> before Adolf came around--Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred
> >>> Wagner
> >>> (both British-born), eg. Syberberg's long interview/documentary about
> >>> Winifred gives some insight into the family dynamics following Wagner's
> >>> death and legacy.
> >>>
> >>> rich
> >>>
> >>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 6:26 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> >>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Alex Ross:
> >>>>
> >>>> + ... In recent decades, scholars have reconstructed a school of
> >>>> Wagnerian leftism, which gained purchase in Europe and America at the
> >>>> end of the 19th century. Socialists, communists, social democrats, and
> >>>> anarchists all found sustenance in Wagner’s work. After the Bolshevik
> >>>> revolution, Wagner had a brief vogue as a figurehead of proletarian
> >>>> culture. / The starting point for the Wagner left was the
> >>>> composer’s own
> >>>> revolutionary activity in 1848 and 1849, which forced him into
> >>>> exile for
> >>>> many years. His writingsArt and Revolution
> >>>> <http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/11/97.pdf>andThe Art
> >>>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>-Work of the
> >>>> Future
> >>>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>were classic, if
> >>>> eccentric, articulations of the idea that art could play a leading
> >>>> role
> >>>> in the struggle for social equality. His own work became a kind of
> >>>> dream
> >>>> theatre for the imagination of a future state. Of course, other
> >>>> ideologies exploited the composer in the same way. It would be a
> >>>> mistake
> >>>> to say that Shaw and his fellow leftists found the “true” Wagner.
> >>>> But it
> >>>> would also be a mistake to say they misunderstood him... Wagner’s tale
> >>>> of the corrupting power of the golden Ring matches Marx’s musings
> >>>> on the
> >>>> “perverting power” of money. When, in Das Kapital, Marx speaks of the
> >>>> hoarding of commodities, he notes that the hoarder “sacrifices the
> >>>> lusts
> >>>> of the flesh to his gold fetish” and adopts “the gospel of
> >>>> renunciation”. The word Marx uses here, “/Entsagung/”, is the same
> >>>> that
> >>>> Wagner applies to the dwarf Alberich’s renunciation of love – the
> >>>> gesture that wins him access to the Rhinegold. For Marx and Wagner
> >>>> alike, love and power are irreconcilable ... Peter Kropotkin was an
> >>>> admirer ...Patrice Chéreau
> >>>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>’s epochal Bayreuth
> >>>> production of the Ring
> >>>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>(1976-80), took
> >>>> inspiration from The Perfect Wagnerite, realising Shaw’s vision of
> >>>> “tall
> >>>> hats for Tarnhelms, factories for Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas”. /
> >>>> In 1943, the great theatre criticEric Bentley
> >>>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/theater/eric-bentley-dead.html>–
> >>>> who
> >>>> recently died at the age of 103 – asked a charged question: “Is Hitler
> >>>> always right about Wagner?” The question hangs in the air as the
> >>>> controversy rolls ever on ...+
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/17/why-did-lefties-love-wagner-alex-ross-wagnerism-revolution-hitler
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> In "Versuch über Wagner", Adorno writes:
> >>>>
> >>>> "In der Liebe sterben: das heißt auch, der Grenze gewahr werden,
> >>>> die der
> >>>> Eigentumsordnung am Menschen selbst gesetzt ist: erfahren, daß der
> >>>> Anspruch der Lust, wäre er jemals zu Ende gedacht, eben jene autonome,
> >>>> sich zugehörende und ihr eigenes Leben zum Ding erniedrigende Person
> >>>> sprengen würde, die verblendet glaubt, im Besitz ihrer selbst Lust zu
> >>>> finden, und der dieser Besitz Lust gerade entzieht. Wohl verweigert
> >>>> Siegfried geizig den Rheintöchtern den Ring; aber indem er den
> >>>> Kreis der
> >>>> Verblendung schließt, findet er die Geste, die Erdscholle hinter
> >>>> sich zu
> >>>> werfen als das individuelle Leben, das der nicht mehr halten muß,
> >>>> dem es
> >>>> einmal hielt, was es versprach. Daher ist Wagners Werk nicht nur der
> >>>> willige Prophet und beflissene Büttel von Imperialismus und
> >>>> spätbürgerlichem Terror: es verfügt zugleich über die Kraft der
> >>>> Neurose,
> >>>> dem eigenen Verfall ins Auge zu sehen und ihn zu transzendieren im
> >>>> Bilde, das dem saugenden Blick standhält."
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Am 28.08.20 um 12:41 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Did you know (cf. Christian Hänggi: Pynchon's Sound of Music, Zürich
> >>>>> 2020: Diaphanes, p. 215) that Richard Wagner is the most frequently
> >>>>> referenced composer & musician in Pynchon's books?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVprS--bLks
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Jessye Norman - Liebestod (Tristan und Isolde)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> --
> >>>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>>>> .
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>>>
> >>> --
> >>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>