Fwd: Pirate's Unique Skill

[J Tracy]

> From: J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> Subject: Re: Pirate's Unique Skill
> Date: April 2, 2025 at 3:53:06 AM EDT
> To: J K Van Nort <jkvannort at yahoo.com>
> 
> So Prentice is a military /intel careerist who was active at least 4 years before the start of WW2 and already  under the observation and control of what he calls the Firm. We have to wonder what Pynchon intends with his/our glimpses into Pirate’s mind and his  entry into other person’s fantasies. We find out PP and his fantasy escapades fit pretty comfortably into the racism and paranoia/adenoia of the great game mentality of the British empire. We also find that this is a very hierarchical world with soldiers with guinea worms and no beer at the bottom, upper echelons willing to place importance on fantasies of giant adenoids devouring London above him and  almost everyone from top to bottom apparently more engaged with fantasies  than fighting. War has become a long distance technological game about  aerial combat, blitzkriegs and mastering  the technos of control and guidance while secretly seeking advantage on a real or imagined astral plane. 
> 
> One can take Prentice’s role in several directions.  He could be seen as a narrator, a novelist whose expertise is occupying the inner life of others caught in  dramatic conflict. He could be seen as everyman in world of techno battles for imperial dominance. This everyman lives almost entirely in fantasies projected by others, fantasies that imitate movies, scary stories, erotic dreams , messianic dreams, heroic victory dreams. Not much has changed; we continue to win every war in Hollywood.  He can be seen as a kind of secret relatively low level inquisitor willing to betray a fellow soldier and lost soul for a chance to rise in the ranks. His moments of enjoying the freedom he is supposedly fighting for are few and fleeting, taking a piss with not a thought in his head, escaping barracks to join an orgy with a wannabe messiah. 
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> What does this have to do with W Von Braun, Lockheed Martin, V2s, and the missiles of Pynchon’s fascination  at the time P wrote the novel? What we find repeated throughout the novel is a particular obsession with psychic spying and various forms of pavlovian conditioning, from Calvinism to Skinner. Colonialism of the soul that echoes psychic spying, and 'public relations'  programs that developed in the Cold War.  The adenoid attack is more of post war 50’s movie fantasy  of attacks from space that anything remotely able to be conceptualized as military intelligence. Like a pirate or privateer commissioned to board foreign ships and seize their cargo for the monarchy, Pirate is commissioned to board other’s minds and do battle with their fears. But the fears have been planted by the Firm themselves and echo the cycle of paranoia and war that still prevails.
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>> On Mar 31, 2025, at 12:05 PM, J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>> 
>> There remains the mixture/blending of dreams and reality. Prentice as a fantasist-surrogate resides in both. He joins and occupies the fantasies of others. He comes  back down from the roof into the slumbering roommates and invades their fantasies where they are ‘drooling of a banana breakfast’. After his breakfast is served, Prentice barely has time to enjoy a mug of mead before the phone rings for him. He doesn’t even get to do ‘me pushups’ before being summoned to Greenwich to receive the message delivered by the V-2 rocket. The hanging up on the other end of the call provides the ‘violent whack’ that arrives after the rocket. He is driven by ‘Corporal Wayne’, his batman, out to Greenwich in a Laconda, a high end British convertible. After passing a group of singing sappers, he falls into his ‘fantasy-surrogate mode, which he attempts to control with his own mental song and dance. So the initial dream/fantasy before he wakes of the first section may not be his own. The ‘exiled Rumanian Royalist’ whose fantasy he enters is among the Elite. Pirate begins humming a tune they taught him to remind himself to ’not fuck it up’.  We get the first verse of the tune with lyrics implying this fantasy-surrogate skill is killing him. Pynchon describes this mental state as fantasies swirling in and out of Pirate’s theater of a mind.  We then get a history of Pirate’s development into the fantasist-surrogate. We learn how Prentice confirmed that they were others’ fantasies, when he witnessed a derelict, luridly observing two young girls, looked over at Prentice and said something right out of one of Prentice’s dreams. After this among a ‘usual list of prizes in a competition grown crowded and perilous’ Prentice fantasizes about being abducted and his unique ability used for ‘unspeakable purposes’. Prentice’s episodes also begin to occur ‘outside any conditions of sleep’ with H.A. Loaf’s messianic fantasy, during this revelation Pynchon also brings in Kipling and racist imagery of colonial empire’s victims, also the hardships of the soldiers of the empire. The dark forces he fears will abduct him manifest when he confirms the fantasy with Loaf, and ‘They’, ‘The White Visitation’, ‘Higher Echelons’, the ‘anonymous voices in a briefing room’ become aware of his ability. Here is the first clear example of paranoia: each term implies an amorphous elite of puppet masters, omnisciently seeking ‘negotiable skills’ and omnipotent control of the Preterite. The Elect exploits Pirate, a Preterite, for their benefit. These Elect are in ‘the Long Game’ implying the Elect’s permanence over its individual members. They patiently study him, ‘committed to the Long Run’, until his skill becomes useful, namely with one Lord Blatheral Osmo, like the Rumanian, a member of the Elite. Osmo is in charge of the Novi Pazar desk important to the control of the Balkans. Osmo’s removed adenoid is now swallowing London in his nightmares, much like ‘the Firm’ assimilates individuals like Prentice, or the war subsumes everyone into its meaningless blob. Prentice must take on this adenoid and allow Osmo to sleep, keeping him ‘able to at last devote all his time to Novi Pazar’. By the end of the section, Prentice has saved “Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of”, another paranoid reference to the Elite and their dreams of “grandeur” fulfilled by WWII.  Pirate nearly loses his mind and ‘The Firm’ allows him ‘tiny homeopathic doses of peace’ to keep him ready for more. Pirate’s separation, his being among and yet apart from those around him, and his unique skill allow several themes to emerge: dream/reality, isolation, the controlling ‘they’/’them’ labeled 'The Firm’, and ‘The White Visitation’; paranoia and insanity.
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