"Reenter[ing] the clockwork of cause and effect"

So I'm a little over 100 pages into Vineland now (it being the first book this semester that I haven't read before). It's hard not to just start underlining the words I learned to underline in Gravity's Rainbow, like "shit" "paper" "ink" "History" etc. And Zoyd's pot habit (the effects of the drug, but also the social persecution) seems like a simple-enough filter to think about paranoia again through. I get the impression that, although it's like half the length of GR, Vineland is playing its cards fairly close to the chest over the course of this exposition, because I'm not really able to put together all that much in terms of analysis so far. But I'm thinking now that this probably has more to do with the whole not-having-prior-knowledge-of-the-ending aspect, and less to do with the novel itself. Maybe it's just less "serious" (or less "grave," without Gravity always there to keep me in line...)

Either way, I think what caught my attention most of all in the first few chapters was all the plays on "the Tube," first of all as a name for the holy and omnipresent television, but also as the barrel of a surfer's perfect wave (tubular, man). They meet nicely at the point that a lot of characters spend time "surfing the channels of the Tube": Zoyd, Justin Fletcher, Frenesi, Hector, etc. Pretty much everyone I've encountered has had some semi-scene at least of being rapt in the "light of the Tube."

But for all this Tube-worshipping, I thought it was interesting that in Hawaii chasing Frenesi, Zoyd, discussing suicide, says that "the only thing holding [him] back...is the indignity of lying there all splattered by the pool and in my last few seconds on Earth, hearing Jack Lord say 'Book him, Danno -- Suicide One.'" (60) First of all, it's really funny. But critically, I read it as Zoyd's inability to disassociate Hawaii (and presumably other locales) from their television counterparts. To die in Hawaii, is to die in Hawaii 5-0. Then, thinking about it a little more, I got to thinking that perhaps this understanding is more of a symptom than a condition. The condition I think would be that Zoyd is afraid of his death (and consequently his life) being reduced to a thirty-minute TV episode, a stinger line to sum it all up. I'll try to follow this up, as I go on, but keeping in mind, I don't know where the book is going, feel free to dissuade me here.

Then there's this presence of the interplanetary. Zoyd drops a beer can from a balcony onto some guy's surfboard: his suspicions extend "far beyond Earth's orbit." (59) The end of Millard and Blodwen's surreal sixties adventure to a cabin out in the redwoods is said to be where "they'd first come back down to Earth." (48) "Earth," "orbit," "planet," etc. These words are all over the place. As I go on, I'll be looking for what the idea of Earth, situated in all this cosmic hippie mysticism, might mean/say/be. The scene on Zoyd's Kahuna Airlines flight that gets boarded, when those "hostages" are taken, seems like with some future-knowledge it could become even more significant.

The last chapter I read, the long-ish backstory on Frenesi, had an interesting passage I wanted to single out. Sasha (her mother, the script-reader) is complaining: "History in this town...is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and it comes about in the same way." (81) It would be stupid I think not to apply what we talked about in GR to this statement, insofar as it ties a concept of "History" to the cinematic, this time in the form of a script, which is interesting because it implies something that is pre-written which actors must enact (that sounds dumb). The script, though, was a filmic image that was kind of ignored in Gravity's Rainbow, most of the attention directed toward the director, the camera, the lighting. (von Göll, the film of Katje at SOE, Alpdrücken). Sasha goes on to say that once there's one version of a script, "Parties you never heard of get to come in and change it. Characters and deeds get shifted around, heartfelt language gets pounded flat when it isn't just removed forever." This sounds an awful lot like a corporate complaint, big faceless specter-groups rearranging "human" interaction. I guess it's probably significant too that Sasha is Frenesi's mother, meaning that she lived through World War II (i.e., she lived through Gravity's Rainbow) and has some sort of perspective on those times. A page earlier, she posits that "Maybe we all have to submit to History." (80) What does that mean, coming from her?

Sometimes I really wonder why I'm so in love with Pynchon's writing when I'm so historically uninformed (read: ignorant). I think I need to at least read the Wikipedia page on Reaganomics or something before I miss out on something important. But then there are times, like in this book when Prairie tells Zoyd frankly, "Love is strange, Dad," (16) and I'm reminded that these characters are in conflict with history too.

I'll do look into Reagan either way.

Matt

On Preterition

The "first ancestor," author of the "Slothropite heresy" that seems to be a serious reading of Borges's story "Three Versions of Judas," might serve as a Counterforcing saint.  "William argues holiness for these 'second Shee[' without whom there would be no elect" (555).  He's a vision of "the fork in the road America never took" (556), and of course it's his hymn that "They never taught anyone to sing" that's ringing in our ears on the last page of the novel --

There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one..
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
All through our crippl'd Zone,
With a face in every mountainside
And a Soul in ev'ry stone...


(Note the play with 18c spelling and punctuation here, to which we'll return in M&D.)


But even ol' Will (named for Shakespeare?) isn't fully free of the deep involvement of all of Us in the workings of the fallen world.  As old Tom says of the Counterforcers --


"They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that's the hard fact.  The Man has a branch office in each of our brains...  We know what's going on, and we let it go on" (712-13).

A fun ride through GR.  On to California!

The Counterforce (Has Conquered Me)

Well, my first impulse is to find a way to say, “This is the Counterforce. Here it is.” But I think instead, I’ll just have to settle for identifying a few places it comes up and speculating from there, yet again. Anyway, I might as well begin with the scene in Pirate’s maisonette that I think you’ve quoted from at some point. Page 650, Pirate is carrying out that whole “sagely revelator” role for Roger, telling him:

“‘Of course a well-developed They-system is necessary – but it’s only half the story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case, there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system as a They-system –’”

Straightforward enough. Pirate goes on to tell Roger that “real and unreal” don’t matter, only whether or not the data can be arranged consistently within these systems, essentially sketching out criteria for being a “good” paranoiac, which calls to mind Tantivy’s conversation with Slothrop way back in London about “operational paranoia” – “That can be useful, especially in combat…” (25) to pretend They’re out get you. Without insinuating that Tantivy is anything more than eager and ignorant, if one imagines “combat” as descriptive of the singular “Us-Against-Them War” that’s implicit in these Postwar conditions, you can consider Mucker-Maffick a sort of sage as well, identifying a sort of Counterforce even here, i.e., that Our paranoia is a force working against Their designs.

Jump ahead to the scene at Utgarthaloki’s party, Roger and Bodine combating the image of Roger being rotisserie-d with an assault of disgusting alliterative hypothetical dishes. Once things start getting out of hand (guests are vomiting, etc.) certain marginalized characters get in on the fun, like investigative journalist Constance Flamp, and the Inner Voices of the string quartet. Eventually a black butler helps the pair escape, saying “Pimple pie with filth frosting, gentlemen,” like a salute to the Counterforce. Gustav the musician even says, “Perhaps you don’t want people like me…” as if Roger is going around recruiting for a team (731) and we later learn that Brigadier Pudding, in death is “now a member of the Counterforce” as well.

However in this scene and in its connection to the Counterforce, there is something more than just a few slighted paranoids who get their kicks upsetting a dinner party: there is once again, a preoccupation with human waste and the vile mortality of the human body. That increasingly numerous English gentry are sent to the bathroom by Roger and Pig’s scatological exclamations is a way of illustrating the force that works against this sort of “bleached” congregation of stuffy power-tripping old people – that regardless of the mechanical disembodied power they’ve managed to amass here, base animal Death will come for them as well. Granted this description of the Counterforce says nothing of its references to the parabola of a rocket’s flight or to perhaps the Historical Gravity that was inevitable in the arc of the Nazis, but I think that will pop up organically in one or two of the following points.

So now is as good a time as any to get to the sex (not that I have a comprehensive theory on it or anything, but so it goes). I want to single out the passage on pg 751 when Thanatz is attempting to seduce Ludwig the Lemming Boy, entreating, “Ludwig, a little S and M never hurt anybody.” What follows is his theory that sadomasochism has been made taboo solely because it is essential to Their techniques of maintaining power.

“It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game…I tell you if S&M could be established universally…the State would wither away.”

This “theory” seems capable of simultaneously shedding light on the role/nature of Blicero, Margherita, etc. and also on the novel’s use of sex in general (i.e., “[submission and dominance] cannot be wasted in private sex.”) It seems fair enough to once again highlight the word waste in that statement, that by making personal and private use of dominance and submission, something “useful” to Them instead fulfills the same symbolic role of excrement in the novel: a reminder of mortality, one that can work against the expansion of the white “Deathkingdom.” I’m reminded of that supposed original title of the novel, Mindless Pleasures, in that by following this logic of private sex as something very un-useful for Them (and thus sacred to Us), it makes sense that descriptions of private sex (Roger and Jessica, Slothrop and everyone, even the imagined Pokler and Ilse, et al.) are among the most sensitively constructed passages in the novel. I’m struggling to think of a sex scene that was disturbed by a ridiculous Vaudevillian song, which is something no other stage seems safe from in GR.

When Katje meets up with Enzian, and they discuss Slothrop, Blicero, the Zone, etc. Katje [seems as if she] confesses that “[she doesn’t] really know why they sent [her] out here…There’s a failure in the light. I can’t see.” (672) It’s somehow more revelatory than as if she had said “The light is blinding me.” For me the phrase “failure in the light” describes a certain purpose or intention that was lost. Of course, on the semi-surface, Katje is identifying the nature of these paranoid holy centers, like how Tchitcherine, in the presence of the Khirgiz Light, only sees that he cannot see it fully. But there is also the light/dark dynamic that plays into the German aesthetic, the extended/expanded symbolism of the Nazi pursuit of the perfect Aryan race: bleached, pure white, and these are implications are at work in Katje’s confession too.

On a vaguely related subject, Enzian, before firing the 00001, feels he must pass his knowledge on to Josef Ombindi, which includes the idea that the Rocket is ultimate proof of Their lies, lies of safety and protectedness, because once the Rocket exists, each are as prone to it as any other; no protection can be guaranteed. It is, in a slightly different way than the shit-motif, a constant reminder of mortality. “We can’t believe Them anymore. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.” (743)

As for the ending of the novel, I think enough has been said about how Slothrop’s dissolution is mirrored by the dissolution of narrative structure or vice versa. What I’m currently finding more compelling is that [a] Pynchon reinvokes the religious beliefs of William Slothrop (the grandfather of preterition, so to speak, hyeugh hyeugh hyeugh) and that [b] it ends with an all-inclusive directive.

[a]“DESCENT” is apparently set inside an old movie theater, wherein something has gone wrong: either the film has been cut or a bulb in the projector has blown. To me this is saying one of these things: either that these folks (reader included) are part of Preterite and are encouraged to invoke their sort-of patron saint in the last moments before being blasted to oblivion, that these folks are the Preterite who are being “passed over” by the Rocket (which I guess would kind of invert a lot of ideas about elect and preterite) or that these people are the Elect, chosen by the Rocket. What’s certain is that, regardless of which class these people belong to, gravity (whether this means physical gravity or the “gravity of history” is debatable – I assume both) has already begun to act on this rocket – hence the title of the subsection. I go back to that idea that William Slothrop may have been the “wrong move” America made at some long-past decision point. To call him up here would be a reminder of that possibility, maybe just a mean little hint that the full weight of that wrong move is about just about to crash down on this movie-going audience. The presence of the cinematic here, not so much as a framing device anymore as an identifying device, seems to say something…but to be honest, I really just don’t know what.

[b]“Now everybody” –” ---- is this the scariest ending of a novel ever? It just hangs there, as if it’s asking YOU to join in with this death-hymn, or perhaps even more frightening, that this call is made for a chorus, and by that point there’s no one there to answer. I think it has this uncanny ability to knock the reader out of the book without also sending the message that it’s “finished.” You’re done reading, not because there are no more words left, but because the book told you to do something. It’s just downright eerie.

Looking back, this post seems inconclusive, disorganized, a little immature compared to my last one (maybe even 2), but I’m telling you, it’s not my fault! I guess it’s the nature of the beast that I’d put double the amount of time and effort into this last section and come out with a big ball of loose ends. The least I can do is say that after thinking a little bit about what I’d like to write about come end-of-times, I mean term, some of my initial ideas seem to involve how P.’s protagonists are mythologized, the presence/function of the cinematic, and Osbie Feel (just kidding).

To Vineland!

Matt

Leaving the Zone

I’m not really sure what went on, but we lost internet access in our apartment for a few days. Sorry for the delayed post. This will include the rest of In the Zone, and the book should be complete for Tuesday’s post. Kind of scary actually.

I want to start with this idea of “John Dillingerism” in the Zone. I think the first explicit reference to the gangster is in Säure Bummer’s deserted hideout, regarding the note Säure has left for Slothrop:

“Now ‘As B/4’ was John Dillinger’s old signoff. Everybody in the Zone is using it these days. It indicates how you feel about certain things…” (443)

Which is, I guess fairly benign enough – the disenfranchised Zoners glorify the larger-than-life persona and the devil-may-care attitude toward authority, not to mention his ties to the black market. But later in the Zone, after Slothrop and Närrisch’s rescue mission (more specifically, after Närrisch’s sacrifice) the plot is interrupted by a recounting of the circumstances of Dillinger’s death outside the Biograph Theater – something in that surely, about what waits “outside” the cinematic. We are told that “Dillinger…found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the movie images that hadn’t quite faded from his eyeballs.” (524) The movie was Manhattan Melodrama, wherein Clark Gable’s character, somewhat analogous to Dillinger, chooses the electric chair over life imprisonment. Thus “Dillingerism” in the Zone would be a choosing of the melodramatic, the Hollywood ending, over some kind of slow, government-sanctioned/-monitored death.

Perhaps more importantly, in that paragraph on Dillinger, there is also this certain homophobic discourse that I’ve noticed popping up in weird places. The officer in charge of his assassination is referred to as “bitchy little Melvin Purvis,” and that when he “lit up the fatal cigar, [he] felt already between his lips the penis of official commendation – and federal cowards at the signal took Dillinger with their faggots’ precision...” (525) At first, it was just unsettling: I didn’t really know what to do with this kind of language in a book like this. But then when the same tone and vocabulary showed up again in the very last section of Part III, it seemed a little clearer what was happening. In that last section, Clive Mossmoon and Sir Marcus Scammony sit and discuss the British operation in the Zone, and when the narrator makes his closing remarks, after claiming that a certain love could exist between men in the trenches of WWI, we are told that the “life-cry” of that love has “long-since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this last war, Death was no longer an enemy but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, the real and only fucking is done on paper…” (627) I think the connection is that this very aggressively homophobic discourse is the manifestation of a sustained pun on the idea of homosexuality as “one man fucking another man,” playing on the use of fucking to mean both ‘having intercourse’ and ‘treating unfairly.’ Therefore, “bitchy little Melvin Purvis” has less to do with a personality and more to do with his authority position and what he has chosen to do to another human being. It follows that when “homosexuality in high places” becomes an ‘afterthought’ (because we are told Scammony does literally engage in some form transvestism) and that the “fucking is done on paper” now, it signals a shift in the metaphor, or perhaps a departure from.

Scammory also tells Mossmoon that, “We’re all going to fail” (627) but Clive knows that this does not mean “the Operation” will too. Inside the Operation, the “self is a petty and indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness,” and that “there is no lower self.” These are the circumstances which are contrasted against the trenches of WWI, where “under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths…men came to love one another.” There is an immediate tie-in to the saving function of Dillinger/Gable’s “sudden” death. (“Die like ya live…all of a sudden.” 524) But there is also this idea of the “lower” self, an animal self in darkness, which (at least retroactively for me) is so integral to the black and white binaries that populate the novel, and to the omnipresence of shit (literal feces, and in other forms) in GR too, especially in that during Slothrop’s Puritan genealogy, “shit” (toilet paper) is one of the three uses of the paper his family produces, the other 2 being the Word, and money. I would say that this whole “lower self” thing is caught up in the fascination with Death, the cold truth that humans are mortal, animal things that die. That’s why Jamf advocates a move toward “the inorganic” (“Si-N” over “C-H,” 589): it is indicative of the German, or maybe just the corporate motions to defy death. This black animal fear that finds an image in shit, is also in a lot of ways what’s at the heart of the Schwarzkommando, and all the other “Schwarzphenomen” (Black phenomena, syndromes), and of the desperate primal racism many white characters exhibit (Marvy, Slothrop on sodium amytal, Tchitcherine, etc.) The most direct connections are probably when Brigadier Pudding unconsciously associates Katje’s feces with a black man’s penis, and when the Schwarzkommando are said to be analogous to the shit of King Kong. It is a humiliating encounter with mortality.

As for Slothrop in the Zone, I think something big begins with the Anubis, although the symbolism is of course, diluted enough to avoid static meaning: Anubis is the Egyptian god who escorted the souls of the dead to the underworld, so one is first inclined to say that the orgy-ers, specifically Slothrop, are being “escorted” into the realm of the dead, i.e., the Zone. It’s all well and good until he falls off – are we supposed to extend the metaphor here? Is this another form of preterition, a “passing over” for Slothrop? Does he “escape” Death here? I don’t necessarily think so, because it also marks the point when Slothrop starts to dissolve into the Zone – because of Tchitcherine’s uniform, he’s taken for a Russian officer, when he returns to the Anubis from the Otto, Procalowski doesn’t recognize him (539), a stray pig cannot tell him apart from a real pig, etc. When he meets up with Andreas at the rocket site, he even relinquishes his role as “quester” by supplying Andreas with intel as opposed to receiving it. (572) I think if anything, Slothrop is sort of “infected” by the Death on board the Anubis, even literally, in the form of the (alleged) hanging corpse of Bianca in the dark furnace room, his as of then, last sexual encounter. It’s sort of mystifying too that over compared to the number of times Slothrop has sex in the first 100 pages, it is over 100 pages from the time he has sex with Bianca till his next sexual encounter, which is in fact, with Ilse Pökler’s mother (Ilse and Bianca of whom it is said “How can they not be the same child?”).

Somewhere in there is also the episode with Ludwig and his lemming, Ursula. That Slothrop helps a German boy chase a pet with a genetic death-wish is blatant enough. But during that passage, there is a little aside about William Slothrop, Tyrone’s ancestor who wrote the book On Preterition, which “argued holiness for God’s second sheep [the Preterite].” (565) He was immediately accused of heresy and driven from the Massachusetts Bay colony, and this follows:

“Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back…” 565-6

This seems like a pretty straightforward representation of [at least one of] Pynchon’s aim[s], to like you said during Lot 49, go back to that moment before an historical event, right before it becomes inevitable, and think about the other possibilities and what happened to those possibilities before they were lost. I guess this particular fork is between marginalizing the “Preterite” and sympathizing with them, a long-term result of this specific catastrophic choice being the rise (and brutality) of the Nazis?

Last major topic here: Enzian in the Zone. He remains mostly invisible except for that short section in which he, Christian, and Andreas are out looking for Pavel, Maria’s husband (Maria being Christian’s sister). But there’s that crazy passage here about the “Fungus Pygmies” that Pavel encounters when he’s hallucinating on synthetic gasoline, creatures that exist on the “other side” of the line between gasoline and water in the emulsion. That line is identified as an “Interface” (capital eye) and the interface is said to be “a long rainbow, mostly indigo.” (532) This rainbow is the interface between the “cellular aristocracy” and the “wastes” (a reference to both the Elect/Preterite binary, and also to “waste” as in shit). I think it’s fair then to see the titular rainbow as an interface as well, and consequently, not unreasonable to see this interface as between other forms of Elect and Preterite. But I know that there is a stronger rainbow image to this effect in The Counterforce, so I’m going to put it aside for now here.

For now, the more important aspect of this section is that Enzian, when he sees Christian raise his gun, has a Zonal epiphany: “Suddenly, this awful branching: the two possibilities aready beginning to fly apart at the speed of thought – a new Zone in any case now, whether Christian fires or refrains – jump, choose –” (533) To say that a new “Zone with a Capital Z” can be born like this, is to characterize the eponymous Zone as another point at which divergent branches could be seen to exist, before one is established in/by history – just like that American fork Slothrop identifies in William’s history.

Well I think that will be it for now. Tchitcherine becomes aware of a counterforce in the Zone (621) but can’t see “the Light”… only the Finger pointing to it. But ironically, Pynchon’s little symbol is using his middle finger to show us…

Matt

In the Zone, Still

So Greta is describing her career to Slothrop onboard the Anubis, eventually arriving at a movie calledJegund Hepauf (“Young Up”??) in which she starred alongside the real Max Schlepzig. There is purportedly a scene in the film in which the two ride a bathtub down a river, but Greta confesses that she never actually got on the river – the stunt doubles did the whole scene for her and Max. Then there’s this quirky little paragraph here, a little paranoid rumination on the way it might have been for those stunt doubles:

“…And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows…all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have left….or never even arrived…and what was that the currents just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was that thud, so stiffened and mute?” (492)

It starts out straightforward enough – the doubles get the idea that although they started out in a simulation of being lost (directed to be lost) they might actually be lost now. They move from imagining abandonment, to the much more paranoid/nihilistic/scary idea that perhaps there was never anyone there to abandon them to begin with. And then there’s the Pynchon finale: a mysterious thing “knocks” against the side of the boat. My mind jumps immediately to dead body, but I can’t really find anything textual to back that up.

This passage seems to be like a miniaturization of what goes on in the Zone. We have the omnipresence of the cinematic as a framing device (“I’m not German…I’m a Lombard.” “Close enough, sweetheart.” [452] Gerhardt von Göll, Alpdrücken, King Kong, Rocketman, the constant imposition of “soundtracks” etc.) but it is complicated by the reality of the actors (the humanity Pynchon seems desperate to sustain?). Slothrop is repeatedly thrust into roles of doubles – Max Schlepzig, Ian Scuffling, Rocketman even (the outfit was there already…whose was it first?) – and his paranoia follows their arc: is he the star of his own kaleidoscopic adventure, or is he just a guy lost on the set?

So this is all well and good on its own, but my take is that it must be some sort of diagnosis of a peculiarity in the postwar human condition, perhaps linked to the nationless mercenary corporations (represented in GR via IG) that have in some way, a hand in everything that happens in the Zone, without ever really being present (culpable? Reassuring?) It is probably also tied into that other way that doubles function in the novel, less as stand-ins and more as mirror images, or opposites.

INTERLUDE: I’ve been thinking about Enzian since your last comment, and I would have made a point in posting on him, save for his relative absence in the last 100 or so pages I read (only see him on board the Toiletship, I think?). Apparently he is named by Blicero after a flower referenced in Rilke, and then when I stumbled upon a description of Slothrop’s penis as his “unflowering cock” which I unfortunately decided was not worth writing down the page number. Either way, it brought with it some new ideas about pairings of people.

To continue in a nearby vein, I started to reconsider Slothrop, who I had wanted to consider an “individual” in the Zone (a bad impulse, I know) as maybe the “double” of Pökler. But doubles and opposites, I’ve learned, require an “interface,” or a meeting point (as learned at the White Visitation à la Peter Sachsa, and through Maxwell’s Demon, for starters). Slothrop and Pökler’s would be Ilse/Bianca.The two worlds that she straddles would be the world of those who watch the film (the circumstances of Ilse’s conception, 404) and of those who live in it (their sex, and Slothrop’s subsequent love of Bianca, 476-80). There are definite similarities between Slothrop’s and Pökler’s situations; for one, they are both “allowed” reprieves, little vacations from the war: Slothrop get un perm’ on the Riviera, Pökler gets his yearly trip to Zwölfkinder. Both are paranoid that they are not so much lucky as part of a complex and precisely orchestrated system of utility. But here’s the thing:

“There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries – since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now Pökler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been extended past images on film, to human lives.” (413)

At Zwölfkinder, Pökler must watch the “moving image of [his] daughter” (429) whereas Slothrop, at every twist and turn, but analogical purposes here, at Casino Hermann Goering, takes part in the “plot” of the film: he is a main character in the story of Raoul’s wild party, and although the discourse is cinematic (“typical WWII romantic intrigue,” 250, “like the eyes of King Kong” 250, “outside of a Frankenstein movie” 249) the narrative persona isn’t necessarily concerned with this imposition of the filmic. So with regard to what this association might “mean” I think it’s first important to note that the two characters are on either side of the War, axis and allies, which probably speaks to the overwhelming tragedy of Pökler’s narrative: the loss of his wife, his daughter, his co-workers, etc. as opposed to Slothrop’s goofball shenanigans, that seem only to get him laid or high. But this may be tied more to their respective positions to the Rocket, than to national allegiances – Pökler is integral in its invention/construction, whereas Slothrop is tied in so many ways, to its firing/use. In quite literal terms, Slothrop is always circling the rocket, questing to reach the center of the maze where the rocket resides, whereas Pökler stood at the center of the target (432) and the rocket exploded all around him. If anything, it says something about rings and centers and the (im)possibility of navigating/locating them.

I wanted to get to the orgy on the Anubis/Morituri too, but it just seems sort of excessive at this point.

Be back with more Zone-findings soon...getting a little anxious about finishing up the novel

Matt

In the Zone: First Impressions

So I've crossed the threshold into second-half-of-the-book land, or more relevantly, about a hundred pages into the Zone now, and there were two places where I stopped, took my pen and circled the entire paragraph, so I think I'll just stick to those here in this post, and if you think I should be redirecting my interest as I proceed, just let me know.

Instance #1: Slothrop encounters the Zone-Hereros, Enzian outside Berlin

----- (367) There is a sort of pre-description of the Scwarzkommando, like a pastoral scene-setting that precedes the specifics. It begins with "They sit on a hillside eating bread and sausages." We are told they are gathered for a "Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country." It is attributed to the same "impulse" (reflex, mechanism maybe?) that had once inspired other nostalgic folk celebrations, such as "mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter..." only that now it will take the form of a "young scientist-surrogate...going round and round with old Gravity, or some such buffoon..." As long as my notes are decent, this is the first instance of a capitalized (personified, I'd say) occurrence of Gravity, and the context, like pretty much everything in this novel, invites interpretation and then complicates it to oblivion.

What I found really intriguing about this passage is that two recurring images (shapes, really) the parabola and the mandala have a weird sort of interaction here. If the rocket has come to be symbolized by (or to symbolize? -- theres goes those signifiers and signifieds again) the parabola based on the action of Gravity upon its trajectory, it's troubling that here, the new postwar folk-consciousness imagines Gravity playing the role of "old Winter," part of a circular story arc, perpetually vanquishing and being vanquished by Spring. The seasons, come to think of it, form a mandala (which is apparently just the Sanskrit word for "circle") although as to the absence of Summer and Autumn in this folk-consciousness, that's for another discussion. If Von Braun can by mythologized as "the force that makes the rocket rise" and Gravity is his folk opposite, "the force that makes the rocket fall," is Tom P making us question here that the "shape of the rocket" is actually parabolic? Are we supposed to see it as a mandala or circle instead? Or maybe it's just that mandala is the shape that the folk-consciousness (the old mind?) would like to imagine, has to imagine the rocket takes, in the face of the postwar omnipresence of the parabola.

It's also funny that he chooses Wagner's Der Meistersinger as the opera of choice for the scene's soundtrack: it's the only of Wagner's "mature" operas without a mythological context -- it's set in a very historically-verifiable period, with mostly historical figures as characters (kind of like a Pynchon book...). Is it significant that the opera of the new festival, of the Zone-Hereros is literal rather than symbolic, is contextual and not universalizable? It says to me that the Zone-Hereros, as opposed to the "old-Hereros," are signifier and signified at once, whereas their ancestors (at least to the Zone-Hereros) can be signifiers of something grander, evidenced by the fact that on pg 325, during our first long description of Enzian, it is said that Enzian faults Ombindi for looking back toward "an innocence he's really only heard about...the gathered the purity of opposites, the village built like a mandala..." Once again, the mandala finds association with a lost past that is more meaningful (in its innocence?) than the unstable present, the literal present. ...I'm going to stop here with this train of thought for now.

Instance #2: Slothrop meets Margherita Erdmann on the old Alpdrücken set

----- (402) "How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender!"

Slothrop is whipping Margherita on the prop-rack when we get this exclamation, and there continues a discourse on the magic in points where one thing gives way to another: "nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses..." Listed are "cathedral spires, holy minarets...mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven...rose points that prick us by surprise..." going so far as to say "the infinitely dense point from which the present universe expanded..." (403) The conclusion: "In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright." I know better than to name any one sort of philosophic idea as the "point" of the novel, but this image does seem to at least describe the situation of Slothrop, and the nature of his various encounters, pretty over-archingly.

When I first read the novel, I couldn't help being drawn to its Freudianisms, to places where dreams seemed to hold a fearful, nameless significance -- and I still see that pop up everywhere ("ugly old woman with long teeth who found you in that dream and said nothing" [381], "a forbidden room...at the edge of his memory...It's allied with the Worst Thing [291] the moray eel, etc.) But I think now this second time thru, that it's only a potent example of this human fascination with the "change from point to no-point," like meetings of opposites, and how Wimpe describes the chemical creation of cocaine ("the cocaine will appear first at the edges...a purple target, with the outer worth the most, and the bull's-eye worth nothing. An anti-target." (382) It would work analogously in that Pynchon is always obsessed with the "outer" ring of society, fringe culture. Brain beginning to fry, going to scour for more textual occurrences of this tomorrow.

Onwards and upwards

Matt

Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering

[i.e., Slothrop's francophone escape]

This whole business of trying to post on whole sections was a terrible idea. I'll be thankful for the fragmenting that the Zone will necessitate.

So the impression I get from the early half of this second part, the thing that's kind of right there in the title, is that Slothrop is sort of placed by Pynchon at this fringe casino because the metaphor of it is the only thing blatant enough so-far that even Slothrop himself will see it, and begin to acknowledge his paranoia: that he is "playing against the invisible House, perhaps after all for his soul...." (207) The Casino lit up at night is even referred to as being "in full holocaust," creating a sinister association of this "House" (the many-times referred to "they") with the War, or at least the War-state. All this has been said before on this blog, in so many words, but I think it's big that at this point, in this melodramatic, Marx Brothers-y locale, Slothrop can finally give voice to it all. "'Tamara's gonna get here before tonight'" Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice." (249) That thought becomes this:

In Writing Pynchon, McHoul and Wills call attention to Pynchon's manipulation of "mention vs. use." (51) According to those two, Tom uses both in such a way as to blue the distinction, pointing to a moment in In the Zone when Slothrop wants to sew an R onto his Rocketman cape (using the cinematic oeuvre) and in the next sentence says, "as when Tonto..." (mentioning the cinematic oeuvre). In this way, mention and use become flush. It seems Derridean, related to his thing about "citationality." I think this rhetorical trick that they identify here is at play with other binaries, perhaps in a less technical way, but still there, the way opposites like Hansel and Gretel (Katje and Gottfried, the child actors in the pantomime, et al.) twist into and out of each other nebulously (Hansel is played by a girl at the play, Blicero cross-dresses his dominated). It happens in Pointsman's lab too, the way "it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, i'n't now..." (232) blending, or at least denying the separation of scientist and subject. Pointsman refers to the "extinction" of his program (231), and by use of this specifically behaviorist term, invalidates his programs position as a solid They, and makes it an at least occasional "Us" (done on a grander scale by the fact that Pointsman, the personification of at least one of Slothrop's "they"s, is a sometimes narrator, whose thoughts we experience. We are not in Slothrop's position, no matter the naturalized desire to be there, our taught protago-worship.

"How high does it go?" (255) -- Identifying the rocket itself as a form of paranoia, or maybe theorizing as to what will happen as a result of paranoia, when mental brenschluss occurs.

A last thought, when I first read the novel, I couldn't really read the passage about Brigadier Pudding and "Domina Nocturna" as anything other than scary, lurid, manic, pornographic. But for some reason, this time through, it just seemed like one of the saddest 5-6 pages up to that point; I think Pynchon really wants to communicate a horror in the position Pudding occupies with regard to WWII, someone who cannot understand this thing that is happening in the world. "They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet." (237) Pudding needs certain things from a War for it to make sense, not only pain, but this towering black villain of myth. WWII does not provide these things, except in the underground, illicit dealings of night -- a more potent and prevalent trope in Pynchon than I had previously realized.

I know I'm leaving a lot from this section out (the bigger things that come to mind are the overwhelming presence of cinema, King Kong, and the weird moray eel departure). I'm still thinking about those things. I responded to your post about "operational paranoia" as a comment, in case you didn't see it.

Now for the Zone I guess,

Matt

"operational paranoia"

Before you get too deep into the chaos of the Zone, it's worth thinking a little bit about paranoia and what it means in this novel.  Tantivy talks to Slothrop about "operational paranoia" (25) in a wartime context -- but doesn't GR suggest that all of modern life is the hermeneutic equivalent of war? 

One of my longstanding thoughts about Gravity's Rainbow is that it's a fictional interrogation of the differences between paranoia and thought, and that it has trouble distinguishing between those things.

Or, as the man says on the first page, "this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into--"

"Oh, that was no 'found' crab, Ace -- no random octopus or girl, uh-uh.  Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart" (188).

"War -- leaving their children alone in the forest"

So the last section in Part 1, from pg 177 to pg 180, describes a Christmas scene with Roger and Jessica and the memory of the pantomime Roger takes the children to, Hansel and Gretel of course.

I thought this section would be particularly good for some closer reading, considering its literal position in the novel, and how it does seem to encompass or at least subsume some of the themes and images that have been floating around "Beyond the Zero," in a refreshingly un-scientific voice, which is I guess the voice of Roger when he's with the Jessica (as opposed to the voice of Roger-with-Pointsman).

First off there's the surface-level connection to Katje-Gottfried-Blicero, by just the sheer fact that the oven scene in Hansel and Gretel is being performed for them (aided by the knowledge that Hansel is being played by a lanky girl) which might possibly be some kind of play on the phrase "theater of war" but is more likely significant because of the way Roger and Jessica, the love that is desperate to survive the war, or at least survive "within" the war, are watching this scene. Some of the secondary reading I've done [David Seed, I think specifically] has been suggesting that Hansel and Gretel might be representative of the German Romantics turn to a "national folk-consciousness" that had the capacity to empower (i.e., Nazism), but that the collectiveness of this dream found its power in the way it destroyed individual identities -- I understand this as being: Weissman is a marginal figure in the scheme of the war/world, but is raised to a level of extreme power and significant in the way he sacrifices his own identity and assumes a folk archetype ("Blicero," the Witch).

During the pantomime, "Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped..." when the rocket falls nearby. This seems to say to me that these folk-identities, whose proliferation and celebration are perhaps causes of this kind of War-with-a-capital-W, are kind of stopped short by the faceless death of the rocket (which reminds me of Slothrop's fantasy about a "rocket with his name on it"...it's paranoid, but it's also a bit of a fantasy that the rockets could have singular identities...a more "human" death?). I think what's important here is that there is a confusion of identities: there have been those who come to terms with their own smallness by assuming the mythic identities of folk hero/villains, there have been those who do it by attempting to connect with someone else (Rog and Jess's love), both sides complicated by the fact that these tactics are flawed -- the folk heroes will start to recognize that role as individual, and the individuals cannot help feeling caught up in something beyond themselves. Thus the terror of the rocket, its randomness, etc.

Then Gretel sings that scary song to calm the children. She sings, "We can fly to the moon, we'll be higher than noon / In our polythene home in the sky," which seems to foreshadow Gottfried's (Gretel's!) eventual home inside the Imipolex G compartment of the 00000. But this is complicated by the line two verses later that states, "Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise / There was nobody there after all!" Then she ends with "And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year / Are of children who are learning to die." To be honest, I'm having trouble breaching the literal, kind of punch-line aspect to the first couplet, my only theory being that maybe Pynchon says "no one was there after all" because Gottfried has surrendered his individual identity to the folk identity of Gretel?

The last line I want to think about is this:

"If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall."

Roger think-narrates this while he contemplates Jessica's transience. He later remembers her lieutenant boyfriend, and remarks of him "Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War." These seem related. The statement would be, from any none-Pynchon character, simply fatalistic: "If I don't have her, then who cares, let one fall on me." But through Roger's connection to the Poisson chart, his position within the war-scheme being essentially tied up with the way the rockets fall, it follows to say that "How the rockets fall" is almost synonymous with the bottom-line wartime identity of Roger Mexico: he is "how the rockets fall." But lots of people are -- Slothrop, Pirate, etc., which again echoes this idea of identities as ghostly things that can't be pinned down and individualized. "Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac in the rationalized power-ritual of the coming peace." A preempting of Cold War conditions, definitely, but also a proclamation of the importance of "idle" time, time that is not constructed and fractured and regimented by the State, as essential for identity (a link to Mindless Pleasures, maybe?)

I'm going off the rails a bit. Should have Part 2 on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday the latest.

Matt

"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre"

So I took a day to breathe between novels. That didn't really end up doing anything for me.

First off, I reread what I had posted on Lot 49 in the light of beginning a book I took out of the library called "The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon" by David Seed, I think from the early 80s, which has essays on his first 3 novels, and on Slow Learner. Not that I "dislike" what I wrote for Lot 49 per se, but my inability to craft any sort of thesis out of my notes is something I don't want to replicate as we go through GR, especially with the amount of secondary material that I'm learning is out there. I found an article called "Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology" by Joel D. Black, which I think is really relevant to what you were referring to, those consequences of German Romanticism, etc. I'm only about halfway through it, so I'll withhold making assumptions as to how it wraps up, but those 2 sources, along with a book I've got coming from the Staten Island library by Kathryn Hume (I can't remember the title; something about mythologies) should really help.

I had hoped to be all the way through Beyond the Zero by this post, but that off-day threw off my schedule. I'll stop whining here.

Okay, so I'm aware it would be fairly redundant to say that I observed an abundance of opposites, of ideas of opposites, binaries, etc. It's explicitly stated in the novel in more than half of the sections (should I call them sections?) that I've thus read. But I can't help being really interested in the character of Pointsman, maybe Pointsman v. Blicero, but as of right now, I've only really encountered that initial tale of Blicero-via-Katje @ Grigori's tank so far, so I guess I'll hold off. But I'm watching for that. I can't tell if it's Pointsman, or if it's only his science, or if those are even distinguishable from each other, but everytime he appears, I get the distinct feeling I'm watching some archetypal b&w villain plotting against the hero, actually almost of Boris Badenov plotting against Bullwinkle (Slothrop fits the Bullwinkle mold pretty well).

Pointsman claims to want to find a "pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche," "no effect without cause," the so-called "true mechanical explanation." (90) Blicero considers a really similar thing when he fantasizes about being able to say "it's muscular," "just...the reflexes," in his Oven-dream. Their obsessions are linked again: Pointsman scolds Mexico for using the term "strikes off" as opposed to "regresses," ("there is only forward -- into it -- or backward" - the binary) and Blicero must envision Gottfried as a negative image of Enzian, even going so far as to fashion an imaginary and invisible Herero girl to be the anti-Katje, because nothing can exist in isolation; the anti-it must exist, binaries again. Also, Pointsman seems to me to be character most explicitly tied to the notion of going beyond the zero, in his discussion of the ultraparadoxical stage.

Apart from these personal interests, I thought a little about how you said Pynchon may be displaying a bit of preference for the analog over the digital, which totally confused me for a while, but after a conversation with a friend majoring in computer science, who was able to explain "analog" to me in terms dumber than even the Wikipedia introduction, I think I may be approaching comprehension. Pirate, contemplating Teddy Bloat's espionage/secret folder, suggests that maybe it really is just a few dirty pictures, which would be "more wholesome than anything this war's photographed...life, at least." (35) This led to me thinking about all the sex, all the vulgarities and obscenities and freakshows in Pynchon's writing, and it all might be tied to this idea of "life at least," perhaps a fear of the great push from the analog (systems/entities that reflect the shape of their subjects) toward the digital (endless translation, detachment from the thing being computed/understood, zeros and ones), tracing the move to its apparent conception in WW2.

And Mexico's Poisson chart *slash* Slothrop's map which leads to Mexico's fear of the Postwar generation and their unconnected "events" (no cause and effect) *slash* the reminder that ancient Romans used a sieve that resembled the chart/map to cure illnesses, do magic things, etc. I can't help but think that this illustrates something central to the novel, the implication/temptation of a mystical power in constellations, imposed patterns, shapes in chaos, but accepting the chaos nonetheless. There is something "analog" about the chart and the map, as opposed perhaps to the "digital"ness of the War (there are no battles, no one "fights" the war as we'd imagine they should, they receive it in transmission-form, translated into a host of war-languages).

I don't think any of this is meant to be all that subterranean. I'm not claiming to have found and opened some mythic ark within the book, and I also don't want to get ahead of myself. I think once again, I'll supplement this post sometime this week as I finish Beyond the Zero (and hopefully an essay or two) before Friday's treatment of Part 2.

Any avenues you'd like me to address that I've ignored, &-so-on, &-so-on, etc?

Matt