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