"What,-- seek the Truth and not tell it! Shameful."

Excuse the ensuing schizophrenia.

I haven't yet reached the Ghastly Fop sub-text -- I stopped for the night at Ch. 40, and that episode apparently occurs somewhere in the early 50's. With any luck, I'll hit it tomorrow night, Thursday at the latest. I think the only mentions made of it thus far have been as insults directed at Dixon by Mason. Possibly one other time of which I can't recall a context. Either way.

Since this is kind of an outdated thought at this point, I'll get it out of the way first: I'm stuck thinking about how it feels to read this novel, as compared to how it feels to read, say, GR. There are certain pairings/assemblies of characters and certain conversations that I feel primed to read a certain way (not even analytically -- just on a base, experiential level). I do what I can to shake off that influence when it seems particularly manipulative, but it has yielded some interesting trains of thought too. The most succinct and relevant train having to do with Mason & Maskelyne out at St. Helena, "doing each other's charts," etc. These interactions had a totally pre-informed shape while I was reading those chapters, and I think it's the shape of Roger Mexico and Pointsman. You have the old doctor, obsessed with the integrity of his science, so totally self-involved and self-righteous, to an almost villainous effect (moreso for Ptsman). Then you have the young melancholy protegé, and it almost feels right to make Jessica and Rebekah analogous in this context. The most blatant difference, I think, is that Maskelyne's "evil" is so immediately transparent and comedic, whereas Pointsman, barring the toilet-bowl-foot incident chasing the dogs, retains a nefariousness for a pretty substantial portion of the novel.

So I guess the question is that if Mask&Mas are Old Tom's version of Young Tom's Ptsman&Rog, what happened between '73 and '97? Or maybe the better question is, "What happened between 1761 and 1944?" The progression seems to be from "occasionally-weird-but-essentially-harmless loony" (Maskelyne) to "weird-and-sinister-but-when-it's-all-said-and-done,-essentially-harmless loony" (Pointsman). In the end, I'm reminded of Pointsman's final scene out on the promontory, face to the wind -- much like how Maskelyne is left in M&D. [Side note: after writing this, I'm struck with the uncanny sense that my facts are wrong, but GR is hiding from me right now...]

As for more "contemporary" stuff. You brought up the notion of people becoming things, as in V., and I was thinking about that while Cherrycoke, snowed in with M. and D., the German girls, the French chef, etc., is thinking about the nature of the Eucharist. He is revisiting questions of whether "the Body and Blood of Christ are consubstantiate with, or transubstantiated from, the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist." (385) I think this dilemma is pretty well-tied-up-with that (maybe original?) Pynchon problematic of animate-becoming-inanimate. Does living flesh become "non-living" foodstuffs? (If so, which is implicit in the vocabulary of the liturgy, the Christian mass would hinge on this very transition from "alive" to "not alive" -- and back to "alive" again? although I guess that last transition isn't directly reflected in the ceremony of the mass...) Cherrycoke posits at last that "the outward Forms are given to bread and wine as an act of God's Mercy, for otherwise we should be repell'd by the sight of real human Flesh and Blood." (385-6)

This hypothesis of his seems to resonate with and expand upon the ways Pynchon has already identified that people live with the fact of violence done to other people. It is given forms that seem more humane to mask a "terrible reality" -- something of GR's old "paper death"?? The violence is still there, but in a digestible form (or at least a form we've learned to digest without much trouble). It's really interesting that (a) Cherrycoke settles on an answer that is actually heretical, and that (b) this heresy is pushed one step further to imagine that even the Body and Blood might only be digestible metaphors for an "Ultimate Carnality." Seems bleaker now than the passage had initially let on...

With that in mind (or without it: probably doesn't matter), I want to get to that long epigraph from Cherrycoke's book that begins Ch. 35 (pg 349). I think it's a fairly famous passage in the novel; most I've read about the book has at least made mention of it, no doubt because of the way it seems to be, almost too simply, a clear definition of "History" in Pynchon-terms. "History is not Chronology," but "nor is it Remembrance....[It] can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other." That's just straight-shooting: history can't be the factual record that Uncle Ives insists upon, but neither is it memory, because "[that] belongs to the People." So if History belongs to someone other than "the People," it must belong to the Historian. Later, in the argument with Ives, Cherrycoke asserts that "It may be the Historian's duty to seek the Truth, yet must he do ev'rything he can, not to tell it."

On the one hand, I think it's pretty easy to say, "This is Pynchon's artistic goal! This is how we should read Pynchon!" and I don't think that's entirely wrong either. I think in a lot of ways, he did intend this passage to be a clear explication of some previously vague distinctions between terms that Pynchon had secretly reappropriated decades ago. There is definitely an analogy between why "Aesop was oblig'd to tell Fables," and why Pynchon is "oblig'd" to write historical fiction of this variety. (350) The truth is in the fiction.

On the other hand, which is not really in contradiction to the first hand, I think there is also something here that deals with the voice Pynchon uses to narrate his novels, as opposed to his authorial imperative: the technique vs. the motivation. In that same epigraph, Cherrycoke* says that "Practitioners [of History, i.e., Pynchon] must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit." Now I won't pretend I didn't have to look up "quidnunc", but apparently, a quidnunc is a gossip. Spy is obvious. "Taproom Wit" to me, seems the most complex component; in my mind, its a sort of blend of stand-up comedy and lewd drunken humor. All of these things, when considered retrospectively, are pretty directly at play in Pynchon's prose. Gossip, espionage, and inappropriate comedy. The syntax of the second half of the epigraph was a little more difficult, but I essentially interpreted it to say that holding on to this "tangle of Lines" that together make up "History" (as opposed to a "Chain of single Links") is our best chance at avoiding the collapse into the abyss. If we held onto a chain of single links (read: "facts") the debunking of one so-called "fact" would be too traumatic and destructive to bear.

Chapter 39 ends with a cryptic look forward to the problem of slavery in the Americas, which I know is something you want me to keep an eye out for as I keep moving. For Mason, "In all Virginia, tho' Slaves pass'd before his Sight, he saw none. That was what had not occurred." (398) To be honest, I really don't feel like I have much of a clue as to how to read that second sentence. Hopefully, some illumination follows.

Realizing now also that I forgot a semi-major point about Pynchon being a "subjunctive" historian ("what may yet have happened") that I guess I'll relegate to the next post.

Till then.

"Doubt is of the essence of Christ" (511)

The "mindless pleasures" (to borrow a draft title of GR) of M&D seem always to circle around flows and uncertainties, as in the Ghastly Fop sub-plot (or sub-text), the vertigo of the Ley-borne life, the Jesuit/China paranoid explanatory system, etc.  I often think of the novel as an extended send-up or comic inversion of the projects of Science and perhaps also Reason.  But a gentle, sympathetic comedy, as opposed to GR's biting tragic anger.

It's a novel to be lost in, but perhaps less dangerously than the earlier novels.  Has old Tom mellowed in his 60s?  Does it matter that this book is dedicated to his wife (Melanie, his once & future agent also) and his son?  The po-mo radical as family man?

I'll have some things to say about the ocean in this novel before too long, also.

"Descending Into Faith"

Feeling a bit sick this week, so as for that previously-promised concluding post for Part 1, it may not have quite as thoroughly an air scholastick about it as I'd've lik'd.

Was reading some stuff on the Pynchon Wiki, saw a short commentary on the idea of Part 1 being like the widening of a lens, which I think is a pretty great image. At first, we see very narrow, action-oriented depictions of M. & D., presumably because they are still trying to "sort out the power betwixt 'em." The action itself is also difficult to see as more significant than itself, like the attack on the Seahorse, and the relegation to St. Helena, etc., whereas in GR, there was from the first page, the sense of a vast significance beneath (or behind?) the surface. Toward the end of Part 1, when M. & D. reconvene in London, they start making conspiratorial connections, wond'ring if they might just be pawns. Fitting too, that this begins back in London, as Pynchon is always skeptickal of Cities, and their effect on people: "yet are Londoners ever a-scan, ev'ry word tha speak, ev'ry twitch o' thy Phiz, for further meanings, present or not--" (250)

As for big, theme-y things, still feels too early to say for sure. There must be something in M. & D.'s final dialogue, when Mason responds to Dixon's paranoia by asking if they'd be any safer if they had been "dropped blindly, into a Forest on some little-known Continent, perhaps? -- no Perimeters." It's this lack of human-inscribed lines on the Earth that frightens Mason, although I'm anticipating that when it comes down to it, Pynchon will probably be professing the opposite: that it is exactly these unnatural lines that spell a certain death for humanity. It's borderline explicitly stated by George Emerson on pg 219 when he tells of how the Ley-Lines, geometrick "right" lines, that he flies along (by magic) are "a clear sign of Human Presence upon the Planet."

Mason talks of how he'd never do Cape Town again, knowing what he now knows, but Dixon counters with the philsophy that "That's part of the Price -- to drink from Lethe and lose all they Memories," and thus seeing the "next World" (America) as "brand new" when in fact he should be bringing along his memories of Cape Town -- it's various horrors: slavery, savage natives, etc. -- to inform the new experience. The thing Dixon says people don't have, which would allow us to make these analogies, is "a Conscience." (253) A historickal conscience, I suppose would be more specific. In the same discussion, there is even a nod back to Vineland, in that Dixon claims the churchgoers are too afraid of silence, to which Mason responds that "all [their] worries [are] usually kept at bay by that protective Murmur of Sound..." (253) Couldn't help reading that as a "Tube" reference.

"Down below, where no property Lines existed, lay a World as yet untravers'd," for those who had "master'd the Arts of Pluto." (233)

This quote is indicative of where I think things are headed right now, "Tellurick secrets," and all that, the "Hollow Earth" theory becoming a sort of Haven for the pre-US Counterforcers. Adjust my bearings if I'm off?

Matt

More Opening Remarks, I Guess -- Is Luddism a Word?

A week has passed, I’m somewhere around 150 pages into the novel, and it’s still mostly slow going for now. It kind of feels like there are hundreds of threads being identified in this opening exposition and I’m not entirely sure which to prioritize, or something like that. So I took to seeing what I could find in terms of scholarly criticism, etc. on the novel: articles, essays, you know. After reading through most of one, I’ve got a little bit better of an idea of where this book is going, but I almost feel like I’m cheating myself out of the reading experience. I don’t know. Stop being so sentimental, is probably the answer to that.

I was also reminded of that article Pynchon wrote in 84, “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” which one critic (David Cowart?) identified as a sort of precursor to M&D so I was able to find that article and I’ll read it over the weekend.

Something cool he got me keen to in the article was the notion of a black hole. I’ve already come across that first reference to “The Black Hole of Calcutta” incident (154), of which I don’t know any more at this point than the little that’s provided within the novel. But regardless, this night when supposedly 120 Englishmen were tortured and killed by their Indian captors – apparently this event is widely known as the “Black Hole”…not just by Pynchon – has the metaphorical effect of seeming to be a vacuum-y form of cultural punishment. All the rationality and supposed pragmatism of British colonialism in a much more spiritual (mystical?) land is like the collapse of a star. I’m still working on why it’s part of the “menu” at Cornelius’s preferred brothel. Gotta be something of the old death/eroticism dynamic here.

I have skimmed the Luddite article, though, and Cowart quoted it a few times, so I have a general understanding of where it goes (and of the closing epigraph – Byron identifying the Luddites with American revolutionaries…seems almost too fitting). So from what I do know, the image of the black hole looks like it might have roots in this article. Pynchon calls the medieval era that preceded the Age of Reason the “Age of Miracles,” because – according to the article – people still believed then that the miraculous and the fantastic were possible, if only because it hadn’t been reasonably disproved by science. “Giants, dragons, spells,” he says. More specifically, this magic had “degenerated into mere machinery.” There’s an early play on this in M&D in the form of the Learnéd English Dog, who should totally be seen as miraculous, but who, in his own words, is just indicative of “provisions for survival in a world less fantastic,” “the end of a process.” (22) Mason & Dixon themselves being men of science, relying quite heavily on machinery, they seem to be kind of stuck in the middle of this split, which I think comes through in Mason’s worrywart-edness, for example, the way he is trying to achieve a spiritual revelation at the Vroom house (88-ish), but demands from Dixon a precise scientific method to achieve it. Or more grandly, in his varying efforts to communicate with Rebekah.

Anyway, I’m getting moving here. Still dealing with a lot of exposition I think, especially reading some of that essay and getting a glimpse at a few of the avenues on the visto. (Hyuck, hyuck) So far in the syllabus, there’s always been something about the Night, and there’s always been something about underground (usually literally) and I’m definitely catching whiffs of those scents again here. Will probably try to follow those trails as I finish up Part 1 over the weekend.

Matt

Jumping Right In to M&D

Just checking in here. I'm like 80-85 pgs deep in M&D since beginning the book yesterday, which, in the grand scheme of things, is hardly clearing 10% of it, and not muuuuch has happened yet, so I'm going to hold off on an analytical post. I'll show up again on Friday once I've got a week of reading under my belt for the first longish post, which should be just about all of Latitudes and Departures. If it isn't, I'll probably stick up an interim post over the weekend to finish the section up.

Until then, I'm keeping my eye on instances of Lines, Ghosts, Hauntings, Shadows, Night, History....all the classic Pynchon obsessions. Any one of those to prioritize? As with Vineland, I haven't read this before, so I'm not as aware of which little threads will become most significant by the end as I could be. Has there been academic criticism on this book?

Matt

The Happy Ending?

Well after a stop-start pair of weeks with Vineland, I'm officially more than halfway thru the oeuvre. But I'll get right to it.

What I think needs reconciling is Vineland’s “death-by-Tube” with the corporate paper Death of Gravity’s Rainbow. Back in GR, somewhere late in the novel, we are told that “Death has been the source of Their power…we only die because They want us to.” (539) I take this as essentially representative of how the big They system of the War functions: They reappropriate Our deaths and sell them back to us. Granted it’s a *bit* more complex than that, but anyway, I think Old Tom prescription shows up at the end of GR during the last moments before Slothrop fades out, as “The object of life is to die a weird death.” (757) I understood “weird” to mean “personal” – unique and individual. So if the War was the technique in the ‘40s, and the Tube is the technique in the ‘80s, it stands to reason that they should have similar effects on our perceptions of death, which is what Weed Atman is thinking about around 218:

“…the soul newly in transition often doesn’t like to admit – indeed, will deny vehemently – that it’s really dead, having slipped so effortlessly into the new dispensation that it finds no difference between the weirdness of life and the weirdness of death, an enhancing factor in Takeshi’s opinion being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, he figured, why not mediated deaths?”

Again, “weirdness” comes up (although I’m not like, rilly sure how that connects to GR’s weirdness?). What’s difficult for me to parse out is how “mediated deaths” would benefit Them in the same way as the confiscated deaths of the War. If Fear of Death gave them power, what do They gain by trivializing it? Separately, the two logics make sense enough. The closest I think I can get to making them match up is to say that perhaps there is a subtle reappropriation going on here with the Tube, in that by trivializing Death via various shows, we would be so constantly overloaded with death in its pre-approved genres that we would be unable to see Our Own Death, the thing that should be absolutely singular and personal, as any different than the serialized, mediated deaths of the Tube, and thus, be unknowingly surrendering it to Them.

Mucho Maas (in his weirdo cameo) says some stuff that seems to affirm this point, save for the fact that he damns the Tube, not for stealing our deaths, but for convincing us we’ll die at all. He claims that acid gave them a “beautiful certainty” of immortality and that the Tube is a way for them to “keep us distracted” so that we can’t fight their insistence that we will in fact die. “Give us too much to process, fill up every minute…it’s what the Tube is for.” (314) But I’m willing to say that the acid-certainty of eternal life is a hippie synonym for owning your own death (even if that ownership is just the right to refuse death entirely). The acid-optimists are matched by the revolutionaries, who by choosing to be part of the revolution were also choosing how and why they would die, and of course, claiming their own deaths. Isaiah Two Four tells Zoyd at the reunion that the “Minute the Tube got hold of you, that was it.”(373) The Tube castrated the spirit of revolution, and that spirit was founded on the personal-ness of an individual’s life (read: death). I mean, it doesn’t exactly dovetail with GR, but it’s pretty close, right?

When Flash and Frenesi are flying into Vineland at the end, there’s a passage where the Frenesi-persona is reflecting on what her life-as-of-late has been, “concluding” that it may all have been another “Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy about kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run.” (354) Well one thing I failed to notice up to this point, probably because of the similar cinematic presence in GR, is that there’s a definite play on Reagan’s history in the movies, which is probably tied into the idea of mediation: in the Tube Age, we aren’t even allowed to have a real president, just an actor playing one. Like how the FBI agents that define Frenesi’s life are probably just character actors. It was a “government-defined history without consequences,” so she says. So is this the great Fast One being pulled over on Americans, that history doesn’t have consequences? In its weird, happy-ending way, it harkens back to GR, the history of the Hereros that they struggle to give a consequence, etc. The Frenesi-persona goes on to identify the herd as, “the destined losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself ‘America’ although somebody knew better.” (354) I’d have to think that the “somebody” in question can be read as the They who are orchestrating the charade, but also maybe as Pynchon himself – he’s writing this book because he knows better, and hopefully we will too afterward.

But these “destined losers” – it’s a pretty clear instance of the Preterite, which is made more interesting because for me, this was the first moment I really imagined Frenesi as one of the Preterite. And it’s this thing with “usefulness” again. If the Preterite are the Used, and the Elect are the Users, is the way out of the system to “useless”? This seems to me like almost an aesthetic philosophy, along the lines of Oscar Wilde’s famous “All art is quite useless.” Sounds kind of like Pynchon laying it on the line, there.

So after all is said and done, I definitely enjoyed Vineland, but it really does elicit a sort of “That’s it?” response when you finish it. I guess the real question would be whether or not that was the intended response all along. I’m inclined to think so, but I think this might also be something I could keep in mind to work into the paper? Should have a first post on M&D on Tuesday, although it might be a little bare since I’m starting the book Sunday/Monday.

Matt

It's like guilt against death?

So my reading over the past couple days has mostly been made up of DL-narrative, from the point when she picks up Prairie at the Wayvone wedding, and through her backstory in Japan, at the Sisterhood of the Kinoishi Attentive, up thru the run-in with "Weed Atman" -- a joke so gag-inducing it almost slips through the cracks (apparently "Atman" is the Hindu name for the 'breath of life'? Is it really just a joke about pot-breath? ...probably).

I guess the most obvious "thing" to delve into would be the Thanatoids. At the roadside BBQ "YOUR MAMA EATS," Takeshi and DL run into the self-proclaimed Thanatoid, Ortho Bob Dulang, who explains that the name is shorthand for "Thanatoid personality" -- apparently a personality that is "like death, only different." (170) I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that we're getting some kind of absurb mid-80's variation on the Herero, an entire culture of people (this time without the racial element) that is obsessed with death, to the point of pursuing it actively (but never in the form of just loading up the old shotgun...) From what I saw, there were like 2 main things that set characterize the Thanatoids specifically: (1) that they spend "every waking hour with an eye on the Tube," and that (2) they're death-drive is characterized by a "need for revenge." (173)

So as much as it does seem that the Thanatoids invite this link to the Herero, they definitely lack the elegance and the tragedy that Enzian's crew always seemed to exude in GR. DL calls them "ghosts," and there's the whole thing with their village of Shade Creek (shade --> spirit?) being this sort of lost zone, "a psychic jumping-off town," and the way Takeshi claims that the Thanatoids are "victims of karmic imbalances." (173) But then I was thinking about what we talked about briefly in the Writing Center today, about novels that looks back, and novels that look forward, and I thought this might actually illuminate something about the Thanatoids vs. the Hereros. The Zone-Hereros anticipate their own death, and see it as the great return -- the final, singular event that rationalizes their state. But these Thanatoid "ghosts" and their focus on revenge definitely have the air of looking-back to them. "They were victims" Takeshi explains, as if the death they try to avenge has already happened (like Takeshi's 'technical' own via the Vibrating Palm).

As for the Tube obsession, I'm a little less certain. I guess there isn't necessarily textual evidence I can cite for this, but I've been thinking about the Tube recently as this even more Foucauvian model of the cinematic. In GR, P. used the cinematic (in confluence with the whole delta-t charting of rocket flight) and its existence as 'a sequence of still frames to simulate movement' as at least in some part a metaphor for an invisible corporate segmenting of life into eventual stillness (i.e., death). Perhaps the Tube is an updated version of this, especially the way it's all broken up into regimented half-hour blocks. I say Foucauvian because of that idea in Discipline and Punish about regimentation as a technique for docility, and ultimately control. Seems likely that Pynchon would buy into that theory on a corporate scale?

-----

The only other thing I really wanted to touch on here is that back when DL is just beginning her tale for Prairie, she comments that it's complicated by "everyone remembering a different story--" (101) I think this is something that I could definitely investigate further as a possible angle for a paper, in that it reminded of the very very cursory reading of Bakhtin and dialogism I had started a year or so ago. This idea of truth being present when all voices are present at once, not that they make up different "parts" of the truth coming together (or at least this is how I remember it). As long as I remember it correctly, it seems like an idea that's really at play in all of Pynchon's stuff, but especially here in Vineland, in the frame of the fragmented memories of stoners and revolutionaries.

Anyway, by Friday I'll be at least close to the end here. I might hold off posting until I actually do finish it tho, and then initiate "Spring Break" after that (like I had mentioned earlier today).

Until then, I want Zoyd back

Matt