Additional Discussion, pp 189-219
Here is the place to speak of any cross references, any sparkings and slippings betwixt books that you have found, or believe you have found. My own thoughts and questions appear as the first comment, below.
posted by Robert Z. @ 9:45 PM
24 Comments:
A number of compelling crossovers have come to light in these pages. I want to point a few of them out to elicit replies from anyone who may have something to say on these matters. And of course, if there's anything else you may be thinking about...
First, we have the Marshall of Jeshimon wearing an inverted pentagram, which we've already encountered in Mason & Dixon. And along with Carnal's description of "their god" being winged, we've got ourselves a curiously strong collection of satanic images. This seems significant, given the broad theme throughout M&D of the Line carving through the dragon, the spirit of the place, throwing nature out of balance, and so forth. Thoughts?
Second, there are two ties to Vineland, one weak and and strong. The weak one is Sloat's propensity for referring to Deuce as "li'l buddy," right out of Gilligan's Island, bringing to mind Hector Zuñiga, the TV addict.
The strong tie is that of Jesse Traverse. In Vineland, we learn that Prairie Wheeler's mother's mother's father is named "Jess" Traverse. We meet him at the family reunion on page 369. The provenance works out, if a bit tight: If Jesse was born in 1902, his daughter Sasha could have been born anytime in the early 1920s and be old enough to have herself a daughter, Frenesi, in the 1940s. And Prairie was born sometime between 1967 and 1970.
Lastly, I've been thinking about that letter to his editor in 1964, where he said he was working on three books at once [1]. It is increasingly clear to me that the three books are Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. Furthermore, it seems to me that Vineland is something of a pullout from ATD -- that Vineland as a whole may have come from a long digressive narrative originally meant for ATD, but cut loose because its action takes place so far outside ATD's fairly tight chronology of 1893 to 1914.
My appeal to the High Chump Council, therefore, is for anyone who knows Vineland well to step forward and discuss for us any themes they may sense ATD shares with that much-maligned tome.
So: what say you all?
---
[1] Hmm, according to this article, Pynchon apparently spoke of being in the middle of four novels, one of which, I suppose, may very well be Vineland; after all, aside from Lot 49, he has only published four novels since that letter was written, since he's always spoken of Lot 49 as a short story "with gland trouble" rather than a true novel...
Hey Decency--
I have some similar suspicions re: TP's four simultaneous novels, though they remain, for the time, only that, strong suspicions. So far, I've been especially curious about Miles's speech to the "bloviators," i.e. long winded commentators or pundits, i.e. us on p. 112, though I already ranted about that back when it was topical. Frankly, I haven't read M&D since it came out when I was in high school, and my last run through Vineland was several years before that, but I've got GR fresh, and that book and this one seem clearly to be part of the same grand symbolic order or cosmology. I'm especially intrigued by how both of TP's most recent novels begin with invocations of the GR, both "now" and the "snowballs."
Also, Tom very clearly situates each novel historically w/r/t the War, though the specific war varies. We seem to have gotten in GR the War and its immediate aftermath, in M&D a fully peacetime narrative, and in AtD a narrative of the onset of the War.
I also find it intriguing that each novel seems to focus on a different set of generic or medial conventions which associate each with a different chunk of the ages of man, i.e., GR culls its conventions from the "adult" popular fiction of war and spy novels, AtD from "adolescent" or "youth" fiction and its adventure stories, and M&D spans the generational divide through oral history (remember, that one's for Jackson).
Only thing is, it seems unclear where a fourth novel might fit. And while I admittedly don't remember it well, I kind of hope that Vineland doesn't get equal billing in the grand scheme of things, though this may well be unfair.
I'm having some trouble, and perhaps here's why.
I see each of the novels as being very much tied to the particular time in which it was written.
V.: What's all this V. we've heard about. And of course, the V for victory becomes the peace sign.
The Crying of Lot 49: Sexual rebellion, musical innovation, counter culture, and underground movements.
Gravity's Rainbow is clearly about using romantic notions of WWII as a good war in order to get people to go pro-Nuke, pro-Vietnam.
Vineland: The days of the hippies are over and they've ended badly. No one is more aware of this than the punk movement, which Pynchon seems to want to embrace (kind of) in order to show his disillusionment with the peace and love generation. Vineland is infinite pop digression and how this force is at play even when people think they're being righteous. It's the 80's and hippy meets yuppie.
Mason Dixon: Haven't read it.
ATD: I don't know, I'm not done. But it seems very linked into American imperialism. I don't think we're dealing with what happens after the hippies anymore. I think Pynchon's realized that our cultures now evolving out of whatever evolved out of that. Time to move, and he has.
But unless he had a crystal ball, I just can't see him having the idea for ATD before the 90's and I really don't think he could have managed this level of imperial outlook until 9/11. Yeah, we were a super power, but we weren't quite flipping off the rest of the world quite yet.
That's my two cents.
Monstro: a Boomer myself, I've become allergic to what seems to me too easy a slotting of Pynchon into that Sixties thang: e.g., how many lame reviews of AtD (and of course Vineland) boiled down to either "he still embraces the anarchic hopes of the 1960s (hurrah)" or "he recycles the tired cliches of the 1960s (boo)."
So don't take it personally if I say that GR was about a great deal more than "using romantic notions of WWII as a good war in order to get people to go pro-Nuke, pro-Vietnam." It would have been serious overkill to drag in Tannhauser and Parsifal, calculus and chemistry, witchcraft and German SW Afrika just for that.
I think that far from "moving on" only with AtD, he has always been after much bigger game than any one decade's "We are the Cusp of History" preoccupations -- and that includes the 9/ll-and-after connections that inevitably catch our eye.
Hey Monte--
No offense taken at all. I think I may have oversimplified for the sake of space. I'll try this again. I think that a major idea running through Pynchon's books is how much of the world we inherit from the movement or generation before this, and how much of what we inherit is real versus how much we inherit is simply romantic notions. Part of that is, yes, using Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies to sell Vietnam in the same way that Fritz Lang heralds Nazism, but I agree 100% that there's much much much more to that novel.
To add to what you've said, we are never on the cusp of history, but we always think we are. I think that's something that's being said in these books. The Peter Penguid people think that WASTE is there's and there's alone, but there are other groups out there, equally insolar and equally connected (other factions in the zone, if you will).
In GR, I think the main metaphor for the novel is film, but that isn't the end of what's being said. It's just a point of reality: everything seems strange, but anything can happen in a movie. But a film is set in celluloid (it has happenned before but there is nothing to compare it to now)--thus in the grand scheme of things for that novel, even if you say nothing else, it has to be about more than film because the actors become self aware. That doesn't happen in movies, just as salvation doesn't happen in predestination (it always was or it never will be).
Believe me, I'm not attempting to limit Pynchon to the peace and love movement of the 60s or attempting to nail down his philosophy into a historical period. I think the man's philosophy is remarkable and, in my opinion, timeless.
Warning, the below gets into some gradstudentism. Marx is alluded to. I'm sorry. If you're offended by this sort of bullshit (and you have every right and reason to be), please feel free to pass by in dismayed silence.
I think the argument boils down to the relation of structure and contingency in history, and I think that Pynchon has a pretty well developed thesis on the relation between the two. To wit, in GR we've got the narrative of WWII which serves as the most obvious narrative frame, but, in the end, we also get some very strong indications that the novel can be read as a parallel for the disintegration (or would reintegration be better?) of the lysergic rainbow of the 60s revolutions. The counterforce concretizes and the illustrious Richard M.'s in charge of our dream theater. The parallel readings suggest a cyclic temporal structure, one that is reinforced (if eternally deferred), by the very ending's return to the filmic imagery of the opening sequence.
Each cycle has the same broad structure (one that is also evident in the occasional mentions of the Real War of material), i.e. disintegration of a power structure followed by a reformation that suits the needs of capital. Pynchon seems extremely interested in the contingent processes that bring about the larger cyclic structure; his interest in history, his maximalist's obsession with listing and detailed description, and his sprawling, interwoven plots are the aesthetic manifestations of such an interest in contingency. Nevertheless, they are almost always in support of the larger nigh-inevitable structures of historical materialism.
That said, much of what makes GR a truly great novel is Pynchon's apocalyptic concern that, with the advent of nuclear technology, material had finally achieved a level of technological sophistication that could break the cycle and lead us into a holocaustal nuclear nirvana.
I think AtD shares GR's simultaneous interest in structure and contingency, but I think Pynchon reconceived his understanding of the relation between the two. GR follows a broadly dialectical understanding of the processes in which force and counterforce were the primary contenders in the War (though, in an inversion of Marx, the revolution seems doomed to fail). This binarism is probably in some ways a function of GR apocalyptic concerns. In AtD, by contrast, there seems to be less emphasis on the binarisms, or at the very least more sympathy with the forces that would, in the earlier novel, have been parsed as out and out evil (i.e. Blicero). Pynchon seems to have developed some more sympathy not for the devil but for the heavenly, is able to see it as reflecting a more multivalent moral landscape. St. Cosmo, e.g., would have been obliged to be a bad guy if he were to appear in GR, though I do fear that by novel's end he may prove to be little more than a dream.
Oooooo... someone's been taking their Smart pills!
Thx for the exercise, AA. I almost get what you're driving at. And as far as a theory of history goes, it's a peach. But, I can't recall any nuclear danger expressed in GR, unless the V2 is metaphor for the bomb. Behavioralism seems the scientific bete-noir of the novel, and the paranoic implications when it's combined with the power of multi-national capital and weapons systems. Slothrop, like Byron the Bulb, is the wild-card actor able to, maybe, upset whole systems by virtue of his essential placement in - or, better, as the fruit of - the calculated machinery of power.
I gotta say too, GR's ending bugs the shit out of me, mainly because of how we are made to lose sight of Slothrop (who, after Dixon, is my fave Pynchon character) as well as the Hereros, and the whole ruined landscape of Europe. To, so to speak, toss it all in the air and have it land in 60s So. Cal. is (though I give it points for strangeness), to me, a certain failure of the narrative.
Now, the form of the novel has certainly been under stress in the last, oh, 80 years. But if anything dates GR, it is, for me, that ending, which feels more like a faddish style flourish, a lit. leisure suit, than a sincere rendering of action; a mistake, our worthy author did not make in M&D.
I tend to agree with "we are never on the cusp of history, but we always think we are." That said, Pynchon has alternated between
moments that historians would consider cusps:
GR, 1945: 52 pickup time in the Zone, with all the old orders shattered for the moment
M&D, 1760s, futures still up for grabs among Anglo colonists and German religious and French and Native Americans and were-beaver and marijuana trees
AtD, 1893-192?, WWI barreling down the track unless someone can throw the switchpoints...
and (2) moments when the established order seems more secure, and the marginalized go looking for their private cusps:
Benny and Stencil in V, Oedipa, Zoyd and Frenesi.
This isn't a dichotomy so much as wide-angle and close-up shots. Stencil keeps wondering what illness infected history back in the AtD period, Frenesi's lefty mom Sasha is a Traverse. And in all of them, whether the canvas is epic or intimate, there's a fierce morality behind the mindless pleasures. Whatever cusps there may be are not "historical forces" cusps but a sum of individual choices:
“All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible —- but it puts you in with the neutered, brother..." (GR 521)
..erm, for " 'historical forces' cusps" above, read "historical forces at work"
"52 pickup time in the Zone"
Fantastic line, for any number of reasons.
Will, reading GR I've always been under the impression that if it had any unmoved mover at its decentered soul that it was the ICBM. Check out the passages on the Radiant Hour.
As for the ending, I'd say that while the ending may date the novel, that the frustration you feel is completely appropriate and probably intended. Just look at Pig Bodine's mournful lamentations when he realizes that he's the only one that can still sense disintegrated Slothrop zipping about in the Other Side.
That said, I think it is, in a way, a shortcoming of the novel when characters are made to submit to some preplanned conceptual scheme prior to their being written, though I'd say that Tom's characters do it all the time. What's more, in response to whoever said that they felt P.'s novels grew organically rather than in sympathy with some broad conceptual or symbolic scheme, I'd personally tend to disagree, or at the very least suggest that Tom, in the Slow Learner intro seems dismayed at his own occasional inability to put characters before thematics in the writing process. his comment is in regard to Lot 49, but I'd say that certainly Slothrop's disintegration, while it is tied to his character, has a lot more to do with the novel's thematics.
So, too, e.g. Lew's unremembered original sin, though in this case, Tom has the good sense to set up the thematic as a framework and then to allow Lew to move more or less at will within the stricture of that frame.
Finally, a thought on the notion that every-generation-falsely-feels-that they-are-on-the-cusp-of-history discussion. I'd say that every generation rightly feels themselves to be on the cusp of history, especially these (and future) days as the acceleration of the acceleration of technological development (not a typo, a 2nd derivative) itself accelerates. Problem is, each generation has difficulty recognizing the pan-historical presence of cusps.
Disintegration a theme, so characters disintegrate with the plot. I get it, just don't like it. True hilarity would have ensued if Tom had somehow convinced Viking to add more, uhm, acid to the final 30 pages of the first edition so as to make them crumble away in the readers' oily hands.
Lot 49, I think we all agree with the author, is his least successful book.
And there will come a point in the parabola when the acceleration deaccelerates. Then, honey, watch out.
...if [GR] had any unmoved mover at its decentered soul that it was the ICBM.
Yes, the combination of the Rocket and the Bomb -- which peeks coyly in as a fragment of newspaper, as the irony in Ensign Morituri's longing for home, and as a realization of the Kirghiz Light. (The USSR would do its nuclear testing one 'stan over among the Kazakhs.)
That's the parabola leading to a point just over the movie theater, and the question left hanging is: just how "ballistic" -- shaped by unalterable law -- was/is it?
So much has been said about the oblique, coded role in GR of the Nazis' holocaust; so little, by comparison, about the other one being painstakingly prepared from 1945 on. We've backed off the hair-trigger a bit since 1973, but the fade-to-white final frame is still out there, foax.
[spoiler, if it matters]
I mean, wow -- does Tesla have a device that can create a huge fireball on the far side of the globe? Wonder what would it be like to live in a world like that?
One more note: to the best of my knowledge, the only extant sample of P's technical writing for Boeing (at the height of the ICBM race) is an in-house newsletter article on the safe operation of a missile transporter/erector.
(Nossir, we wouldn't want any toes or fingers crushed. Now... what wacky, far-out black comedy can I put in my novels?)
There was at least one interesting technical study of in-house Boeing literature that ID'd a number of different anonymous pieces as being likely by Pynchon. As a mild correction, the piece you referred to was not, technically, technical writing, but appeared in a company magazine and so was intended for a larger audience. As I recall, the other writing generally was highly technical -- much less accessible to a lay audience. Unfortunately, I can't seem to remember who wrote the study, but lemme rummage through my notes, and if I find something I'll post it in either this or next week's additional discussion pages.
Also, Will, I probably think that Lot 49 I happen to love Lot 49 quite dearly and think, insofar as it appeals to much, much larger readership than any of his other works, give or take "Entropy," while at the same time being a sophisticated, aesthetically innovative novel-on-steroids, it is, in a very real sense, his finest.
As much as I love the meganovels, you gotta be kind of a douche bag as an author to to expect your readers to put in so much effort. What's more, as a reader, you gotta be kind of a douche bag to submit to an author who expects so much out of you. Present company, and especially myself, fully included. There's something disturbingly decadent about this aesthetic. It's like Liz Davis's Cleopatra but for lit majors.
Finally, in response to a comment you made over in the discussion proper, but whose rebuttal is more appropriate if delivered here: at least in GR, the Pynch novel I know best, there is some very strong evidence that Tom did do a lot of the plotting ahead of time. The novel's stories correspond to too many different ordering schemes -- dates in the liturgical calendar, tarot cards, historical info, etc. -- not to have been laid out, at least in large part, ahead of time. And as for whether a work of literature can succeed under such strictures, well, there Ulysses and there's Il Commedia for starters . . . . I'm sure, if pressed, more could be named. But certainly, it ain't easy.
novel-on-steroids = short-story-on-steroids
Alas, can't find this at Youtube, but, hey. . .
Who are you calling a douchebag??!
And it's Liz Taylor, you Lot 49-loving maniac.
Lot 49 is my favorite Pynchon, too, partly because there are so few great novels that really evoke California well, and he managed to do it brilliantly. Ditto for his other maligned California novel, "Vineland."
And be careful about invoking Liz Davis/Taylor. She's already moved into goddess territory, and "you will kneel, for I am the Queen of Egypt."
I realize that this may not be a comment that gets read, but for what it's worth: I like The Crying of Lot 49 more than Gravity's Rainbow. Not for the experience. Gravity's Rainbow is clearly more intricate, more complex, more rich. And not for philisophical issues. The nature of causality is complicated in The Crying of Lot 49, but it dies explosively in GR. The problem is that I can never find two people who've read the novel and who can agree on what happens in the last three hundred pages or so. That's the damn resolution; ACT V, if you will. How in the world is this group supposed to figure out what the novel is about when at least a third of it is up for grabs.
And thus, I find that conversations run to the extremes of academic esoterics or the mundane banalities ("it's funny"), but ask any one why So Cal, why Zhlubb, and they will each have a different answer and they will all be sure that theirs is the one that Pynchon intended.
It would seem that the reader dissentegrates just like Slothrop.
some spoilerish stuff in this post for those who aren't too far into the book and want to avoid that.
.responding to dj
the inverted star as I recall is on the guns of the "Paxton" boys who were historical assholes who murdered peaceful Indians in some towns west of Philadelphia. Both seem to refer to "vigilantes /death squads/paramilitaries/mercenaries" or self commisioned militias whose ilk clear the way for empire, and soon become the Jacksonian vanguard, and then the breakers of every Indian treaty ever made. The star which is supposed to represent an end of raw darwinian violence but in the hands of the Paxtons...Kit Carson....the rough riders... Henry Kissinger... Ollie North .. Don Rumsfeld etc. is terrorism of imperial expansion.
All of these guys remind me Of Brock Vond of Vineland who is the Ollie North style reaganaut setting up a secret detention facility in California, and trying to reclaim his biological daughter Prairie Wheeler from the counterculture father who, along with his ex-wife's extended family(The Taverse Clan) has raised her from a baby. Might be worth looking for an inverted star in association with Vond, but.. I've misplaced my copy of Vineland.
There are also the references to Godzilla which are reminiscnt of the northern snakeman in ATD.
I didn't read Pynchon until 2001 or so but I used to live in Arcata CA and the first TP book I read was Vineland given to me by a good friend. It was one of the literary finds of my lifetime. I grew up in CA and was part of the 60s anti war movement so for me it was hilariously weird, dense and close to home. I then read V. found the plist and argued that Vinelandepressed the writer's movement towards a lighter humor and greater sympathy and hopefulness for America and the human condition. Most thought I was a naive reader and went too far, but having since read CoL49, GR, M&D and ATD I think my naive instincts have some reinforcement . Plenty of room for debate on that one but that 's my take until persuaded otherwise.
Alright take it for what its worth but here is some really personal and subjective stuff. Does art really make any difference? Well since I started reading P's work I became a quaker, started writing letters to the editor against the war and on other topics, was given an occasional column,expanded my circle of friends, started putting petitions before my town meeting, said a prayer for peace in front of a roomful of republicans and the Rebublican governor of Vermont, started eating organic food, expanding my garden, driving less and feeling more like a citizen and less lke a consumer. Pynchon is one part of the many influences on my life and one of the most cynical, but I see in that "cynicism" a deep sympathy for the resistors of the colonial mentality and when you get down to it Vineland changed my life. I decided to rejoin the resistors and I feel a lot better these days. I laugh more than I cry, for one thing.
I kinda wonder now what's gonna happen with Prairie and the young Russian sailor who now brings to mind Yashmeen and her roots on an oriental Russian prairie. This novel starts above the prairie and in the end seems to be headed for Shambalah evenif it isn't.
I also think He worked out a lot of plot details of the last 4 novels in advance but the characters have become more sympathetic and less fixed. they grow more. they change more inwardly.
I really like what monte is saying about Pynchon's consistently fierce moral intensity.
I, too, feel that Lot 49 is unfairly maligned. I first read Lot 49 in college at good ol' University of Iowa as a class assignment for a low-level lit class. I generally read it whenever I feel the need for a Pynchon fix but don't have the time or energy to devote to one of his massive tomes.
I've only read GR once, and it was after I read 49 for the second time. As Monstro said, I don't really know at all what happened during the last part of the book. Yes, it is definitely time for a careful re-read. After AtD is finished, of course--I don't think it's possible to read more than one Pynchon book at a time without short circuiting.
Simply drop by to tell you chumps how much i love this blog and your contributions which make reading Pynchon a delightful trek.
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