observations of breathtaking originality and genius

First of all, a tying-up of my last couple posts, where I blathered on and on about heroes and that business. It’s interesting: when Slothrop avoids Them at Der Springer’s party, and They castrate Marvy thinking he’s Slothrop, our loveable Tyrone now has no one hunting after him. He’s not being chased anymore. So what does he do? He gives up, settles down, lives… somewhere nice. Don’t remember where. He doesn’t continue his quest, because he doesn’t feel he’s getting anywhere. He doesn’t try to return “home” (though you could argue that a “natural state” is technically home), he just stops where he is, with no more bad guys to fight. Not to mention his failure to protect Bianca, which I’m sure deadened his Rocketman/Plechazunga image. So that seems to be the end of that.

All of which supports the fact that I was so right. Me = right.

The other thing that peaked my interest is the way in which a work of excess, or an encyclopedic novel, or a monsterwork, or whatever kitchy label we want to slap on to this big book… these things work very well in the satiric genre, which is also what GR is. A satire’s purpose is to mock persons or institutions. A work of excess’s purpose is to be about everything. So wouldn’t an effective satire be one that mocks everything? That’s why these two literary concepts play so nicely together in the graveled swingset area that is GR. In my mind, this is what a satire should be, and while I’ve never wanted to write an obscure 760 novel with 2,654,456,345,385,463 separate characters, I do try in my own snotty little work to satrize as much as possible. It’s an effective method.

Count this.

A perfect world | The San Diego Union-Tribune

A perfect world | The San Diego Union-Tribune

Terminal Tours

Terminal Tours

Pynchon line for the day

Ok, so you guys won't come across this for a few days, but I cracked up...

"We're sold out of everything tonight but ham," then seeing Slothrop, "oh, dear, I'm sorry..."

Images from Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Images from Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_

Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_

Political map of Germany - World Sites Atlas

Political map of Germany - World Sites Atlas

WHKMLA : History of Western Germany, 1945-1949

WHKMLA : History of Western Germany, 1945-1949

Political Map of Germany,

Political Map of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein - Atlapedia Online

In Need of Clarification

I have no reply for Jo, though I hardly believe that Pynchon’s one fleeting act of portraying Plastic Man’s affection excuses him from his perversion. However, I would like to comment briefly on John’s post. I find that, I to, do not completely understand the reference to the concentration camp (in fact, I failed to pick up on this until John had mentioned it in his previous post; though I am confident that Ginger will provide her ever fulfilling insight on the matter). “It is apparent that Weissman wants Polker around for the special project concerning rocket 00000.” Perhaps someone could also explain to me why this is apparent or how this conclusion could have been drawn (I’m sure this is my ignorance). With regards to Scott’s post, I had expected that he would have defended or perhaps explained “the disgusting” in GR. Perhaps he was hoping for one of us to offer an explanation. If this is the case… don’t look to me. I would offer that Nabokov’s use of “the disgusting” was appropriate in Lolita, if not integral, to his work while Pynchon integrates it because of its humor appreciated by the select few and because, to put it simply, its compelling and he can. Though I would not have denied Pynchon his Pulitzer, I don’t find the retraction surprising. To be honest however, I find that "the disgusting" is what I enjoy the most (or certainly is the most memorable).

Matt

On the disgusting

Jo brings up a good point and its worth considering in light of the two books we've read and the third to come.

Why would I expect you to read such works in a nice Lutheran college like Dana?

We discussed the notion a bit with Lolita, but Lolita was also rather less graphic when compared to GR. In fact, there was a very clear moral position with Lolita, in that HH was a bad, bad man. The disturbing elements seemed to come from the rather lush and voyeuristic manner in which Nabokov positioned us as readers. It was hard not to feel complicit through HH's verbal manipulations.

Now we get Pynchon, and the graphic depicition of perversion is much more extreme than Lolita. Worse, that moral grounding seems more difficult to find. At this point, some of you may be much more sympathetic to that Pulitzer committee that refused to give Pynchon the prize.

A professor once told me, we live life to please us, we read literature to disgust us.

The Truth Problem, Is Karl Rove a French Deconstructionist?, by Sandeep Kaushik (10/14/04)

Pop culture is awash with Derridian references. While this doesn't get at the sophistication that you should have as readers of deconstruction, it is a good example of the vulgar deconstruction that permeates popular understanding: The Truth Problem, Is Karl Rove a French Deconstructionist?, by Sandeep Kaushik (10/14/04)

On deconstruction

With the death of Derrida, a number of the listservs that I read have been commenting on the viability and relevance of his work. His a short pithy post from Tom Lynch, a professor at UNL.

"It's commonly done, but I don't think it is accurate or helpful, to conflate deconstruction with other allegedly "post" modern fields, such as, say, the new western history. Deconstruction says that every narrative has within it contradictions and exclusions that undermine it. Therefore it seems useful in challenging old narratives, and people often use
deconstruction to do things like "deconstruct" the frontier history narrative, without then realizing that any replacement they have in mind is likewise deconstructable because it is in the very nature of language and story (according to the theory) to be incapable of expressing reality. The old narrative, then, is not "deconstructed" because it is false, but because it is a narrative. Deconstruction cannot really be used to further any alternative story, it can only be used to knock all stories down as more or less equally contradictory and false.

I don't think this is true, and I don't think it's intellectually or ethically helpful. I think, for example, that the new western history is a more accurate rendering of the facts of what happened in the lives of real people in real places, not just an alternative but equally deconstructable construction. Just as the notion that the earth orbits the sun, and not
vice versa, is a more accurate rendering of the facts, and not just another equally (in)valid astronomical construction.

Not to speak ill of the newly deceased, but I think Derrida led a lot of folks down a cul de sac.

But what do I know. --Tom

Michael Bérubé Online

For those of you still wondering about deconstruction, check out this blog entryMichael Bérubé Online.

Michael Berube teaches at Penn State. I met him and had a few meals with him when he came to speak at Cincinnati. A very intelligent and prolific critic.

Plastic Man versus Odysseus

Count this.

So here I’m beginning to see a conflict in views. We’re talking about Slothrop as potentially an epic hero. And yet when Slothrop thinks of himself, it is as Rocketman, he of the opera cape and helmet. This is creating a lot of problems for Slothrop.

If this story were set in Hellenic Greece, Slothrop would react perfectly to the circumstances (circumstances being that he has been launched on a quest, alone, against a host of forces which take on a supernatural aspect due to their great power and secrecy). However, this is a story set in modern Europe, with a modern American in the lead. As a result, his perceptions of the hero figure are different. He’s Plastic Man, or Cary Grant as he says himself. He knows there are bad guys, and there are good guys, and he is one of the good guys. So all he has to do is beat up on the bad guys, and everything will be fine. Things will work out, because he’s the hero and that’s what happens.

But that isn’t what’s happening. In an epic story, the hero has no natural enemies; everyone is an enemy. He has to make careful alliances, and then work to maintain them because they may fall apart. Even among gods, there are some who hate him and some who love him. Most importantly, the epic hero goes through tons of, to use a literary term, really bad shit. Odysseus had all of his sailors turned into pigs. Aeneas, at the very beginning of his story, was running away from his home city, which was in the process of burning to the ground. On the other hand, Superman never has to deal with a chipped tooth. The film and comic book hero of this time period is nearly indestructible (it’s only in the mid 60s that we begin to see superheroes take a beating).

So Slothrop is playing a superhero in an epic hero’s role. It’s possible that Pynchon is saying something about America in general, and the “cowboys and indians” mentality with which we approach both foregn policy and internal conflicts. At the very least, he is making fun of Slothrop’s simplistic, stripped-down view of problem-solving, which amounts to putting on a cape and punching something.

Sex and Plastic Man

Count this.
If you'll look at the time on this post, you'll notice I was dedicated and stayed up really late to catch up on all my reading, like a perfect student! Whether you believe that or not is up to you.

I wanted to remark on a few things, and pose some questions for general consideration. First thing is, the title of the novel. I think that on a literal level, the reference of “gravity’s rainbow” is clear. It refers to the path or smoke trail of a rocket in the sky. It goes up, then gravity pulls it down, forming a smoggy rainbow in the sky. But what about this book can we take at face value? So on a deeper level, it also refers to the paths of people. Katje is said to follow a parabola in her life, but I suppose Slothrop does as well. Where we’ve left him, at page 269, he’s climbing the parabola. Soon he’ll get to the top, and then eventually he’ll fall (if he’s not even in the last part of the book, he must fall fairly hard). This might be a part of the post-modern worldview, that everything is eventually going to turn to shit and fall apart, opposed to the Enlightenment Project and the Hegelian Dialectic. Maybe the entire planet follows gravity’s rainbow.

Now, I promised you some talk about sex. What I’m curious about is, why is the novel so overtly sexual? You could say that most modern (small m) work is very sexual, since sex has lost a lot of its taboo nature in our society, but a show like Sex and the City is much more concerned with portraying realism than GR is. It’s entirely possible that Pynchon is throwing in so much sex purely because sex is a part of life. I think personally that he’s playing off the mythos of the American Hero, the John Wayne or the Indiana Jones, or even James Bond (though technically British, he’s become an American fantasy). Scoring chicks is all part of that rougish Western Male image. This only explains why Slothrop gets so much slap-and-giggle, though. What other reasons could there be (besides a raw desire to offend on Pynchon’s part) for all the graphic sex?

Lastly, Plastic Man. On page 206, Slothrop is reading a Plastic Man comic book. The superhero phenomenon, particularly in the WWII era, makes perfect sense when linked to Slothrop’s status as The American. “Good guys vs. bad guys” and “might makes right” are very much tied into the American consciousness (just listen to W. talk about the war sometime). But if Pynchon just wanted a superhero, he could have used Superman. Plastic Man is a weird choice because… well, he’s weird. No, seriously, he’s weird. Plastic Man is fucking weird. I point this out to show how much control Pynchon has over every detail in this novel; even the smallest props are appropriately bizarre.

Oh, and when I read That Scene, I had a short bout of dry heaves. Actually, I think I might have thrown up in my mouth a little. Thanks, Scott!

For Tuesday

I'm working on getting more information to you guys prior to your scheduled reading. So for Tuesday, one of the sections I want to focus on is pp166-67 where Pynchon introduces IG Farben and coal tar. A close reading will give you most of what you need, but it's an important passage because the refinement of coal tar--a waste product--into the various dyes and chemicals becomes crucial as GR progresses. Of note here, is the metaphoric spin that Pynchon puts on the preterite substance.