on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

 or - Hysteresis sez the man with the plan....

 I just finished re-reading Vineland. That is the final panel, one might say, in Thomas Pynchon’s go at the Cold War world – the set consisting of  V, Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland.

Pynchon was the center of James Wood’s punchup of “hysterical realism” in the 00s, stirring up a bit of sluggish controversy in that ice . Looking back at that verbiage, what stands out, to me, was the astonishing absence of the politics  that should surely figure in the mix. Wood was writing for the New Republic in its final, Marty Peretz driven phase of shredded liberalism. The politics of its book review pages had long been clear. You would not find a word of praise for anything “communistic”, anything that leaned towards Palestine, and in general anything that was happening on the “loony left”. The politics of the writers on Wood’s black list, Pynchon, Delillo, and their supposed acolytes, like Zadie Smith, was very much in contrast with the politics of the one American writer Wood championed: Saul Bellow. This isn’t to make a judgment about the variety of political stances, it is simply to note an old Cold War theme, in which a certain formalism substitutes for politics, in keeping with the odd idea that politics is somehow suspect in art – turning it into propaganda.

The problem Pynchon poses for that old theme is that he does not seem to write, as per the Old Left,  anything resembling socialist realism. Like Saul Bellow, in fact, Pynchon seems very unintimidated by the formalist notion that the essay and fiction are to be separated under pain of aesthetic failure. In a passage from an excellent essay on Vineland by Peter Coviello,The Novel and the Secret Police,  Coviello nails the politics of the book, an outlier for the end of history 90s:

“From where we sit, though, it may be better even than this. The matter is not just that Vineland is a sweetly companionable sort of book, heartsick and humane. I mean rather that it is hard, here in the somehow-not-yet-done-with-us summer of 2020, to avoid feeling that it is also unnervingly prescient, and that it is so not least in how it stitches into coherence scenes of street-fighting militancy, brutal state reaction, and the ramping up of a rabidly privatizing economic order we have since taken to calling, a little gauzily, “neoliberalism.” There are stark and distressing clarities on offer even in slapstick, messy Vineland—about economy and security, about the bringing of militarized counterinsurgency back to the metropole, and above all about what the novel unblinkingly calls “the true nature of the police.” And these, with each new day, seem a little more vivid, a little more goddamn realist, and a little less the stuff of stoned counterfactual invention.”

Realism – how many sins have been committed in your name! I sorta want to patter. From the cracked mirror of a servant girl, to use Stephen Daedalus’s phrase, there are certain legatees who have inherited the crack. From that cracked perspective, the world that ordinarily appears as it is defined by the class who creates public opinion appears differently. It is shrouded in apocalypse and slapstick. It is, indeed, the world of hysteros, the womb, but as well it is the world of hysteresis, out of joint with the contemporary, the synchronic world in which we are all on the same page – good guys over here, bad guys over there, and thus it shall ever be.  Pynchon’s tendency to find the bad guys running the American imperium is just the kind of idea that the New Republic, in its glory days,  took on the task of squashing.

Coviello speaks of the book as “unloved”. The first time I read it, which happened in some never-never – in New Haven? In Atlanta? I don’t know – I do recall feeling that this is not the rush I expected after Gravity’s Rainbow. The latter dogs all of Pynchon’s afternovels – there are moments – there are even hundreds of pages in novels like Against the Day, where that magic touch and text comes alive once again, but these novels are distinctly different. Re-reading Vineland, I can see that difference now as a virtue – the intentional immersion in TV trivia, much different than immersion in the polytides of chemistry because we are all experts here, is a deliberate blow against the cult of expertise, against the insider knowing, that can lead a Pynchon reader into a certain fatal fandom. A fandom that is, among other things, all too politically easy – and leads to the kind of relaxed authoritarianism that makes American power so dangerous. Vineland, set not so accidentally in 1984, touches on all the topics of the non-serious, para-political left, like the archipelago of secret police, informers, and violent interventions that run through the recent history of the U.S.  Unlike  that left, which is premised on a certain notion of American innocence being hijacked by bad guy conspirators, Pynchon’s book is all about various stages and stooges of collaboration. Pynchon is the last person to make a cult of, say, JFK, who figures in Gravity’s Rainbow in contrast with Malcolm X, in a language become bubblegum and goofy. Innocence just isn’t in it – fall comes after fall. In this sense, it stages, decades before this became the issue de jour, the project of giving a critical history of the U.S. And just as the 1619 project became a cause among the remnant of Cold War liberals who want to rescue America as a good guy against the America founded as a slaveowning republic, so, too, Pynchon’s work is inherently rebarbative to the liberal humanist notion of what the novel should be.

 

 

Guns don't kill people -desperation kills people

 Sadly, the NRA mantra is right: guns don't kill people, people kill people. That doesn't mean we should not have gun control; it means that in a country with weak social insurance - no universal medicalcare, low wages, massive poverty, no national childcare program, continual threats of more cuts, etc. - and a floating island of guns, the mass of gun violence - the greater portion of which is suicides - will continue. When we compare other nations with gun control, what we leave out of the comparison is the stronger social insurance in these countries. The stronger emphasis, for instance, on equality. We have only to look at the shocking, enormous addiction and opiate overdose death rate to see how broken something large is in America. The mass killings are an extreme psychotic symptom of a deep problem we are not confronting, because we have entered a day by day lifestyle of not being able to do what needs to be done (because it is enormous)

So those who are rah rahing gun control and refuse to support medicare for all are, I think, being as hypocritical as the prayers and thoughts crowd.
Make America less desperate.

on not liking the term "postmodern"

 

I’ve never liked the term “postmodern”. Or, in fact, all its children and cousins – the posties. Post-truth, post-stucturalism, etc. It is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight in my book. Yet, I like Lyotard’s postmodern writing, even if I do not understand the slippery conceptual tegument that allows Lyotard to say: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.”

Why postmodern rather than, say, modern-less? If what is modern is outdated, indeed archaic – an affinity between which is, in Kenner’s The Pound Era, insisted upon – I’d suggest that the break, if there is one, is between the progressive idea of modernity and the contemporary, in which an engulfing simultaneity elevates accident and chance as the deities that watch over us. Nemesis has return to watch on the city walls, or at least in numerous Netflix series. The contemporary is not some sort of debasement and chaos – it can well engulf the past, much to the puzzling distress of those who are both 100 percent against moral relativism and 100 percent against “judging the past by our current standards”. 

I’d even posit that there is a history of the contemporary that goes from rumor to the printing press, the industrial basis for the newspaper and the “news”.

The hero cult in academia

 

I am fascinated to an unhealthy degree by academic gossip and the subtweeting of all those nesting high fliers. Since the appearance of the letter in support of Comaroff, signed by the Harvard stars, and the appearance of the oopsy letter of retraction signed by the same Harvard stars making clear that their only mistake was idealism and their belief in the higher things mind you, (rather than endorsing a sex pest and the system that protects him, cause that would be a too literal reading of their literal words), there’s been abundant spillover and a joyous run on vows to non-cite the likes of Jill Lepore and Henry Gates and Paul Farmer and other “heroes”. This was followed by Paula Chakravartty’s account of academic bullying by one of Comaroff’s supporters, Arjun Appadurai, which lends so much veracity to my prejudices against academic highfliers that it is almost a nightmare come true – really, these people are, in their lives, Profiles in Pecking Order Pecksniffery. I’ve known this from forever – I remember talking to a man who was leading a search committee at U.T. in the 1980s who told me that he simply tossed applications that were not from people from the big four universities, thus conveniently narrowing everything down.

Narrowing down – with “no alternative”, these are the slogans that ride mankind.

Anyway, in the hubbub, there is a certain charismatic gleam that is of interest to me. For there is a strong streak, in academia as in Hollywood, of looking for “heroes”. The citation of Appadurai or of x, y, or z is often not a monument to Weberian rationality, but a monument to Weberian charisma: the citation is a temple to a local hero.

The hero is a character type that has been on the upswing for some time. Its nemesis, the anti-hero, came out of the closet in the sixties and seventies, and seemed for a while to harsh everybody’s mellow. I have a very strong sense, from having experienced this a bit, that Derrida was so shocking to the old timers in the eighties by seeming to want to dispense with heroism all together – which of course turned out not to be the case, as Derrida was made into a hero himself, and so on and so forth. We know the terms of the contract.

The hero figure is inseparable from the roots of modernity - it is hard to see how the work of Enlightenment can be done without it. Which is why, contemplating this storm in a teacup among the whole pyramid of teacups and blood that lords it over us all, I’m thinking of Balasar Gracian.

Gracian’s first book to acquire a European reputation was The Hero. It was translated into English in the seventeenth century, and into French in the early 18th century by a translator who remarked on Gracian’s resemblance to La Bruyere. A book with such a title, one might expect, is an essay on heroes that one finds in history or literature. But this isn’t so – the book is in a sense a how to book about how to become a hero, or great man. Gracian worked in the field of worldly wisdom – his distant heirs now retail banalities about “leadership science”.

The heirs are writing for an audience of essentially uneducated businessmen, and are often as lacking in education themselves, and make up for this last point by being ardent collectors of the inspirational sayings of the famous. Context, of course, isn’t the point – leadership disdains context, which is full of obstacles and other people’s objections, and marches proudly into war, or a higher ROI, with the conviction that the long term will simply be taken up with collecting various sayings of the leadership that did it, to inspire others, and will pay no attention to the blood and guts on the field, the fired help, the long term disasters born out of intoxicating short term gains.

Leadership, in other words, is a royal screwing.

But we can’t blame Gracian for this sad state of affairs, since he was evidently intent on giving advice on how to become a universal man (suitably Catholicized). One of the properties of the hero that Gracian promoted was what his English 17th century translator called “gusto” – evidently, taste had not yet grown out of its vulgar accountrements of tongue and appetite at this point:

“Every great capacitie is ever hard to be pleased: The Gusto must as well be improv'd as the wit. Both rais'd and improv'd are like Twinns begotten by capacity and coheirs of excellency: Never sublime wit yet bred a flat or abject Gusto. There are perfections like the sun, others like light. The Eagle makes love to the sun. The poor frozen fly destroyes her self in the flames of a Candle. The height of a Capacity is best taken by the elevation of a Gusto.”

Gracian’s Gusto operates though the logic of praise and dispraise. The taste of the hero is perfect in as much as its praise and its scorn are appropriate to the object – and there’s the rub. There’s a crooked line under the skin of the culture that leads from Gusto to fandom, or from the universal man to the fan. The world of like and dislike – our ultimate buttons – have simplified and rationalized Gusto until it works for anything. Until, I think, it gets in front of everything.

The poor frozen fly, in contrast to the hero, “destroyes herself” – o that gendered fly – by having, as Chakravartty points out, the wrong pedigree. Or by existing as a “her” – in a higher education system that is much like the Democratic party, dominated at the top by old white men and women who depend on and despise the intersectional oppressed that vote for them. When the poor flies, however, start to give up the hero cult: then things get interesting.

 

 

 

a Karen Chamisso poem

 Nearer my God to thee

„An Bord der »Titanic« befanden sich fünfundzwanzig Millionäre, die zusammen mehr als 100 Millionen Pfund repräsentieren.“

I liked to look and not look

in Dad’s book at the picture

Of the iceberg that rammed the Titanic

A telltale smear of paint on its flank

- I had nightmares about that ship going down

My birthday cake with the candles lit

Enormously drowning In the dark North Atlantic

A liner’s hold scrawled over the blood freezing tide.

My friend John recently took me

To Rue des Ecoles to point out the crossing

Where the absent minded mythographer

was run down by a laundry truck

Nearer my God to me I sang out

Mixing up the chords and dischords of time

Born for collision and some final knackery

Iceberg, laundry truck or drowning colder

(“Le Cœur est un organe femelle » )

than the North Atlantic’s spasms

stripping away

our itty monkey manners.

- Karen Chamisso

on Kristin Stewart's Diana

 I saw Spencer last night, and a miracle happened: my heart opened up and I had a little sympathy, a trickle of blood or some other humour, for Diana.

I have a strong sense that the reactionary culture of the eighties began with the marriage of Charles and Diana. It was like rock n roll heaven for reactionaries. Of course, I am more of the school that the royals and the aristocrats are spongers who sit on piles of blood money exacted from the skins of millions of peasants by their horrific ancestors. So I am not exactly unbiased. I have more sympathy for Ulrike Meinhof than for Diana.

Until I saw Kristin Stewart's performance, and realized that Ulrike and Diana were closely akin.

Of course, being plunged into the Windsor family must have been like being thrust nightmarishly into one of those Goya portraits of the Bourbon family in Spain: all the awful faces, all the inbred attitude. I've read the reviews: of course, the movie takes reality on a joyride, and there are some - such as the once enjoyable and now completely petrified Anthony Lane, the review for the New Yorker - who are a bit upset that more isn't made of Queen Elizabeth's bountiful philanthropy. The usual plea for billionaires. However, the film definitely resists using philanthropy as a prop to celebrate gaudy and unaccountable wealth. Thank God. The dialogue is all Pinter laced with underlings out of Shakespeare.

I'd love to see Steward do Ulrike Meinhof next. About ten years ago, the Austrian writer wrote a play that collaged Meinhof to Schiller's version of Mary Queen of Scots. A collaging of Diana to Meinhof would work much better. Politics, so often, is temperament. As it should be, perhaps.

oh brother

 

If you look up the literature on jokes – which ranges from Bergson to Freud to analyses of the Gricean implicature of jokes, and so on – you will notice that the joke is always connected to laughter. Without laughter, it would seem, there is no joke. Even the feeblest joke is defined as such because it fails to provoke laughter.

Myself, I think jokes are often about laughter. But jokes are sometimes not about laughter at all. This seems to be a paradox from the mainstream point of view, but from ordinary converse it is obvious – at least to me, and I believe to almost everybody – that jokes are sometimes not meant to provoke laughter at all. There are many intentions packed into a joke. Sometimes they are meant to bother. Sometimes they are intentionally meant to waste time – to delay. Sometimes they are tics, like cracking your knuckles or stripping the cuticle from the side of your fingernails (a particularly bad habit in my opinion). You could say here that the laughter function is perverted, or diverted. Or you could say that negation and affirmation in the world of affects responds to a different logic than it does in the world of syllogisms. That the negation of laughter could be the motive of a joke is, from the world of affect, a logical result of the particularly enunciative situation of the joke.

Freud recognizes that there are different types of laughter – and that there is a pleasure in laughter that is sadistic. Sadism, however, throws the stage lights on too brightly to describe all kinds of jokes that are disattached from laughter. It is, however, true that laughter is, at some point, related to biting. In fact, satire is often described in terms of biting. Biting and sucking are, of course, some of our earliest intentional actions. The mouth is centered as an important organ for the newborn, who learns to use it to make sounds and then words and then when he is all grown up and a Dad, Dad jokes.

Lately, when I make a humoristic comment – something that is as related to a joke as an undershirt is related to a shirt – Adam tends to say ha ha. It is the typography of a laugh, or another way of not laughing at all. When he started doing this, it reminded me of something. A couple of days ago I remembered it: oh brother.

When I was about Adam’s age – nine – I started replying to jokes or things that were meant to be funny, offered by classmates and adults, with the phrase: oh brother. I must have used that phrase a lot, because at some point in the sixth grade I was dubbed “brother Gathmann”, and I retained that nickname for a long time. I’m not sure what I felt about it. When playing, it was shorted to Brother, so, say, in basketball it would be, “pass it to me, brother”, etc. etc.

Hearing this, I wonder if adults thought it had to do with religion (the Christian evangelical thing of sisters or brothers) or with white kids pretending to be black (brother, in the white mind, being what black men called each other – at least on tv). The one thing that wouldn’t occur is that the name derived from a conditioned refusal to laugh, or to enter the circuit of the joke.

I had not thought about that nickname for a long long time, until Adam started with the ha ha. And now I am curious how, unconsciously, I pass things down to my son. Or maybe he makes them up for himself. And maybe that is a role in the schoolyard – the oh brother role.