#much there like he missed the point of eagleton's position imo and he pinpoint's genuine weaknesses in jameson's but his anysis of those

[thevividgreenmoss]

Once a culture founded on mobility came into being, however, it became possible to dream of leaving one’s waste behind; and this is what happens in the United States, a culture that throws away things rather than repairing them, replicating thereby the initial gesture of departure from the native land. But one can only throw away for so long: to be precise, only for so long as there exist open spaces into which to migrate, leaving the waste ones behind. Once the last open space has been traversed the terms of the equation change; and that is why Pynchon sets his novel on the Californian coast, which symbolizes the extremity of possible consciousness. (One can nevertheless go further, as Pynchon’s stopping point indicates: beyond the coast lies an ocean created when the moon tore free of the earth; and so one has the moon itself as the next destination of a culture fascinated by science fiction and determined to abandon its technologically ravaged planet; this is surely why Pynchon’s subsequent novel took the rocket as its hero and insisted on the parabola of gravity, which returns one to earth and precludes any such escapism. For if there is an escape it will of course be for the few: First Worlders, and even then, only for a few of them.) Once this point has been reached it becomes possible to dream of a waste that consolidates itself and so provides a lever for the dislodgement of official culture, This is Pynchon’s inversion of the American dream (which systematically overturns the ‘American Dream’ of Mailer: wealth, fame and impunity): a waste—a left-over (the theme of the after-life of the object and person, to which I will return)—that is not just a residue but the growing point of the revolution of the new.

But if waste may be a counter-force of the dispossessed, it may also be the posthumous executor of Pierce Inverarity’s American millionaire dream of an after-life in the form of Oedipa’s obsession. Here Pierce’s possible thirst for an after-life rhymes ironically with Pynchon’s own concern for the after-life of apparently ephemeral objects and persons. If they have no after-life, how are the disinherited to come into their true estate, the life they have never lived? Can the preterition death imposes be overcome, allowing the object and its repressed life to return again? The quest is one to counteract entropy and the inevitability of waste, by arresting time, achieving perpetual motion (via the workings of Maxwell’s Demon) and the Californian dream of eternal youthfulness. If Oedipa is simply the unwitting executor of Inverarity’s will—his urge towards futurity—then the book is purely dark: even after death the tyrant determines reality, and the past weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And yet one cannot be sure, for the absence of the expected ending—the coda in which the detective conventionally wraps up the story by retelling it in the right order—leaves everything open. Everything hovers on the verge of a revelation, the Pentecostal speaking in tongues that is one of the book’s interconnected leitmotifs, and yet its coming is delayed indefinitely: the number fifty that would betoken Pentecost never arrives, being forestalled by forty-nine, which draws on the mystical authority of 7 X 7 to masquerade as the true ending. Midway through the book Pynchon remarks very cannily: ‘Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the world came back.’ The absent final page anticipated here may be just such an overexposure of consciousness.

Like Walter Benjamin, The Crying of Lot 49 asks what persists of the dead—what persists of the past—in a present condemned to amnesia by the sheer momentum of technological advance. Are they resurrected periodically, like the dandelions in the dandelion wine, which ferment annually on the anniversary of their period of blooming: ‘As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine’? Pynchon’s concern is thus with the redemption of history: a history that can only be redeemed by memory (his own memory, as he burrows into archives, researching the arcana of his novel); a history that can only be redeemed by utter oblivion or transformation (as he erodes the history he draws on by fusing it with fictional events, aligning the real Webster with the imaginary Wharfinger in order to shift both into the Utopian unnamed realm between ‘either’ and ‘or’, the excluded middle). There is a magical aspect to this fictionalization of history (itself a form of ‘magic realism’): by attaching fiction to history he seeks to create for it, by association, the force of the real, so that the imaginary underground organization can enter the realm of the actual. Pynchon’s project is thus akin to the unfurling of a flag in the hope that people will rally to it simply because it is there, a point that fixes and attracts the eye within an otherwise flat landscape. The gesture includes a hope that in the end the nightmares of history will prove as forgettable as a mere novel.

And so one has the ending that is no ending, that rehearses the title of the book (‘Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of Lot 49’), places the whole book in the future (in the same way as the ending of Proust’s ‘Recherche’, his quest, places Marcel’s novel, which we have just finished reading, in the future), and so inaugurates the eternal, infernal recurrence of the events it relates. It looks to the future with the aspiration of Rapunzel (Oedipa as Rapunzel whose hair may never be climbed, as all her men fall away from her): with the dreaming detachment of the figures in the paintings of Remedios Varo, to one of whose works Pynchon alludes at the end of chapter one, and with whom he seems to have possessed a deep elective affinity: for again and again the figures in these paintings have the shapes of spindles or cocoons, somnambulistically spinning the web of their selfhood around themselves, like Penelope, waiting to wake. This ending projects one beyond the terms of the book by indicating the degree to which silence (the inarticulacy of the dispossessed?) is more important and potent than language. The text cannot speak the Other: to do so would be to coopt it, to destroy it by bringing it to the light. If the Other of the book is the world, the Other of speech is action—the revolution we will have to make if we are ever to break out of the revolving cycle of the book’s recurrence. (As it heads towards a revelation and revolution that never materializes—since it has not yet occurred in reality—the book takes on the shape of a door that turns into a revolving door: a door it is very hard to go through, as it turns one back from one’s goal to consider the grounds of one’s failure to reach that goal.) It is Pynchon’s recognition of the sheer difficulty of this revolution—especially for middle-class intellectuals such as Oedipa or ourselves—the terrible weight of dead consciousness it will have to dislodge, combined with his stubborn refusal to relinquish its Utopian, barely figurable image, that gives his book its exemplary passion and intelligence. Its example can only be followed by acting on the injunction of its final page, in which the text becomes a code without a message (like the empty television set with which it began): an injunction to complete unfinished business.

Paul Coates, Pynchon's Aesthetic Radicalism

#yes yes yes #i didn't much csre for the first segment of this intervening in the postmodernist/third world literature debates cause I don't think he #much there like he missed the point of eagleton's position imo and he pinpoint's genuine weaknesses in jameson's but his anysis of those #weaknesses is v off but goddamn when he got to the main point shit popped off in the best way #essays #thomas pynchon #walter benjamin #the crying of lot 49 #*