D2: Psych class notes

"Against the Day"

I'm in a Haverford College Humanities Center group discussing Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" and I suggested at our first meeting that I would create a blog resource for us. Here's step one.

It's been harder than I had expected to get a blog front end setup for thinking about Pynchon, probably because of my anticipation of this latest novel as a way to review and think about my own near 40 year fascination with the man. That's a little weighty for a single blog entry, so let's start with a thought or two about the reading we will be discussing tomorrow: "Iceland Spar" to page 260.

I'd like to come back to the question of whether we can find useful analogies in music or other arts to the way Pynchon animates the many sections of this book. Jazz? Mahler? Raga? Milhoun?

Pynchon (hopefully) trolls the too-strange-for-fiction “Chums of Chance” by us readers regularly for the effect they'll have on our understanding of other parts of the plot. Their Russian counterparts (the “Tovarishchi Slutchainyi”) tweak them with a worldly knowingness about war and betrayal, Russian style. The Chumbs seem to be early in the process of figuring out something about their own missions.

Wittily, [Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.] allows the Chums of Chance to figure in the novel, subtextually, as storybook characters, dime-novel heroes in the kind of fiction that boys relished in series at the turn of the century. ("The Chums of Chance and the Caged Women of Yokohama" and "The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates," etc.) The comic is always subverting the earnest and profound in "Against the Day." The narrative may be erudite (remember your quadratic equations?) and reportorial, but it is also richly allusive and imaginative. It has the same kind of Hieronymus Bosch quality that we remember from "V.," "The Crying of Lot 49" and "Gravity's Rainbow."
Alexander Theroux. Wall Street Journal, Nov 24, 2006 (Proquest copy)

I.G.L.O.O. On rereading the section for tomorrow's meeting (pages 118 - 260, in "Iceland Spar") I am particularly struck by the whispered-of destruction of New York City in the wrathful feeding frenzy of the primordial being extracted from the ice by the good ship Étienne-Louis Malus. Our  2007 New York -- the refracted image with which we are familiar -- is prospering again, and the uncanniness of ground zero does not seem to bother the millions of city-dwellers who pass it every day.

Pynchon's account of the return southward of the accursed ship calls up at this early point in the novel expectations of Lovecraftian horror. The dark pre-history of the world has been re-awakened by modern science, and now we'll pay for our arrogance.

Then something terrible has happened to New York, and we wonder if we’ve napped through it. Much of the city was apparently destroyed by fire after its population was driven mad with fear. What's left muddles along, run by a new class of folks, but now it's the kind of New York Bogart suggested to the Germans in "Casablanca" they not invade, with an added kink.

To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when "he" was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissibly, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of "her" beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, "he" remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men's clothing.
(p. 154)

... and I can hear Richard Nixon hollering, "What?"

Ways of approaching this bird. Since our discussion at the first meeting of the difficulties posed by this large novel's many and bifurcating plots I've thought more about my "epigenetic" analogy, based on the old Erik Erikson neo-Freudian ego psychology I used to teach. The image I had was of a boy of various ages scribbling down on a menu card a note for a joke or a plot line for a story or a bit of word-play around a popular tune. These cards get stored in a box and periodically extracted, added to, amended, and re-indexed (cf. Dubya's speechwriter). Those pertaining to the several main plot lines are dealt out to the reader with some concern for keeping us aware that there are characters on the other quadrants of the rotating stage, and there may be times when we think we understand a particular jump from, say, Traverses to Vibes. Mostly, we just get settled on one group of characters when we’re yanked into the parallel universe of another plot line.

 Pynchon-esque sex

February 23, 2007: At least three of Pynchon's novels -- V., Gravity's Rainbow, and Against the Day -- feature moments of kinky sex. Women are dressed in fetish attire, tied up, at least imaginatively abused. Men watch these erotic scenarios and sometimes participate by playing one or another classic sadomasochistic role. In Against the Day we have:

• Lake Traverse taken orally and anally nine deuce and Sloat, respectively

• Yashmeen Halfcourt taking and taken in a variety of dominance-submissions scenarios, both lesbian and "straight"

• Dally Rideout's richly explored dalliances with outre settings and the performance of erotic roles

At Wednesday's session, I brought up Tristan Taormino, Pynchon's niece (brother's child), erotic perforformance artist and New Age sex writer/speaker. She has a website, and Justin Hall attended her 30th birthday party in May, 2001. Her book Down and Dirty Sex Secrets was reviewed by Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Resources

• "Against the Day" Wikipedia entry
• "Against the Day" wiki
• "The Chumps of Choice" blog
• "Research Methods for Professional Writers" blog
• Amazon's "Against the Day" page
• Reviews of "Against the Day," aggregated at the AtD wiki
• google blog search on "Against the Day" (2/7/2007: 12:10: d2's 16-hour-old posting is hit #2
  
• James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima
• Lovecraft, H.P. The Call of Cthulhu
• Ynglingasaga Wikipedia entry
• Tristan Taormino Wikipedia entry

Turkle: Aspects of the Self

In Chapter 6, "Aspects of the Self" (p. 178), Turkle gets to the vexed issue of the "ego" in psychoanalytic theory:

One of Freud's most revolutionary contributions was proposing a radically decentered view of the self, but this message was often obscured by some of his followers who tended to give the ego greater executive authority in the management of the self. However, this recentralizing move was itself periodically challenged from within the psychoanalytic movement. Jungian ideas stressed that the self is a meeting place of diverse archetypes. Object relations theory talked about how the things and people of the world come to live inside us. More recently, post-structuralist thinkers have attemped an even more radical decentering of the ego. In the work of Jacques Lacan, for example, the complex chains of associations that constitute meaning for each individual lead to no final endpoint or core self.

D2: This constantly re-constructed self, sampling from many component bits of biographical drama played through neurotic styles and defense mechanisms, is what plays out and discovers itself, IMO, in blogs, chat, and gaming.

Turkle's work is our bridge between Freud and Web. She discussed these issues down the road in 1997:
Change Your Virtual Identity and Discover Your Real Self (From the UPenn Gazetteer)

During a library-sponsored symposium about the Internet titled "What's Playing on the Celestial Jukebox: Real Knowledge in a Virtual World," moderator Terry Gross, host of the nationally syndicated radio show Fresh Air, asked panelist Sherry Turkle to talk about some of her experiences in the world of MUDs: Multi-User Domains. Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at MIT and the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, began by describing what the symposium itself, held in November, would be like if it were taking place in a MUD instead of a basement auditorium in Meyerson Hall.

...

As a student at Harvard University, Turkle recalled, she studied with psychologist Erik Erikson, who "used to write about adolescence as a time of moratorium, a time of 'time out,' " one often associated with the college years. "You had a chance to experiment with these many aspects of self -- to have a kind of consequence-free time, and he wrote about how important that was in the development of a healthy identity."

The Gold Bug Variations

I thought I'd provide some background for my digression today re Richard Powers, an author with whom I am much taken these past two years (since Jon Schull recommended Plowing the Dark).
I'm about to finish Powers' The Gold Bug Variations (1991), an immensely complex and satisfying novel I've been reading slowly all summer.
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug" suggests the puzzle-solving aspect of the plot, as Bach's "Goldberg Variations" provide the set of chapter titles and a recurrent gloss on Dr. Stuart Ressler's career as failed bio-genetics researcher and deep thinker about genomes, love, and patterns. It's useful to have links to both handy as you read.
Back in August (while I was in Minnesota) I found a Salon interview with Richard Powers, and it might help you decide if you want to read him.
Found a Salon interview with Richard Powers:

I was born in Chicago, moved away to Bangkok at the age of 11, came back to the United States at 16, finished high school in a rural Illinois town, went to college in a rural Illinois town, moved to Boston, moved back to a rural Illinois town, moved to the Netherlands, lived for many years there, moved back to a rural Illinois town. The Midwest is such a tabula rasa. Turning the prairie into agribiz is the apotheosis of this drive for control and mastery and efficiency that describes what we are. My books are not Midwestern in the sense that they plumb the Midwestern psyche in the way that Southern writers get to a real precise regional sense of their culture. Or New Yorkers do for their culture. Or the western does for another whole American narrative. I don't know what the Midwestern narrative is really. It's definitely diffident, it's definitely deferential, it's definitely Protestant, it's definitely a great believer in progress, it's maybe the last bastion of enlightenment, misguided enlightenment thought. I don't know. But it's also -- I know it feels exotic to you, it just feels like a baseline to me.
. . .
The Midwest is useful to me for a lot of reasons. One is that it does seem the apotheosis of normative bourgeoisie behavior to me. And that's very useful. Make yourself invisible, don't break the rules and all will be well. And of course, that's subverted and played off against in a couple of my books. It's useful to me as a kind of Everyman setting. There is that sense of omnipotential, unwritten, blank page to it.

Each of the three Powers novels I've read -- Plowing the Dark, Galatea 2.2, and The Goldbug Variations -- has moved and fascinated me.