The transcendental Swede

Criticism begins in this simple act: copying a passage, going over the words lovingly as one types it into a computer, where it hums in the virtual unconsciouss, haunting the writing that encloses, interprets, reinforces it. In copying a passage, I seek recognition, alienation, resonance, dissonance with my ideas, a process that works especially well with idea-packed texts like American Pastoral. As in this captivating series of sentences about the book's seemingly intrepid protagonist Swede Levov:

The Jewishness that he wore so lightly as one of the tall, blond athletic winners must have spoken to us too--in our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejection. Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him: the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns (20).

Roth continues, but that's enough: here are rich ideas, finely described, which sparkle and entice and inspire. First, the way Roth frames Levov's body as the site of Jewish desires--he'll note soon that Levov's subjectivity seems absent, that Levov functions more as embodied symbol than a human being embedded in the social, with all its swirling antagonisms. Like all such points de capiton, Levov must be more or less empty in order to function as such a transcendental signifier, and yet unlike freedom or Coca-Cola, he lives and breaths, and the purpose of the book's narrative is to draw out the messiness obscured by his canonization.

The They in the System

The world of Gravity's Rainbow is the world of biopower: statistics, measurements, great arrangements of bureaucracies, system, not individual, except in so far as the system chooses to figure an individual. So why all the Theys? Why paranoia? What signal-to-noise ratios are undone because of Slothrop's paranoia?

“So it is here, grouped on the beach with strangers, that voices begin to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate… it’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders beyond the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in. Pale lines of force whir in the sea air…pacts sworn to in rooms shelled back to their plain views, not quite by accident of war, suggest themselves. Oh, that was no ‘found’ crab, Ace—no random octopus or girl, uh-uh. Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart” (188)

Katje's "Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet" is at the core of this sense--the dizzying sense that this has been arranged for me, that which is not possible in the world of biopower, but that sense of which is endlessly iterable by the sirens of consumption.

What's fascinating about this particular They, for my purposes, is its insistence on gender--Slothrop's vaunted hardon--as at the root of Their conspiracy. But still, novel devoted to system, focused on They. No small rooms, but a hardon, and is this the metaphor for gender and conspiracy theory: that the conspiracy theorist longs for, or at least longs for the reassurance of, a hardon as the point de capiton of the power-knowledge-system's accumulating bureaucracies. To be identified by one's hardon is surely better than being " filed ... high on the white-sea-façade, in a room to himself" (GR 181), a formulation that dooms the individual subject to a meaningless passivity. The image of being "filed" in a hotel is the exact opposite of octopus Grigory showing up on the beach, in a vertiginous, but nevertheless comforting, in terms of being among the conspiratorial elect, planned outcome. We were meant to meet confirms that the universe has a structure, and if the God upholding such a structure is an erect penis, all the better.

Another valence of the small room

In an uneven, but repeatedly suggestive article on I Married a Communist, the political theory influenced critic Sorin Radu-Cucu offers a lively take on Ira Ringold's Zinctown cabin and its connection to two other rooms: Johnny O'Day's ascetic retreat amongst the steel mills of northern Indiana and Lenin's "anchorite room [in Zurich] where the revolutionary founder of Bolshevism had lived in exile for a year and a half ” (Roth 278, quoted in Radu-Cucu 178). In Radu-Cucu's view, Ringold's shack becomes infused with the Communist mythology of "retreat from capitalist life"; these rooms achieve meaning, then, not just in terms of their isolation from the antagonistic world of the social (to use Roth's ideas) but in terms of their legibility within a larger cultural narrative, as manifested by their visual similarity to a famous scene from such a cultural narrative, Lenin's own room. DeLillo has Oswald play with this idea in Libra (a similar text to IMAC, in many ways) but DeLillo makes clear that Oswald's motivations are personal first and political second: his shaky grasp of Communism leads to his repeating ideas like "Trotsky's cell" without a clear understanding of how Trotsky's cell figures into the larger mythology of Communism itself that Roth reproduces in IMAC.

All this is to say that the small room isn't just a recurring trope, it's also a recognizable one, one that assumes meanings--as a retreat from capitalist life, infused with a proletarian pastoral--borrowed from larger narratives.

Rationalization of everyday life

"Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made--that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses, and other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day" Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Like a Bible, this text, and if this quotation is a bit much, so be it; speaks to the dim routinization of life demanded by the industrial state. Ostensibly, the book is about War, but he's after Postwar, the widening gyres of bureaucratic rationality that gradually encompass all human endeavor: everything measured, as in The Postmodern Condition....

The irrationalization of imperialism

Reading GR again, the episode involving Katje's ancestor and the dodo. This segment is as good an example as any of Pynchon's continual scrutiny of the irrationality of power:

Did we tell them 'Salvation'? Did we mean a dwelling forever in the City? Everlasting life? An earthly paradise restored, their island as it used to be given back? Probably. Thinking all the time of the little brothers numbered among our own blessings. Indeed, if they save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ's kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear to be in the world's illusory light--only our prey. God could not be that cruel (111)

Scientific ridiculousness, of the sort deployed seriously in rationalizing imperial war.

Pura Vida

Roth, in I Married a Communist

[E]verything that lives is in movement. Because purity is petrification. Because purity is a lie. Because unless you're an ascetic paragon like Johnny O'Day or Jesus Christ, you're urged on by five hundred things. Because without the iron pole of righteousness with which the Grants clubbed their way to success, without the big lie of righteousness to tell you why you do what you do, you have to ask yourself, all along the way, 'Why do I do what I do?' And you have to endure yourself without knowing (318).

I especially like the "iron pole of righteousness" line: the assertion of knowing is, to Roth's Murry Ringold, a trap which has ultimately tricked even himself, making him "no less a historical casualty" than his brother Ira, who sought purity in the Communist Party.