The American divide in American Pastoral

Roth's Swede Levov is a complicated character, and his relationship with the cultural upheavals of the 60s is more complicated than the following passage suggests. Still, Roth seems to encapsulate, in his flawed, unexamined protagonist, the ideology of a certain job-creator Silent Majority:

These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who’d never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or car, had never sold anything and didn’t know how to sell anything, who’d never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker—people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing. All that awareness, all that introspective Sheila-like gazing into every nook and cranny of one’s soul went repellently against the grain of life as he had known it. To his way of thinking it was simple: you had only to carry out your duties strenuously and unflaggingly like a Levov and orderliness became a natural condition, daily living a simple story tangibly unfolding, a deeply unagitating story, the fluctuations predictable, the combat containable, the surprises satisfying, the continuous motion an undulation carrying you along with the utmost faith that tidal waves occur only off the coast of countries thousands of thousands of miles away—or so it had seemed to him once upon a time, back when the union of beautiful mother and strong father and bright, bubbly child rivaled the trinity of the three bears (413).

The Swede here sounds like someone out of the Ayn Rand mythography, whereby looters and moochers have taken over the American dream.

Puzzling out the epistemology, or the contemporary use-value, of Gravity's Rainbow

There's no reason to reify this novel, obviously, and Molly Hite is right to historicize it as a function of certain countercultural discourses and energies. But I'm certain that Pynchon has seized something about the shift into late capitalism, and the bewildering transnational Network Societies that it breeds. In Slothrop, I will argue, he captures a consciousness torn between paranoid certainty and a disorienting embrace of multitude, the white male last subject cast into the whirlwind of flow.

Slothrop’s whole existence under the They-system is one of jarring realizations, followed by drifts into uneasy ... what I'll call for lack of a better term disknowledge, or disparanoia, the epistemological black holes which rive the Zone, the Zone itself being a jumble disknowledge/knowledge, the organization of the War Machine and the disorganization of its collapse. (In Lines of Flight, Stefan Mattesich terms this duality "drift" and "submission" (2)). “What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences… “’Want me here’? What for?” (395). This dim slide of meaningless into meaning, disorientation into orientation, characterizes the shifting flows of rigid Cold War nostalgias juxtaposed with vertiginous overflows, sublime aggregations of disarrayed facts, which characterize life in the Risk Society or Information Society. All anchored, in Slothrop’s case, by the ultimate nostalgia, the one that works at you before you were born: gender.

Pynchon analysis

Pynchon's voice: the counterculture, the C. Wright Mills sociology, the Weberian analysis of bureaucracy, the technologist, all brilliantly cascading into this particularly pithy analysis of the War:

The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provided raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while there still here to gobble it up” (Gravity's Rainbow 105)

What does Benjamin say in the Theses on History that Pynchon doesn't say here?

Conspiracy theory as allegory

In an article expressing sympathy for 9/11 skeptics, Michael Truscello critiques conspiracy theory as allegory:

"[For cultural critic Jeffrey Melnick] this “grassroots rebellion” is not to be taken seriously on its own terms, but rather as a “revolt not only against governmental control over 9/11 inquiry but also as a critique of the centralized control of American media held by corporate actors such as Clear Channel” (p. 43).

Truscello critiques what he views as the wide brush with which Bratich, Fenster, Dean, Birchall paint conspiracy theory, particularly 9/11 conspiracy theory:

by assuming the label “conspiracy theory” applies to all 9/11 skepticism, they condemn even demonstrable falsehoods to what Orr and Husting call the “freak show” of postmodern American culture; and by focusing on how the theories are able to circulate, rather than whether the theories possess any epistemological legitimacy, they avoid questions regarding the very definition of conspiracy theory (33).

Truscello, then, would seem to pose an "epistemological test" for would-be conspiracy theories: if such theories have more truth value, then they should not be labeled conspiracy theory. This is an old argument, and a bit defensive, but, as Truscello notes, one that continues to be worth making as long as legitimate skepticism continues to be dismissed via the label conspiracy theory

In contrast to this group of "academic treatises" Truscello poses the more heterogeneous references to 9/11 embedded in film and television: V for Vendetta, Rescue Me, Jericho, Heroes, and others, arguing that such a field renders visible 9/11 skepticism that these academic treatises obscure:

The difference between these examples of popular culture appropriation and the academic treatises on 9/11 in American culture is that these films and TV shows at least contained consideration of the ideas in circulation online, whereas mainstream academics seemed to believe 9/11 skepticism was either marginal enough to ignore or unconvincing in the forms it has appeared (57).

The question here: why is 9/11 skepticism worth discerning? Also, does the fact that an idea resonates through popular culture translate into "useful" or "worth promoting"? After all, popular culture is a vast and uneven field, capable of harboring both the most hopeful subversions of power and the worst petty racisms...

Colonial refusal

Pynchon on colonial refusal, the zerodeath among the Herero:

A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's teh fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe its nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit (317).

Tribal death or Christian death...Hereros choose refusal.

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.