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Anonymous
A question about a Gravity's Rainbow quote 2017-02-25 05:32:09 Post No. 9154154
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A question about a Gravity's Rainbow quote 2017-02-25 05:32:09 Post No. 9154154
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>It wasn’t always so. In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat. . . . It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideas of right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day in and out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the people—an English class was being decimated, the ones who’d volunteered were dying for those who’d known something and hadn’t, and despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. . . .
What was it about WW2 that made it so drastically different than WW1? In what way was there "love" with WW1, yet "faggotry" with WW2? Does it have anything to do with the idea that War and Society in general were becoming more and more mechanical and 'destruction-focused' after WW2, with the 'faggotry' being a metaphor for a sort of death? Perhaps in a reference to The Cold War and the arms race? That's the only thing I can get from this quote. What do you guys think?
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Memes.
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>>9154184
Don't do this to me, man.
Also, as I was re-reading Gravity's Rainbow, I noticed that two lines sort of had the same sort of phrasing.
>"“Pirate in the lavatory stands pissing, without a thought in his head.”
This line appears right at the beginning of the book, and the 'without a thought in his head', line reminds me of the Slothrop final scene, where it says
>“Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. . . .”
Am I being autistic or did Pynchon actually plan a sort of mirroring of these two scenes with the line of 'having nothing in your head'?
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>>9154154
I think it's mainly commenting on the isolation of England and the lack of a battle front.
WWi was close quarters, top-down trench warfare. Death unlike any war before still kind of old school war. "death was no enemy, but a collaborator" is less about the reality of the wars and more about the conviction of fighters within them.
That double-edged jab at the abolition and execution of the aristocratic classes of Europe by the capitalist merchant classes is, I think to put the isolation and distance between actor and action on the complete conversion of power into capital.
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>>9154154
>It wasn’t
post the case to which this pronoun refers, a paragraph of conditional information is like a heavy loss for meaning
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>>9154326
>Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus’s estate, “The Birches,” the fore-play is a game about who has the real power, who’s had it all along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of pretty “Angelique” are calibrated against their degree of fantasy. No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain. . . .
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