Saturday, January 29, 2005

what happened to Tyrone Slothrop?

I did not traipse across the DMZ dressed as a bomb, ripped from the fabric of linear reality by drugs and the nefarious plans of corporate, international industrial cartels and their theft of my personhood. I don't think I am deeply, in a very repressed way, intimately associated with any industrial plastics. I don't pretend to understand everything Pynchon was saying- I still couldn't understand Miller when I finished Gravity's Rainbow- I hadn't truly lost my fucking mind yet when I got to the final page of that book- but here's the impression I did retain:
Tyrone Slothrop, sold at birth to the international chemical cartels, still in some way under their sway during and after the war by a)being put in harm's way as a soldier in a war that was a veiled economic exercise, an illusion, and b) being used to find the V-2 without his own knowledge. At the end of the book, and again, I read this awhile ago and was lost during most of it, Slothrop dissolves. His corporeal Slothropness "finally flies apart," to paraphrase herm. He gets washed out in the pattern as it becomes larger and more incomprehensible, as his own nature is diminished more and more in importance as the plot that has controlled his life becomes clearer (and infinitely larger) and as his usefulness disappears. He melts into the pattern of his surroundings.
In the wash of so much information, such a total mediation of his life, he actually ceases to exist, he becomes indistinguishable from the plots he's been a part of.
Do you ever get to feeling that way?
I'm overstimulated. And I may have completely misunderstood and misremembered Pynchon, to boot. The uncertainty of it all!

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