Remembrance Belongs To The People
Thomas Pynchon’s attentiveness to history and the details of the contemporary American scene (a hyperawareness that sees revelation in progress all around him and a parable to be entered into around every corner) places him within my continuum of Beloved Community. As a kind of visionary, grounded yet awake to mystery in all things, his unique brand of watchfulness reflects a love for the American landscape and the renewable resource of countercultural possibilities still at work, though often untapped, within our national character. He looks hard and humorously at everything we’re becoming with an eye for every virus of unfreedom that might corrupt our endlessly impressionable imaginations. He seems particularly interested in all the ways in which a population will kid itself concerning its own history (recent and ancient) and all the madness that inevitably follows. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance against unstoried tyranny and death-dealing impulses played out as necessities, Pynchon’s creative labor involves enough overtime to leave readers feeling dizzy. But the charges of pessimism and paranoia often leveled at those who deem the practice of paying attention a civic duty are unfair, and in Pynchon’s case, betray a misunderstanding, perhaps willful, of what he’s up to.
In each of his novels, Pynchon goes back, way back, with a sometimes maddeningly thorough attentiveness to specifics concerning who thought it would be a good idea to subjugate someone else and how the subjugation was accomplished. In 1969, he noted aloud a trajectory between the displacement and death the German government brought down on the Herero people of South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century and my government’s foreign policy:
I feel personally that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration.
Stay with that last part despite the fact that it sounds like a line from a textbook. What’s the number being done on people’s heads? A culture that privileges analysis and differentiation imposes itself—silences, shuts down, appropriates for its own dark purposes—a culture based in unity and integration. Think about it: analysis over unity, detachment over relationship. A myth of critical detachment versus a myth of unity. If America is to remain, in any living sense, an extended conversation about what human beings owe one another, what the myth of critical detachment does to a sense of living unity, the violence it imposes, has to be our subject. Or, as the ghost of Walter Rathenau, a Jewish statesman who was also the German Foreign Minister of the Weimer Republic, put it to Nazi officials who sought his counsel in a séance in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: “What is the real nature of control?” What does critical detachment, as a faith commitment, do to human beings who believe they wield it over others? Google “Daniel Hale” or “Reality Winner” or “Mordechai Vanunu.” Then poke around to see if any elected official has acknowledged their acts of conscience.
One televised exchange once brought the myth of critical detachment to my mind in a peculiarly helpful way. It was the poet, Allen Ginsberg, in conversation with the pundit, William F. Buckley on PBS’s Firing Line. Ginsberg has held the floor for an unusually long time through the recitation of a poem all the while holding Buckley’s gaze. Buckley praises the beauty of his word choice but includes a to-his-mind crucial qualifier: “Well, you know what in my judgment is unsatisfactory about this analysis, I really don’t think—incidentally it is not so much analytical as it is poetical…”
Ginsberg interjects, “Oh, poesy is the oldest form…Analysis is a later form.”
Buckley, for once, had no retort. Think about it. We can analyze away, but the point (Poetry’s the older form) is a palpable hit to the claim of detached judgment. Analytic posturing, let the reader understand, is the latecomer in the human barnyard, and the seat of judgment is perhaps the most folkloric and dangerous myth of all. The lyrical precedes the analytical. Poetry, in fact, generates analysis as a form. Our perception of reality is relentlessly narratival, just as every fact is a function of relationship. Spirit, we have to understand, knows no division.
It is within this movement of Beatitude that Pynchon dropped his first novel, V., upon the world. Amid tales of the Herero, plastic surgery, wars, and barroom brawls, we receive the motto “Keep Cool, but Care” which perhaps might serve as a guiding ethos throughout his fiction. It’s uttered by McClintic Sphere who, depending on your interpretation, might be viewed as a stand-in for Ornette Coleman or Thelonious Monk, and it’s an increasingly necessary word for reading Pynchon as you come to suspect he’s never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. It speaks against the cynicism of ignorant bliss as well and for the desire to know more feelingly the complex histories in which we live and move and have our being. As Fred Friendly understood, learning to live with the tension of what you’d rather not have known concerning the interconnectedness of the workaday world is the beginning of wisdom. While dipping further into the book of what really happened always risks feelings of defeat and despair, any sense of coherence that depends on an aloof posture of disregard for the actual world is, for Pynchon, a poor showing for the still-sometimes-possibly-righteous promise of America.
Trying to care against despair will involve, among other things, a determined wit that can overcome melancholy, a turn for the comedic that won’t let tragedy have the final word. Incidentally, comic consistency, in Pynchon’s work, is a conspiracy of hope requiring constant satirization of the merry band of resisters who appear throughout his novels. In Vineland, for instance, his liberation force concludes a planning session, ready to tackle fascism and every form of totalitarian thought encroaching upon the realm of liberty, and the moment they make for the door coincides with the theme from Ghostbusters suddenly breaking out on a nearby radio. Every moment of emerging seriousness eventually finds itself in a larger comic context, a funnier parable than whatever gravitas momentarily held the stage.
When Pynchon terms his resistance movements (against “Them”) the Counterforce or the People’s Republic of Rock ‘n’ Roll, he can bring to mind the odd, moral authority of Jack Black in School of Rock or Lear’s Fool or Tom Bombadil. As absolute power corrupts absolutely, it becomes increasingly intolerant of the playful word and the honest though seemingly powerless testimony. In Vineland, Pynchon’s freedom fighters believe that corrupting power keeps “a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face,” and filming the unsympathetic powerful, with an emphasis on the close-up, will dethrone and unmask them slowly but surely. The subject of his lamentation and the object of his lampoon is whatever comes only to steal and destroy, seeking whom it may devour, inevitably appearing to its host bodies (Pynchon’s “They”) as an absolute moral necessity, duty, what-we-have-to-do, doublethink. Naming the Adversary (“the persistence of structures favoring death. . . . This is the sign of Death the impersonator”), mocking power and speaking truth to it, would seem to be the purpose that, in some way, links all of his work. Celebration of life, not letting the Caesars or multinational cartels or whoever talks most loudly and expensively about freedom define who you are, is the driving method of a prose that kicks at the darkness. It’s cynicism’s opposite: coolness and caring.
As the witness of Beloved Community never stops reminding us, a nervous breakdown is at large, always advertising itself as normalcy, and that which gets called sanity might sometimes be nothing more than the agreed-upon madness of the global kleptocracy. Pynchon’s characters, meanwhile, represent a humankind who can’t bear much manufactured reality, and their inability to fit in or get with the program begins to look like a much-beleaguered stronghold of freedom.
There is, even now, a contagion of power and pride and endless self-justification that spreads out in every direction, marketing itself as something to which all who believe in decency will gladly pledge allegiance. White supremacist antichrist poltergeist has a nasty habit of confusing itself for the voice of God. It believes in its own sincerity so powerfully that it will feel violently offended at any question concerning its well-rehearsed script of goodness and sacrifice in all that it does, in all that it’s ever done. It will mistake its Towers of Babel (cooperatives of concentrated lies) for the light that shines in the darkness. Consider Bill Lee, Tate Reeves, Greg Abbott, and Ron DeSantis. Who could persuade them, at this point, that they’re waging war on the very people they’ve sworn to serve? Who could compel the poltergeist that possesses them to surrender its millionaire host bodies? Who can get close enough to try?
Pynchon helps us see that which passes for history as a diversionary tactic or “at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud.” His work brings the prophetic vision of Beloved Community to bear on the way we think about the past. To do this is to stand firmly within the sacred insight that evil doesn’t come to us self-consciously, introducing itself and offering us a choice (“Join us in our evil”). It’s more like a kind of sleepwalking, an unself-consciously Faustian bargain, a narcissism in which we believe our fantasy to be the only real, unbiased version of events. When we succumb to it, we surround ourselves with voices that will affirm our fantasy and dismiss as treacherous (or evil) any witness that would dare to call our innocence into question.
Combating evil in all its impersonations will begin with a refusal to cooperate with it. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon notes that evil will usually assume a “calculated innocence” (“It’s part of Their style”), and the ancient curse of Western culture is its “dusty Dracularity” made all the more inimical by its ability to publicize itself as Progress, “even to the point of masquerading, a bit decadently, as mercy.” Taking the power of collective delusion seriously, Pynchon follows Ginsberg’s lead by understanding that the high places of Baal and the logic of human sacrifice to Moloch aren’t limited to biblical history. They’re here and now. Consider our red state legislatures.
Like Emily Dickinson, Pynchon understands that our failures aren’t compressed in an instant. They’re consecutive and slow and well-intentioned, and tracing them well, the comedy and tragedy of it all, will require some careful storytelling, a clear eye, and some redemptively meandering confabulation. Above all, tracing our world out truthfully will involve the abandonment of domineering knowing-ness for the more biblical justness that only lives by faith. Cultural revolutions are always housed in stories. Revolution is story. It will be told. “Once upon a time. . . .” “The kingdom of God is like. . . .” Enter Reverend Cherrycoke.
Among the numerous characters who come and go in Gravity’s Rainbow is an unnamed German girl who spends an evening with the novel’s confused American protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, who’s found himself wandering around postwar Germany in a pig costume. Their conversation turns to the topic of her father, a printer, missing since 1942, whose union had resisted the Nazis while all the others were getting dutifully in line. The tale of his existence inspires a state of liberty-loving reverie in Slothrop as he contemplates the commitment of his Puritan forebears who once dared to speak and write down the truth as they understood it, under the threat of persecution and even death. He also considers the righteous possibilities of a printing press and the threat a paper supply will always be to the prospering wicked: “It touches Slothrop’s own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer’s ink, dwelling along with antibodies and iron-bound breath in a good man’s blood . . . did he run off leaflets against his country’s insanity? Was he busted, beaten, killed?”
Exiled to a pre-1776 America in response to similar crimes against authority, we have the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke as our primary narrator and spirit guide in Pynchon’s later novel, Mason & Dixon. Charged by the British with the crime of “Anonymity,” Cherrycoke was discovered printing and posting unsigned flyers outlining injustices he’d observed, “committed by the Stronger against the Weaker.” He said what he saw—or wrote it all out--named the guilty, and been locked up, and as he began to protest the notion that his own name, not his to give or withhold according to the law, belonged to the British authorities, he was declared insane (“or so, then, each in his Interest, did it please ev’ryone to style me”) and shipped off to the New World for treatment.
Just in case we need reminding, it is the Hebrew scribe who dared to assert in writing that one day the mouths of liars will be stopped, that the one who oppresses the weak despises their Maker, and that the Lord opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. The biblical collection ascribes a voice of moral authority to the refugee, viewing the disenfranchised of history as the custodians of human seriousness. Excommunicated for his own commitment to truth and justice, Cherrycoke, a kind of American Baron Munchausen, holds forth in the household of his sister and her husband, John Wade LeSpark, a weapons merchant who’s made his fortune selling arms “to French and British, Settlers and Indians alike.” Hosted within a domestic economy comfortably situated within the emerging military-industrial-incarceration-entertainment complex, the Reverend is allowed to subsist with the LeSparks as long as he keeps the children amused with stories. His audience will include LeSpark’s brothers and their children as well. The year is 1786, and the place is Philadelphia.
Cherrycoke is an expert in circumlocution. Truth, as he sees it, demands as much. Like wisdom, it will have to dazzle gradually. He’ll tell it slant. Easing it with explanation, he spins his yarns “for their moral usefulness.” But as the properly received parable will often dislocate (rather than reinforce) the personal peace of mind of the hearer, exposing the ways we go about betraying our most publicized values, it shouldn’t surprise us to find that the Reverend is ever a prophet without honor, possibly too much the enemy of the state for his family’s tastes, and the charge of insanity will continue to be placed in his direction by those whose interests are threatened by his truth telling.
Needless to say, the family values that come through in the conversational storytelling that constitutes the novel do not always coincide with one another. Given the fact that arbitrary weapons sales fuel the LeSparks’ bread and butter, young nephew Ethelmer imagines that “if there are Account-books in which Casualties are the Units of Exchange . . . his Uncle is deeply in Arrears.” Despite these realizations, all are reluctant to directly insult their host. While Cherrycoke is inarguably a man of faith, he understands that LeSpark’s devotion to the notions of Adam Smith are no less a faith-based initiative than his own vocation. As he sees it, LeSpark lives “safe inside a belief as unquestioning as in any form of Pietism you could find,” and his travels as an arms dealer are performed “under the protection of a superior Power,—not, in this case, God, but rather Business. What turn of earthly history, however perverse, would dare interfere with the workings of the Invisible Hand?” Although it is Cherrycoke’s own version of America that has the floor, he knows that he lives in close proximity to LeSpark’s regime, which thrives everywhere unnamed, understanding itself by way of “undeclared secular terms in the Equations of Proprietary Happiness.”
Twenty years after the fact, Cherrycoke tells the tale of an act of delineation he once witnessed, a line he saw drawn straight through the heart of a wilderness. In his account, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon function as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the Age of Reason, following their orders as duty seems to require while wondering if there’s any particular duty motivating the Charter’d Companies (Factory, Consulate, Agency) whose interests are consistently served by the work they’ve undertaken on behalf of the Royal Society. “Charter’d Companies may indeed be the form the World has now increasingly begun to take,” Mason remarks somewhat regretfully while wondering if the benefit of hindsight might transform his actions. Can we ever know completely what ends we’re serving? Dixon notes that erring comes with being a human in history, but folly can occasionally be curbed by the presence of “a Remembrancer, as some would say a Conscience.” As a Quaker, Dixon believes such mindfulness is accessed through silence in worship, a wisdom beyond the immediate evidence of our eyes and memories, but Mason doesn’t quite see the point of mixing up their jobs with “Religious Matters.” Like many future citizens of the land he’s unwittingly defining, he believes he has the right and the preternatural ability to step back from religion when he thinks there’s a job to do.
“Are we being us’d by Forces invisible?” Dixon fondly asks. And as the novel ostensibly addresses science, technology, and cartography, we’re lead to wonder if the surveyor of land might prove to be the purveyor of mass delusions. Reverend Cherrycoke accords the right of division to God alone who, he will admit, probably did well to divide the waters with the firmament. But he wonders if the man-made divisions that follow aren’t sometimes a little presumptuous, a machinery that claims Authority without the proper reverence for, in Blake’s phrase, the human form divine (that would be everyone who’s ever lived). Having narrowly escaped the fading, secularized lights of Europe, he hopes for epiphanies of American Illumination not yet received, viewing the land as “a Prairie of Desperate Immensity.”
As storyteller and Remembrancer, Cherrycoke places his characters in the company of various movers and shakers on the eve of the republic’s founding. When Dixon drinks a toast to “the pursuit of happiness,” a young Thomas Jefferson asks if he might borrow the phrase. They’ll encounter Washington and Franklin on their journey as well, but the America that Cherrycoke celebrates is “the America of the Soul” lying beyond the presumption of deism and the arrogance of enlightenment “into an Interior unmapp’d.” It is in witness to this, a countercultural, unmapped world of Word made flesh in spite of the domineering claims of royalty or a corrupt Christendom, that the Reverend printed and posted his fliers in the first place. His America serves as “a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive hopes, for all that may yet be true.” But there is also a spirit of reduction and devastation at work “that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments.” This, he fears, will steal away the New World “from the Realm of the Sacred.” And as the experience of Mason and Dixon demonstrates, this demystifying machinery was doing its business some time before 1776.
Having glimpsed enslaved people during a visit to the Cape of Good Hope and their arrival in Maryland (not unrelated to the notion of Proprietary Happiness), Mason and Dixon begin to see a related pattern at work in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a massacre of indigenous people had occurred. Given the alleged, civilizing mission of the colonists, they find it peculiar that “the first mortal acts of Savagery in America after their arrival should have been committed by Whites against Indians,” and they’re dismayed by the manner in which the settlers “are become the very Savages of their own worst Dreams, far out of Measure to any Provocation.” While otherwise priding himself on his dedicated participation in the Age of Reason, Mason is moved to pray at the site of the massacre, “like a Nun before a Shrine,” as he later described the moment to Dixon. And as he prays, he experiences a troubled premonition concerning future generations whose skills in remembering righteously he imagines might prove perversely diminished: “In Time, these People are able to forget ev’rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again.”
As they anticipate an engagement with representatives of the Mohawk nation, they’re prepared to answer any number of questions about their strange instruments, but they come to dread the possibility that anyone would put the more straightforward query, “Why are you doing this?” The undeclared, secular terms haunt them as they progressively doubt whether or not their labor will prove to have served any morally defensible end at all. “Whom are we working for, Mason?” Mason: “I rather thought, one day, you would be the one to tell me.”
As a narrative presence in the novel, Cherrycoke’s prophetic distrust of concentrated, unchecked power marks his revolutionary reliability. And as he tells this story of the Founding (or as some Pynchon readers put it, the Anti-Founding), his listeners, especially the older LeSparks, are continually put off by what they take to be his bias. But bias is as difficult to prove as objectivity, and those who claim to be the most fair and balanced in their reportage have already outed themselves. Truth, like beauty, is its own credential. Like wisdom, truthfulness doesn’t go about promoting itself. It cries out in the street, raising its voice in the marketplace, extending its hand, but it can’t exactly heed itself or force anyone else to heed. It will only witness and testify. Like poetry, it doesn’t make anything happen. Ethelmer listens to the Reverend and the LeSparks’ protestations and smiles as if to say, “We are surrounded by the Pious, and their well-known wish never to hear anything that sets the Blood a-racing.” They’re hellbent on denying any data, any body of evidence, that might call their own integrity into question. Sound familiar?
Cherrycoke, meanwhile, aspires to truth, but he knows that claiming to own it is a heresy (Who can know the mind of God?), and believing yourself capable of seeing it undimly is a crime against humanity: “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base.” Cherrycoke was run out of old Europe for his stand concerning the “Authorial Authority” of one human voice that aspired to speak to the people for the people. And the beauty of a genuinely credible witness is that it doesn’t come with signs and wonders. In the land of Cherrycoke’s dream, it is freely given and freely ignored. Let anyone who has an ear hear. Keep cool, but care.
On The Simpsons, when Montgomery C. Burns, threatened by the ability of Springfield’s citizens to make of him what they will, decrees the age of his own first-person singular by crowning himself king of all media, Lisa Simpson procures her own printing press and goes to work on the Red Dress Press. In spite of the manufactured crises of a Burns’ news product monopoly, young Lisa crafts her own transmissions, asserting Authorial Authority one act of reportage at a time. This is how it works. As Karen McDougal once observed: “Every girl who speaks is paving the way for another.” There is yet another word to be had. Another human angle to be posited against the efforts of brutalizing forces to dictate meaning. Margaret Atwood’s right: “A word after a word after a word is power.”
Predictably, Burns cracks down on her operation without mercy, but it’s too late. Lenny, Barney, Flanders, and all of Springfield are following suit. Echoing Martin Luther, Homer remarks, “Instead of one big-shot controlling all the media, now there’s a thousand freaks Xeroxing their worthless opinions.” So be it. This is the way the work gets done in the land of a thousand freaks. We get to hear one another again, awaking power to its pretensions. “Remembrance,” Cherrycoke instructs, “belongs to the people.”