Title: Green Scripts in Gravity's Rainbow: Pynchon, Pastoral Ideology and the Performance of Ecological Self
Abstract: In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented that “foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. [ … ] Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? [ … ] Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” (Nature 1). The optative mood of this complaint—which in fact inaugurates Emerson's literary career—is readily perceived as an instance of pure persuasion. We are compelled to treat Emerson's inquiry as a rhetorical question for the reason that, in large measure, the innovative aspect of American literature—as attested to by Hawthorne, Melville, and yes, Emerson too—consists almost exclusively of “an original use of discredited original materials”—in Emerson's case, a recycling of the American jeremiad, as well as complementary tropes of Paradise, the Fall, the promised land (Lewis 8). In The Performing Self, published two years prior to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Richard Poirier makes the claim, amply supported by Pynchon's novel, that “America is now and history” (xi). American novelists and, to varying degrees, their fictional characters as well, often seem preoccupied with the uneasy task of “shaping a self out of the materials in which it is immersed”, of “turning [ … ] a sentence this way or that,” merely in order “to keep from being smothered by the inherited structuring of things, [ … ] to keep within and yet in command of the accumulations of culture that have become a part of what he is” (xiv, xiii). Performance, in terms of a palpable sense of individual and collective identity invoked in and by the act of discourse, “may, in its self-assertiveness, be radical in impulse, but it is also conservative in its recognitions that the self is of necessity, if unwillingly, inclusive of all kinds of versions, absorbed from whatever source, of what that self might be. Performance in literature, life, or politics is allusive, and therefore historical” (xiv).
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-03-03
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 51
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