Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1995

Thesis Director

William D. Miller

Abstract

This work seeks to analyze Western thought as a system. As a case study representative of this system, I have chosen the United States of America, as it started as a strange experiment in purely Apollonian thought, which has largely remained a closed system and has become the primary engine of cultural change in the twentieth century. As the tools for my analysis, I have chosen the dialectic represented in the mythical opposites Dionysus and Apollo and the counter cultural reaction by a number of post World War II authors, most notably Thomas Pynchon, to the "American Dream."

America began as an experiment in forming the perfect society according to "Gods blueprint'', or the therein projected values of some Anglo-Saxon, Protestant religious zealots. Puritan values are almost purely Apollonian in that they elevate structure, logic and hierarchy--all attributes of the left cerebral hemisphere. With at least equal zeal, the Puritans purged the Dionysian or right brain attributes of non-hierarchical, non-linear thinking, sensuality and emotion.

Two important symptoms of this hierarchical Apollonian perspective were a fascination with contractual or corporate structures and racial dichotomies. As wealth was seen as evidence of being chosen by God, commerce took on a semi-religious meaning. The dichotomy of races into white and non-white led to the identification, with non-whites, of the demonized Dionysian attributes and to the consequential genocide, enslavement and persecution perpetrated against the alleged bearers of these attributes as a "race."

Although the Puritans were a relatively short lived phenomenon and a plethora of other peoples flocked to America, most of the Puritan values persisted relatively unchanged among those whom Pynchon would call the "elite" into the later half of this century. And, these values linger with us still. Calvinist values, in a more palatable guise, have marked official American culture. After a generation of young men had gone to war to fight against similar values, intensified under the swastika and returned to an atmosphere of intolerance, repression and the all-new threat of nuclear destruction at home, a particular Dionysian counter-culture developed--the "Beats".

The Beat writers and those who, like Thomas Pynchon, were affected by them questioned the official values and brought a decidedly Dionysian slant to their writing. In the short story "Entropy'' and in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon creates the complex metaphor based on the second law of thermodynamics of a system running down into chaos. Pynchon uses this metaphor as an allegory for Western and, particularly, for American society. In V and Gravity's Rainbow, he destroys the illusion of linear time and mathematical order by moving back and forth out of the middle of scenes as movies do and by presenting a large body of major and minor characters who are all interconnected, both by their membership in the natural Dionysian whole of humanity and by their involvement with the global conspiracy of Western civilization. Pynchon portrays our civilization as bent on death and running towards apocalypse.However, Pynchon immediately offers the hope of survival alluding to the fact that the process only tends to run down; there is, in his work, the hope of a "counterforce" of single elements not acting as the majority tends to act. One is then offered a number of alternatives concerning the impending apocalypse. The most hopeful possibility is that of a breaching of the chasms created by the Apollonian dichotomies of white/non-white, male/female and elite/preterite by a counterforce resulting in the development of a collective Dionysian ego, as Norman O. Brown suggests, and, thereby, averting the imminent destruction of our species resulting from our cultural repression. However, the dominant suggestion is that white man's erotic fascination with death and the machines that make it possible on a large scale will bring us to the apocalypse which seems to be the point and logical conclusion of our culture and monotheistic religion. Pynchon again qualifies this, however, with the possibility that self-destruction means transcending to another plane of existence.

Pynchon's novels and short stories can essentially be read as a single work, many of the characters of one work being found in the next, a non-linear plot being common to all, and the same powerful theme being at the heart of each. A holistic reading is rarely done, however. As Sklar points out, Pynchon's shorter novels were not nearly as well received as V or Gravity's Rainbow (88). The dominant theme of his work is that all life is part of a Dionysian whole; everything is interconnected, even with its Apollonian opposite. Western culture itself is a grand conspiracy in which everyone plays a part, and for which the all pervading symbol is the machine our culture has come to worship. In his last novel, Vineland, Pynchon even suggests that machines themselves may function according to natural laws of chaos, thus completing the cycle.

America is still waiting for the pig that will save it.

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