Orpheus in LA, the Most Dangerous Man in America, and Thomas Pynchon
The Death of Orpheus | c. 1870 | Henri Leopold Lévy
An Ode to Disarray
You want granular? Fair enough. But first, some art de la table, as it were.
1970 has hit us like a goddamn train as one decade rolls gracelessly into the next. We’re a few months off the back of Woodstock. The death rattle of the American Counterculture is down to its last whimpering gasp before scattering into a hundred incompatible social silos, finally divesting itself of that once proudly adorned capital-C. The 37th is welcomed into his second year of office and is quietly gathering the judicial and political ammunition necessary to launch what would be famously known as the War of Drugs™ but in reality, we now know to be the “war on poverty and ethnic minorities.” Jerry Rubin is still a few years away from compromising everything he and his six co-defendants stood for in '68 by becoming an obscenely wealthy technocratic capitalist; hey, at least Abbie Hoffmann is still sticking to his degenerate guns and slinging cocaine. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz has been published to very little fanfare and its author is still paddling furiously against the Charybdisian whirlpool of substance abuse. LA has comfortably positioned itself as the stinking diesel engine powering the American economy by way of its most profitable exports: military intimidation, quietly fascistic propaganda, and systemic racism. The I-10 is packed, you can barely see the sun through the carbon monoxide haze, but you can’t argue the beaches are nice.
If you look a little closer at one of those coastal suburbs, you’ll find a cozy little two-level duplex on 33rd just a few blocks up from the sandy paving stones (and under those paving stones, the Beach!) If you were to look into the window of that duplex, chances are you might just see a thin mustachioed shut-in scribbling furiously on engineer’s quadrille. He’s been bent over that desk at a vertiginous angle for the better part of a decade, trying to reconcile his complicity in a military-industrial cartel he likely didn’t recognize for what it was until it was already too late. There’s no putting his body upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and making it stop now. The best he could do is write their war crimes (and yes, he really did mean war crimes) into a byzantine fictive cathedral built upon not brick and mortar but rather “Money, Shit, and the Word.” That’s what he’s been parked at this desk doing since, by my estimation, September 1962. Hunched over the table in a sparsely furnished apartment with mostly rocketry manuals, Rilke translations, and piggy banks to fill the vacant space. He doesn’t see you from the angle you’re watching him, but he knows you’re there, hoping his words will eventually ring true in your ears provided the Big Fiction machine doesn’t excise the contentious resonances from his manuscript before the first edition hits the shelves on February 28th. You can’t read the words from where you’re standing but if you could, they might sound a lot like this:
Orpheus Puts Down the Harp
This subtitle should garner immediate recognition from seasoned readers of Pynchon’s Big Red Rocket. To those who haven’t established a depth of familiarity with Gravity’s Rainbow, you’ll find this sequence in Part 4, Section 73, in the 13th of 16 vignettes that comprise its final chapter. Even the most disoriented of Pynchon neophytes (among which we have all counted ourselves at one point or another) should by now have intuited that the novel’s last gestures toward narrative cohesion have dissolved at approximately the same point along its diegetic timeline as its protagonist’s dispersal into a crossroads. From the moment that “Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow […] and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural...” onward, “The Counterforce” section of the text is generally recognized to be the most abstract and disorienting of its four constituent parts. Conscious of the entropic acceleration leading into his climactic “Now Everybody–” it’s at this point in Section 73 that Pynchon accepts the passing of his narrative's Brennschluss, and allows his idiosyncrasies go “pure Ballistic.” Thus, we find ourselves in a state of what I might describe as “channel-surfing” through the writer’s mind, as he ping-pongs back and forth through prolepsis and analepsis, presented to us in 16 fractured vignettes.
The Surrealist Coup
The chronology and situation of these variegated scenes comprise everything from Chinese spiritual writings to Tarot readings, to cartoon superheroes, to the Apollo space program. Each of these deserves a close reading akin to what I’m attempting now, but without a Harriet Shaw Weaver to bankroll my literary obsessions, you’ll have to settle for the one that I’ve identified as most critical to understanding Pynchon’s worldview. There is a contingent of (in my opinion, misinformed) readers who have accused this sequence of being simply the product of its author’s excessive drug use, reading almost as a sampling of inchoate draft materials that couldn’t be woven into the text in a more linear fashion. While I appreciate the abrupt perplexity one may feel here, compounded with the exhaustion of being nearly 800 pages into one of the English Language’s most demanding books, I don’t buy that argument for even a passing second. What Pynchon is deploying here is a technique I’ve heard described as a “surrealist coup”, wherein the wireframe artifice of narrative is stripped away (scattered, if you will) and what we’re left with is the free-associative discourse of an ex-Serviceman with a once-in-a-generation intellect, former security clearance, and an enormous fucking axe to grind. All we can do, as his wholly unprepared readers, is make a conceited effort to “follow the bouncing ball.”
And so, apropos of the 750 pages that preceded it, “Orpheus Puts Down Harp.”
One can’t even consider a commentary of this section without first addressing its subtitle, as Orpheus is a name that echoes repeatedly through GR, particularly in the utterances of Colonel “Blicero” Weissman and his beloved Rainer Maria Rilke. While an intertextual reading of Sonnets to Orpheus could superimpose reasonably upon the text as a whole, that’s not the angle from which I personally approach it. One needn’t reach much further than the novel’s halfway point before establishing that Pynchon’s “Eurydice-obsession” isn’t exclusively through the middleman of an Austrian poet; that is to say, his interest is primary, not secondary.
I won’t anchor myself to the assumption that all (of the few) who read this are conversant in Greek Classics, so I’ll reiterate the essentials with as much brevity as my undiagnosed ADHD and lack of a copyeditor allow. Orpheus, famous for Hadean roundtrips, misdirected glances, and a slick set of fingers across the harp, neared the end of his life with a complete resignation toward all the Gods save Apollo. One might think that by 1973 the American treasury had begun to feel the same way, as the Apollo program—built upon the rocketry technology made possible by the collusive Operation Paperclip— racked up a modest price tag of $25B. But I’m meant to be talking Greek mythology here, aren’t I…
Orpheus’ life met a dismembered end when he was torn to pieces by frenzied Maenads, his harp left floating out to sea. It seems Orpheus hadn’t so much put down his harp, as he had it put down for him. I don’t think it takes a Zone’s-width of conjecture to realize this allusion is pinned to the scattered remains of Slothrop left to haunt that aforementioned Zone as something of a friendly spectre, a lingering presence, an echo of harmonica (or, mouth-harp) chords half-heard across the ruined hills of Occupation. He’d been to Hell (but not back), turned his gaze upon the Machinery of a System that would do everything in its power to keep its operation covert, and was dealt with in the only way that System knew how: dispersal and dismemberment. Ahhh America, a failure of Creativity.
Without belaboring this mythological comparison any further, let’s press on through the perforations of the Zonal moiré and consider the possibility that a novel placed during the European 40’s is actually about the American 60’s. Orpheus is just your guide into its underbelly.
Nixon’s Narrative in Pynchon’s Los Angeles
“LOS ANGELES (PNS)—Richard M. Zhlubb, night manager of the Orpheus Theatre on Melrose, has come out against what he calls ‘irresponsible use of the harmonica.’ Or, actually, ‘harbodica,’ since Manager Zhlubb suffers from a chronic adenoidal condition, which affects his speech. Friends and detractors alike think of him as ‘the Adenoid.’ Anyway, Zhlubb states that his queues, especially for midnight showings, have fallen into a state of near anarchy because of the musical instrument.”
From Occupied Germany in ’45 to L.A. in ’70. How’s that for a hook turn?
Douglas Fowler suggested “PNS” stood for “Pynchon News Service” but I subscribe to the Wiesenbergerian notion that this actually corresponds to “Pacific News Service”, a briefly-syndicated alternative news organization. Circa 1969, PNS’ beat of choice was a countercultural perspective on America’s antagonistic role in the Vietnam War. With each passing week of military exportation into Southeast Asia, anti-war sentiment circulated among the cultural and political left with a quickening pulse. The political arena of public discourse grew closer and closer to violence, with wrong-place-wrong-time dissidents such as Tom Hayden and Co. finding themselves on the receiving end of a kangaroo court trial. In response to the growing “threat” of the counterculture, Presidents Johnson and (more importantly) Nixon directed the various arms of their extra-judicial surveillance apparatus (COINTELPRO, CHAOS, & Project Shamrock principally among them) to infiltrate, interrupt, interrogate, and at times assassinate key members of this political faction. Not for nothing is GR dedicated to confirmed COINTELPRO target, Richard Fariña. Nor is it accidental that in these final climactic pages, we find ourselves in the company of (pretty goddamn obviously) a thinly-veiled Richard M. Nixon.
“The evacuation proceeds but it is all theatre,” and Zhlubb (Nixon) is the proprietor of the narrative that’s been performed for you this entire time. He knows a thing or two about putting on a performance for you under the auspices of acting in your best interest. He’s not here to manage your experience, only to offer up to you a product to be purchased (tickets please). The management of your experience is Pirate Prentice’s job, and the last time we saw him operating as a fantasy surrogate, he was in combat with an oversized Adenoid. Seems, I dunno… intentional(?) that our very own Zhlubb should be suffering from an “adenoidal condition”.
It also bears repeating that the object of his ire is the sound of dissenting harmonica. Evidently, the dispersal of Slothrop and his mouth harp “all through our crippl’d Zone” was something of a situational necessity to catalyze the burgeoning Counterforce that gathered in his wake. Now they’re all waiting in Zhlubb’s “queues, especially for midnight showings, [and] in a state of near anarchy because of the musical instrument.”
“‘It’s been going on ever since our Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casarès Film Festival’ complains Zhlubb, who is fiftyish and jowled, with a permanent five-o’clock shadow (the worst by far of all the Hourly Shadows), and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted “peace sign,” which also happens to be semaphore code for the letter U, exposing in the act uncounted yards of white French cuff.
I’ll just drop this in right here, the perfect antithesis to the Pacifists’ iconic peace sign that became synonymous with the Counterculture in our collective memory.
Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
“‘Here, Richard,’ jeers a passerby, ‘I got your French cuff, right here,’ meanwhile exposing himself in the grossest possible way and manipulating his foreskin in a manner your correspondent cannot set upon his page. Manager Zhlubb winces slightly. ‘That’s one of the ringleaders, definitely,’ he confides. ‘I’ve had a lot of trouble with him. Him and that Steve Edelman.’ He pronounces it ‘Edelbid.’ ‘I’b dot afraid to dabe dabes’.
The case he refers to is still pending. Steve Edelman, a Hollywood businessman, accused last year of an 11569 (Attempted Mopery with a Subversive Instrument), is currently in Atascadero under indefinite observation. It is alleged that Edelman, in an unauthorized state of mind, attempted to play a chord progression on the Department of Justice list, out in the street and in the presence of a whole movie-queue of witnesses. ‘A-and now they’re all doing it. Well, not ‘all,’ let me just clarify that, of course the actual lawbreakers are only a small but loud minority, what I meant to say was, all those like Edelman. Certainly not all those good folks in the queue. A-ha-ha. Here, let me show you something.’”
The Most Dangerous Man in America
Steve Edelman is another one of the spectral enigmas that repeatedly dances a jaunty two-step through the chronological superimposition of Pynchon’s Zone. There’s no rigid consensus on whether a real figure of historical significance existed by this name. I see Edelman as another of those translucent Imipolex shrouds – not unlike Richard M. Zhlubb – to mask an individual who does indeed hold significant cultural capital.
Edelman’s first appearance is early into Part 3 as the editor of “Tales of the Schwartzkommando,” followed by a yawning absence until this final chapter when he reappears as a Kabbalist spokesperson and “habitual user of this tranquilizing drug [Thorazine].” There’s your first clue. Pynchon then plays his hand pretty bluntly by revealing that Edelman is “currently in Atascadero under indefinite observation.” That small detail is sufficient to correspond Edelman to Timothy Leary, notable for his strong Countercultural dispensation, psychedelic research, and imprisonment on trumped-up drug charges.
Timothy Leary | Photographer: Robert Altman
A “fierce individualist libertarian” who Nixon (possibly apocryphally) called “the most dangerous man in America” shared Pynchon’s unabashed ire of the military-industrial complex. In the annals of his Archive, now housed in the New York Public Library, we have it conveniently committed to record that the former admired the latter, having read GR while incarcerated for one his many psychotropic misdemeanors (felonies in the eyes of the California judicial system). "Every character in Gravity's Rainbow is either an operative working for a Psycho-political hive-bureaucracy, or an Independent Intelligence Agent (Out-Caste) working counter to the hive-bureaucracy."
In these final gasps of the novel’s breathless conclusion, following Slothrop’s dispersal, one could consider Leary as a gesture toward aggregation rather than decumulation, gathering fragments of the Counterforce Pynchon considered his peers into a single totemic figure. What better choice for his Golden Calf (though as far as metaphors go, Pig would probably be more apt) than the raspberry seed in Nixon’s wisdom tooth? Regardless of the scale of Nixon’s disdain for Leary, it’s inarguable that their socioeconomic inclinations ran antithetical to one another; simulacrums of the two nodes to Pynchon’s electromagnetic field: Preterition and Election.
Complicity and Cultural Decay
“He ushers you into the black Managerial Volkswagen, and before you know it, you’re on the freeways. Near the interchange of the San Diego and the Santa Monica, Zhlubb points to a stretch of pavement: ‘Here’s where I got my first glimpse of one. Driving a VW, just like mine. Imagine. I couldn’t believe my eyes.’ But it is difficult to keep one’s whole attention centered on Manager Zhlubb. The Santa Monica Freeway is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as they say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks, and they are all out today, making it difficult for you to follow the Manager’s entertaining story. You cannot repress a certain shudder of distaste, almost a reflexive Consciousness of Kind, in their presence. They come gibbering in at you from all sides, swarming in, rolling their eyes through the side windows, playing harmonicas and even kazoos, in full disrespect for the Prohibitions. ‘Relax,’ the Manager’s eyes characteristically aglitter. ‘There’ll be a nice secure home for them all, down in Orange County. Right next to Disneyland,’ pausing then exactly like a nightclub comic, alone in his tar circle, his chalk terror.”
Woodstock | 1969 | AP
I mean seriously, you can’t ask for a better Pynchonian one-liner than “the Managerial Volkswagon.” A staunchly conservative politician… driving a consumer vehicle produced in Nazi Germany… which was later appropriated as a symbol of the anti-fascist American Counterculture.
The Preterite and the Elect slam face-first into one another as Pynchon decries not only the government that exploited its citizens but also those citizens who excused their own complicity in that system. A “generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone […] desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them […] willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.”
Tell me, can we say with any degree of ontological stability that the Zone is meant to correspond with Occupied Germany? At a naturalist level, sure, it’s hard to argue. But given the temporal overlay present—a technique I suspect Pynchon drew from Finnegans Wake—one could go so far as to suggest that the America he witnessed during the Long Sixties was something of a Zone itself. A place where even our seemingly most innocent institutions of childhood awe are actually products of intergovernmental collusion, whose “real business […] is buying and selling.”
Some of the Preterite—Timothy Leary not least among them—saw the establishment architecture for what it was and fought their good fight right through to their whimpering ends. Others rolled over and showed their bellies to the now-gridded sky, submitting to that very architecture and understanding that despite their marches, protests, hunger strikes, and dissident poetry, they had lost. You can find the last vestiges of these cultural failures today, 40 miles southeast of Gordita Beach. You can also find them explicitly in Pynchon’s oeuvre, in a tight 480-pages he called Vineland (woefully undervalued in his catalogue, I might add).
“Laughter surrounds you. Full, faithful-audience laughter, coming from the four points of the padded interior. You realize, with a vague sense of dismay, that this is some kind of a stereo rig here, and a glance inside the glove compartment reveals an entire library of similar tapes: CHEERING (AFFECTIONATE), CHEERING (AROUSED), HOSTILE MOB in an assortment of 22 languages, YESES, NOES, NEGRO SUPPORTERS, WOMEN SUPPORTERS, ATHLETIC —oh, come now—FIRE-FIGHT (CONVENTIONAL), FIRE-FIGHT (NUCLEAR), FIREFIGHT (URBAN), CATHEDRAL ACOUSTICS…
‘We have to talk in some kind of code, naturally’ continues the Manager. ‘We always have. But none of the codes is that hard to break. Opponents have accused us, for just that reason, of contempt for the people. But really we do it all in the spirit of fair play. We’re not monsters. We know we have to give them some chance. We can’t take hope away from them, can we?’”
You keep telling yourself that, Dick. You’re right, you have been accused of contempt for your people. If one were to rattle off a few of the most outspoken names that claimed so, they might reach for Gary Webb, David Talbot, or James Douglas. Those are just three of the many whistleblowers (or is “harp players” a better analogue?) who called you and the rest of the Elect on your collective bullshit. “Capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are—” But I guess that’s neither here nor there.
Unraveling the Counterforce
“The Volkswagen is now over downtown L.A., where the stream of traffic edges aside for a convoy of dark Lincolns, some Fords, even GMCs, but not a Pontiac in the lot. Stuck on each windshield and rear window is a fluorescent orange strip that reads FUNERAL.
The Manager’s sniffling now. ‘He was one of the best. I couldn’t go myself, but I did send a high-level assistant. Who’ll ever replace him, I wonder,’ punching a sly button under the dash. The laughter this time is sparse male oh-hoho’s with an edge of cigar smoke and aged bourbon. Sparse but loud. Phrases like ‘Dick, you character!’ and ‘Listen to him,’ can also be made out.”
The noise-to-signal ratio is at an all-time high during this last chapter, so if didn’t recognize these historical signifiers for what they are the first time you read it, I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest. “The Counterforce” is so densely encoded with references, redirections, and red herrings it can be hard to tease out what is and isn’t pertinent. What you’re reading here is a depiction of Kennedy’s funeral procession, transposed from Washington DC to the inbound freeways of LA. Our Nixon stand-in is gesturing at something vaguely suggestive of grief, despite being a staunch campaign opponent and ideological foil to Kennedy.
All this somewhat begs further questioning: why is Pynchon positioning Kennedy in these ascendant moments of the novel’s climax? Following the monstrous fuckup that was the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy notoriously described his desire to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” This was, of course, unacceptable to the right-leaning Jingoists who relied on the Agency to maintain their amicable relationships with fascist dictatorships. Now, I have neither the time nor the constitution to relitigate the competing theories as to why JFK’s prefrontal painted Dealy Plaza, so I’ll simply direct you to two sources which are more inclined to do so: TrueAnon, and Death is Just Around the Corner. While I don’t believe Pynchon’s relationship with Kennedy was uncomplicated, I am convinced Pynchon was right there with him in the belief that the CIA was, to borrow Bernie Sanders’ words, “a tool of American corporate interests that repeatedly toppled democratic leaders.” A moment of silence for Patrice Lumumba. One might consider them paralleled in their (correct) belief that the CIA is one of the most monstrous extrajudicial creations ever wrecked upon God’s Green Earth.
One can only infer this less-than-enthusiastic opinion toward three-letter agencies as a possible motivation for why the initialism “CIA” appears (by my count) three times throughout the novel. Sorry Tom but “Committee on Incandescent Anomalies”? You would need some serious syntactic gymnastics to not make that scream conspicuously up from the page.
Kennedy Funeral, Memorial Bridge | LA Times
“‘I have a fantasy about how I’ll die. I suppose you’re on their payroll, but that’s all right. Listen to this. It’s 3 a.m., on the Santa Monica Freeway, a warm night. All my windows are open. I’m doing about 70, 75. The wind blows in, and from the floor in back lifts a thin plastic bag, a common drycleaning bag: it comes floating in the air, moving from behind, the mercury lights turning it white as a ghost… it wraps around my head, so superfine and transparent I don’t know it’s there really until too late. A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death…’
Heading up the Hollywood Freeway, between a mysteriously-canvased trailer rig and a liquid-hydrogen tanker sleek as a torpedo, we come upon a veritable caravan of harmonica players. ‘At least it’s not those tambourines,’ Zhlubb mutters. ‘There aren’t as many tambourines as last year, thank God.’
Machinery of Terror: Pynchon on the Military-Industrial Complex
If his work on BOMARC Service News is any indication, Pynchon has a deep familiarity with the propulsion systems used by ICBMs. While liquid oxygen is the propellant typically evoked throughout the book, later permutations would shift to liquid hydrogen and eventually solid fuel to fire their vessels of hatred into our Terrestrial Vault. The multiplicity of interpretation notwithstanding, you cannot deny the intentionality of depicting the raw material of terror and control here. Contrary to his promise on the second page, this is both a “disentanglement from [and] a progressive knotting into.” This has been the author’s modus from his opening line: to deconstruct the fantasy of the System that’s been managed for you and reassemble it as something that closer resembles… I dunno, the fucking truth?
What we’re witnessing here in the wake of Kennedy’s death, is the military-industrial machinery moving under the cover of night toward its Holy Centre, its final iteration. A World on the Grid, where every throbbing heartbeat is positioned under a Poisson distribution recalibrated to selectively target those who operate in any manner deemed antithetical to the Machine’s interests. These rockets are falling over the dilapidated and impoverished East End, remember?
Plenty of “harmonica players” (you should recognize the gesture for what it is by now) screamed their warnings up at the sign of a techno-capitalist future to come but did anyone take even a passing moment to listen? Some of you probably did but many of the players had their harps ripped from their mouths before they got a chance to reach that particularly groovy chord. Sit here and graft whatever pseudo-intellectual Jungian bullshit reading onto this text you want; Pynchon is speaking to you in unabstracted terms here. The last vestiges of resistance against these extra-governmental thugs is riding headless in the back of a hearse, while we sit in the jump seat with a schlub behind the wheel. “Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide… though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker…” Hope you folks are happy sleeping in the bed you made, because this is your country now.
“Quilted-steel catering trucks crisscross in the afternoon. Their ripples shine like a lake of potable water after hard desert passage. It’s a Collection Day, and the garbage trucks are all heading north toward the Ventura Freeway, a catharsis of dumpsters, all hues, shapes and batterings. Returning to the Center, with all the gathered fragments of the Vessels…”
Any evocation of the Kabbalah draws us immediately back to Part One, where two cells speak to one another from within the central nervous system of Rollo Groast:
“It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home—only the millions of last moments… no more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”
You’re damn right about that; you’re reading one of them. The new aggregation of technology, concentrated capital, fascism, and innocent death compacted into a shining, phallic vessel that’s now closing the gap of that last delta-P overtop of the American Panopticon as the country watches on in stunned silence. You may have seen this film before, but I don’t think you’re prepared for what they’re about to show.
“The sound of a siren takes you both unaware. Zhlubb looks up sharply into his mirror. ‘You’re not holding, are you?’
But the sound is greater than police. It wraps the concrete and the smog, it fills the basin and mountains further than any mortal could ever move… could move in time…
‘I don’t think that’s a police siren.’ Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. ‘I don’t think—’”
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now.
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Sydney, 2024
Werner von Braun | Getty Images
