Totality/Casting GR

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Adrian Kelly writes:
"Is Pynchon acknowledging the (conditioned) reflex
to misrecognize oppressive totalities such as the folk-consciouness, or is
he 'mistakenly' associating the multiplicity advocated in the second
passage (or have I misread it?) with a totalizing fusion?  Is the overall
text itself, despite its avowedly anti-totality gesture nonetheless
totalitarian, a "'motley painting of everything that has ever been
known'" as D&G say again of capitalism in AO?  Big questions I guess.
Any thoughts? "

First, rather than scamper to D&G for insights (although I think too that
they are uncannily close to P quite often--hey, I got to Warwick too!), we
might look at Max Weber's Gesselschaft and Gemeinschaft (if I've got those
right), elsewhere surfacing in Vonnegut as "karrasses" and "granfalloons"
(if I've got those right).

As to the text, doesn't P constantly undercut totalization by a) referring
us back out of the text--this isn't the totalizing universe of Joyce or
Nabokov--and b) self-critiquing via such passages as the "explication of 
the Text" discussion (and here we are whacking away at it just as predicted)?

Finally, as to casting:
for Blicero--maybe Klaus Kinski (using makeup left over from NOSFERATU)

o-or

how about double-casting the later Peter Sellers as Blicero (in a serious
role) and (comically) Poinstman?

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN