Pynchon list

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Jan(et?) writes:
>The point about the degree of understanding of these "secret politics" that 
the
individual can have is well made, but we're still often talking about the
exposure of real economic connections.
>

One interesting place to take this thread (brought to mind partly by your 
description of Port au Prince) would be this issue of paranoia, but examined 
from the premise that there are two "histories" (a self-evident truth to the 
Pynchonized).  One is endlessly churned out by the Official Media.  The 
other is Actuality.

Interestingly, Official Media seems to exist in all known political 
contexts---Dan Rather is not that different from the party hacks that drone 
out the official line in Beijing, or the old apparat in the Kremlin.  You 
might even say the citizens of the ex-USSR had the advantage over us in the 
States of a conciousness that more thoroughly recognized the slant---which 
made it easier for them to reach some concensus between the lines on what 
was *really* going on.  The amount of attention TRP gives to observing his 
characters dealing with propaganda is tremendous.

Then there's Actuality.  In a way, what TRP is getting at is not really 
paranoia at all, because paranoia implies distortion.  What we often call 
paranoia in his work is rather the rejection in various ways by characters 
of the Official Media.  One of the points I was trying to give shape to was 
that TRP seems focused on the dance that individuals do in coping with the 
mismatch between Official Media and Actuality.  This rather than the systems 
analysis oriented critique more common to his generation.  Of the same 
generation, I often use the term "political" in the sense of 
meta-individual---though I have come to suspect this deployment more and 
more.  Maybe TRP has just gone beyond this dichotomy.  Clearly it is no 
matter for surprise for him that global corporate operations (e.g., Shell) 
know no war-time allegiances.  With these "real economic connections" as a 
given, perhaps he then wants to understand how we carry on, creatures of 
Actuality within the sh*t storm of Official Media...

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Lindsay Gillies                           FMR Corp.
lindsay.gillies at fmr.com         82 Devonshire Street, R22A
617-563-5363                              Boston, MA 02109
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