Marvy

[Mr Craig Clark]

> From: Penny Padgett:    But are any of these castratable offenses?
> From: Aaron Yeater:  	I always figured the ole' boy's castration was not 
> a come-uppance, as such, but a moment of comic incompetence by "them".
> From Brian D. McCary:      I think Aaron's got this one right.  I never saw
> Marvy's castration as punishment.  If anything, there is a little ironic counter
> action: here is a character who is overtly racist, mysoginistic, and sadistic, as well
> as a fool of the system, and we can't do much about it, but at least 
> the world a generation from now will be a better place if he doesn't 
> have kids to pass his values on to.  It's the same as the knowlege/death
> thing on the Saved thread; it's easier to prevent the creation of a
> bigot than to re-educate them later.  But, as Aaron points out, this is
> not a direct act, it's just noise in the system leading to systemic
> limitation.

A-and don't forget that Pointsman basically gets excreted upon from 
the proverbial dizzy height for this particular screw-up. It's the 
end of his Nobel dreams. So "They" aren't out to cut marvy's balls 
off - it's a good example of the kind of entropy in Their system 
which They try to control, and fail. There appear to be two forms of 
entropy in TRP (and indeed, as I understand it, in thermodynamics): 
that which represents the system's tendency towards death and 
immobility, and that which represents the system's ability to be 
unpredictable, surprising (and therefore arguably free from control). 
They perpetuate the former but are maybe defeated by the latter, and 
GR contains a number of hints of this: Ludwig finds his lemming, Geli 
finds her Vaslav.

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"