Captalism and Pynchon (was: RE: The Olympics)

[Henry Musikar]

How about the Black Market? I think that the passages concerning the
black market as capitalism in microcosm indicate P's true ambivalences
towards the whole K thing. No film enthusiast would write about the
black market without thinking of The Third Man. A-and how about the
fur-henchmen? Eh? 

On  7 Aug 96 at 10:02, Scott Weintraub wrote:

> Date:          Wed, 7 Aug 1996 10:02:36 -0400 (EDT)
> From:          Scott Weintraub <scottw at wam.umd.edu>
> To:            Pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject:       Re: Captalism and Pynchon (was: RE: The Olympics)

> On Wed, 7 Aug 1996, Mr Craig Clark wrote:
> 
> > Agreed, but I think _Gravity's Rainbow_ indicates a deep hostility
> > towards capitalism. A very deep hostility. Way deep. I mean, you
> > thought _Capital_ was anti-capitalist, but boy you ain't seen
> > nothing till you read the Rainbow.
> 
> I never got this message from _GR_.  While I think it's extremely
> safe to say that Pynchon is anti-Big Business, I'm not sure it can
> be taken much further.  If we're sticking with the equation that
> chaos = good and order = bad, in theory, what's better than a free
> market?  I'm looking at a dictionary right now (Webster's) and it
> says that capitalism is "an economic system characterized by private
> or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are
> determined by private decision rather than by state control, and by
> prices, production, and the distruction of goods that are determined
> mainly by competition in a free market."  With free enterprise, we
> have a market that is an entity of its own.  Every variable in the
> system determines how it will act next.  Just like any large system,
> there are plenty of unknowns.  The market takes random (entropic)
> shifts.  If it didn't, we'd all be rich.  I don't see why Pynchon
> wouldn't favor something like this.
> 
> > 
> > Where the ambiguity creeps in is in regard to the alternative.
> > Don't think TRP is exactly enamoured of what Orwell calls
> > oligarchical collectivism, as practised in the former Soviet
> > Union, either.
> > 
> 
> Yeah, definitely not, although, keeping TRP's hippie background in
> mind, I could easily see him going for an "Easy Rider"esque commune,
> something self-sufficient.  He doesn't seem like the collective farm
> type.
> 
> When it comes down to it, I think the best theme to cling to would
> state that rules and authority figures in any economic system are
> bad.  When a commune is, in reality, a cult with a strong hold on
> its members, that's bad.  A Ma and Pa drug store in Tennessee,
> that's good.  Microsoft, an entity attempting to impose utmost order
> on a (theoretically) free enterprise system, is bad.  Something like
> that.
> 
> > 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"
> > 
> > 
> 
> Scott Weintraub
> scottw at wam.umd.edu
> 
> 

Keep cool, but care. -- TRP