American Death (was: Plastics!! (and coal tar))

[Paul Mackin]

Concerning GR p. 722 and thereabouts:

Don't know if I should dive into these shark-infested waters but . . .

in that wife-stealing article I think it was, P was quoted as saying that
he couldn't imagine WHAT he could have had in mind at the time certain 
passages of GR were written.

Might these paragraphs be some of what he was referring to?

Many beautifully expressed images here, but it's a little hard to put 
them together. 

America is seen as having taken on some new negative. (The a-bomb hadn't 
quite happened, but the scene is related to Geli at a time fairly close 
to August 1945.) 

For Europe, America is a way of RETURNING (an opportunity
to go around the cycle one more time). Somehow Europe refuses.
Does Europe, like Blicero, "want to break out--to leave this cycle of 
infection and death"? 

There is the idea that sin is passed by inheritance from parent
to child (old world to new world, Blicero to Gottfried), rather than
being an acquired characteristic. (Some early theologians spoke of
Original Sin in this light.)  Pynchon seems not to want to preclude 
the possibility that what applies to the original also applies to the
subsequent in spades. (bridge, anyone?)

Later there is almost the implication that a divine plan is at 
work: "Death in its ingenuity has contrived to make the father and son
beautiful to each other as Life has made male and female . . .  oh 
Gottfried of course yes you are beautiful to me but I'm dying . . . I
want to get through it as honestly as I can, and your immortality 
rips at my heart--can't you see why I might want to destroy that, oh that 
stupid clarity in your eyes . . . when I . . . (the sentence continues)

Death always Death. Europe's "Original Sin" was Modern Analysis.
And of course analysis is a breaking down, and death. Death to what is
rejected as untenable, incorrect, not the case. (even inconvenient or
too expensive)

This post is in no way meant to imply that the old-/new-world
stuff is playing itself out on this wonderful and I hope never-
to-die list. :-)

					P.