Maddox, Chomsky, TRP, & LeCarre

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

> Hey, hg, mail order a copy of Halo, right now. Or there's a great short story,

thanks, all on the list

> Incredulous, hg exclaims: "John LeCarre? r u serius??"
> 
> Of course I'm serious. I can't think of more than 5 or 6 contemporary
> American writers who are in LeCarre''s league. You pomo heads ought to
> give the "popular" writers as much respect as you give "popular science"

or as little - I agree with you

> hg PS's: "I may be way off, but it seems to me that you are under the
> impression that TRP has some kind of obligation to produce a certain
> kind of work; also, that you are labouring under the Chomskyan
> illusion that there is some kind of truth out there that is being
> kept from us, and that writers such as TRP should help us find -
> correct me if I'm wrong...."
> 
> You're right, sort of. I don't believe Pynchon is under any "obligation"
> to produce a certain kind of work, one that would--you imply--please
> my own radical political and aesthetic sensibility. The only obligation
> he has is to the integrity of his own work. 

"Intergrity", see, that's one of those heavy, baggage-laden terms I'm not so 
sure about - doesn't it make some "wrong" and "insane" assertions, 
     that we are meant for work, for government, for 
     austerity: and these shall take priority over love,
     dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class 
     trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of 
     the day... (GR, 177).

>                              Let's face it Vineland--which
> has wrongly been interpreted as some sort of thematic deviation from
> past works (especially off-base, in my view, is the lunatic idea that VL is
> more hopeful than past writings:  this reading can only be true if
> TRP has completely lost his sense of irony, which even I don't believe has left
> him yet)--doesn't live up to the standards of his past writings or the
> promise of Vineland itself

maybe that's a double irony, right there? or even a conscious 
re-evaluation of the good old high/low culture divide? 

> Of course, I'm a devote of Noam Chomsky. So is Pynchon (do a close read
> of the Tinasky letters, Vineland, and GR--Chomsky's stuff is embedded throughout
> each.) 

Yes - but so is Pavlov's and Cesare Lombroso's. What I think is one 
of Pynchon's particular strengths is that he is able to see both the 
similarities and differences of all these totalizing discourses he so casually 
and effortlessly de(con)structs in his fiction.

>        Indeed, it can easily be argued that Chomsky and Edward Herman are
> as much an influence on TRP as McLuhan and Norbert Weiner. More, I'd wager.
> Pynchon's no relativist when it comes to politics, economics,
> human rights, the environment. I know where his sympatheties are; indeed,

of course, no question indeed - but do you think it's a weakness to 
realize that even the greatest villains are humans, or vice versa? 
does acknowledging that Cecil John Rhodes may have really loved his 
dog make one an ethical relativist? or even the realisation that 
Abraham's monotheist abomination is just as surely part of Their 
structures as National Socialism?

> they're crucial to his work. Of course, many of the most prominent pomo
> critics (Frederic Jameson, excluded), try to strip this out of
> Pynchon-crit, perhaps because so many of the wretched pomo/decon crowd
> were/are Nazi symps
> and closet fascists (LeMan, Derrida, Heidegger, etc...).

I bet that's what the Lost Novel was about - the Pomo Fascists 
managed to conspire to keep it unpublished....
 
> Do you deny there are secret histories out there, truths that are being kept
> from us by the thought censors at the New York Times (not to mention the
> smug Peter Jennings or the mumbled-mouthed Dan Rather)? The Times knew, for
> example, that Allen Dulles was importing Nazi war criminals (rocket
> scientists, "geneticists," SS officers, architects, munitions experts,
> intelligence oerpatives, u.s.w.) to the US. The Times didn't report it. The
> Times knew of the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia--Kissinger convinced
> Scotty Reston not to publish the reports. They knew Reagan had alzheimers,
> JKF and Bill Clinton were screwing around, They knew our boys offed Patrice
> Lumumanda of the Congo and Allende in Chile (and why), knew of our
> involvement in the genocide occuring in East Timor--mostly on behalf of US
> corporations). Didn't make the papers when it would have mattered. Hell,
> half the US foreign correspondents are CIA informants. Wake up...this kind
> of sophisticated thought control by the powerbrokers of this country is
> vital to any understanding of  Pynchon's writing.

You are spot on. And please don't forget Angola - now there is 
something to write about! And what about Mozambique? Did you hear 
about the Texas billionaire who used to financially support Renamo and 
all their jolly finger / genital chop-chopping, and has now convinced the 
government to allow him to open a huuuuge eco-tourism resort? Talk about 
conspiracy - eco-tourism and fascism, now there's something you wouldn't 
expect in bed together - or would you?
 
> Geeze, that's what makes TRP America's most important writer since
> Faulkner, perhaps since Henry Adams (whose history of how Jay Gould
> cornered the Gold Market--never mind his almost unread Chapters of Erie--is
> a sadly neglected niche of Pynchon scholarship.)
> 
> Pynchon, like his intellectual soulmate Peter Mattheissen, writes about
> things that matter, (love, nature, death, community, betrayal, promise,
> oppression, dogs, rebellion, survival, rivers, addictions, redemption--the

red wine, trees, lemmings, sweat, laughing, crying, music, friends, breakfast ...

> shared epistemologies of everyday life, the ways we form, what the great
> Levi-Strauss called, tiny solidarities to resist, create, connect, and
> endure the baroque, mundane and often horrific the rhythms of history,) to
> real people, That's what saves Pynchon--even at his worst, as in Vineland--

No - that's not what SAVES Pynchon, but what DEFINES him. Big 
difference.

> Oh yeah. You, like George Bush, Tipper Gore, and Bob Dole before you, take
> a pot shot at Oliver Stone. Besides Scorsese and Coppola (Kubrick having
> expatriated), name another contemporary American director who has even
> dared to interpret recent American history. 

Spike Lee? another one to make quaint little ethnic sit-coms about insecure 
adolescent males agonizing about the meaning of their banana

>                      Stone's the Norman Mailer of
> the American cinema, 

is this a comment about American cinema?

>              and I, for one, am damn glad he's making films like
> JFK, Heaven and Earth, Nixon, Born on the 4th of July, Talk Radio, the
> Doors, Salvador (who else would have touched that one, eh?) and even
> Natural Born Killers.

I'm also glad that he's making them - like Charles Dickens, Oliver 
Stone tells a good story. But like with Dickens, one should not 
forget that the stories he tells are mere mirror images of the status 
quo, and many things still lurk in the shadows waiting to be fed.

hg
hag at iafrica.com