GRGR(10) Control, and a Dostoevsky anecdote

[Paul Mackin]

> From: Juan Cires Martinez <jcm at mat.upm.es>

>  "``It's control.  All these things arise from one difficulty: control.
>   For the first time it was *inside*, do you see.  The control is put
>   inside.  No more need to suffer passively under `outside forces' -- to
>   veer into any wind.  As if ...
>     ``A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now
>   could *create itself* -- its own logic, momentum, style, from
>   *inside*.  Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had
>   happened -- that you had dispensed with God.  But you had taken on
>   a greater, and more harmful, illusion.  The illusion of control.  That
>   A could do B.  But that was false.  Completely.  No one can *do*.
>   Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought
>   to be inseparable...''"  (p. 30?)
> 
> And now the Dostoevsky anecdote:  some time ago I asked a literature
> professor about Pynchon and he said, literally, that Pynchon is a bad
> imitation of Dostoevsky.  I don't remember in what sense.  So it doesn't
> surprise me to see so much Dostoevsky in those lists...
> 


Seems pretty likely the literature prof had in mind the very passage you
quote, Juan. The cosmic stuggle between God and Man. Pynchon tries
to bring it up to date--apparently without great success according to the
professor.

Both Dostoevsky and Pynchon are obsessed with those "accursed
questions."

Can't help notice the passage quoted bears on the dismal science,
putting Rathenau clearly into the picture. Rathenau had not been
satisfied with Adam Smith's Invisible Hand,  but lived (died actually)
to regret it. This doesn't mean the Chicago School is correct.  Just
one more unresolved conflict. And of course merely the tip of the
iceberg. 


				P.