Johnny Quest

[David Casseres]

Joseph Cerrato sez

>Catching up as usual with several days of unread messages, I come across the
>quest thread, Galahad and the Grail usw... I agree with most of Diana's 
>posting although the cycle of round table medieval romances may offer more  
>complexity and ambiguity than what Galahad's successul quest of the Grail
>suggests.  After all most of these stories deal with the loss of meaning in
>a world where even the best of men, like say  Arthur or Lancelot, find
>themselves progressively cut off from the magic  which had originally brought
>them together and made them heroes. Well for sure, it's the repetition of the
>Christian founding myth, all men seem to repeat Adam's destiny of fall from
>paradise, but we may read it differently. It's the "end of the heroic times"
>in the "post-quest" world.  The times are ripe for Mordred and other such
>"They" characters. 

I've somehow missed most of this mythology thread; I hope it's still on its way to me and I'm hearing its impact here before it arrives.

A bit to add to the above: the beginning of Arthur's career, when he pulls the sword out of the stone, is often interpreted phallically or politically, but I've always seen it as an almost literal account of the discovery of metallurgy, making Arthur the first technological hero.  And he uses his whizzy new technology to change the world for the Good of All Mankind, only to see it all turn into ignorant armies clashing by night and die bitter and broke.  He's been fooled by the oldest promise of technology, that it will make us like the mythic heroes, but in fact it destroys the heroic and just makes us into deadlier mortals than we were before.  Maybe there never really was a mythic magic, it was just that there weren't enough heroes to really fuck things up, eh?

All the technologists in Pynchon, be it noted, are decidely post-Arthurian.  The only technological quests (well maybe) are Slothrop's not-for-real search for the Schwartzgerät -- he puts at least as much effort into recovering Saure Bummer's hash -- and Blicero's to use the 00000 to launch a man *clear off the planet*, even if only for an instant at the zero of apogee....


Cheers,
David