paranoid thinking

[Greg Montalbano]

Yow -- nice connection!
I've always felt that Fausto was one of the more significant of Pynchon's
characters;  I've been on the list for a couple of years, but haven't
noticed that much discussion of him.
In retrospect, it's really kind of amazing how convincing & involving a
character he is (compared to some of the others in the book), considering
how YOUNG Pynchon was when he wrote it.  While it's easy NOW to see TRP in
the Rev'd Cherrycoke, the job he did THEN of portraying a man near the end
of his life, moving very slowly under the accumulated weight of years &
events, was startlingly accurate (speaking as a man near the end of his
life, moving slowly etc).

~G~

At 11:49 AM 7/3/97 -0400, you wrote:
>In line with Greg's comments on paranoia and conspiracies, who can forget
>the brilliant remarks of Fausto on the essential work of the 20th century
>poet: to lie.  But to lie knowingly.  Other men take science and religions
>literally.  Poets know that they are the constructions of individuals
>(some of them poets) who impose the human needs for order, meaning,
>purpose, causality, consciousness, tenacity, etc. on a brute universe.
>Lots of people do this: Hesiod, Homer, Moses, Ikhnaton,even Mulder, you
>name 'em. But it is the poet who understands such images of order are
>metaphors mirroring the needs and fears of those who create the images.
>Knowing the order, no matter how reassuring or paranoid, is a
>psychological projection, poets, like Fausto after WWII, can reclaim the
>qualities projected in order to augment their own humanity and thereby
>avoid the fates of Herbert and Victoria.  Has TRP ever created a character
>more moving and brilliant than the Maltese poet?  Surely he is a
>philosophical brother of Kant, Henry Adams, and Wallace Stevens, among
>others.
>	To be sure, individuals like Herbert, Victoria, Hitler may pursue
>death-dealing projects, but these are relative orders, not absolute ones.
>The proper pursuit of absolute order, such as may exist, would be with the
>reasonable doubts of something like chaos theory--not by buying into the
>revelations of individual order-makers.  
> 	Perhaps Fausto's insights have become axioms evaluated by those on
>the list longer than myself.  But they do not appear to have been taken
>seriously.  Surely they are fundamentals of TRP's poetics and concepts of
>what exists and how we know what exists.  Am I wrong?
>	If one sets out to draw a line across a wild land, one may base it
>upon the stars, but does it have a human meaning more valid than the
>truths of astrologers?  Is it more fruitful than a jar placed upon a hill
>in Tennessee to order the wilderness?               JRR
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