FW: Re [2]: Hystories

[Jan Klimkowski]

Vaska wrote:
>It may well turn out that like the Shell Shock Syndrome, a portion of
>whose sufferers were the victims of some WWI chemical warfare that
>could and did indeed produce a variety of psychiatric symptoms, the Gulf   

>War one will eventually be seen as a blanket term for a variety of
>afflictions whose etiologies are markedly dissmilar: Showalter may still   

>have a point there.

Sure, a proportion of Gulf War Syndrome will likely turn out to be good   
ole fashioned shellshock, aka PTSD.  Wars do terrible things to minds.   
 But the problem with Showalter's argument is that she is ruling out an   
organic cause (eg sideeffects of exposure to chemical/biological warfare)   
in favour of a psychological one.  Thus IMHO, Showalter has no point.

In his post, Eric alluded to the wider frame of Showalter's argument   
perhaps being of interest to the ListWorld.  I agree.  Showalter does   
spend much time describing the type of cultural feedback loops which lead   
to, say, an American epidemic of alien abductions.  Good Pynchon   
territory and all fine and dandy.  But she then extends this argument to   
the likes of Gulf War Syndrome.

Of course, soldiers talk to each other, and a few deformed babies can   
soon become a national crisis, even while the epidemiologists are busily   
reassuring us that the numbers are not statistically significant (sic).   
 However, with  Gulf War Syndrome there is almost certainly an organic   
cause for some of the afflictions:  soldiers were exposed to dangerous   
combinations of chemical agents which we know do nasty things to rats.

And for me, this is the rub with Pynchon too.  In what now seems like an   
early incarnation of globalisation, international companies did continue   
to trade "with the enemy" throughout WW2.  Slothrop discovers the tip of   
this iceberg, and GR brilliantly explores the effects of these   
discoveries on his psyche. BUT GR is not the proto-conspiracy theory   
book,  (BTW the phrase "conspiracy theory" is almost certainly a PsyOps   
invention).  It is not a study in unfounded paranoia.  It is, rather, on   
one of its many levels, a study of how the mind copes with information   
which threatens all its fundamental assumptions, whilst knowing that the   
full picture will never be available.  That it will be never be possible   
to know quite HOW different things are.....

jan