The Italian Wedding Fake Book

[Greg Montalbano]

David Casseres, on WE/THEY:

>I agree.  And just the other evening I ran into a passage, toward the end 
>of Gravity's Rainbow, that gave me yet another of those "so *that's* what 
>he's trying to tell us" experiences: Pirate Prentice lecturing Roger 
>Mexico, who has just gone round the bend into, literally, raving 
>paranoia.  Pirate explains to him that if you really want to do paranoia 
>right, you need to have not only a Them-system but also a We-system (it's 
>the other end of the remark near the beginning that paranoia is just the 
>leading edge of the perception that Everything Is Connected).
>
>The narrative then reels off into a lot of loosely connected passages 
>that seem to be about Slothrop trying to put together or find some sort 
>of a We-system to save his sorry ass.  Slothrop himself is disintegrating 
>rapidly as a character and everything gets more and more like a comic 
>book or a Busby Berkeley number.  In Gravity's Rainbow, as in V., there 
>is no viable We-system; it's a joke.  But The Crying of Lot 49 and 
>Vineland are about Us.  This parallels the dichotomy someone proposed 
>between the mythical (Them) and subcultural (We) novels.
>
>In Lot 49 and Vineland, the We-system turns out to be mostly a forlorn 
>wish, natch.  It doesn't really manage to be a Counterforce after all.  
>One reason they're short books.  But as Mason and Dixon comes up over my 
>horizon, I am wondering if it will turn out to be, at last, the paranoid 
>synthesis that Pirate proposed -- achieved only by going back two hundred 
>years to find out who We might be and *how* Everything Is Connected.  
>That would be nice.
>

Good point;  and suggestive of a certain pleasing symmetry.

All I would add, regarding the "forlorn" nature of the Couterforce, is:

Going to the next level, there are hints, clues & suggestions throughout
V and GR that the "They-system" may not be as organized or intentional as
it's victims might think.  Part of the defining character of Pynchon's
paranoia is the possibility that it's all a construct of characters who
cannot imagine the universe as random, as impersonal as described in the
mechanistic Age of Reason.  The oppression of Everything being Connected (in
such a manner that it works against "us") is somehow never as terrifying as
the idea that NONE of it is connected;  that "shit just happens."

Paranoia, and then some.