Woge, Thanatoids and Spirits
Meg Larson
mgl at tardis.svsu.edu
Wed Dec 9 07:05:16 CST 1998
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Treyvaud <m.treyvaud at ugrad.unimelb.edu.au>
Matt sed:
>revolutionism, Takeshi was in another novel ;) In a similar way, the 80s
>as a whole could be said to be haunted by the people, living and dead, who
>were marginalised or killed as a result of the then-government's social
>policies (that passage about what sort of creature would be defined by a
>binary code of lifes and deaths...?)
>
>The past always catches up with you - this definitely ties in with the
>notion of 'karmic adjustment'. If you don't heed the warning of the
>spirits you inadvertently created, you end up as one yourself.
>
>The children, especially Prairie, have no dark histories apart from a few
>full nappies. Nevertheless, they still have to face the results of what
>their -parents- did; and pardon me for spraying schmaltz on y'all, but I
>think the final Brock-Prairie scene is authorially supportive of the idea
>that they can be victorious over The Past.
>
Me:
I am reminded of a line from _Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil_: In
order to understand the living, you must commune with the dead. For all
intents, as far as Prairie and Zoyd, and DL, are concerned, Frenesi and
Brock have been "dead" all these years. Perhaps by "communing" with them, Z
and Prairie have come to an understanding of themselves by book's end. And
maybe it's not that they are victorious over the Past, but have reached a
place where they can at least live with it.
I could be wrong.
M.
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list