Onlist Re: OFFLIST Re: Far Canard to Swallow (wink); was...

[rj]

M. Millison dit:

> It's kind of hard to tell, when so many of you hide behind anonymous names
> here on Pynchon-L. 

Ici, quelle distinction? 

Doug, "hide behind" is a really loaded and negative idiom, which is all
my point was really. You dislike anonymity on the list, moreso when the
anonymity is simply a spamcloak. That's fine. I'm not personally
offended because I don't court your approbation or approval. My passing
observation was neither protest nor defence, simply that, a passing
observation. But, how about addressing the content of posts (another of
your own mordant catchcries, I might add) rather than gratuitously
taking issue with posters? After all, you did ask me for clarification:

> Mr. Pynchon equates "democracy" with the "They" in his fictions? Care to
> elaborate on this in the context of VL or M&D or both?

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Subject: Lighting "the Amerikan dark" (VL235.39); was Re: Majorities   
                                                  Moral and Otherwise
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 22:23:15 +1100
From: rj <rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org

VLVL(7) Momentary Holiday Hyacinth Spoiler Alert

Rex Snuvvle in _VL_:
"You're up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking
crusades, retributions, closed ideological minds passing on the
Christian Capitalist faith intact, mentor to protege, generation to
generation, living inside their power, convinced they're immune to all
the history the rest of us have to suffer. They are bad, bad's they
come, but that still doesn't make us good, not 100%, Weed." (VL232.5)

_GR_:
>Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the 
singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite 
heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper. Might there have 
been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of 
Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route 
back--maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a 
little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the 
whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the 
waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without 
elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up. . . .<
                                                            (GR556)

_M&D_:
>Does Brittania, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in
which all that cannot pass in the Metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd 
Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-
ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the 
majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for 
subjunctive Hopes, for all that *may yet be true*,-- Earthly Paradise, 
Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind 
the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and 
recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already 
known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all 
from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities 
that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the 
Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare 
mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.<
                                                           (M&D345)



I find no little irony in the fact that democracy vindicates and
enfranchises just such anonymity as Doug, list-wise, purports vehemently
to detest. This delightful peccadillo aside, let me also make a
distinction between benign anonymity, such as that which Slothrop craves
(along, it seems, with his creator), and the more malignant type of
anonymity which, for example, enabled the latent anti-Semitism of the
German volk to become manifest in Hitler and the Holocaust. And,
likewise, "The Movement" was snuffed out at the American ballot box.

Perhaps my sentiments and antipathies *are* simply a reflection of my
own 'Vondian redneck sensibilities'(!), but Pynchon reaches out of the
novels often enough to taunt us---Western readers with standards of
living and available leisure time and 'higher' education enough to sit
around and contemplate such 'highbrow' literary edifices as his---taunts
us about our complacency and flatulence and smugness and superiority and
*complicity* in all of it. And our self-deludedness.

~ sez
> The THEY in Pynchon's is not democracy or any other human creation. The THEY
> are forces invisible. 

But that's just it. *Democracy* is the deus ex machina of 'The System',
a 'System' which 'They' control. Sure, it's all rolled in with the
military-industrial complex and Protestant work ethic and capitalist
hegemony and machismo power plays and whatnot. And, sure, 'It' is
invisible, malignant, reprehensible, inhuman, potentially inanimate even
(remember SHOCK and SHROUD). But I find it to be one of the sublime
ironies in Pynchon that this "They", actually, is *us*.

be(a)st

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