GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Doug Millison]

At 3:30 PM -0800 12/5/99, Michael Perez wrote:
<As rj mentions, after Dora was liberated, the
>former inmates did not act out of goodness.  Pynchon tells us this
>twice, before Pokler's tale.  Does this place some ambiguity in the
>mind of the reader?

Ambiguity about the Holocaust, the evil that was done to these people by
the Nazis?  No, not in the morality that GR lays out, showing us what is
Good and what is Evil in the world of this novel.

> Is there such a thing as "Nature's cycle of eternal
>return/rebirth"?

In the world that Pynchon creates for us in GR, yes there is such a thing.
A narrator talks about it at  length, and makes some clear-cut moral
judgements, in Pokler's story.

I'm afraid that the attempt to deconstruct GR and fit Pynchon's novel into
a post-modern box may blind some readers to the fierce moral judgements
that in fact punctuate this work. To name a few:  in the world of the
novel, what doubt can there be about the morality of what the Germans have
done to the Herero, in Africa and in Europe, or to the Holocaust victims?
That the War itself is a force of evil, destroying life and the earth
itself so a few individuals may profit and gain power? That treating human
beings as mere production factors or experimental objects is evil? The list
could be extended with more  issues about which the novel's narrators make
clear judgements, judgements which, by exercising his powers as author to
select, arrange, and present what he wants to present, Pynchon the author
would seem to be affirming as well.

Clearly postmodern theory adds much to our appreciation of the novel and
represents the fruit of much fine thinking and scholarship. But Pynchon's
work slips beyond the grasp of even the most sophisticated critical theory,
especially theory that, in its nihilistic extremes, seems to have a hard
time dealing with the kinds of irreducible moral judgements GR presents.



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