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

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

rj wrote:
> 
> Paul M (I think)
> > > > > Hard to keep one's moral compass from twirling incessantly.
> 
> Y'know, standing back, looking at the plot as a whole, I can sort of
> envisage it as a compass of sorts on one level. Or, a Rocket mandala,
> perhaps. The four sons -- Slothrop (the Westward/erman), Enzian,
> Tchitcherine and Gottfried -- all approaching this Holy Centre the
> Rocket from their cardinal radii. That it is the Northerner, the
> European, who finally seeds the one (the Ultimate Zero in fact) hovering
> over all of our heads circa 1974 is an apt touch, but even so the other
> three boys were closing in perilously all that time, and would have if
> they could have no doubt. And, still will if they can.



> 
> > GR employs Comic Book morality
> > lessons which are not insincere, but they do not overide all sorts of other
> > conflicting messages.
> 
> Hear hear. Pynchon chides the Sentimental Surrealist in himself often
> enough. The sentimentality and optimism in Geli's song (289-290), for
> example, aren't played for the cheap laughs that most of the other
> lyrics are, but I wouldn't say that it is totally unironic, knowing what
> we (and Geli) know about that Tchitcherine.
> 
> I think -- and I'm not trying to stir up Dubya Dubya Drei around here
> again but I think it's an important point -- I think that there isn't a
> single "heart" or "moral center" to this book. I do think it tends
> towards a whole lot of p.c. sentiments and interpretations, possibly
> some not so p.c. ones as well. But I don't think the point of the novel
> is to batter us about the ears with what we already know and believe
> (about the Holocaust, and colonialism, and industrialisation, and God,
> and whatever), but rather to make us begin thinking for ourselves again
> and questioning our preconceptions and not just soaking up all the
> propaganda and the pap that the power brokers keep pumping down our
> throats. And, in part, this means that as well as the moral lesson of
> Pokler's story there is the somewhat ameliorating lesson of the Dora
> rampages which precedes it. Yeah, "Human 'Nature'" is the key, I guess,
> as David M. sez.
> 
> For mine, *GR* constantly exposes Western history and morality as part
> of the problem. "The Holocaust" as we perceive it now (or, in 1974) is
> all tied up with this history and morality, just as colonialism and
> "progress" and mechanisation are. Intolerance, outrage, retaliation,
> murder, destruction: these are not useful or "good" responses, whether
> in the name of anti-Semitism or in the name of philo-Semitism, are they?
> For me, that's the bottom line message of the choices and juxtapositions
> Pynchon engineers.
> 
> I see in the text an ironicised version of the novel as Bildungsroman,
> and I think one of the twists is that as Slothrop is learning so, in
> fact, is the reader.
> 
> fwiw, best


Bravo! And education, "as Henry Adams always sez, keeps
going on forever." 

And I get Sothropian chills when I think of the very real
post-Renaissance Faustian Hubris of elite synthesis and
control and Murphy's law. The papers here in the States are
focused on the waste, the money lost in space by the foot or
the meter. 
"Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their
needs which are understood only by the ruling elite..." 

Oh Western Man, how fantastic, how fabulous, how comical,
how wonderful the world you only think (mostly with your
penis) is your own.