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

[Doug Millison]

At 5:11 AM -0800 12/6/99, Michael Perez wrote:
> The book does portray what I would personally call evil, but I
>believe the portrayal is far from being judgmental.  As I've said
>before, the great majority is treated sort of matter-of-factly,
>surrounded by the evil of all sides.  It is not necessarily a cure for
>Manicheanism, but the Germans are not the only evil ones.  Just as in
>the Cold War or the Korean and Vietnam Wars (the hot wars), the
>American empire did not necessarily represent goodness.


One of the disturbring things about GR, to my mind, is precisely that it
finds evil not just on the side of America's "enemies" -- the Nazis, to
name one prominent example from the novel -- but on both sides fighting the
War,  in the War itself, and especially in those individuals who profit
from the War and the larger destruction of the earth and human life that
the War represents, individuals who are as likely to be found sitting on
the boards of American corporations as around the Nazi military and
industrial planning tables. Pynchon goes further, to locate what it is
inside of us as individuals to make us prone to buying into the Lie that
these evil forces disseminate to get us to support their efforts.

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