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

[Doug Millison]

At 8:19 AM +1100 12/15/99, rj wrote:
>[snip]
>millison's contention that "it is the claim of innocence every child
>molester makes" is simply not borne out by the text.

We get the story in retrospect from Weissman, the colonial exploiter and
perpetrator, not from the victim.

I understand that some of us are reluctant to drag the real world into this
reading of GR (although what that says about the author spending all that
time researching and thinking about the real world events, issues, and
philosophical questions that in part motivate his writing of the book -- a
book which contains as much of the "real world" as any other book I've read
--  I don't know), but fact is that some people who have been sexually
abused as children wind up having a very difficult time coming to grips
with the knowledge that they, at some level, "enjoyed" the physical
sensations (and maybe even "loved" the perpetrator -- a father, for
example) of a crime that in every other way robbed them of their dignity.
(Some people still do talk seriously of the Holocaust, too -- as seriously
as Pynchon does in GR -- even though it appears to bore some of us;
genocide continues, too. Heaven forbid we should trouble ourselves with
thoughts of crimes against humanity -- if we did, we might begin to feel
some responsibility regarding taking action to stop them, I suppose. That
would interfere with such mindless pleasures as this discussion, wouldn't
it.)

That unpleasant realization (the abused child's) echoes the way that many
of us feel when someone demonstrates, in humiliating detail, how we've been
seduced into cooperating with -- and maybe even applauding or excusing or
loving -- the forces that are bent on our own destruction and degradation.
As Slothrop and others do in the novel.

Perhaps "good" and "evil" are too crude for some readers, but Pynchon goes
to great pains to show that what Weissmann does to Enzian, the U.S. and
British and German and the rest of the governments in thrall to cartels and
capital, do to the rest of us and to Mother Earth herself. A sense of
palpable rage -- perhaps due to Pynchon's youth at the time of the novel's
writing, and borrowing from the spirit of rebellion and personal
transformation that animated many of his contemporaries and some of his
friends -- regarding this fucking-over gives, I submit, the novel much of
its power.  At least one P-lister recently seemed willing to chuck such
sentiments overboard as trite and cliched and obvious, but it may be worth
remembering that at the time of Pynchon's writing of GR, such sentiments
amounted to a line in the sand between very real forces very much at work
in the world (Vietnam seems to have captured TRP's attention with
particular focus and his treatment of WWII in GR may   owe something to the
spectacle that was then playing on the evening TV news), and by building
them into a work of such art and power, Pynchon elevated them, made them
forever a part of the Western world's literary conversation, dignified
them. And, yes, enmeshed them in wonderful webs of complexity, irony,
double, triple, quadruple whammies, such as to keep us arguing about them
up to the present.

It may be worth remembering -- if you still have doubts about whether or
not Pynchon makes any clear-cut moral judgements in GR -- that after laying
out his world in such detail across all these pages, he blows it all up.
That seems a rather clear, final judgement, to this reader at least. And
all the more reason to marvel at the ending Pynchon managed to fashion (and
the novel leading up to and meriting that ending) for M&D, the masterpiece
of his maturity.




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