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

[rj]

millison
> 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.

Well, not quite. That rocket is suspended an ant's-dick away from the
"theatre" (in all its metaphorical glory) in which the individual
current reader sits at novel's close. It's a warning, and a seeming
inevitability for sure, but "there's still time ... "

What he does do, though, in the final stages of the novel is dismantle
narrative artifice entirely, and I think that perhaps the recourse to
another cigarette and the Komikal Kamikaze sit-com on the tube with
which an/the (?) author persona throws his hands up in the air late in
the text is a recognition of something like what doug is saying when he
writes:

> (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.)

If *reading* about it (in the context of the machinery and ethos behind
the production and distribution of consumible literary artefacts in the
late twentieth century) is just such a "mindless pleasure", then by
*writing* about it isn't Pynchon himself just pandering to Their
program, contributing to the propensity of bourgeois Westerners to be
desensitised to all these genocides and atrocities?

Unless unless he can reach across that Interface. And subvert.

best