GRGR (15): Good & Evil: Utilitarianism

[rj]

TF
> Like
> Melville's Ahab, Pointsman is Shakespearean and like
> Melville Pynchon tells us whom he has stolen from
> Shakespeare, in this example, Pointsman is a literary
> descendent of Richard III. And like Melville and Dickens,
> Pynchon has invested his personal political attacks into
> Pointsman. 

I question Terrance's correlation of Pointsman's attitudes with
Pynchon's own, particularly in the light of his prior statement that
"the
> reader must distance himself(sic) from Slothrop to make any sense
> of the novel."
It seems to me that "the Slothrop family tree" (329.24) is remarkably
coincidental, in many respects and particulars, with the Pynchonian one,
and the passing mention of "Snodd's Mountain" (329.28) in the Berkshires
as a childhood haunt of young Tyrone's (cf. Grover Snodd in 'The Secret
Integration'), not to mention a shared penchant for Plasticman comics,
jazz music, ballistics and programs of elaborate and obsessive
interdisciplinary research, would seem to further the presentiment that
Slothrop carries some of his author's personal history (if not baggage)
along with him in his travels and travails.

I'm not of the opinion that Slothrop is *the* protagonist of the novel,
in that unfortunately restrictive definition of the term foisted upon us
by the pedants from *Fowler's Modern Usage* and the like, but that the
"novel" is in fact an accretion of many such stories (Ensign Morituri's
story, so named, is one such coming up in GRGR, but also Pirate's,
Roger's, Jessica's, Enzian's, Katje's, Tchitcherine's and thanks to
Peter Petto for good notes and stuff on the current section), with
*many* protagonists, and that it is through these many and varied
perspectives that Pynchon presents and discloses various attitudes and
antipathies, some of which he shares, others which he might not, for the
reader's consideration. But it is his great *humility* (and this is the
issue of his ardent privacy as well I think, not just self-consciousness
about those buck teeth) as an artist which stops him from making
definitive statements about this or that ethical or historical or
political or even aesthetico-critical issue. He, too, is just one man,
holds one point of view. To presume anything beyond this is where the
evil begins.

In *GR* the characters have become agencies of the narrative, the
multifarious voices of the novel -- an extension of the way realist and
Modernist novels before it appeared to detach themselves from the
authorial perspective, in order to condition the reader to the "truth"
of the fiction, enact a "suspension of disbelief" -- but also a
wonderful display of the great Babel-clash of attitudes and opinions and
moralities which exist in the world. And, in *GR*, and what makes it
*postmodern* in my book, what really sets it apart from the literary
sub-genres of the novel which have preceded, is the fact that both the
author and the reader have been propelled likewise into the narrative as
characters themselves: their self-doubts, ingrained prejudices,
sublimated desires, the whole kit'n'kaboodle. All this because it is the
"real" world we are talking about here after all, not Middle-Earth or
Brobdingnag (although, I guess, that's what Tolkien and Swift were on
about too, in their own ways.) And, lame as it might seem, we do -aspire
for it to be a better place.

best