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

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

rj wrote:
> 
> 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


"I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus." GR.738-739

I just read the Wall Street Journal and swear by every word.