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

[rj]

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

Yes. That's the passage. Thanks Terrance.



Terrance F. Flaherty wrote:
> 
> 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.