GRGR(6) - The Empire's Suicide

[Gary Thompson]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> (128.30) Yet there was one black face, the counter-tenor, a Jamaican
> corporal, taken from his warm island to this [...] - not to mention the
> Latin, the _German_? in an English church? These are not heresies so much as
> imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man's presence, from acts of minor
> surrealism - which, taken in mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its
> pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the
> thousands every day, completely unaware of what it's doing...
> ------------------
> 
> Does this "suicide" mean incorporation of "the other," the conquered, into
> its fold, ultimately resulting in dissolution of the original purity of the
> Empire's noble race?  Extermination of the conquered would be the
> alternative, but then who'd wash your dirty underwear?
> 
> Now, if we got to really mixing it up, commingling all those races
> relentlessly over centuries we'd eventually have one new race, shared by
> all: the Brave New Mongrelized World.

I don't see race as linked to suicide here but to surrealism (the
presence of this Jamaican counter-tenor in the middle of the English
countryside singing a carol in Latin and German in the middle of a crowd
of servicemen smothering farts on Christmas eve). I had a different
reason for P's calling it suicide--the Empire, which extends well beyond
the Third Reich or Anglo-American Empire, back to Rome, ahead to the
generalized bureaucratic world that seems to me to be P's main target in
_GR_, connects to what might be called the novel's ecological theme.
Point of ref. is Kekule's dream--

"Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail . . . The Serpent
that announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant,
eternally returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is
to _violate_ the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that
'productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System
removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to
keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most
of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid
waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's
only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with,
of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later
must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more
than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls
all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding
across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . ."
(412) The passage continues, of course.

Back to the Advent section, my ears pick up about 130-- "and listen . .
. listen: this is the War's evensong, the War's canonical hour, and the
night is real. [. . .] it is not death that separates these
incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the
Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives." (This too goes
on.) 

I suspect that it would be possible to collect references to war and
empire and bureaucracy and stitch them together to make a fairly
coherent position from _GR_. Whether that would conflict with what I was
calling the book's indeterminacy earlier today is an interesting
question.