GRGR(6) - Ep. 15

[rj]

Terrance:
> > indeterminacy throughout the novel is a
> > deliberate ploy.
> 
> More than a "ploy" wouldn't you agree?

"Ploy" in the sense of narrative strategy. (Invoking one of the novel's
major themes, no less. But I'm not really sure what you're insinuating.)

> An instinctive moral compass?

Yes. We "like" Slothrop and Katje. They're the "good" guys. We "hate"
Blicero and Pointsman. They're the "bad" guys. That sort of thing. If
the events and motivations of the characters are revealed as hopelessly
indeterminate, various possibilities co-existing at once, then how can
we justify and sustain the seeming unequivocality of our moral instincts
towards them?

> And what do you mean by both fictional and historical?

Katje and Slothrop are 'fictional'. "Herod or Hitler" (135.34) are
'historical'. Rog and Jess going to the Advent service is 'fictional'.
The domestic and military routines of WWII glimpsed in the sequence are
'historical'.

> 
> What is moral indeterminacy?

Well, for example, this:

" . . . and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are
manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it ("You forgot
Roosevelt, padre," comes the voice from the back, the good father can
never see them, they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams:
"Wendell Wilkie!" "How about Churchill?" "'Arry Pollitt!") for a baby to
come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna
redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined. . . . "

Or a notion of "the Anglo-American Empire (1939-1945)" expressed at
129.4 (the Jamaican counter-tenor's pov?): WWII as an *Allied*
power-play all along?

If local (and thus, by inference and demonstration, global) historical
*events* can't be pinned down, are constantly subject to this type of
prismatic perspectivism, then specific historical *interpretations*
(i.e. judgements, moral compasses) of these events must be similarly
equivocal. Mustn't they?

> You lost me.

Hope the clarification and examples help. But it was (and remains),
after all, a question.

best