GRGR (2) "great bright hand"

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

keith woodward wrote:

> s~Z, building on Terrence,
> >Here's a nice illustration of Terrance's point. (I think.) ...
> >
> >(p. 30) "But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion.
> >The illusion of control. That A could do B. (ed., A never did) But that
> >was false. Completely. No one can DO. Things only happen, A and B are
> >unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable. . . ."
> >   "More Ouspenskian nonsense," whispers a lady brushing by on the arm
> >of a dock worker. Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous le Vent mingle as they
> >pass.
>
> A-and:
>
> "How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and
> fright?  Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware--perhaps--that in his play he
> wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect
> itself.  What if Mexico's whole *generation* have turned out like this?
> Will Postwar be nothing but 'events,' newly created one moment to the next?
> No links?  Is it the end of history?" (56)
>
>



> "not a chain of single Links, for one link could lose us All"  M&D

I imagine Pynchon stopping on that narrow bridge, a few yards from Nabokov's
room, gazing over the suicide rail at the lush ravine below, oh the vertiginous
height, exacerbated by the swirling thoughts of history, Linking Pip to
Magwitch from the Dickens lectures, but  now broken by the Russians and that
passage from Tolstoy's colossal masterpiece:

The movement of nations is caused not by power, not by intellectual activity,
nor even by a combination of the two as historians have supposed, but by the
activity of ALL the people who participate in the events.

History belongs to the people, on this Pynchon and Tolstoy agree, but does
Pynchon reach the same conclusion as Tolstoy?  "it is necessary to renounce a
freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not
conscious."   see the last sentence of W&P 2nd epilogue

Terrance