Prosthetic Paradise(2) Enfetishment&MS

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Michael Perez wrote:
> 
> Terrance wrote:
> "Is Pynchon, as
> Weisenburger argues, a satirist that simply delights or as Wood would
> have it, an allagorist that only calls attention to himself, or in
> Pynchon's own metaphor, a novelist that has sailed through the pillars
> of Hercules into the abyss of indeterminacy, or North to the pole where
> the moral compass simply spins on a relativist's axis in all directions
> without discrimination of what is good and what is evil?  Are mindless
> pleasure equal to mindless hours? Are we all voyeurs, tourists, buying
> trinkets of Nazi genocide, taking the trip through the mad carnival of
> the night towards the promise of space travel in a moraless future
> where one can not know who is on trial at Nuremberg and why?
> 
> Are there no spells left that can protect us against falling
> objects?"
> 
> 
> 
> To label what kind of writer we are considering here is, of course,
> problematic, yet it is a bit too flippantly facile to say something
> like "I would describe him as indescribable."  

I agree. If GR is indescribable and Ulysses is indescribable
and Moby Dick is indescribable, no science of them is
possible. If we are going to object to the term satire, not
by arguing that GR is not satire, but that GR is
indescribable, we must be silent on the matter (perhaps like
the great Greek philosopher we can simply move our finger)
and stand alone in perplexed awe of the indescribable,
ineffable, inexpressible, unspeakable, mind-boggling,
mind-blowing, text that we can not discuss.   

I can see how some
> students of the novel can find fault structurally with Pynchon (or
> Melville) as a "novelist" or as a "satirist" or an "allegorist."  The
> forays into any and all of these identities lack any sustained
> application of the necessary duties of each. 

I don't understand this?

 However, I wouldn't call
> the kind of indeterminacy that we find as readers an "abyss."  One of
> the reasons, perhaps, the "moral compass," as you say, is spinning
> uncontrollably is that our expectations are not met by in some way by
> being able to pigeonhole the texts.  

No matter what we choose to call GR, it is my opinion that
it is not divorced from moral and social issues. To my
reading of all of Pynchon's works, he leaves no doubt in my
mind as to his attitude towards racism, oppressive economic
practices, genocide, police state repression, the treatment
of humans as fetishes, the evils of germany's acts of
violence in Africa---a subject we will read about in the up
coming chapter and many other issues that he is not
ambivalent about. 


Call it postmodern or whatever,
> but there is a difference (to state the bloody obvious) with Pynchon
> and other quite different fiction writers.  These are very different
> kinds of books.  Does _GR_ have a "protagonist?"  Slothrop?  The
> rocket?  The Firm?  Then we can trot out the "anti-hero" and the
> "anti-story" or "anti-novel."  What drek.  

Again, GR is a unique book, but isn't better compared to
Hard Times than Cassell's New Latin Dictionary? 


Indeterminacy is a part life
> and art, perhaps that is one of the indicators of what could be called
> postmodern, even though even that is hardly helpful to achieving a
> definitive description of WHAT this type of writing is. 

Indeterminacy is a term as loaded as satire. As your
coupling it with "postmodern" reveals. 


 These texts
> don't preach, necessarily.  The writer reveals many contradictory
> indications of what we are being "told" and what we are to think about
> what is revealed.  The method of the revelations is by no means linear,
> doesn't conform as picaresque, bildungsroman, ad nauseum.  The good
> folks / bad folks line is blurred throughout much of this writing.
> Enjoy the ride, I say.  There are no "spells" to protect us.  I like
> being a free-range reader.
> 
> Michael



If it were a preachy book, I'd throw it out. I don't like
books that preach or being told how to think, hell I went to
Catholic schools. The good guys and the bad guys are not so
blurry, perhaps this is something we should discuss. Is
Major Marvy a good guy? 
The mindless pleasures that blurrrr everything in the zone,
prevent characters from knowing who is on trial at Nuremberg
and WHY? In GR, sometimes a bad guy asks the most important
ethical questions--Rathanau--and sometimes the soulless
bureaucrat saves a live in a heroic act and then reverts to
his soulless conditioned condition and although Roger is
looking for Love in all the wrong places he is looking, yes
Roger is an important guy in this book, but it is a bad guy
that will make the most beautiful statement about Love in
the book. Pynchon is not unique in doing this and this is
not imo, moral indeterminacy. 

TF