Prosthetic Paradise(2) Enfetishment&MS

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

I've got to go to work, but please, don't think my pie in
the sky a flippant response to your post. I wrote it before
I received yours. I want to reply in good faith and I want
to explain my position with the text. 

Thank you for this discussion, 

I'll reply later today. 

Terrance

Michael Perez wrote:
> 
> Terrance wrote:
> "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."
> 
> Later:
> "Indeterminacy is a term as loaded as satire. As your
> coupling it with 'postmodern' reveals. [snip] 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."
> 
> I certainly don't want to quibble over terms, since I think it seems
> that we agree at least that there is some (actually, I think, a good
> deal of) blurring.  Perhaps indeterminacy is an inaccurate description
> and, yes, probably as loaded a term as satire or postmodern or
> morality, for that matter.  Most of what we can gather about Pynchon's
> attitude, though, I believe, is simply a matter of knowing ourselves
> the difference between good and evil.  No, I don't think Major Marvy is
> a good guy, but is Slothrop?  Is Pointsman really a bad guy?  He is
> certainly not likable, but is he evil?  And poor Roger?  I agree he is
> an important character, but is he good?  Was all the evil of the Nazis
> and the real or imagined Cartel(s) inside and outside the text worth
> the technological advances, the geopolitical realignment, the social
> cohesion (spirit of Dunkirk, don't y'know), the entrance of women into
> the workforce en masse, etc.?  Where would we be without Hitler?
> [Please, no one should take these two questions TOO seriously] Of
> course, we would, I suppose, all answer that we could have done very
> nicely without all the atrocities and we could have waited a little
> longer for the evolution of air and space travel.  However, some of the
> evil was caused by the supposed good guys, too.  No, not equally, of
> course, but nevertheless substantially.  Loyalty to goodness does not
> necessarily imply party (or national or planetary or racial or
> whatever) loyalty.  All empires are evil, aren't they?  That's where
> the moral indeterminacy is, I believe, for lack of a better term.  Find
> me a better one and I'll salute it.
> 
> Michael
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