GRGR(12) some comments

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Slothrop hides out in Chaos and Old Night, the world of
order and daylight is the bureaucratic world, in which, for
example the death of Tantivy can be arranged by a newspaper
story and the closing of a file, a world in which Slothrop
was "filed" in a room at the casino, a world in which one
can indeed speak of life and death in terms of opening and
closing files. He hides because he is beginning to see the
patterns of the war; he sees that it has "been reconfiguring
time and space into its own image." He hides, I think,
because, for "possibly the first time he is hearing America
as it must sound to a non-American." The world of
freedomless existence, constructed in the name of freedom
scares the hell out of him. We remember that Slothrop loves
freedom, and that his love of liberty has much to do with
his Puritan paranoid heritage. 

"Back when Shays fought the federal troops across
massachusetts, there were Slothrop Regulators patrolling
Berkshire for the rebels, wearing sprigs of hemlock so you
could tell them from the government soldiers. Federals stuck
a tatter of white paper in theirs. Slothrops in those days
were not so involved with paper, and the wholesale
slaughtering of trees. They were still for the living green,
against the dead white." 

So the American love of, desire for, liberty has inculcated
in Slothrop the desire for "some promise of events with out
cause, surprise, a direction at right angles to every
direction his life has been able to find up till now." But
it seems, it is the equally American urges for acquisition
and understanding which condition the world to which he has
escaped. The underground market to which he has come is
rational, organized, articulated, much as the world he has
"escaped." As Semyavin tells him: "everything here is
specialized. If it's watches, you go to one cafe. If it's
women you go to another. Furs are subdivided into Sable,
Ermine, Mink, and others. Same as dope: Stimulants,
Depressants, Psychomimetics...." More importantly perhaps,
is that information, language, words, as Semyavin tells him,
have "come to be the only real medium of exchange." So
Pynchon, and I think this is what he addresses in his
Luddite essay, as pertains to computers and information,
seems to agree with Plato's Thamus, that the "specialized
knowledge" of the masters of (a new technology for example)
are mistakenly understood as wisdoms, the masters wise. Of
course the masters believe this as well. The result is that
certain questions can not be asked, by the preterite
(losers), indeed certain critical questions do not arise.
For example, "To whom, Mr. President Gates,  will this new
technology give greater freedom? And whose power and freedom
will be reduced by it?"  Very important to Americans, where
a democratic ethos, relatively weak traditions, and a high
receptivity to the new, especially new technologies,
encourages enthusiastic technological "advance" with the
belief that these benefits will spread to a large extent
evenly among the entire population, if not the world. This
childlike conviction, most widely held in America, I think,
is exploited by the cartels, who work very hard and bring
their "technological knowledge" to the population, to sway
an American optimism towards the improbable hope of unity
through technological means. So Slothrop is in a world not
much different from the one he escaped, a world of plans and
blueprints, but of course the plans are stolen and
blueprints surreptitiously photocopied. 

Pynchon, I guess, like Shakespeare (Venice) sends Slothrop
to Zurich. Here he has the Odeon cafe (thanks David), with
all of its history. Zurich like Venice is a curious place,
central to Twentieth century Politics, literature,
philosophy, art. Here Lenin and Trotsky spent the war in
exile, Einstein wrote his "On the Electrodynamics of Moving
Bodies," and Joyce plotted the peregrinations of a
middle-aged Jew around his Dublin. These men worked in a
sense as Joyce, perhaps Pynchon agrees, said an Artist must,
in "Silence, Exile, and Cunning." All of these dudes plotted
Revolutions. Zurich is then a perfect place for Slothrop to
go--the capital city of Modern Revolution. But, Zurich is
also the city of "Reformation country, Zwingli's town." A
place of "grave markers" a place "to find vanity again." The
weary order of the Swiss burghers betokens the bloodlessness
and the worship of Nothingness which are "dusty Dracularity,
the West's ancient curse." The West, the cities of the West
are allied with the "dead white," built in spite of Nature,
consecrated to Man who is consecrated to Nothing save
himself. Squalidozzi the Argentine anarchist speaks not only
of his country it seems, but od civilization:

"In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of
paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine,
inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride,
that place belonged to him....We cannot abide that openness:
it is terror to us..."

To Freedom in the zone....

"Que es mi barco mi tesoro,
Que es mi Dios la libertad,
Mi ley la fuerza y el viento,
Mi unica patria la mar."