animals in M&D

[Spencer Thiel]

At 3:14 PM -0400 9/3/99, you wrote:


>Are the LED and the Duck examples of conditioning? Where do
>you find support for this in M&D?

First, I think that the name LED carries some meaning w/r/t 
conditioning (either on or off).

I'm not able to pull anything out of the text, nor do I think it is 
necessary in this instance.  Pynch's books are filled with animals 
doing strange things.  Grigori, Fang, the Duck, etc.  The 
non-fictional history of animals displaying abnormal behavior is 
almost always attributed to conditioning. Clever Hans is just one 
example (also, check Paul DiFillipo's example here 
<http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9711&msg=621&sort=thread> 
).  It seems that if animals display abnormal behavior, humans refuse 
to give the animal credit for having innate intelligence (possibly 
stemming from literal biblical interpretations).  If I remember, the 
LED claims that he is the logical progression of the dog, since the 
reason that dogs came into existence was that they learned to act 
like humans so as not to be eaten by humans (conditioning? I think 
so).

This is just one view of the role of the animals of MD and not 
mutually exclusive of any of the other interpretations.  Can't they 
all be correct?  This is the encyclopedic Pynch, after all.


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