Chasing ... Cutting

[jbor]

----------
>From: Dave Monroe
>
 snip
> But this is what I mean about cutting to the chase.  On your reading, as I'm
> reading it, you are claiming that Gravity's Rainbow is, indeed, perhaps
"beyond
> good and evil," transvaluing ("subverting," at any rate) perhaps all those
values
> its readers are quite likely to bring to it (say, Life on Earth).  One might,
of
> course, note that this might well involves bringing one's own values and/or
> transvaluation of them to the reading, to the text, but ... but I think the
point
> raised that said Nietzschean "transvaluation" might well, should, apparently,
> involve the creation of new values is a valid one.  So, then, what new values
are
> being created?  If any?  Am interested in what your conclusuons are goind to
be
> here ...

I don't believe Pynchon (or Nietzsche in his works for that matter, but I'm
no expert there) is in the business of depicting such a "revaluation of all
values" in *GR* -- neither a definitive, authorial manifesto for such a
thing, or even promulgating or promoting a particular extant system of
values as such -- though what I think he does present in the novel is an
array of such attempted and speculative "revaluations" and perhaps even
revisionisms, in all their flawed glory. I think that what he has done in
this novel is lay the cards out on the table and then leave them there for
the reader to interpret and respond to as they find fit. That final
beginning (is it an imperative? an admonition? a question? a statement? a
lament?):

     Now everybody--

is, I think, amongst many other things quite probably, an invitation to the
reader to act, or react perhaps, to what she or he has read; to go off and
masturbate or hug a loved one or sing a hymn or take mortal comfort in the
ways we usually have, unmoved by the arduous and breathtaking spectacle
which we have just witnessed; or maybe to go out into that there real world
where Slothrop has been dispersed and change the ways we interact with
others if such changes are so indicated, maybe even strive a little harder
to make changes for the better on a domestic, local or even professional
basis, to "be nice to one another" which is the motto Otto suggested and
which isn't quite as corny as it sounds when you consider how so very
opposite of that people in general are to one another both on an individual
and global basis, and that the only real message to come out of Pynchon's
first extravaganza was to "keep cool but care".

So, in order, my responses to your pop quiz are: OK; yes; yes, no; none;
and, n/a.

Ca suffit?