Human Interactions

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >From: JEANNIE BERNIER <JEANNIE.BERNIER at morningstar.com>
> >
> 
> > but
> > corporations are just stupid, not evil.
> 
> Yes, I think this is one of the key things Pynchon hits on as well,
> particularly in his depictions of those executives at Shell Mex House in
> *GR*, or Lyle Bland, or that conversation between Clive Mossmoon and Sir
> Marcus Scammony right at the end of Part 3 (GR 615-6). And, of course,
> there's Mucho Maas in *Vineland* who (in one of those "retours des
> personnages" that McHale offers as another defining characteristic of
> postmodernist fiction) has become a "music industry biggie" (VL 307). Mucho
> has forsaken the "beautiful certainty" induced by psychedelic drugs (VL
> 314), and I don't think the reader is expected to have forgotten what Mucho
> was *really* like back in the 60s (in *Lot 49*) when he launches into that
> anti-Tube tirade which is tinged with all the effete nostalgia and impotent
> envy of the failed or pseudo-radical ("It was the way people used to talk",
> quips the narrative.) These are the people who head up those supposedly
> "evil" corporations, and like the military and political leaders Pynchon
> depicts -- Blicero and Pointsman and Pudding and ... Reagan and Nixon --
> they are not personifications of "evil" at all but merely flawed and frail
> humans who have sold out:
>      "We're all going to fail," Sir Marcus primping his curls, "but the
>    Operation won't." (GR 616)

I agree and disagree. Can't they be both? Sure, Reagan is a
flawed and frail human just like the rest of us, he has sold
out, just like the rest of us (We R They), but Pynchon
brings in Brock Vond, frail and human sell out too, and he
transforms him at times, as he does with Blicero and Marvy,
who is at first only a stereotype of the southern U.S.
military racist ass-hole, but becomes Racist America on the
screen, literally (when Enzian tosses him off the train)
then mutates like a Disney character or like one of the
grotesque images in the film "The Wall", and represents a
number of American evils personified (not only American, but
Russian, English,) see the drinking party paid for by GE). 
Of course Pynchon sets tensions upon tensions and poses
ironies against parodies and plays with the reader's
"conditioned" knowledge of "good and evil" not so much by
turning the camera on the reader or holding the mirror up to
the reader or overt concerns with "text processing", but by
tensions and conflicts, so at one point in the Marvy
chapters, our "Hero" Slothrop becomes another frail and
human flawed painter we all is Hitler. I think too much of
McHale's work and a lot of other criticism in his "school"
has  focused on Pynchon as literary critic and not enough on
Pynchon as innovator and genius of a new American fiction.
The parodies I mention above are deep and profound
contributions to literature, for example  Henry James (the
moral consequences of the meeting of American innocence and 
enthusiasms with a sophisticated but corrupt European
culture exposed by irony and narrative technic, complex and
subtle style, etc. is set against Joseph Conrad's Dark
American Heart of enlightenment and liberation (colonialism)
revealed as an often ruthless commercial exploitation in
post war Europe and the world which through symbolic
richness (here's the French in Pynchon) that invites
multiple interpretations and ironies deep in the cultural
and individual conscious and unconscious mind confronting
violence, nihilism and despair, exposing a fascination and
fear of the Heart of America and of Man. The mirror Pynchon
holds up is not to reading, the mirror is Conrad's mirror
held up to the Black death repressed deep in the oven
returning against shit, money and the word.  


> I think it is probably a very comfortable way to read Pynchon's work, to set
> up that we and "They" distinction in order to exonerate ourselves from the
> inequities and cruelty which pepper the spectacle of human history which he
> depicts. But, as we know, Pynchon resists simple binaries like this. The
> "They" isn't a personal pronoun in *GR* at all: it signifies systems and
> institutions in which *we* are implicated, which *we* accept and perpetuate.
> *"They"* 'r' Us.

But They are doomed. They will fail, but we are not, we
don't have to fail. How we succeed in the system we cannot
escape is what Pynchon's seems to hold up to the reader. 

> 
> And this is why I think that Kurt-Werner's (was it?) idea of separating the
> list into a "political" and a "literary" discussion of Pynchon's work falls
> short of the mark. For starters, the political and literary "content" (and
> philosophical, scientific, historical, submerged biographical et. al. stuff)
> is there in *all* of the texts, so categorising *GR* as "literary" and
> *Vineland* as "political" is rather simplistic, and quite unproductive imo.
> But more than this I think it is crucial that the *literary* devices of
> Pynchon's fiction do draw the reader into the text: over and over we are
> "conned, bullied, betrayed, embarrassed, conditioned, lured, offended"; all
> those confronting verbs that McHale uses and Terrance is offended by. 

I'm offended by what he says Pynchon is up to with this
conning and betraying. There is not denying that it happens,
but I like your explanation of why, much better than
McHale's. 

"Happiness is an ACTIVITY of the soul in accordance with
virtue." Aristotle