Kids

[David Morris]

Very nicely put, Terrance.
DM

>From: Terrance
>
>Yes, it is noticeable and recurrent in Dostoevsky too, in
>fact I think V. and perhaps GR too is indebted to Book V of
>the Brother's K. That children are given more than simply
>sympathetic treatment or put in cruel predicaments in GR is
>an important thing to establish. What kind of world do they
>live in? They live in Their gnostic world. Perhaps the most
>convincing episodes is the Roger and Jessica Christmas,
>"what do you think it's a children's story? There aren't
>any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no
>place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here tonight…Listen
>to the mock-angel singing…" [GR.135].
>
>The system, the evil gnostic world has no soul. Soul of
>Byron the Bulb? An evil Jewish woman that kills children? A
>Gnostic that dreams of a death kingdom on the moon? An
>animistic culture infected by the rationalization and
>individualization of Modern Christianity? What did the
>pre-Christian Herero believe?  The attribution of conscious
>life to natural objects or to nature itself or the belief in
>the existence of spiritual beings that are separable or
>separate from bodies or the hypothesis holding that an
>immaterial force animates the universe, from Latin anima,
>soul. Is Fragmentation PoMo or is it Modernism's Alienation
>with an "Anti-Paranoid" ("where nothing is connected to
>anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long"
>GR.434) Soul? Has Pynchon taken Modernism's "existential"
>impressions/concepts (existential in terms of the primacy of
>the individual, and of individual choices, over systems and
>concepts, which attempt to explain the individual; the
>absurdity of the universe; a reality that evades adequate
>explanation, and remains radically contingent and
>disordered; anxiety caused by absurdity, but also freedom
>caused by absurdity, since actions cannot be causally
>explained or predicted) and shackled it with mind forged
>post-modern manacles? The animistic sensation of being at
>home in the projected world is analogous to the comfort,
>something religious if you want, that young children and the
>historical questers (i.e. the Knights/Grail that Pynchon's
>profaned characters parody), maintain, affirm, and have
>faith in. Pynchon demonstrates more than sympathy for
>children and animistic cultures. Children have wisdom and
>they wisely accept the inevitabilities of life, often
>demonstrating their unflagging confidence in better times
>and their adeptness at living in the nonce with humor. Aries
>is only part of the story and those "few" passage in the New
>Testament (Luke in particular), Freud, Rilke, Blake,
>Rousseau. A good way to approach this issue is to examine
>Children's myths, dreams, and games in GR, which are
>directly contrasted with the "gnostic" world of the Empire's
>"dreamless version of the real." [GR.129] Slothrop as Pig
>Hero episode. In Cuxhaven the children play Himmel and
>Holle. Simple mythical version of the world belong to the
>children and THEY are not able to live with simple mythical
>versions of the world. Children must be kept out, their
>dreams crushed, their smiles and tears, their  humor and
>good will must be conditioned to be  captured on film and
>sold as pornography. Follow that Shirley Temple Paul noted.
>GR is a celebration of children and the child's wisdom,
>humor, and simple mythical projections, something religious
>if you want, of the world.

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