(no subject)

[Terrance]

The old proverb said it well, 
that it is with men as with asses;
whoever would keep them fast, 
must find a very good hold at their ears. 


 I'm not discussing human progress, I'm
suggesting that in Pynchon's portrayals of family life we
can see that the family is radically and irrevocably
changed (not from everything is roses or some "father knows
best" television ideal) by the complex shifts in the
relationships among family members  brought about by the war
state. 

 I maybe a cynic or not, that's really not the point, poke,
poke, shouldn't joke, but I can't help it. Yes, you said
that some say Pynchon is cynical and existential. I think
there is much to support that characterization of Pynchon's
fiction, especially prior to GR, but you also said that
there is a lot of anti traditionalism in Pynchon and anti
traditionalism, as I understand it, functions in GR as one
element of his satire. Satirists like Pynchon may be called
all sorts of names, cynics, misanthropes, lunatics, etc.
(see the strange history of Mr. Swift) and they may be
accused of writing to call attention to themselves, or to
confirm the critical theories of contemporaneous schools,
but I don't buy that. 

He is the father you will never quite manage to
kill....because 40 years ago we could not kill them.... 
GR.747


Hohmann can't figure this out, he says we can't read this as
a statement about history, pretty cynical that. He can't
even identify Pynchon's moral position on human sacrifice!
 But Eddins provides a better reading of Pynchon's
gnostic/anti-gnostic and nostalgia (see GP.148-150, Blicero
and Greta). Vineland confirms Eddins, not Hohmann. Is that
why so many critics didn't like it? Did it challenge their
readings of GR? Of TRP? 


To insist that Pynchon  "satirizes the longing"(Eddins
quoting Hohmann) that drives this process is to deny, in a
postmodern privileging of indeterminacy, the logos of that
well evidenced norm by which he condemns the betrayers of
the earthly and the human. GP.119

"The socio-political implications of this gnostic perversion
are made clear...." GP.148

The War State is a SYSTEM won away from Nature, a gnostic
perversion, a Plastic Saturn devouring  community, culture,
family, children. 

http://metalab.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/goya/goya.saturn-son.jpg
	

            Pynchon, like Benjamin, gives a new political
             meaning to the pain of the returning past, and
             demonstrates that nostalgia need not have only
a
             negative or reactionary value. Pynchon's
revised
             nostalgia does not constitute (as, for
instance, does
             Reaganist nostalgia) a leapfrogging back past
historical
             trauma to some imagined age of solid family
values. It
             emerges, rather, directly out of the moment of
greatest
             trauma, out of the moment of apocalypse itself.

http://rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/papers_berger.html