Chasing ... Cutting
jbor
jbor at bigpond.com
Tue Sep 5 16:07:41 CDT 2000
----------
>From: "Terrance Flaherty" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
> OK, If you want to we can discuss your statement: "Blicero
> is the character most venerated in the narrative."
... by other characters. I'd say he is, wouldn't you?
> 1. Why is Marvy the exception to the no good guy bad guy
> reading you propose?
I find Marvy despicable, though, also, a stereotype: I can see very little
attempt to "humanise" this character as the other main characters invariably
are. Jeremy said it well when he described Marvy as "evil comic relief".
When critics talk about the cartoon-like characters in Pynchon's novels it
is Marvy who most quickly springs to mind. We don't get inside Marvy's head
at any point: he seems to have no doubts, no conscience, no consciousness to
speak of. Even Brock Vond is given moments of these. Marvy's castration is
poetic justice: a romanticised resolution of the "problem" this character
poses (for society, in history, to the text etc).
>
> 2. Why do the Dora homosexuals experience their freedom as
> banishment rather than liberation?
I'm not sure that this is quite true. These emotive terms you are bandying
about really don't register with the actuality of the situation as
represented in the text, or even historical "reality". What would life have
been like for homosexual men (let alone women) at this time in Germany or
elsewhere in Europe? Anywhere, in fact? The term "banishment" tries to imply
that they somehow enjoyed the time they spent in the prison camp: I don't
think this can be supported by the text. Upon liberation this is simply what
these men did. They wouldn't have had "freedom" as such prior to their
internment and they probably recognised that they wouldn't get "freedom" as
such upon liberation: they no doubt recognised that the war wasn't about Gay
Rights at all. And so, they opt for segregation: they simply adopt the
tiered authority structure which was in place at Dora to regulate their own
community. Probably because it functioned efficiently. They attempt to set
up a little "utopia" of their own, just like the Herero Empty Ones or the
Argentine anarchists who have organised some sort of cosmopolitan
film/commune. But, as the narrative noted then:
It isn't the strangest village in the Zone. Squalidozzi has come in out
of his wanderings with tales of Palestinian units strayed all the way
from Italy, who've settled down farther east and started up Hasidic
communes, on the pattern of a century and a half ago. There are onetime
company towns come under the fleet and jittery rule of Mercury, dedicated
now to a single industry, mail delivery, eastward and back, in among the
Soviets and out, 100 marks a letter. One village in Mecklenburg has been
taken over by army dogs. ... (613-4)
In each case what it is is self-determination par excellence ("anarchy
...?"); all these mini-nations are doomed, of course (remember how Slothrop
"is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days" too
at 291.4); for *we* know what comes next. They don't, however, though the
portents are there (those Russian MPs and Polish guerillas at 668-9).
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