Pynchon as moralist

[Doug Millison]

rj and Mackin in recent days have wondered how Pynchon could be 
considered to moralize, or have argued that he avoids moralizing.

Of course the notion of author as moralist is hardly new; serious 
readers, critics, and scholars quite easily talk of an author's moral 
stance or attitude, or of the way an author, through the use of 
irony or other rhetorical device, might make a moral judgement or 
otherwise comment on a particular character or event. I tire of the 
Holocaust theme, so was pleased to read an article that illustrates 
how this works with regard to Pynchon's environmentalism.

A recent example occurs in Thomas Shaub's article, "The Environmental 
Pynchon:  _Gravity's Rainbow_ and the Ecological Context," published 
in Pynchon Notes #42-43.  The article is a fine discussion that puts 
"_Gravity's Rainbow_ in the intertextual field of environmental 
discourse of the 1960s and 1970s" and which draws meaningful 
connections between the writings of environmentalists (including 
Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, and many others) and GR.

Schaub observes that "late in Slothrop's progress, the narrator notes 
that Tyrone has become 'intensely alert to trees, finally' and goes 
on to say, 'With the moral judgement implicit in that reprimand 
("finally"), the text begins to read like leaflets handed out by 
Earth First! or Greenpeace."

A bit later in his article, Schaub says, "The plastic motif allows 
Pynchon to build the ecological consciousness of the 1960s into the 
technology and culture of the Second World War as a kind of moral 
judgment on them."

Schaub's article is good, not least when he  talks about plastic and 
"Captain Blicero, Gravity's Rainbow's allegorical figure of death."

Schaub also offers his own take on what the "central theme" of GR might be:

"The book [Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_] has once been titled 'The 
Control of Nature,' and it closes on that note:  'The "control of 
nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal 
age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature 
exists for the convenience of man" (197). This, it might be argued, 
is the central theme of _Gravity's Rainbow_."
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