Sanders, "The Politics of Literary Reinscription ..."

[Dave Monroe]

In my rush to post my Pynchon List Digest Condensed
version of that Sanders article, I apparently left out
a few things that should have been included, given
what I did post.  From Mark Sanders, "The Politics of
Literary Reinscription in Thomas Pynchon's V.,"
Critique, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Fall 1997) ...

"An apostrophe in Gravity's Rainbow to 'Karl Marx,
that sly old racist ... trying to make believe that
it's all Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets,' suggests a
gloss on the earlier allegory:

Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and
repression.  Out and down in the colonies life can be
indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with
no harm done to the metropolis, nothing to soil those
cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts....
No word ever gets back.  The silences down here are
vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how
animal it gets. ([GR] 317)

"Writing and art are repressive.  Marx's analyses
betray none of the pleasures that go with
colonialism." (Sanders, p. 83)

I hope to post some excerpts regarding specific
"syntagmata" in Chapter 9 of V., specific
reinscriptions from Pynchon's various sources on the
Herero, Bondelzwarts, et al., but I also see that, in
my rush, I never quite got to Sanders' conclusion/s,
either ...

"... examining Pynchon's 'sources' has not simply
produced the pleasure of discovery and of locating the
points at which he differs from and revises the
'original' writers' interpretations of events ... but
has happened upon a point at which no specific
interpretation is proffered by the source; the account
is left to shock and fascinate on its own with no
interpretation much more plausible than another. 
Thomas Pynchon, in a spirit of critique, proffers and
account of his own ....  reading the source carefully
warns us against interpretation itself and the
tendency to indulge in hasty historical revisionism,
although, of course, it would indeed be making an
interpretation to say that, in this case, there may
not be an interpretation, although various
interpretations can be made." (Sanders, p. 95)

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> > "Marx's analyses betray none of the
> > pleasures that go with colonialism."

> What passage in GR? At one point, a  narrator calls
> Marx a
> racist and chides Marx blah blah, is this what you
> are all
> referring to? 
> 
> BTW, Voegelin has some very nasty names for Mr. Marx
> as
> well.


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