globalization & Pynchon?

[Doug Millison]

M&D does go into some detail about corporations at the time of the emergence
of that way of removing the risk of doing business from individual merchants
and displacing it onto a legal entity.  M&D also links specific corporations
(East India Company is one of them, I believe; he also discusses the
chartered corporations that have the right to colonize Maryland and
Pennsylvania, if I remember correctly; I don't have access to my copy of M&D
now) to the rape of the areas that have come under the imperial domination
(and subsequent commercial exploitation by those corporations) of European
powers and interests. An essential feature of a corporation is the "veil" (a
legal shield) that protects the Board, executives, and shareholders of a
corporation from responsibility for the consequences of actions undertaken
by the corporation.  (Having served as a co-founder and officer of a couple
of corporations, I happen to know a little bit about this aspect.) In other
words, shareholders and executives and employees profit, but the corporation
is held responsible for damages, penalties, fines, etc. It's a pretty nifty
way for people who can afford to invest in corporations to make money by
exploiting labor, natural resources, human weakness and remain legally
shielded from the damaging consequences of their investments. Historically,
it has proven quite difficult, to hold individual people responsible for the
actions of corporations.

Tim Ware provides a link to the East India Company web site from  his M&D
index, which  includes "Charter'd Companies" in his index (p. 252), with the
note: "The lord proprietors of England's colonial trading companies claimed
special protections over their incorporated businesses, extended through
their divinely granted authority, including permanency of incorporation,
limited liability, and the legal authority to be free from community and
worker interference. These protections were initially limited by the
American colonists, whose intent in this area was to create a nation where
the citizenry were the government and the government controlled the
corporations--by ensuring that, if a corporation violated its agreement to
obey all laws, to serve the public good, and to cause no harm, its charter
would be revoked." Needless to say, since colonial times, corporations have
shaken off virtually all meaningful limitations to their activities (in my
opinion) and reign supreme with their President Bush on the throne. Ware's
index also includes reference to the Atlantick Company at page 713, the
"imagined Atlantick Line's Proprietor" -- a passage that would seem, again
if I remember correctly, to have some bearing on the influence of
contemporary corporations.  

Pynchon does trace responsibility and involvement for Nazi war crimes to
specific corporate (multinational) collaborators in GR. This represents a
fairly important story line that runs through GR from end to end.  You might
(or not) even call it central to the novel, since it is the story of
Slothrop's quest.

Whether or not the continual linking of corporations to crimes and outrages
throughout Pynchon's fiction amounts to "blanket condemnation" I can't say,
that wasn't my comment, but that linkage is certainly there in the books to
be examined and commented upon, and it has been examined and commented upon
in some depth and detail by quite a few critics and students of Pynchon's
writing.

Re corporations having a life of their own, it's worth considering that U.S.
law defines them as, and gives them the same legal protections, as
individuals, as I understand it.  The lawyers among us can clarify that. 

The contemporary critique of multinational (global) corporations focuses on,
among other things, their ability to avoid heeding the laws of any
particular locality or nation, because of their ability to pick up stakes
and move if the locals (or nationals) object. In this sense, they do enjoy a
degree of freedom that most individuals and all governments don't.

Jane, I suggest you check with Pynchon re his personal feelings about
corporations in general and about specific corporations; I don't have any
insight to share with you along those lines.