globalization & Pynchon?

[calbert at tiac.net]

Doug:

> Those interests are display.  Still, Pynchon takes care to talk in
> some detail about the corporation and its role in the colonial
> exploitation that the eponymous M&D serve - he shows how corporations
> take on a life separate from the individuals who serve them and the
> kings and governments that charter them.

But if they take on "separate" lives, will they not then compete 
directly with the interests of their former sponsors?

  This builds on his
> indictment (not too strong a word, in my opinion) in GR of the
> corporation and the cartels they form, their responsibility for War,

Do the other loci, which I assume we agree exist, bear any such 
responsibility? I'd be astonished to find that he doesn't spread such 
blame around.....I aslo suspect that P finds war to be as natural a 
component of life as sex, doling out blame in such a context would 
seem a fools errand....

> the rape of the Earth, the perversion of basic human impulses (cf
> Their colonialization and exploitation of Slothrop's unconscious
> impulses - there's that "im"), and in exacerbating human misery across
> the board. 

I think this is a very narrow interpretation...for instance, what 
"corporate" form drives the extinction of the dodo, which surely 
functions as a metaphor for larger processes of this kind? As I read 
that passage the dynamics of that campaign are at once more 
complex and basic. The nutty dutchman is driven by some internal 
mechanism to embrace his task, an "irrational" rationale lies at the 
heart of it - in contrast, economics is generally held to be the activity 
of RATIONAL parties......

love,
cfa