TboneSE

[Dave Monroe]

>From Patrick O'Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural
Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2000), Ch. 3, "Engendering Paranoia," pp.
77-109 ...

"The process by which remnants of the dead are
converted into devices to spuriously protect the
living from the harmful effects of nicotine (repeated
in the story of American World War II G.I.s whose
bones have been transported from their resting place
in an Italian lake as part of Inverarity's dealings
with the Mafia) is one in which bodies are
commodified, the memorial is transmogrified into the
ephemeral (literally, going up in smoke), and death is
placed at the service of pleasure.  We can view this
bizarre example of almagamatory capitalism as a
metaphor for the cultural order depicted in the novel
that everywhere works to assimilate dispersed cultural
productions and remains into interlinked systems of
transformation and exchange that feed desire.  Even
the scattered elements of the novel's econd world--the
underground cults, unofficial systems of
communication, and marginalized entities that
constitute a nomadicy--operate according to an
assimilatory rubric in which teh stray message and
wandering soul are incoroprated into the singular
conspiracy of the oppressed mirroring the singular
conspiracy of the powerful.  In this regard, the
paranoia of The Crying of Lot 49, as the many
references to Narcissus and narcissism imply, is that
of the mirror: every element of the novel--all of its
multiple sites, stories, messages, puns, identities,
and scenarios--reflect the positioning of all the
others in the welter of overlapping plots and
discourses.  What emerges from the cros-hatchings of
conspiracy in The Crying of Lot 49 is a monolithic,
silvere image of the symbolic order as Pynchon
perceives it operating in the articulation of
economies, histories, and narratives." (p. 86)

And add to what Bec and Pyn might share a parodic take
on that Leibnizian order of mutually mirroring monads,
e.g. Molloy's sucking stones ...

http://www.nypress.com/14/8/news&columns/slackjaw.cfm

http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckdark.html

Which reminds me ...



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