IG Farben & French Shakespeare.1&2

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<... what does it mean that Pynchon names I G Farben or Jay Gould & Jim 
Fisk, J.P. Morgan, Richard Nixon, Rathenau, Dulles, JFK, Malcolm X? And what 
does it mean that he connects I G Farben to the U.S. Military Industrial 
Complex? That a screaming ICBM is come to America? >>

Well, precisely.  What does it mean, outside the value of the artistic 
juxtapositions within the novel?  The reader may have an answer, but it's 
entirely the reader's own. 

<<And VL, as Doug notes, turns to the American war on drugs>>

I was speaking of GR.  I think Vineland a tedious bore of a book and the 
facts that Pynchon draws lefty connections we're all familiar with anyway 
does little to redeem it.

<<Take Malcolm X, isn't his presence, his characterization in GR in part an 
assertion, a statement, perhaps even something didactic (Dickensian even)? >>

I'm not being contrary for the sake of it, but no; I don't think that's so.  
That Malcolm is from Boston,--Roxbury, I suppose--and was there at a time 
when it's conceivable his path crossed with Kennedy's or Slothrop's, is a 
nice moment in the novel and, yes, I agree P is sensitive to race relations, 
but the value of that moment with Malcolm is esthetic and inside the novel.  
Wouldn't one have to be very naive and unformed actually to learn something 
about race from the sequence?

<<P does not simply create Marvy for our amusement does he?>>

In large part, yes.  Again:  are you saying you think P believed his readers 
were unaware of the sort of redneck that Marvy lampoons?

<<Wagner was a thief, and he flouted history, so Pynchon ... P makes what he 
takes his own.>>

Good, yes, and I get the parallel of course.  But  I qualified at the 
beginning of my previous post "in the context of thise [sic] strings," which 
strings have dealt with journalistic and legal truths as to IBM's and other 
corporations' and families' and individuals' connections to the Third Reich.  
Perhaps you'd be willing to go before a court waving GR and quoting Newman on 
Wagner, but I would hope not to be your client.  

<<Dave Monroe (?)  and Doug, others,  having read GR, I think, back when it 
was published, have a very important contribution to make here ...>> 

I would guess I am approximately of the same age.   GR rocked me too, but 
I've read, in the years since, hundreds and hundreds of books, and contexts 
evolve, or so one hopes.  The attitude toward Pynchon as Colossal Head/Seer 
of his Age, etc., teaching and showing us, is troubling, to say the least, 
thirty years later.  It's like an old doper who found the deep truths of the 
ages in Beatle lyrics.

<<Yes, it seems  safe to say this was his primary goal, but his primary goal 
does not  preclude these others. The two are in fact not incompatible, but 
two sides of the same text.>>

I would argue rather that one can't do both properly.

As to the arguments in your second post, e.g.:--

<<... On a social level this leads to a repressive technocratic system, a 
total and
totalizing System won away from the entropies of lovable but
scatter-brained mother earth. Mothers and Fathers, Family surrenders to the 
state, and the state is an incestuous sodomizing system in love with Death.>>

I'm sorry.  I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't give offense, 
but this stuff makes my eyes glaze over.