pynchon-l-digest V2 #1711

[Doug Millison]

Why neglect the positive implication -- and, indeed, the positive 
content -- of Pynchon's narrative?  Plato didn't -- humans might be 
living in the cave, but they can step out into the light. Fra Fairing 
may be stuck in the sewer, but we're not -- unless we want to be.  We 
can always go up into the light. As we see in V-2, the Kirghiz Light 
remains a possibility for some, if not for those who serve death and 
the Rocket, those who, like Weissmann/Blicero among others, are on 
the way to becoming machines themselves as they take on more and more 
inanimate attributes. Pynchon does not deny the possibilities for 
liberation, release from the death-in-life that characterizes 
contemporary society; alongside the critique of the limitations of 
human existence as we have ordered it, Pynchon affirms many wonders 
of life:  the miracle of creation, the love and concern that people 
manage to share, the solidarity of people working together to improve 
their lot (Vineland's affirmation of some aspects of the U.S. labor 
movement, for example), and a mind-blowing, ecstatic vision of the 
merging of individual consciousness with cosmic consciousness 
(Slothrop's epiphany, as some people read it). Is the glass half full 
or half empty?  Which do you want it to be?

rj:
>  the added implication in this
>subsequent expository passage is that what we are each building from
>"history's rags and straws" in our constructions of identity/consciousness
>and courses of "action" are in fact prisons -- just like Fra Fairing.

[...]

>Conversely, references to Plato's allegory of the cave in _The Republic_,
>that unenlightened or "irrational" state of human consciousness wherein mere
>moving shadows are perceived as reality, figure in John Updike's texts.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>