A sketch of Pynchonian politics

[Jane O' Sweet]

Phil Wise wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jane O' Sweet" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 6:52 AM
> Subject: Re: A sketch of Pynchonian politics
> 
> >
> >
> > Phil Wise wrote:


> > > Pynchon's narrator continues: "It [the murdering and violence] provides
> raw material to be recorded in History, so that children may be taught
> History as a sequence of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared
> for the adult world.  Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary
> folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that pie while they're
> still here to gobble it up.  The true war is a celebration of markets..."
> (105).
> >
> > >So, the little people, well below Their position, are given
> > >an incentive to play the market game and thus be implicated
> > >in the "true war": if they are not individualistic enough to
> > >try and grab a piece of that pie, the spectre of mass death
> > >faces them.

Jane asked: 

 How does this work? Not sure I understand your reading of
 this???


> >
> Straight analogy.  Pynchon's quote speaks of ordinary folks as "little
> fellows", who need to grab what they can from the system while they are
> alive.  The alternative is mass death.  The incentive is certainly for
> people to climb over each other to increase their chances of survival,
> although it is true that some of the characters don't behave that way.
> 
> It is the System that creates the war, and the war is a celebration of
> markets.  If the real business of the war is buying and selling, one of its
> strategies is to get these little people, ordinary folks, to use the markets
> (the narrator goes on to cite the black markets where ordinary people trade
> what they have for what they need, questioning whether they really are
> "organic").

See this is why we need textual support. I'll have to type
the rest of it up and then we can look at it. We have Katja
to consider, the Organic, the exchange of life for
information, the guilt of the Jews. It's a very complicated
passage, we have discussed it here at some length in the
past.