MDMD and the meaning of life

[Paul Nightingale]

Thankyou, Doug. I should have striven for greater clarity. My problem with
Pynchon or anyone else 'telling us how it is' is with the view that we need
him to bolster up our anti-war views or justify them. Pynchon is not a
propagandist; he is not an essay-writer who explains (as does Chomsky -
whom, for the record, I tend to agree with, more often than not) why we
should be critical of US militarism. I don't go to Pynchon when I wish to
refine my critique of multinational capitalism; although I fully accept - as
one of the tenets of discourse analysis - that the way we understand/read
mult-cap overlaps with the way we r/u contemporary fiction. However, the
(recent? ongoing?) discussion about Ch7 has never really considered 'slavery
is bad' an issue to be addressed. One might wish to conclude, from the text,
that the author (a sign-system known as Thomas Pynchon) doesn't approve:
does it matter? One of the worst novels ever written in the English language
(I cannot bear to mention its title or author in the company of Pynchon) was
said, by some at the time, to have 'inspired' the anti-slavery movement in
the years preceding the American Civil War. I rather suspect this wasn't the
case, but it was offered as a point of view, at the time.