Not necessarily an attack on Quail

[JBFRAME at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/25/2001 9:13:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
millison at online-journalist.com writes:


> Here's my theory:  so thoroughly have people like Quail been co-opted by
> the bitch goddess America, they can only react hysterically when it begins
> to appear that this art object they venerate -- Pynchon's writing -- may
> reveal uncomfortable truths about America.  They miss Pynchon's irony
> entirely, it's beyond their ken that Slothrop or Pokler might represent the
> kind of journey of discovery that each of us can take if we start noticing
> what's actually going on in the world around us. What would happen if you
> looked closely at the companies that manufacture the weapons used in the
> current war, if you followed the money and saw how the same companies and
> shareholders profit by supplying all sides in the current conflict, if you
> investigated and learned to what degree we have created and nurtured and
> sustained the enemy we now fight, if you came to grips with the
> responsibility we share for the suffering by virtue of our support for the
> leaders and institutions that carry out that suffering in our names, if you
> confronted the reality that inside of us of us is a tendency to evil that
> we can't split off and destroy no matter how hard we try, we can only come
> to terms with it and learn not to let the evil tendency dominate our
> behaviors. That's a scary line of thought.  In Pynchon's fictional setting,
> coming to grips with that seems to blow Slothrop apart, and it crushes
> Pokler.  It's threatening to the reader, too; this is subversive
> literature, profoundly subversive.  so it comes as no suprise that readers
> like Quail have got to keep Pynchon up there on the bookshelf and deny his
> work is anything but "fiction", unwilling to admit that Pynchon might
> really mean it when he talks about the "the criminally insane who have
> enjoyed power  since 1945".
> 
> How do we respond in a world where the loonies are running the hospital?
> Personally, I like Pynchon's response, he writes books that expose the
> lunatics  for what they are.  You are right to focus on GR in the current
> situation, a novel that begins in the midst of a terror attack from the
> skies and which ends with a manned bomb falling to trigger what may be the
> long-awaited apocalypse; in between those two pages Pynchon explores in
> some detail  how we come to live in a world defined by such terror. I do
> believe we might be able to learn something from this novel, and P's other
> work, that could help us in the current situation (great literature often
> helps people in their lives outside the book). Too bad that's not a welcome
> subject here on Pynchon-L, it gets shouted down by Quail and his ilk each
> time the topic surfaces, and they've become rather hysterical on this
> point:  what on earth, they have asked repeatedly in recent days, can a
> novel published 28 years ago have to do with the current geopolitical
> situation? The intellectual bankruptcy that undergirds that question is
> absolutely stunning.
> 
> 

Sorry, folks, but he's right.
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