Pynchon's Response to Rampant Insanity (was Re: Quail: "You won't even simply *give up* when asked. [...] stoplecturing me")

[davemarc]

From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>

> 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.

>From what I can see, much of Pynchon's response is actually like that of
most of the subscribers to this list:  A lot of silence and distance.  It's
as if he sees that the world is so screwed up that the truest path may be to
remove oneself from the general hubbub as much as practical.  When he does
commit his words to paper, he often writes a kind of surrealist fiction that
enables him to raise many questions and portray complexities--the rampant
lunacies--while not quite engaging in polemics.  More often than not, I
venture, he raises questions without insisting that there are even
answers--in his fiction and his non-fiction.

I find much wisdom in that kind of response. I also find myself thinking
more than ever about the Luddite essay, with its references to the Badass:

"There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass.  He is usually
male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is
almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he is Bad, and he
is Big.  Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work
mischief on a large scale.  What is important here is amplifying of scale,
the multiplication of effect."

Pynchon refers to the Frankenstein creature and King Kong as examples of the
Badass.  Today I think of those examples as metaphors for human creations
and natural phenomena that are powerful, on the verge of being out of
control.  I think those metaphors resonate strongly when applied to the
powers wreaking havoc all over the world today.

And once again I recall, as I've often done on this list, Pynchon's public
words of support for Salman Rushdie and Marianne Wiggins after the Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini called for Rushdie's death.  Pynchon didn't use their
threatened victimization as an opportunity to harp on the evils of the
society to which Rushdie and Wiggins belong.  He thanked them "for reminding
us again that power is as much our sworn enemy as unreason."  Today there's
still plenty of power and unreason running rampant in every corner of the
world, and it would be wise to recognize that power and unreason are never
exclusive to one person, one group of people, or one nation.

Like it or not, we're in this together, folks.  I suggest we get more
comfortable with each other.

d.