pynchon-l-digest V2 #2192

[Doug Millison]

Quail:
> a great, high-budget epic mini-series

With all due respect, not only is this one of the funniest oxymorons I've
heard all day ("great mini-series") but it's about as far from Pynchonian
as you get can along the entertainment sprectrum.   I can imagine Pynchon
writing a funny-as-hell novel about the making of a TV mini-series, but
giving one of his properties into the hands of a TV producer? I can think
of at least two good reasons we haven't seen any such attempts:  most TV
producers don't know jack about Pynchon, and, probably more important, its
quite likely that Pynchon has never sold film or TV options for his works;I
expect that if he had done so, there would be news items or rumors about
such projects in the Hollywood trade papers. When Pynchon collaborates on a
TV or film project, I'll get excited about it and not before then; I've
always been intrigued with the notion that, at one point, apparently
(according to reports about P's long-ago grant application, if I remember
the detail correctly), P was interested in creating an opera.

rj/rjackson/jbor/?:
> The opening section of _GR_ is much more than a simplistic "War is Bad"
> screed. Perhaps not even.

I don't believe anybody has tried to argue that GR is "a simplistic "War is
Bad" screed" -- that's a straw man argument;  certainly I've been
consistent in noting the complexity and nuance of Pynchon's prose, and have
acknowledged repeatedly in what I've written on Pynchon-L these past many
years that Pynchon's work is open to multiple interpretations. Some of
those interpretations are more plausible than others. It's going to take a
lot of revision to turn Pynchon into an advocate of War.  In general,
rj/rjackson/jbor/? seems to have set him/herself a daunting
literary-critical challenge:  how to take perhaps the most left-leaning,
anti-War, progressive among serious American writers and re-interpret his
work to turn him into a neo-conservative supporter of  the machinations of
global capital, multinational corporations, and US foreign policy.  This
requires prodigious rewriting of  Pynchon's text in the sort of tortured
deconstructions rj/rjackson/jbor/? occasionally offers, accompanied by
suppression of a large number of the elements present in Pynchon's fiction.
rj/rjackson/jbor/? has yet to make a convincing case for it here on
Pynchon-L, but I do applaud the gusto with which he/she pursues this
project.

rj/rjackson/jbor/?:
>It is explicitly the experience of innocent Londoners during the
>V-2 raids of 1944-5 in which the reader's imagination and empathy become
>immersed.

Obviously, Pynchon leads his readers to sympathize with the terrified
victims of an aerial attack.  Even the sophomores get that on a first
reading.

Does Pynchon thus invite his readers  to consider what it might feel like
to be on the receiving end of the kind of aerial attacks that had been a
staple of the war the U.S. was fighting in Vietnam?  Perhaps not
explicitly, but that's certainly what went through my mind, when I
encountered and read GR in the summer of 1973.   By the end of GR,  does
Pynchon invite the reader to empathize, in that last delta-t,  with the
victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to which the novel directly alludes?

But, Pynchon doesn't stay focused on the victims of the rocket attacks --
Pynchon takes the reader to the other end of the rainbow, the launch sites,
and rather thoroughly examines the culture that produces the rocket and
launches the attacks, some of his most inspired prose explores the
worldview of Blicero, in love with death and technology to the point of
sacrificing his lover to those gods.   In GR, of course, it's Europeans
killing Europeans; its essentially the same culture on either end of the
rocket's trajectory. Depicting the innocent victims of the terror that
grows naturally out of the culture the victims have collectively created
(with a lot of help and direction by their leaders), and making the reader
realize she is one of these co-creating victims -- that lies at the heart
of GR's subversive power.

GR doesn't show us the colonized peoples striking back at the metropole;
the dodo dies at the hands of  the colonist, the Counterforce fails. Here
the parallels between September 11 and the current situation begin to break
down. As Chomsky and others observe,  for the first time, the people the
Europe, the U.S., and their allies have been pissing on have finally struck
back in a way that got our attention in a significant way.

rj/rjackson/jbor/?:
>He negotiated with the Taliban to hand over
> the chief suspect.

Bush said repeatedly he would not negotiate, he made a non-negotiable
demand, and has continued to repeat it.

rj/rjackson/jbor/?:
>And then, when all other alternatives had been exhausted

No alternatives were seriously considered, according to the NYTimes,
Washington Post, and other mainstrem news organs in the US that widely
reported that Bush made his mind up on September 11 to respond with an
attack on Afghanistan.

rj/rjackson/jbor/?:
> he declared a just war

That's propaganda. The fact is, as many reputable observers around the
world have noted, the war is not legal vis-a-vis the relevant  world law,
UN procedures, etc.

rj/rjackson/jbor/?:
>on the regime harbouring the terrorist leaders and
> began strategic bombing raids on their military installations and transport
> and communications centres.

And in the process, killing an untold number of civilians -- already in the
hundreds according to credible, mainstream news organizations.  Those
responsible for these attacks know from the get-go that there is a margin
of error involved in targeting these bombs and missiles, and they seem to
have decided, once again, in the cruelest sort of cost-benefit analysis,
that innocent civilians are expendable in order to achieve the larger goal.
How does that differ from what the terrorists did in their attacks on the
U.S.?

rj/rjackson/jbor/?:
>Anything less would have been suicide.

You could just as easily say, decades of a bullying US foreign policy has
turned out to be suicidal, by creating one after another force to do our
dirty work for us somewhere very far away from Washington and NYC (Saddam,
Osama, Noriega, the Golden Triangle heroin warlords, Central American death
squads, etc. & etc. ad nausem), and then suffering the results as those
creations turned against us, like Frankenstein's monster.  Sooner or later,
people get tired of being picked on and oppressed, and they strike back at
the bully, in this case, with tragic results.

Are a bully's victims justified in thus striking back at the bully and
killing more innocent victims?  I say no, in so doing they are guilty of
perpetuating the same evil that has been done to them.  Is it
understandable that a bully's victims would thus strike back?  Of course
it's understandable:  flip things around the way so many people have done
-- envision the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks as bullies, us/US
as the victims, and consider the many explanations put forth to justify the
current attacks.



Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
millison at online-journalist.com
www.Online-Journalist.com