they might be giants

[Terrance]

Posted here previously, but worth reading with M&D 68

http://titan.iwu.edu/~wchapman/pynchon.html

"But Pynchon undercuts the political value of the "natural" even as he
maintains it."


hmmmmmmm, not sure this is true at all. 


Nature may contest the dominance of the "structures favoring death," but
we perceive and understand nature only through social discourses -- and
social discourses are ideological. Thus the Titans have an ambiguous
resonance in the novel: on the one hand, they are associated with the
"overpeaking of life" that predates death-obsessed humanity, but they
also bring to mind the space helmets at the Mittelwerke (the helmets
"appear to be fashioned from skulls . . . perhaps Titans lived under
this
mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms," GR
296-7); the image of the Titans thus suggests technological militarism
as well as vital nature. How one sees is crucial, and Pynchon never
allows the reader an extra-ideological perspective from which to see.





The theory of ideology which is implied by Pynchon's qualified
anti-essentialism can only be described as paranoid: the very complexity
of the involvement in oppressive structures which is implied by an
identity constructed or conditioned by discourse argues for some sort of
hidden design. 

What the novel offers as political praxis, then, cannot be a
disentanglement from masculinism, for that would be an attempt to step
outside of language and the self. Rather, what the novel offers is a
disruption of coding in general -- a failure of coherence, a breakdown
in the narrative.



Yeah, certainly one very interesting approach to the novels of P. 

All the tiny ants are marching....