Playing in the Dark

[Doug Millison]

>   "Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America
> her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the
> metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in
> the restless Slumber of these Provinces. [ ]" (M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345)

I wouldn't assume this is a sweet dream of liberty and justice for all that
somehow might be accomplished in America in a way that isn't possible in
Britain.  It's equally possible, and, given the drift of Pynchon's fiction
from one book to the next, more plausible, to think in terms of the
emergence of impulses that must be constrained in the Old World or have no
opportunity of expression, linking it to the GR passage that Barbara cites,
America as the field of dreams in which the colonials can rape and pillage
and exploit without restraint, the realization of their dreams become a
nightmare for the people they displace, the slaves they transport, the new
world that they spoil.


>"....Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more.  Colonies are the outhouses of
>the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy
>the smell of his own shit.  Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as
>loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy.  Eh?  Where he
>can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive
>darkness of limbs, of hair as wooly as the hair on his own forbidden
>genitals.  Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and
>not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and
>fungus native to Europe.  Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and
>repression.  Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and
>sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to
>soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts....No word ever
>gets back.  The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior,
>no matter how dirty, how animal it gets...."  (GR 368)
>