re Re: MDMD: Lambton Worm

[Doug Millison]

davemarc:
>Surely they didn't "learn" everything from the CIA!  Surely there were other
>influences that contributed to their misogyny, religious intolerance, and
>preoccupation with martyrdom.  Or are these people purely programmed by the
>US to terrorize it and Jews, plus anyone else who happens to be in the
>vicinity?

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

Agreed the CIA isn't their only influence, although the US role in creating
these monsters, begun under Reagan, is well documented (as are many other
examples of "blowback" -- not least of which is the importation of Nazis
into the US to work on Cold War weapon systems, cf. GR, as you know of
course). But you make a very good point. The September 11 attacks, and
other crimes attributed to al Qaida, are horrific and inexcusable.

You're also right about  Pynchon being "relatively quiet publicly on these
issues in a non-fiction context".  But, he hasn't been completely silent.
I think it's telling that (apparently) Pynchon did grant the interview to
Playboy Japan where he made some comments that go against the grain of Bush
Administration propaganda; in the post 9-11 climate, this seems a
significant gesture, to me at least.  He says less than other artists,
agreed. And, he limited his comments to the Japanese media market, unlike
some others who spoke out in dissent against the Bush Administration in
more visible ways here in the U.S.  (Barbara Kingsolver is an American
author who comes to mind; Chomsky; Susan Sontag).

> The US population could use less sniping and more
>of a vision to counter the momentum that the Bush government has.

Amen.  The Bush Administration benefits from the long experience with
"divide-and-conquer" tactics, and can dominate mainstream media as no
previous administration has been able to do, making an organized opposition
more difficult than it might be.

>As for the remarks about violence leading to more violence, I fear that
>they're also too simplistic to bear scrutiny.

This is where our views begin to diverge. I believe the power of
non-violence is vastly underrated, largely because people so often lack the
mettle to consistently apply it.  But I agree that violence is a troubling
and persistent  part of the human condition. Pynchon seems to struggle with
this same question throughout his work. He bears enough of the 60's
counter-culture imprint to keep coming back to an idealistic point of view,
he sees the negative results of war and violence (as in the Lambton Worm
story), but he's also been through the counterculture retrenchment under
the Nixon-Reagan-Bush hammer and the sell-out of the Boomers. Does he come
down, finally, on the cynical, negative end of the spectrum?  That's
difficult to judge definitively, based on reading Vineland and M&D, which
contain as much if not more hope as his earlier works.

Before he joined "David Morris" and the rest of that posse riding herd on
my posts, Keith used to have some very interesting and insightful things to
say about what I see as the central issue of the Lambton Worm story in M&D.
The monster is laying waste to the region, no doubt about that, it's mean
and nasty and cruel.  But eliminating it requires more human sacrifice
(killing one's father v. letting nine generations suffer). The
objectification of the monster as evil Other seems important in the way
Pynchon adapts this legend -- he emphasizes he way the monster coils around
the outside of the castle, the way our young hero goes off to fight evil
somewhere else in the world even as the monster raises hell at home.  You
can't separate evil out of yourself and try to eliminate it, that's the
salient feature of the story in my reading of M&D; the evil lies within and
must be dealt with here and now first of all. (This is where the James
Hillman -- whose book I'm enjoying now, _Re-Visioning Psychology_ --
illuminates Pynchon especially well.)  Maybe Keith can help us here based
on what he's reading and thinking about these days?

And that's where Pynchon's use of this legend in M&D seems to me to
dovetail with something I've mentioned here before: Walter Wink's
three-part work (Naming the Powers; Unmasking the Powers; Engaging the
Powers) featuring  his analysis of the myth of redemptive violence and its
power in our culture, why violence appears so successful as a tactic.
(Naming the Powers goes into great detail in examining the language of
power in the New Testament, and as such is as much a work of Bible
scholarship as anything else; the following two books address
social/cultural issues in the context of Christian non-violence; Wink has a
Quaker background). Wink stays on the more optimistic end of the spectrum,
reflecting some of that light that continues to shine in Pynchon's work no
matter how otherwise dark and tenebrous his landscape becomes.