Forget Conspiracy

[David Morris]

--- William Zantzinger <williamzantzinger at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >    "Pynchon's and DeLillo's novels tend to rehearse and confirm many of the
aspects of the 'official narrative' of conspiracy.  But they also sharply
interrogate this narrative, suggesting that conspiracies are constitutive of
rather than epiphenomenal to contemporary civilization, that the recommended
strategies of counterconspiracy are designed to perpetuate conspiratorial
power, not to eleiminate it, and that, in order to resist conspiracy at all, we
must learn, paradoxically, to 'forget' it."
> > (pp. 254-5)
> 
> Right, but this is not quite possible for the characters in Pynchon's novels.
Paranoia, making connections or  conspiracy is how the characters make sense of
their worlds. Forgetting would amount to anti-paranoia and that kind of
forgetting is a midless pleasure the characters can't stand for very long. 
even in the temporary anarchy of the zone, forgetting is a dangerous mental
activity.  It causes Slothrop, for example, to become cold. Chracters that
paradoxically forget, can not even know the difference between the evil of the
Holocaust and the good of saving children from death. Paranoia is required,
connections are needed so that the characters can make sense of the world. 

"Forgetting" is advocated in GR by the narrator of the lab scene who laments
that all the rats can't just be let free.  He laments that men, their captors,
can't just forget impending death in order to "just live."  I think Slothrop
somehow reaches that Buddha-like state.  I don't think this is rightly called
going "cold."  But I also agree that GR's paranoia is the common realm of all
men striving to undertstand the world, and this does involve the moral aspect
that Bill mentions.  Slothrop became an enlightened hermit.  The best that most
of can do is create a "we-system."

David Morris


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