more fraud

[cathy ramirez]

Still Crazy After All Those Years
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Salman Rushdie
January 14, 1990
The New York Times

Thomas Pynchon is no sentimentalist, however, and the
balance between light
and dark is expertly held throughout this novel, so
that we remain uncertain until
the final pages as to which will prevail, hippie
heaven or Federal nemesis. And
we are left, at the last, with an image of such
shockingly apt moral ambiguity that
it would be quite wrong to reveal it here.

Have to agree that Thomas Pynchon is no
sentimentalist. The balance or the conflict of light
and dark is sustained throughout his texts. To
disentangle this tangle of lines in Pynchon's books
strips them of the "shocking apt moral ambiguity" that
Rushdie alludes to. It's shocking to the reader of
Pynchon's novels partly because the reader is apt to
side with the light and not the dark. But Pynchon
flips the switch or it is flipped some how and we left
in the dark, invisible and alone. Or, it flips and we
can love again. But the ambiguity is shocking. In V.,
after 1945--the end of the war-- the world flops and
there is no love. There is no hate, but there is no
love. Shocking.

Invisible, yes, what do the furnishings matter, at
this stage of things?

Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was
talking only to him, say
"You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come now,
we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going
to take the trouble to save YOU, old fellow...."

Gravity's Rainbow page 4

No one is going to take the trouble to save YOU. But
maybe we are not so all alone and invisible. Maybe we
are not trapped in solipsistic existentialism. Maybe,
somehow, a switch can be thrown and we will be saved
from the darkness. But we all know that switches once
set can be reset. Pointsman? Reagan? What makes the
world flip and flop?
Who has their hands on the switch or on the wheel?
God?

"We are digits in God's computer...and the only thing
we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the
only thing He
sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world
of toil
and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the
hacker we call
God."

Vineland

In V. Benny is not reading Ellison's Invisible Man but
Existential Sheriff.
He has a conversation with SHROUD. Apt and SHOCKING.

Somehow Profane had difficulty getting back in the
plot (in the plot? not into?) of
Existential Sheriff. After a while he got up and went
over to SHROUD. "What do you mean, we'll be like you
and SHOCK someday? You mean dead?"
Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean.
"If you aren't then what are you?"
Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go.
"I don't understand."
So I see. But you're not alone. That's the comfort
isn't it?

V. Chapter 10 at the end of Part II
Flip/Flop


That war, the world flipped. But come '45, and they
flopped. Here in Harlem they flopped. Everything got
cool--no love, no hate, no worries, no excitement.

V. Chapter 10 Part IV

No love after 45? SHOCKING!

Shocking too because Sphere says that after the war
the world flopped. During the war there was love but
after it there was none. Everything was cool after the
war but there was no love or hate and no worries. 


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