Haunted by Iraq's Ghosts & Our WMD

[cathy ramirez]

--- Doug Millison <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> cathyramirez69 at yahoo.com:
> > I didn't say that the Holocaust is a
> > central concern in Pynchon's fiction. 
> 
> OK, have it your way:
> The sentence structure is vague; I'm assuming you
> mean
> that it's the "the corpses of Auschwitz" that haunt
> Pynchon's novels, not "car bodies".

You're right. the entire thing is vauge and patchy. 
rather than have it my way I would prefer to trash the
entire message. Maybe when I have more time I'll cut
out Burton, add in more from Marcuse and get to the
point. The point is not about the Holocaust being
central to Pynchon's fiction. I don't believe this is
the case at all. 


In think I'm going to cast my vote for the SL tales. 

But while I'm trashing and rehashing this I will say
that the point is something about what haunts
Pynchon's fictions. I think if you re-read the marcuse
 I included you will see the connection Im trying to
make here. Granted, I can't make it too clear with
only 10k.

If you want me to I'll send 5 or so 10k messages. I'll
include a topic sentence in every paragraph and all
that english 101 stuff.  

 Anyway, ever read P's short story the secret
integration? it's the attenuated ghosts sort of thing.
carl is an imagined figure, a fantastic figure and a
ghost of sorts. he is named after a musician that is
taken away by the police and is never heard from
again. the boys who give carl "life" are white boys
and they decide to have a black boy as an imagined
playmate. There is a childless balck family in the
tale and they are terrorized by the boy's parents.
Anyway, the father of one of the boys owns a junk yard
(see the connection to Elmira's junk yard and the car
bodies? no? well I've been in that junk yard and in
the prison there and I've been on the beautiful campus
and maybe I'm just frauding all this too....but I
think there is a connection and a point to all this)
and the kids construct the imagined friend from junk,
all the stuff the adults toss away. 

So here at the end of  M&D we have this parade of
ghosts, ghosts attenuated, philadelphia's unchosen and
I think they are the ones that have been used up and
tossed away. the are chinese, indian, irish, black,
the insane. 

At the darkest hour right before the dawn, all of
Philadelphia's Unchosen, a parade of shades with a
grievance, attend Wicks and LeSpark. Already, the
preterits of America have been passed over. Passed
over and run over and fucked over by the political
machines progress down the Line. 

So what haunts this novel is what haunts all of
Pynchon's books. They are there in the dump in Elmira
New York, car bodies piled up like the corpses of
Auschwitz. They are there when men of science and
religion and business experiment on baby Tyrone and
when Slothrop the soldier is injected with Sodium
Amytol. In M&D they  the are chinese, indian, irish,
black, the insane, all the unchosen. 

And now to the marcuse passage. 

all these unchosen and attenuated ghosts (i.e., carl M
and carl B) and the corpses of Auschwitz haunt
Pynchon's fictions not so much in the memory but in
the accomplishments (the rocket for example) of man or
in the in the progress of man. in his architecture,
his cities, his plastic matrix rolled out from Penn to
san narcisco. it haunts the progress of the Line and
all that is constructed on and about the Line. This
includes all the divisions, the earth, family, the
indians from their land, the irish from theirs,
eventually the north from sout and freedom from
slavery, brother from brother. 

Imagination has become an instrument of progress cotra
naturum. 

 what the Line divides and separates is only as
important as what it merges and blends and
commercializes on technical and political
sacred/profane ground.Merged are  Science and magic,
religion and psychoanalysis, the virgin and the
dynamo.

The formally antagonistic realms merge on technical
and political grounds ---magic and science, life and
death....

see Marcuse, One Dimensional Man   

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