VLVL2 The Return of Weed Atman

[Terrance]

Ghetta Life wrote:
> 
> >From: Toby G Levy <tobylevy at juno.com>
> >
> >"I'm a pilgrim...who's taken ten years of your time just to get this far.
> >The network has been buzzing, like, 'for a while' with stories about this
> >karmic adjuster working out of Shade Creek, who actually gets results? I've
> >come to ask him to take my case."
> >
> >Unlike the other Thanatoids in the book up to this point, Weed Atman is
> >clearly dead.  The other Thanatoids might be dead, but could be thought to
> >be "like dead, only different" in that their lives are over except for the
> >all consuming desire for revenge on real and assumed wrongs done to them in
> >the earlier parts of their lives.
> 
> What evidence do you have that Weed is any different than the other
> Thanatoids?  Is it that you know Weed's history, but not the others'?
> There's no textual support for making Weed any more or less dead than the
> others.

There may be evidence that Weed is different from other Thanatoids, but
I guess we will have to wait and see what we learn about him later on.
For now, I think we should try to define KA and Thanatoid and Shade
Creek as best we can. It may true that Pynhcon's texts provide no
unambiguous definitions of KA, Thanatoid, Shade Creek, but if we just
give it the old college try ... well we might ... we might ... 

A good place to start is back in Father Fairing's Parish. 

"Allegory should not be tolerated, unless it overcomes itself
  and acts like fiction as it does in Kafka, Mann, Dickens or
  elaborates some complex truth--Dante, Kafka, or when "it
  explodes itself in the hunt for allegorical truth
  (Melville)."



  "Pynchon is the inheritor of Melville's broken estate. His
  novels behave like allegories that refuse to allegorize,
  allegory and the confusion of allegory, are what drive
  Pynchon's books and his explicit politics." 



Wood doesn't like the talking inanimates, Pynchon's humor, prose,
  irony, characters, digressions, evasive incoherence. He
  says, Pynchon  uses allegory to hide the truth, and in so
  doing, turns allegory into a fetish of itself. He divides
  Pynchon's readers--made by the author--as those that think
  him a great occultist, and those that think him a visited
  hoaxer. Pynchon's novels only call attention to their own
  signification, "which hang without reference, pointing like
  a severed arm to nowhere in particular."



> 
> >But in accepting the character of Weed Atman ten years after his very
> >certain death, we have to come to a decision here.  Are we to assume that
> >Pynchon wants us to believe that in the context of the novel people return
> >from death to seek revenge?  That ghosts exist on the same plane as the
> >living and interact with them?  Then Vineland becomes a fantasy.
> 
> I don't think "fantasy" is the right word.  Try "allegory."  Also,  I
> wouldn't say the Thanatoids haven't  "returned from the dead," they're just
> dead, but with a bit of animation.  And the suggestion is that they'd rather
> not be animated, but that the injustices inherent in the circumstances of
> their death compels them to keep mulling over their fate.  I think the
> "results" they seek is peace, sleep.  And to a very large degree their
> function in this book is as reminders to those living of something they'd
> rather forget, so they exist not so much for themselves in this regard.
> 
> Your fear of accepting the unreal in Pynchon's texts evidenced in what you
> find more "satisfying" below limits your understanding of the writing,
> forcing you to rewrite it in your head.
> 
> Ghetta
> 
> >On the other hand, could it not be that the story that Takeshi and DL are
> >telling to Prairie is the fantasy.  That they are describing the
> >resurrection of a memory of DL's dead comrade and not the resurrection of
> >the person himself. This interpretation is much more satisfying to me.
> 
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