Slothrop, Where Are You?

[vze422fs at verizon.net]

on 2/15/03 8:27 PM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> 
> 
> prozak at anus.com wrote:
>> 
>>> I actually live like this already ...
>> 
>> There's some sense to it. "Criminally insane" or not, there's
>> something creepy/very wrong about the way this world is going.
> 
> No SENSE To IT!
> 
> I wonder about this. Does Pynchon actually believe that the criminally
> insane have been in power. If THEY are criminally insane, no rational
> explanation can justify their use of power. There can be no moral
> explanation or justification.  If he does believe this,  I suspect we
> will find out in that 1984 Forward (if it is not a hoax). Why? Well,
> because in 1984, there is no sense to it. No rational. No reason. None.
> 1984 is  a strange and I think unique dystopia for exactly this reason.
> In fact, this is one of the reason why the novel is not very good and
> why so many can remember the manifestations, the particulars, of power
> but not the reason for power and control. There is no moral
> justification for the exercise of power. None.
> 
> So, while slow learners lash out at Bush, calling him criminally insane
> while they step willingly to the S&M dance, others debate, argue,
> consider the reasons, the policies, the alternatives, to the Bush
> policies and arguments.
> 
> It is not the business of novelists to make policy with their fictions.
> Their politics can only weaken their fictions. But great novelists have
> done it. Great prose fictions, great dramas, poems, can carry  heavy
> political burdens. If these survive and become truly great works
> (Richard II, Paradise Lost, Guliver's Travels, A Dialogue of Self and
> Soul, The Brothers Karamazov) it is because they are so strong that they
> can carry heavy political burdens. GR, I suspect, will carry on. I'm not
> sure 1984, as apt it may seem, will be standing in another 30 years.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, will people born today make any sense
of Ingsoc, Big Brother, or Goldstein thirty years from now? I'm curious to
read what Pynchon has to say about it - if, in fact, he has said anything at
all.

I guess, we'll know in a couple of months.