Notes From Underglass- Why Pynchon Matters

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In a message dated 2/22/2003 4:59:02 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
barbara100 at jps.net writes:


> The only
> meaningful difference I can see is the level to which I partake. It's one
> thing for Saddam to kill his people. There's not much I can do about that.
> But I'm damned if I sit back while my government kills his people

Precisely. From Peter Viereck's Intro to _Darkness at Noon_, 1961:

       ...in the sense of Yeat's distinction:"Of our arugument with
       others we make rhetoric, of our argument with ourselves we
       make poetry."

       During the lonely  introspection of his four-month imprisonment
       in Franco Spain, Koestler had discovered that "man is a reality,
       mankind an abstraction; the end justifies the means only within
       very narrow limits; ethics is not a function of social utility." Such
       ethical self-discovery then became the framework of _Darkness_
       unifying the novel's otherwise divergent politics and aesthetics
       and preventing the former from coarsening into soap-boxing, the
       latter from rarefying into preciosity. (p. xiii)

What makes Pynchon important as a novelist is precisely because of his
sense of political and ethical responsibility which balances and informs 
his aesthetics, something Riefenstahl, for example, failed to accomplish. 

If indeed Pynchon does pen a fore-word to the coming edition of 1984, I
cannot think of better timing to demonstrate his continuing "ethical
self-discovery," to "Matter," as it were, given the precarious geo-political
situation.

respectfully
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