SLSL, 'UtR' Who won?

[jbor]

>> I'd say that's pretty accurate, the product of research or knowledge beyond
>> the Baedeker. There's more than a hint in the story that the contest between
>> Porpentine and Moldweorp goes much deeper than national rivalries, that they
>> are working for more powerful and less visible interests (i.e. what will
>> eventually become "They" in GR).
>> 

on 24/2/03 12:29 PM, Mutualcode at aol.com at Mutualcode at aol.com wrote:

> Perhaps, but there is a sense of something more sinister beyond "They"
> as in: "But they- no, it- had not been playing those rules. Only statistical
> odds. When had he stopped facing an adversary and taken on a Force,
> a Quantity?" (134-5).

Quite right. I think one of the developments in the author's historical
vision is Pynchon's progress in trying to track down this elusive "it" or
"They". I.e. Who's responsible? Who's to blame? In this early story he has
Porpentine realise that the ... motive force, say ... behind the opposite
"sides" he and Moldweorp represent is something which cuts across national
borders and which is beyond the desires and directives of leaders and
generals and human individuals altogether. Porpy is on the side of
"gentlemanly enemy-camaraderie" -- an intuitive code of "human" and
quasi-chivalrous conduct -- but his newly-constituted nemesis is something
which is frightening and impersonal, and it is personified in
Bongo-Shaftsbury the automaton. (The switch might be real, it might not. We
can never know for sure. It's deliberately indeterminate.) But later on, by
_GR_, Pynchon's realisation is that while it's not an actual "they" (i.e. a
bunch of people who can be positively identified and detained, and blamed),
it isn't properly an "it" (i.e. something abstract and non-human) either.
It's a "They", a personal pronoun which has been transformed into an
allegorical category, a manifestation of the way we as humans project fault
and blame onto others to retain a sense of our own blamelessness and
superiority.

I think it's instructive to consider the way Victoria in this story morphs
into "V" in the novel.

best
 
> It's unclear if Moldweorp has also achieved this level of illumination. My
> guess is that only Porpentine has looked this deeply inot things. The
> question for me is how much Victoria, and to an extent, Bongo, have
> become agents of "it."
> 
> Is Bongo's switch real? Do the wires really connect to his brain, ennabling
> him to cut off potential emotions when necessary; keeping it "simple,
> and clean," avoiding Porpentine's pitfall, or, is it just a ploy, like a
> tongue
> bar, to remind him to be cold- "a boyish gesture"?
> 
> I think the latter, but the switch is a motif that comes into play later
> in V. from a different angle- Sphere's musical flip-flop. Pointsman's
> investigation of the ultra-paradoxical abreaction strikes me as the
> most explicit GR connection. Whether real or prop the presence of
> the switch seems to reflect a very masculine need for control, the
> quest for which leads to being even more an agent controlled by It.
> 
> Victoria seems the feminine inversion of that. She seems to embrace
> It, and seeks to transcend the fate of Propentine and Goodfellow by
> giving up all notions of control, and merging with It.
> 
> "They" might be just another comforting paranoid delusion.
> The real question revolves around the inevitability of It, whatever
> It might be.
> 
> respectfully 
>