SLSL back to Low-Lands? WAS re Re: NP Tolkien Picks Up ...

[pynchonoid]

John Bailey:
>"The term "speciesism" was first coined by Richard
>Ryder, who noted that 
>discriminating between sentient individuals due to
>perceived species is 
>arbitrarily divisive in the same way sex or race
>discrimination is. "

This edges near a concept that's not entirely foreign
to Pynchon's fictional world:  the insights into the
emotional ife of William Slothrop's pigs, not to
mention M&D's L.E.D. and which puts into play
arbitrary distinctions between animal and human, the
tree that talks to Slothrop in GR, the notion that the
Earth itself is a living being, effectively
challenging the Enlightenment notion (it goes back at
least as far as Descartes) that consciousness,
emotions, intelligence are what distinguishes humans
from all the rest.  There's some of this in
"Low-Lands" where Pynchon blurs the boundaries between
Earth and the human body -- "the sea was quite
literally in our blood" (p.59)

-Doug



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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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