_1984_ Foreword: race

[Doug Millison]

"The strategy of pitting race against race does not seem to be found in the
Party's tool kit. [...] He may have believed that by the time of the
tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for _1984_, the European
nationalisms he was used to somehow no longer exist, perhaps because
nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed
into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessmism, this
might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy
analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have
determined too much history snce 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily."
--Pynchon, _1984_ Foreword, pp. xvii-xviii

from a timely review (it came in today's email from H-Net) of:
Mark Perry. _Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from
Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders_. New York: Viking Penguin,
2001.  xxii + 406 pp.  Notes, bibliography, and index.  $29.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-670-03011-2; $15.00 (paper), ISBN 0-142-00103-1.
<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=313971050540338>

"Perry describes the emergence of abolitionists in the most unlikely
of settings, Charleston.  Sarah, born in 1792 as the second of
fourteen children of John and Mary Grimke, never embraced the role
of slave mistress.  Beginning at the age of eleven, she defied her
father's expressed wishes and taught slaves how to read in a Sunday
school. [...] Through their church, Sarah and Angelina quickly connected with
anti-slavery reformers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.  Both
women developed oratorical skills during their participation in
church meetings, where members discussed the merits of gradual
emancipation and colonization.  [...]   Perry believes that the Grimkes'
most significant contribution to
the civil rights movement was Archibald's publication of "The Heart
of the Race Problem,"  published in August 1906.  This essay reveals
Grimke's feelings towards his own mixed racial ancestry.  Grimke
maintained that the propensity of white men to rape or sexually
coerce women of African descent was central to understanding the
race problem. "

"--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist
skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make
believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no.
Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European
soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of
his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he
feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh?" Where he can just
wallow and rutand let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of
limbs, of hair aswooly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the
poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and
style of death, as do ergot and afgaric, the blight and fungus native to
Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death ad repression. Out
and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all
its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil these
cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets
back. The silences down here are vast enough to abaorb all behavior, no
matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . ." (GR 317)

Kute Korrespondence:  Pynchon's "Out and down in the colonies"  turns
Orwell's  _Down and Out in Paris and London_ upside down.