Pynchon and fascism

[Michael Joseph]

Paul,

Realizing that I haven't talked about Pynchon at all and only obliquely in
mussing over the problematics of homeland, I want to apologize for my
digression, and thank you for your patience and your lucid explanation and
examples.



Michael

> I am being interrogated/tortured by the secret police in Nazi Germany or
> Stalinist Russia. I know I'm an enemy of the regime, perhaps because I'm
> Jewish or a Trotskyist, whatever. That my body is being abused precedes
> my recognition of that abuse, insofar as I can only know something that
> has already happened. However, the way I understand being tortured, the
> form taken by my understanding, requires a broader knowledge of what
> exactly is going on in society. Hence, my anticipation of being arrested
> and tortured is based on what I have learned (since I'm not born with a
> knowledge of torture, even if I'm born with the capacity to feel pain).
> Hence I might be inclined to go underground/into exile or pretend I'm
> not Jewish or a Trotskyist because I think it a good idea to avoid being
> arrested, and so on. There's a lot of 'knowing' and 'making sense of'
> there.
>
> Now, as a way to start getting back to Pynchon, consider the political
> prisoner in Elizabethan/Jacobean England, also a police state in which
> torture was routine. I think Shakespeare deals with such political
> realities, for example, and Middleton's A Game of Chess was a victim of
> political censorship etc, but does it make sense to refer to that time
> as a police state? I've just done so as a convenient shorthand, but the
> word 'police' and the word 'state' didn't have the same meanings then.
> Let's agree the body being abused in both cases experiences the same
> pain: does it make sense to apply the term 'fascist' to the Elizabethan
> torturers? Pynchon isn't referring to Shakespearean England, but ...
>
> Anyway, thanks for your lengthy response, and I hope I'm making sense
> here.
>
>
>
>