Gorman ("The Specter") Takeshi & Neo-Freudian Revisionist Quackery

[Terrance]

> 
> In Pynchon’s novels this illness is the default state of being, and
> Gnosticism is but one model of explanation for this default state that
> Pynchon flirts with.  

Not sure what you mean by a default state of being. I don't think that
Pynchon flirts with Gnosticism. What we see, time and again, is that the
Crew (TWSC of V., All the people Oedipa and Slothrop and Prairie and
Dixon and Mason meet, are sick, but their sickness is treated tenderly,
they are and YOU are admonished, laughed at and with,  by the text,
because there is simply no way out. In fact, they are bond together with
their oppressors, the henchmen,  who able to "synthesize and control"
because they are useful switchmen at the Firm.     

>Freud’s explanations are also flirted with.  

No, I think that Pynchon goes directly to Freud (and Marcuse) setting
these against the neo-Freudians. 



But
> EVERYBODY is sick, and living in an inescapably sick world.  Some, however,
> seek ways out, escape or redemption comes in small doses.  But these are not
> cures, only palliatives.

No one is saved. There is no way out. In fact, the struggle is only
going to make matters worse for everyone. Sooner or later the System
will collapse of its won weight and a new one will take its place. There
are moments, spaces in time, when all is as flat an Argentine hill side
and a white horse passes, when Germany is lawless anarchy, when America
is off the map, off the grid, but Zoyd Wheeler comes rolling into town
after Frenesi Gates and a band of outlaws came riding into his, and the
subjunctive is the here and now, as DL tells Ralph, and Brock comes
screaming across the sky.  These voids, (see Tony Tanner's wonderful
essay, "The Rubbish Tip for Subjunctive Hopes)  are quickly filled with
the follies of men and the Waste that incest lays in the cradle slouched
toward by the rough beast (see How Thanatoids are related to the Law). 

> 
> >Freud's hypothesis of the death instinct and its role in civilized
> >aggression shed light on one of the neglected enigmas of civilization;
> >it revealed the hidden unconscious tie which binds the oppressed to
> >their oppressor, the soldiers to their generals, the individuals to
> >their masters. The wholesale destruction marking the progress of
> >civilization within the framework of domination has been perpetuated, in
> >the face of its possible abolition, by the instinctual agreement with
> >their executioners on the part of the human instruments and victims.
> >Freud wrote, during the First World War:
> >
> >Think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now
> >allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe
> >that a handful of unprincipled placehunters and corrupters of men would
> >have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of
> >their followers were not also guilty.
> >
> >But the impulses which this hypothesis assumes are not compatible with
> >the moralistic philosophy of progress espoused by the revisionists.

Freud is not quite as influential as Adams, but add Marcuse and its a
close match. 

> >
> >"Death, in Modern Karmic Adjustment, got removed from the process."
> >VL.175