VLVL2 (15): "the old reliable names"

[Steve Maas]

Q: What IS "the last unfaceable American secret"?

A: It’s all a lie man, it’s not about redeeming the preterite.

Q: What is Pynchon suggesting lives "virilent, waiting, just beneath"?

A: The unpleasant side-effects of understanding the truth are reminiscent of 
the wiggily life that prospers beneath fermenting leafs.

Q: The "blackly fermenting leaf" and the "random soles" (what a great pun!) 
are
metaphors for what?

A: The crumbling facade of the lie, and the crumbler.

Steve Maas

dedalus204 posted:
371.31:  "And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question 
of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or 
whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light 
they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the 
same bright-colored shadows.  One by one, as other voices joined in, the 
names began -- some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable 
names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia -- 
Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, 
that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not 
constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, 
diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time 
deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly 
fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because 
of all that lived, virulent, waiting!, just beneath."

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