GR and Nixon

[jbor]

> "Too fully realised ever to be *merely* metaphoric, history in Pynchon is
> nevertheless always potentially a metaphor for the present; in Gravity's
> Rainbow, for example, the German "Zone" of 1945 is, in part, a lightly
> disguised version of the fragmentation of America under Richard Nixon. The
> same novel now seems uncannily to have foreshadowed today's geopolitical
> landscape, with warmongering giant corporations the puppet-masters behind
> nation states and anarchists, ecowarriors and third world rebels allied in
> resisting their globalising ambitions and repressive methods."
> --John Dugdale, "The Invisible Man," New Statesman, 5 May 2003

I'm not sure what evidence there is in the novel to say that the "Zone" is
meant to be America under Nixon -- which "part" or parts of the novel is he
talking about, in other words. I also suspect there's an excluded middle
somewhere there in that second sentence: opposing the wars against Iraq or
Chechnya, say, doesn't mean you support the "third world rebels" setting out
to kill innocent children and civilians, nor does opposing terrorism
automatically align one with "warmongering giant corporations" and
governments (Dugdale's overblown rhetoric indicates where his sympathies lie
in the false binary opposition he has constructed, by the way). It's more
accurate to place Pynchon's work in that excluded middle ground, of course.

best