GR and Nixon

[jbor]

>> "... 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."

> GR "uncannily" foreshadows nothing.  GR, in part,
> describes the determination of a number of global
> corporations--Standard Oil of NJ, Royal Dutch Shell,
> IG Farben--during the period of WW II to maintain
> relationships that would persist once the war was
> over, knowledge that Pynchon obtained from reading
> Richard Sausuly.  I.e., what it "foreshadows" had
> already happened.

While not intended as a reflection on Malignd's general thesis regarding GR,
the complaint about the word "foreshadows" here is off-target. Dugdale's
point is that the historical panorama represented in GR is *like* what is
happening in 2004. It's a pretty simple (and common type of) observation:
Pynchon's fiction addresses historical phenomena; what was happening then is
comparable to what is happening now; history proceeds chronologically, prior
events and situations influencing subsequent ones etc. It's a bit like that
"It's Gaddis' world, we only live in it" schtick, or Pynchon's own musings
on the difference between "prophecy and prediction" in the _1984_ 'Intro'
(xiii-xiv).

However, the bombing of Hiroshima by Truman is nothing like Nixon's
continuation of the war in Vietnam, or the war in Iraq -- either in the real
world or in Pynchon's text (from which, in fact, the Vietnam War and the
Iraq War are notably absent). Similarly, Pynchon's "anarchists" (i.e.
Tchitcherine?), "ecowarriors" (i.e. Slothrop? Geli Tripping?) and "third
world rebels" (i.e. Enzian? the Empty Ones?) cannot really be said to be
"allied" in the way that Dugdale is insinuating, nor is it reasonable to
imply that they find real world counterparts in, say, the Unabomber,
Greenpeace or Osama bin Laden. Dugdale doesn't seem to understand the deeper
ramifications in Pynchon's characters' constructions of "They-systems" (in
order to justify themselves as a "we-system") either.

Btw, I've mentioned DuBois' _The Devil's Chemists_ (1952) before, and asked
what exactly it is in GR that Pynchon is supposed to have cribbed from
Richard Sasuly alone:

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0102&msg=53424

There's no doubting, however, that '60s anti-Establishment rhetoric and
paranoia predates, and informs, the mood of Pynchon's novel (i.e."the
Establishment" = government + corporations [in the abstract] = Pynchon's
"They").

best

PS There seem to be quite a few "dangling chads" in that p-list "best 10"
vote. I think a recount is called for, if not wholesale electoral reform.

>> "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