AtD - Anarchy vs Terror

[kelber at mindspring.com]

p. 138-155 SPOILER












Did anyone else take the Creature laying waste to the City sequence as, in part, a reference to global warming?  It's an obvious description of 9/11, with shades of King Kong, but the fact that the danger comes from the arctic seems a nod in this direction.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au>
>Sent: Nov 30, 2006 9:39 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: RE: AtD - Anarchy vs Terror
>
>Me too, partly - and perhaps, at a stretch, the reader's skepticism ("of
>course there was never *really* a hole in the antarctic pole!") a
>literary refraction of contemporary denial about climate change, most
>obviously the ozone hole of which people living around my neck of the
>woods are all too immediately aware. 
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
>Behalf Of kelber at mindspring.com
>Sent: Friday, 1 December 2006 1:28 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: RE: AtD - Anarchy vs Terror
>
>SPOILER, p.114-118
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>I took this description to be sort of a negative (photographically
>speaking) image of what's actually happening in the modern world: the
>shrinking of the polar icecaps due to global warming.
>
>Laura
>
>-----Original Message-----
>>From: John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au>
>
>More interesting to me was the way
>>P describes the polar entry points to the Telluric interior as freezing
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>>over, sealing up, and the interior itself as being a far darker, more 
>>dismal place than it was in M&D. It's easy to infer that soon enough 
>>those icecaps will be solid, and the interior will be inaccessible.
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>>It does a nice job of extending that M&D theme of modernity 
>>rationalising away the possibility of magic, of wonder, of the 
>>impossible. Which of course is something that runs through every one of
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>>P's novels.
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