AtD - Anarchy vs Terror

[gp]

I've noticed this too - I think it humanizes them, at least so far as
I've read.  Perhaps casts judgement, even.

On 11/29/06, John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au> wrote:
> Been a long time gone, but with AtD causing serious spinal damage as I
> lug it everywhere of a working day, I thought I'd turn back to the list
> for respite (boom TISH!). I'm about 200 odd pages in after three days
> with the thing and thoroughly enjoying it - I'll echo those who suggest
> it's up there with his best.
>
> Some small thoughts: I'm stunned at the way Against the Day seems to be
> consciously bridging all of P's other novels (perhaps excepting COL49),
> making explicit reference to characters and situations which have come
> before and after and sometimes extending these. I'd always thought one
> particular episode near the end of M&D felt out of joint, not fully
> worked through, but it's given a satisfying recap not too far into AtD
> which allows it (and much of M&D) to be resituated in vaguely the same
> cosmology of GR and the rest. Same with all the ideas surrounding
> electricity, wind, light etc. And the Traverse clan - well, I can
> definitely believe that P had already been working on AtD while Vineland
> (and certainly M&D and even GR) were being written.
>
> Also, his command of dia- and ideolect seems to have improved
> dramatically. Coming from a non-American (or British) English-speaking
> background, some of the more subtle changes in phrasing, word choice etc
> are a delight to me; for once, every character seems to have a really
> unique voice, and the shifts in generic voice (esp Lew Basnight's
> hardboiled adventures) are just great.
>
> Anyway, to finish off, I've been thinking about the various suggestions
> surrounding the novel's portrayal of anarchists vis-a-vis contemporary
> terrorism (and suicide bombers as discussed), and one thing that seems
> to me to trouble this correspondence is the way Pynchon's anarchists
> aren't (so far) aligned with a common cause or fundamentalism, but are
> motivated by a very individualistic ideal of freedom, in that very
> idealistic US/Western way. Sure, one on level the bomb-throwing miners
> might share with, say, an Al Qaeda operative a common hatred of US
> corporate colonialism, but the anarchist's actions seem to stem from a
> desire to return to the kind of prelapsarian freedom of the individual
> which came before the rise of the capitalist state.
>
>