ATD SPOILER p. 95 (and also p. 214)

[Jason Tanz]

I'm wary of inserting myself into an already not-so-civil argument, but I have to agree that it may be fruitful to discuss whether AtD's bomb-throwing anarchists are at all analogous to today's suicide bombers. For instance, check this out, from page 214: "If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn't somebody ought to carry on the family business -- you might say, become the Kid? ... Reef began to feel some new presence inside him, growing, inflating -- gravid with what it seemed he must become, he found excuses to leave the trail now and then and set of a stick of dynamite he had stolen from the stone powder-house at some mine. Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts." Whew! Beautiful stuff! But also, that sense of inherited struggle reminds me a lot of the suicide-bomber Palestinians in the film Paradis!
 e Now.

I think this is a super-pertinent issue, actually. I can't remember which reviewer, but someone suggested that in AtD, TRP immaturely and dangerously romanticized terrorist acts. I'm only 250 pp. or so in, but I'd imagine that AtD takes a fairly nuanced, complex, even self-contradictory view of the Traverses, as opposed to blanket approval. I think our man is often misread in this way -- seen as a full-throated revolutionary, a card-carrying member of the Counterforce, when in the end I think his work is much more ambiguous about the efficacy of such Counterforces. Specifically: if life is both/and rather than either/or, if these false dichotomies and taxonomies are behind the world's evils, then is it really safe or wise to divide the world into Them (Force) and Us (Counterforce)?

As an aside, this is my first post this decade. I signed up with pynchon-l after I graduated from college about ten years ago, when I was making my first slog through GR. Really helpful and interesting, but I let it go after several months (the list, not GR). I rejoined in preparation for AtD, and it's good to be back.

J.