ATDTDA - petroleurs, p.19

[Joseph T]

On Feb 1, 2007, at 11:44 PM, Joseph T wrote:

> Yea, I didn't think you were trying to say P drew no moral lines,  
> and I wasn't trying to do a straw man on you by making the 2 ideas  
> equivalent. Also I like your choice of Webb's confession from the  
> other side. My sense is that it does represent at least as real of  
> an afterlife as one might expect for someone who has done some  
> serious fucking up but sees too late he could have done better.   
> But there is heroism here too. How do you fight the bastards who  
> rape the land , who conspire to outgun  anyone who might slow down  
> their acquisition of power and money?   His sons pick up the quest   
> and open up a booklength inquiry into the various forms of anarchy.  
> It is, for me any way, the most difficult and challenging theme in  
> the novel.
> But I do think I hear P taking directly to the pulpit from time to  
> time. As I do a second read I will see if I can back up my  
> contention . One message that runs through the entire body of TP  
> novels is that colonialism in every cultural, national, social,and  
> religious form is the most destructive force bound up in the human  
> condition. I think he is posing anarchy not as a political ideal  
> but as an opposite tendency toward freedom, shared pleasures,  
> respect, experiment,  a grace that is multi dimensional.
>
> On Feb 1, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>> Joseph T:
>>
>> >  Before ATD I would have agreed with the statement that Pynchon
>> > doesn't  preach, but he seems to be taking that liberty , albeit
>> > with restraint, in this
>> >  novel. Some moral lines are drawn here.
>>
>> For what it's worth, I intended "Pynchon doesn't preach" to be  
>> read not as "he draws no moral lines" -- I think he does, and  
>> always has, and plays both ends against the excluded middle -- but  
>> as "[he doesn't *need* to sermonize]... he's god in his own  
>> creation."
>>
>> That is, the most immediate and powerful moral communication in  
>> any remotely realistic fiction comes via what the characters  
>> *are*, what they *do*, and what *happens* to them. Given the  
>> author's power to choose and orchestrate all three, and our  
>> tendency to take them as givens and start our judgments from there  
>> -- well, Modernism 101 sez: show, don't tell. (Then in Modernism  
>> 207 we lare reminded that the author isn't *really* paring his  
>> fingernails indifferently; he stacked the deck six ways from  
>> Sunday by putting *these* people in *these* situations via *that*  
>> plot. And then in the PoMo seminar, surprise!  we wax indignant  
>> about how that kind of sneakiness covers up hegemony.)
>>
>> The nearest thing to a verdict on Webb is surely his own, at  
>> Madame Eskimoff's seance (672-673):
>>
>> “No point makin excuses. I could’ve done ’er different. Not driven  
>> you all away. Figured how to honor those who labor down under the  
>> earth, strangers to the sun, and still keep us all together.  
>> Somebody must’ve been smart enough to manage that one. I could’ve  
>> worked it out. Not as if I was alone, there was help, there even  
>> was money.
>> “But I sold my anger too cheap, didn’t understand how precious it  
>> was, how I was wasting it, letting it leak away, yelling at the  
>> wrong people, May, the kids, swore each time I wouldn’t, never  
>> cared to pray but started praying for that, knew I had to keep it  
>> under some lid, save it at least for the damned owners, but then  
>> Lake sneaks off into town, lies about it, one of the boys throws  
>> me a look, some days that’s all it needs is a look, and I’m  
>> screamin again, and they’re that much further away, and I don’t  
>> know how to call back any of it. . . .”
>>
>> Where we get to choose is in how much weight to give his assertion  
>> that dying in bed, surrounded by a loving family, "wasn’t in the  
>> cards for me, not in that flat-broke world it was given us to work  
>> and suffer in, those were just not the choices."
>>
>> To me this is a voice from a Virgilian kind of afterlife: to the  
>> extent there's punishment it's neither fire nor ice, but simply  
>> that no amount of self-knowledge and reflection now can undo what  
>> he did and didn't do then. And hey -- we all get to taste plenty  
>> of *that* without even dying, right?
>>
>> Some time ago I mentioned the "Hamlet, revenge" theme, and of  
>> course the Bard of Oyster Bay flips it at us here too:
>>
>> "But the one thing his sons wanted, they wouldn’t get tonight.  
>> They wanted to hear Webb say, with the omnidirectional confidence  
>> of the dead, that seeing Scarsdale Vibe had hired his killers, the  
>> least the brothers could do at this point was to go find him and  
>> ventilate the son of a bitch."
>>
>> And we're off to the races. Remember all those classroom debates:  
>> is this *really* Hamlet's dad... or a diabolical apparition sent  
>> to tempt him to regicide and/or suicide? Would Claudius *really*  
>> go to Heaven if Hamlet were to kill him at his prayers...or is  
>> that moot because the prayers, ironically, are worthless... or,  
>> double-ironically, is it all about Hamlet damning himself a la  
>> Roger Chillingworth by playing God, presuming to look into and  
>> weigh another's soul?
>>
>> Then again, since just a minute ago Reef was "singing  
>> operatically, in the tenor register, and the Italian language,"  
>> Webb's ghost may be not the former Great Dane at all but the  
>> Commendatore. Lord knows the kids get lots of multinational sex.  
>> Help me, opera buffs: that's the testifying ghost who comes to my  
>> ignorant mind, but surely there are others..?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

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