ATDTDA - petroleurs, p.19

[Charles Albert]

"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."


It's just another extension of "consolidated power"......ultimately they are
simply part of a pathology, and therefor value neutral.

POSSIBLE SPOILER..........PG. 400 or so...










Note the appearance of Dr. Spengler....he classified the stages of cultures
along anthropomorphic lines.


love,
cfa





On 2/1/07, Joseph T <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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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