ATDTDA - petroleurs, p.19
Joseph T
brook7 at sover.net
Fri Feb 2 12:37:27 CST 2007
On Feb 1, 2007, at 11:44 PM, Joseph T wrote:
> Monte:
> 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 as a way to address the issue. 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, although I couldn't in a few minutes find an example. As I do
> a second read I will see if I can back up my contention, otherwise
> I will concede this one. . 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 and shared wealth, 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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