ATDDTA (3): Control issues, 54-56

[Dave Monroe]

On 2/16/07, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> So: "Who's in charge?" -- an important question, but I'm not sure there is an unequivocal answer to it....

[...]

> FWIW, I'm not sure that the Chums' commanders are not-identified: I think they are 'They' ...

[...]

> When They remain faceless - in the guise of giant robed figures, or Fate, or History - it is all too easy to submit oneself to Their power, to the inevitability of Fate, etc. ...

[...]

> Many of Pynchon's characters may speculate who They could be, but I'm not really sure they want an answer to this question, because it is so much easier to submit oneself to an abstract principle of power than to someone with a face and a name.

Cf., e.g., ...

   "'They?' inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
   "'Us?' asked Oedipa."  ((Lot 49, p. 41)

"This is America.  You live in it, you let it happen.  Let it unfurl."
(Lot 49, p. 150)

[...]

> Behind that unnamed and unspecified source there is of course a face, but that face is never shown in AtD, and this suits the Chums just fine, since it relieves them of the bother of questioning this Authority in any profound manner. The interesting  thing of course it what happens when this Authority simply absconds towards the end of the novel and leaves the Chums to their own devices ...

Cf. ...

"'By the time of Columbus, God's project of Disengagement was obvious
to all,-- with the terrible understanding that we were to be left more
and more to our own solutions.'" (M&D, Ch. 50, p. 487)

>From Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) ...

"The world of modernity, Weber stressed over and over again, has been
deserted by the gods. Man has chased them away and has rationalized
and made calculable and predictable what in an earlier age had seemed
governed by chance, but also by feeling, passion, and commitment, by
personal appeal and personal fealty, by grace and by the ethics of
charismatic heroes." (pp. 233-4)

http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Weber/WEBERW9.HTML

http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Weber/Whome.htm#Rationalization

>From Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930, 1958
[1904-5]), Ch. IV, "The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism"
...

"The great historic process in the development of religions, the
elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the old
Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific
thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition
and sin, came here to its logical conclusion. The genuine Puritan even
rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his
nearest and dearest without song or ritual in order that no
superstition, no trust in the effects of magical and sacramental
forces on salvation, should creep in." (p. 105)

http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Weber/Whome.htm#words

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/world/ethic/pro_eth_4.html

Tres gnostique, this deus absconditus, as well ...

But note as well not only that such paranoia relieves the paranoid of
responsibilty, but also reassures him/her that the world is
understandable, intelligible, rational, even ...