Kick-Ass Thank You: on Laura on Lake

[David Morris]

I don't know about the specifics of representative roles of Lake (and
others) in AtD, but I suspect some sort of political and/or
psychological dialectic is at work.  How else can one explain
characters behaving so incomprehensibly?  I'm sure that's also why
I've never been able to understand Frenesi's motives in VL (and why
her character seems such a dead-ender).  In both cases I think they
represent a massive Achilles heel in Pynchon's fictional world.  His
theories can produce characters and scenarios that leave one cold and
scratching one's head.

Beyond that, though, this exploration of third-party intermediaries
between two other partners and/or opponents is a fascinating
development.

David Morris

On 5/27/07, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Laura,
>
> I like this......Lake as the thinnned-out, shallow "entropic" end of what one p-lister---Mike Bailey?--called 'muscular anarchism'.   Maybe this is why she is so uninteresting, so shallow [to some of us]
>
> Lake---a still body of water created where rivers flow into a declivity.!??
>
> Mark
>
> kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> All right, maybe this is over-extrapolating, but if the Western sequences of ATD are "about" America:
>
> Webb represents anarchism, rebellion, militant labor. Lake represents the death of all these. Where Webb was busy dynamiting the powers that be and their interests, Lake passively gives herself over to Deuce and Sloat, hirelings of the mine owners. In Europe, the socialist parties capitulated to nationalism and capitalism at the advent of WWI. Lake does the same. The militant Wobblies at the beginning of the 20th century devolved to the current US union movement, hobbled (like Deuce and Sloat hobble Lake) by punitive anti-strike clauses and the Taft-Hartley Act, to become one of the most passive and non-militant working classes in world history. When we last meet Lake in the book, she's a bitter, helpless, sterile old woman. John Sweeney, anyone?
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> >From: Tore Rye Andersen
>
> >
> >Laura: Your comparison between Lake and Gottfried as passive intermediaries is a great one. I still think Gottfried is much more interesting than Lake, however: His passivity is part of a larger, historical framework, namely Pynchon's examination of the (German) mentality which made WW2 possible (Pökler is part of this same examination, as is all the Kracauer-derived stuff about German movies). I can't really find any such validating framework for the shallow portrayal of Lake in AtD. It might be there, but I've yet to see it.I absolutely agree about the difference between Lake's and Cyprian's intermediary roles, BTW.