ATDDTA (8) Gov. Satan (212:10-11) [one more time!!!]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

From: Pynchon’s Inferno

by Charles Hollander

  . . . . Pynchon’s writings have much in common with 
          Jonathan Swift’s and Dante Alighieri’s. Both 
          these men were involved in the politics of their 
          day. Dante was eventually banished from 
          Florence, having thrown his lot in with the losing 
          political gang, the White Guelphs. While in exile 
          Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, in which we 
          are given a structure leading us down to hell, up 
          through purgatory, and finally into heaven. 
          Along the way we meet mythical and historical 
          figures who allegorically stand for various 
          religious doctrines and dogmas.

          At the same time, many of these figures 
          recognizably mimic living figures of the day, 
          the winners of the political conflict. Under the 
          camouflage of his most lofty poetry, his most 
          theological writings, Dante was sticking it to 
          many of his contemporaries. Throughout the 
          nine circles of Hell stand real historical figures 
          indicted as panderers and seducers, evil 
          counselors, falsifiers, traitors, murderers.

          Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels operates so well as a 
          comedy on the narrative level that it is frequently 
          thought of as children’s reading, though it 
          obviously works as a scathing commentary on 
          the adult human condition as well. Only when 
          we immerse ourselves in the documents of the 
          day do we realize that Swift was calling this 
          particular public servant a timid, petty, and 
          frightened Lilliputian; that specific member of 
          Parliament an overbearing and gross 
          Brobdingnagian; this particular scholar a 
          nitpicking ninny of a pedant; and perhaps some 
          very powerful men of his day Yahoos. . . . 

          http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm

               They all lived in fear of the Governor, forever to and 
               fro in Jeshimon and apt to arrive anywhere in town 
               without warning. What impressed a first-time viewer 
               was not any natural charisma, for he had none, but 
               rather a keen sense of something wrong in his 
               appearance, something pre-human in the face, the 
               sloping forehead and clean-shaven upper lip, which 
               for any reason, or none, would start back into a 
               simian grin which was suppressed immediately, 
               producing a kind of dangerous smirk that often 
               lingered for hours, and which, when combined with 
               a glistening stare, was enough to unnerve the boldest 
               of desperadoes. Though he believed that the power 
               that God had allowed to find it way to him required a 
               confident swagger, his gait was neither earned nor, 
               despite years of practice, authentic, having progressed 
               in fact little beyond an apelike truge. The reason he 
               styled himself the Governor and not President or King 
               was a matter of executive clemency. The absolute 
               power of life and death enjoyed ba a Govenor within 
               his territory had its appeal. He traveled always with 
               his "clemency secretary," a cringing weasel named 
               Flagg, whose job it was to review each day's 
               population of identified malefactors and point with 
               his groomed little head at those to be summarily 
               put to death, often by the Governor himself, though, 
               being a notoriously bad shot, he preferred not to 
               have a crowd around for that. "Clemency" was 
               allowing some to wait a day or two before they were 
               executed, the number of buzzards and amount of 
               tower space being finite. AtD 212