Dark Ages America

[Dave Monroe]

>From Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), Ch. 3, "The Home and the World," pp.
81-111 ...

   "Of course, I may be overdrawing the contrast here; no culture is
purely tribal or purely secular. Still, the archetypes do exist in
people's minds, and do operate across the cultures of the world to
varying degrees. One of the best portrayals of these polar opposites
occurs in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, especially V. and Gravity's
Rainbow, in which the literary structure resembles a funnel. The
narratives begin with a completely anomic, open-ended, scientific
world, in which everything that happens is random, and nothing has any
relationship to anything else. The first two hundred pages or so are
extremely difficult to read; they depict a totally anarchic and
meaningless world. But just at the point that the reader can't take it
anymore, and he or she is ready to throw in the towel, Pynchon begins
to reveal that all of these random people, objects, and events are
actually part of a web of hidden connections. As he draws the net
tighter and tighter, the relief initially felt by the reader--that of
being out of the anomic world--turns into a claustrophobia of the kind
described by my Palestinian friend: there is nowhere to hide. By the
end of the story, the reader is faced with two horrendous, and totally
opposite, paranoias: the open end of the funnel, the world of
anesthesie, where (as in my apartment building) you could basically
drop dead and nobody would notice; and the contracted end of the
funnel, in which you don't have a moment's privacy, and where
everything you do is everybody else's business. Which would you
choose?"

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/pynboard/viewtopic.php?p=246#246

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/pynboard/viewtopic.php?p=247#247

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/pynboard/rss.php

http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring07/032977.htm

DARK AGES AMERICA

This is the Blog for MORRIS BERMAN, the author of "Dark Ages America".
It includes current publications and random thoughts about U.S.
Foreign Policy, including letters and reactions to publications from
others. A cultural historian and social critic, MORRIS BERMAN is the
author of "Wandering God" and "The Twilight of American Culture".
Since 2003 he has been a visiting professor in sociology at Catholic
University of America in Washington, DC. Feel free to write and
participate.

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/

... and thanks to "rstephen" of the Hyperarts Pynchon Forum for having
saved me some typing.  Can't "Search Inside" thebook via amazon.com,
not accessible via Google Books, a bit tricky--not to mention
dangerous--simply to keep it open in front of me at work (in case
y'all were wondering why I tend to use so many online sources ...), so
...