airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly ramblings, really)

Monte Davis monte.davis at verizon.net
Thu Nov 8 11:43:25 CST 2007


David Morris sez:

> As a part of his examinations of 
> power structures he idealizes the untamed/unregulated 
> "wilderness"...

Note the ambivalence within the gaucho's speech itself: "We cannot abide the
openness.  It is terror to us." Are ATD's polar waste and Central Asian
desert really congenial places? Was Sudwest, even before the Herero war? Or
the environs of the Kirghiz Light, or of Vheissu? Or Mauritius? Aren't
Charles and Jeremiah terrified every bit as much as exalted as they approach
the Ohio? Re-read the Colorado landscapes: see how often human dwellings are
described in terms like "...fasten their mean shacks to the mountain with
steel cable and eyebolts and let the wind roar and be damned. And next
morning be out in it picking up  pieces of roof and stovepipes and what all
hadn't been blown to Mexico yet." (364) Home, sweet home, eh?

I'd say it's a very special, highly charged and double-edged kind of
"idealization" going on, a lot more nuanced than any back-to-nature that
Rousseau or Marie Antoinette would recognize. Pynchon's a writer; while he
may not like what history has scribbled, the blank page is pretty damn
scary, too. 





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