Lew Basnight and realization: a detective story?

[Mr Haney]

markekohut:




>Paul Nightingale sent, sourced: 
 
>>"In essence the detective story constitutes a mythos or >>fable in which crime as a distinctive problem 
>>of bourgeois, individualistic, and quasi-democratic>>societies, is handled without upsetting society's >>fundamental institutions>>or its world-view"
 
>Lew Basnight, the detective in AtD, has a moment of >realization he comes to
>call 'grace":   That things are as they are...[paraphrase; >away from AtD; correct if wrong, please]
 
>Does the first paragraph relate to the second [from >AtD]?....How?
 
Lew's moment of grace precedes his identity as
a detective.  He has an interregnum thingie
(which we've - some of us - posited as a good
 (or "the best" or "only") opportunity for grace)
going with Drave'n'them which leads to that moment
 
Could the big game here be blending detective
(and with Cyprian later, "spy") genre fiction into
a larger worldview? 
 
>Does Lew solve a crime? What does that mean in the >light of the rest of Paul's
>sourced notions of 'the detective story"?
 
If Durkheim's point about crime being "normative"
is valid, would the momentum from that fact carry beyond
individual criminals into criminal organizations, not just the
obvious ones, but criminal tendencies in big business and 
government as well?  Is this what Lew begins to see?
 
But rather than joining up with the anarchists as
the (deliberately misleading) foreshadowing seems
to portend, he is drawn into Nookshaft's world instead...
 
(can't help but think of how the fumes of hemp smoke
and patchouli emanated from the radicalism of a later
date, similar to the fumes of Cyclomite from the
dynamiting-Anarchists -- and how in both cases
those who followed their noses ended up outside the
political movement in many cases)
 
>Lew's feeling of being blamed for something he cannot >remember relate to the nature
>of the detective story?       Was anyone else reminded of >the notion of Original Sin in Lew's feeling?
 
the fact that he doesn't actually know what it is
seems like it's more out of Kafka than the Bible.
 

Of course, the question of
whether Durkheim's point is well-taken or
whether - as seems to me to be the case -
he is succumbing to the Devil's wiles in excusing evil,
depends on whether the inquirer believes in some
kind of transcendent morality --
10 Commandments, Golden Rule --
something that is prescriptive rather than
descriptive, something a priori, something to
try to live up to (and which therefore
might seem to come from a lawgiver 
of some kind, though Socrates seems to 
have gotten at it through reasoning)
_________________________________________________________________
Share life as it happens with the new Windows Live.Download today it's FREE!
http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_Wave2_sharelife_112007
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20071124/fe75c713/attachment-0001.html>