Atdtda28: Society and syntax, 779-780

[Michael Bailey]

On Wed, 7/2/08, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> God's
> abandonment of Russia perhaps a view shared by Padzhitnoff (and crew),
> perhaps not. Heaven's mandate, moreover, means a loss of certainty:
> reference to "any peasant's struggle with the day" (top of 780)
> invokes a
> social order in stark contrast to the rational organisation that,
> supposedly, characterises bureaucracy
>

The Norman Mailer book about Hitler had a substantial digression wherein the
devil-narrator attended the Nicholas coronation.

There was generous detail of how the celebration for the peasants attracted
an overflow crowd which suffered from shoving for the giveaways
(modern correlative: Who concert in Cincinnati) with great misery and sadness -

The devil had to contend with the guardian angels for Nicholas's soul,
and the implication within Mailer's text was that the devil won that round,
and returned, fortified, to guarding and guiding the young Hitler.

So, Russia's abandonment by/of God opening the
road for totalitarianism... a theme mentioned and developed by both Pynchon
and Mailer, in unique ways...









-- 
"He ain't crazy, he's a-makin' pottery" - Finley Pater Dunne