Repost: "The Big One"

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

     <<There's a cadre of self-appointed critics that want to maintain 
     a theory that there is essentially no moral center in Pynchon's 
     world. I do not agree  with that viewpoint.. Those same critics 
     maintain that Pynchon's pinnacle is the profoundly pessimistic 
     Gravity's Rainbow*. And so it goes.>>

     malignd:
     I don't know who makes up the "cadre" you describe and it's hard
     to tell in what you write whether they are incoherent or you are, . . .

I've attempted to read a number of "Postmodern" essays on Pynchon full of 
gobbledity-goop. Whether by design or accident, they were just about as bad 
as it gets. I realize that cohesion and clarity are not my long suits, I'll 
cop to that. I'd say that you are one of the people I'd include in the set
of those most dismissive of Pynchon's work after Gravity's Rainbow.

     . . . .but pessimism and morality are not mutually exclusive.  GR is 
     pessimistic, overall, but it is also very moralistic.  I'd argue that 
     if there is a problem with Pynchon's moralism, it is that it is, for 
     me, anyway, not terribly sophisticated.  He is fluid in sophisticated 
     ideas, surely; but his moral judgements are black and white.  
     His paranoid connection of one thing to another--e.g., nazism to 
     IG Farben to Royal Dutch Shell to Ciba Geigy--indicts everything 
     and everyone equally. There's guilt to go around, but Royal Dutch 
     Shell is not the third reich. . . .

I would disagree with you on this particular point and would point to 
Weissmann's tarot as the narrator's true feelings on the subject.
I simply cannot see an author documenting so much anarchist 
history without some devotion to the cause. Certain themes pop 
up in all of the man's books, over and over. They skew hard left. 
Maybe that's the part you don't like.

     . . . .He is similarly unfailingly on the side of the underdog, as most 
     times, am I.  But the underdog or oppressed, freed of oppression, –
     can ultimately make your skin crawl, e.g., Mugabe.  Pynchon is 
     not very subtle or insightful on such dynamics.

Well, he's not subtle, I'll grant you that.

     <<Call me a crackpot all you like, but only after re-reading 
    Weissman's Tarot.>>

     ". . . .(what, a dialectical Tarot? Yes indeedyfoax! A-and if you 
     don't think there are Marxist-Leninist magicians around, well 
     you better think again!). . . ."