Repost: "The Big One"

[Mark Kohut]

I suggest that the moral vision, fully seen, of Against the Day, as of Mason & Dixon, maybe. is as subtle as anyone's and more subtle than almost everyone's. 

And GR's IS as subtle as Dante's.... 

--- On Wed, 7/9/08, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: Repost: "The Big One"
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 6:20 PM
> <<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!). . . ."