Repost: The Big One

Paul Mackin paul.mackin at verizon.net
Mon Jul 14 10:52:07 CDT 2008


kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> No, you're not alone in seeing the moral nuance, Mark.  When he writes of IG Farben or the Ludlow Massacre, there's not a whole lot of room for moral nuance.  I don't know of any essays written by anyone (correct me someone if I'm wrong) that show that the Rockefeller's actions in the Ludlow massacre were based on a genuinely moral outlook.  You don't need to be a moralizing prig to come down on the side of the miners. When we're talking about whether TRP's writing is morally flat or un-nuanced, the implication is that he's somewhat of a prig or at least a knee-jerker.
>
> When he writes about WWI or the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (Madero presidency) he's aware that there are no good guys to side with.  In the sequence where Frank dynamites a moving train in a collision course with Federales, knowingly causing untold human and animal deaths, he's become uncomfortably aware that he's going through the motions (and deadly motions they are); he no longer knows or much cares what he's fighting for.  Then TRP's morality kicks in: the morality of the state of grace, the Buddhist viewpoint:
>
> (p. 985):  " ... suddenly the day had become extradimensional, the country shifted, was no longer the desert abstraction of a map but was speed, air rushing, the smell of smoke and steam, time whose substance grew more condensed as each tick came faster and faster, all perfectly inseparable from Frank's certainty that jumping or not jumping was no longer the point, he belonged to what was happening ..."
>
> Faced with the moral chaos of WWI, the Mexican devolution, the post 9-11 world, the only choice (I think he's saying) is to view the world in its proper perspective, as it is, nothing more.  This may be moralizing, but it's neither flat or un-nuanced.
>
> Laura
>   


The moral judgments you cite are the judgments of History, not those 
principally of Pynchon.  The judgments were made long before he came on 
the scene.  He uses these historic situations as backdrop for his novel, 
but I don't think he would like it much if he thought people were 
reading him for further long laments over the many injustices of the 
past. Regardless of how well written.  And of course it would be written 
well. He must know his recitations read better than those of the historians.

But needless to say, we want more.  So what we should be discussing is 
how the author goes beyond what History already "teaches" and what we 
all would agree on even if we never read Pynchon.

e.g.,

The intricately worked out character of Weissmann, whose passion for 
reaching the stars allows him to throw off conventional morality with 
great elan.  Let me put it this way. I don't think  Pynchon  necessary 
means for us to say  tut, tut,  tut  while Gottfried is being entombed 
in the rocket. Weissmann is an uber-mensch. (of course so was Hitler)

Or the poor man's uber-menchen.  The bomb throwing anarchists who have 
convinced themselves that bourgeois lives (very loosely defined) aren't 
worth considering in the collateral damage.  That's really spooky but a 
tiny bit uplifting at the same time.

Two obvious examples of P-moral ambiguity. There must be a zillion more.









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