Repost: The Big One

[Mark Kohut]

A Flat-Out, so to speak, challenge to moral flatlanders (and all )p-listers: 

Gloss just p. 985, the very thematic "Frank and the train wreck' with full moral nuance.....read it as Pynchon himself, within earlier sections of "Against the Day", has shown us how.

I'm tweaking simple verbal nuances myself at my busy moment in time. But will send.

New Aunts.


--- On Mon, 7/14/08, Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:

> From: Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
> Subject: Re: Repost: The Big One
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, July 14, 2008, 11:52 AM
> 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.