IVIV (12): 195-197

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Joseph Tracy: 

> I missed the quote marks on the passage Monte is citing. Where is that
> from?

GR 521. A related passage appears on p. 230, after Webley Silvernail's 
dance with the lab rats:
 
"I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All
the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are
being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who
are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I
can't even give you hope that it will be different someday - that They'll
come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror,
and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts
men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here,
simply alive...." (GR, 230)
 
- which of course points us to the elaborate riff on p. 412-13 ("Living 
inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by
a maniac bent on suicide..."). AtD never digs as deep as this, Mark, and
Pynchon's frequent mention of the System in GR is anything but simple.
Read the capitalized S on the System as you read the capitalized T on
Technology: Not as Pynchon's way of pointing at some overarching form
of control (or, I guess, Control), but as a way of showing our tendency
to evade responsibility, to put ourselves at the mercy of the System.
 
Yes, there is a System, GR tells us so, but it also tells us that WE to
a large extent constitute this System and thus help keep up the peckers of
those human sultans.   		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Keep your friends updated—even when you’re not signed in.
http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/windows/windowslive/see-it-in-action/social-network-basics.aspx?ocid=PID23461::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-xm:SI_SB_5:092010