IVIV (12): 195-197

[Mark Kohut]

Tore Ryen Anderson writes:
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. 

Love the last line and, yes, I will even agree that AtD does not go as deep
but it does go wider, yes?...When I wrote 'deep' I loosely, perhaps imprecisely, meant deep in History. 

I do think AtD tries to show the roots of how WE created the System, don't you?...The Whole World-System since the late 1800s? 

 


--- On Mon, 11/2/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: IVIV (12): 195-197
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, November 2, 2009, 3:27 AM
> 
> 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.      
>         
>           
>   
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