Re: IVIV (15) 269/274—7000 Romaine revisited

[Robin Landseadel]

On Nov 22, 2009, at 7:25 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> OK Hughes was clearly in on some heavy shit and it looks like that  
> or something else took its toll on him, and I think you are onto a  
> key political component and are right to push him forward. For me it  
> ties everything together in a way that I was looking for with the  
> political aspect. But Pynchon is doing more than identifying a  
> particular criminal; he is identifying an archetype or mythic hero  
> of a major American psychopathology and looking at many elements of  
> that  archetype and pathology.

Agreed. Think of Hughes' ties to Film Noir—Scarface being a key  
example and classic archetype.

> I have just started reading Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective  
> Unconscious and came to this passage that I think applies to what I  
> am saying. He is speaking about the revival of primitive patterns of  
> collective myth manifest in Fascism.

And Pynchon displays interests in these subjects that I can see in  
Vineland and Against the Day. It's far too long since I've read  
Gravity's Rainbow and I know there must be a lot in that  book that's  
been subtly re-configured by the books that followed.

> 	"The man of the past is alive in us today to a degree undreamt of  
> before the war, and in the last analysis what is the fate of great  
> nations but a summation of the psychic changes in the  
> individuals?."   C Jung

"Historians write opinions on his fingernails."