Pynchon theme from Darwin on his anniversary?

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Thanks, Mark. To further celebrate the anniversary, here's a quite loosely
- and mostly extrabiologically - Darwinian riff by the narrator of GR:

"Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive
18-volume study of "King Kong", "you know, he *did* love her, folks."
Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing
out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of
symbolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras,
grips, lab people . . . even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be
eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100 times and be
prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam. . . . And yet, and yet: there is
Murphy's Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel's
Theorem -- *when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go
wrong, or even surprise us . . . something will*. So the permutations 'n'
combinations of Pudding's _Things That Can Happen in European Politics_ for
1931, the year of Gödel's Theorem, don't give Hitler an outside chance.
So, when the laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as
determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously
generating items like the "S-Gerät" Slothrop thinks he's chasing like a grail.
And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from
the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to
generate its own children, running around in Germany even now -- the
Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate.
(Viking 275)


Heikki

On Tue, 24 Nov 2009, Mark Kohut wrote:

> offgrid    If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.- Charles Darwin
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