afterthought per Ray and Richard

[Carvill, John]

>> I have no reason to believe our author himself makes this category 
mistake.  Quite the contrary, it seems to me that the author is 
completely aware of how deeply confused his characters are.

> Bingo. For me, the same is true for most (not quite all) of his characters'
conspiracy theorizing and occultism, too.

Bongo. Leaving aside the question of what exactly would have to be going on in order for pynchon *not* to be aware of how much (or whether) his characters were confused, this seems to me to be pretty much the opposite of what I take away from, say, Gravity's Rainbow. The 'reading' of pynchon which sees all his portrayals of conspiracies as merely aimed at satirizing those who would subscribe to conspiracy theories, is one I find hard to square with the feeling I get from pynchon's books. Such a reading would, for example, have to encompass the claim that when we're told, in GR, that the war was really just a 'celebration of markets' - a line which seems to be one of those times when the general mood of the book is coalesced for a moment in an explicit authorial statement - then we're really meant to just have a quiet giggle at the sort of fluffy-headed 'conspiracy theorist' who would be apt to take that sort of thing seriously.