IV God Damn the Repo Man

[Mark Kohut]

Money is shit......that notion by TRP, inspired by
Norman O. Brown (if others), is embodied in the 
great trip into the toilet in GR.......(and given an
echo in AtD by the scrier who can detect in toilet bowls)

--- On Wed, 9/2/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: IV God Damn the Repo Man
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, September 2, 2009, 8:02 AM
> In Metaphysics, Aristotle, "The
> Philosopher's Philosopher,” declares
> that money is by nature
> "barren," He argued that the birth of money from money is
> therefore
> "unnatural."  Consequently, the taking of interest
> is to be censured and hated.
> 
> Plato, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and various other leaders
> of ancient thought,
> arrived at much the same conclusion.
> 
> Medieval thinking, in theology as well as in law, went
> well
> beyond Aristotle's views in these matters. Aristotle had
> acknowledged
> the importance of private property and the need
> for money in the functioning of the state, but he condemned
> retail
> trading as unnatural and usury as worst of all. The
> same mistrust of merchants and their work is found in Peter
> Lombard's
> Sentences, where he says that soldiers or
> merchants unwilling to give up their professions should not
> be
> received as penitents because they could not exercise
> those professions without sin (4, d.16, q.4, a.2).
> 
> But the major thirteenth-century commentators on the
> Sentences,
> Albert, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, modify his position
> considerably.
> They recognize that countries are not
> necessarily more self-sufficient than individuals and must
> rely on the
> services of those who can procure supplies for
> them, that in a complex society one cannot always buy
> directly from
> the producers.
> 
> Dante's attitude towards commerce is essentially a moderate
> one,
> accepting it as a fact of life, a potential benefit to
> society, as
> long as it serves the common good and does not
> harm the community in order to advance individuals. He
> presents the
> distribution of wealth as the result of divine
> providence in the passage on fortune  and justifies
> craft and
> manufacture, hence, implicitly, trade, in his description
> of art as the daughter of nature and granddaughter of God.
> The
> importance he accords both to personal property and to a
> stable currency is manifest in his treatment of their
> abuses; he
> discusses in some detail a variety of economic
> and monetary sins, not just greed, but plunder,
> squandering, usury,
> fraudulent buying and selling of different kinds of
> goods, theft, and counterfeiting. Each one appears in a
> separate
> section of Hell, and several are attacked in
> Purgatory and Paradise as well.
> 
> Dante employs the technical language of commerce literally,
> in
> connection with the
> abuses, and metaphorically, applying it to spiritual
> treasures and
> moral debts. The technical language and
> commercial details would have been a particularly effective
> means of
> reaching the members of the audience attuned to
> them and would presumably have added a whole other sphere
> of
> application to Dante's message. The metaphorical use of
> the
> same language seems to be Dante's way of countering
> "corporal usury,"
> which is forbidden, with "spiritual
> usury," which multiplies the benefits of God's gifts, a
> distinction
> made by canonists and theologians.
> 
> Pynchon also employs technical languages with great effect:
> coal,
> dyes, pressure…and the technical jargons, rates, flows,
> costs profits,
> interest…The engineer poet polyglot is satirized  .
> . .Brock Vond's
> physiognomist  . . .history, engineer poetry and the
> inanimate ….the
> sick crews conversations at the spoon . . . Freudian cant
> ….
> 
> So the smoke-stacks have Earned the compounded interest
> bearing
> capacity of Berkshire and Gold Coast monies. Money profits
> and
> proliferates through interests and trusts like a
> Slothropian estate.
> 
> The irony is, that money is not barren, people are.
> 
> Abstractions procreate and generate, are fruitful and
> multiply,
> machines are alive and "YOU think you'd rather hear about
> what you
> call 'life': the growing organic Kartell," but
> Slothrop-the
> “protagonist” of this black phallic comedy ---for all
> his sexual
> conquests, can not even, like Oedipus discover himself,
> though he
> searches with his penis for his Frankenstein.
> 
> "Death converted to more death." THEY would have their
> pound of flesh,
> and YOU would have a rocket with your name on it.
> 
> The langauge, the trechnical language, the shop talk,
> jargon, business
> and profession speak, the TV-talk, the movie talk,
> discussion of film
> and acting, so on, these are not "just the way folks talk"
> and
> Pynchon's great ear and ability to write authentic
> dialogue.
> 
> God Damn the Repo Man to Hell. Larry wants to hire some
> dude did the
> waves for him, the natural waves coming to the shore blown
> by the
> breath of God.
> 
>