Who are "They?"

[alice wellintown]

Re-read "The Law of Acceleration", that's chapter 34 of The Education.
They are not the force, but those who claim to or pretend to weild it.
After the Virgin, there is no unity. But We crave Unity. We expect
that Benny, a volunteer, won't get paid for his job hunting gators.
But he does. Contradiction? Sure.

According to Pynchon  there is a drive within us to establish systems
at the expense of differentiation.

As a writer, as a modern artist, author of american romance (see
Hawthorne's famous prefaces for the latitude argument)  he wants to
expand the reader's point of view. He writes  an
encyclopedic satire elaborately designed but he subverts hisown design.

There is a sustained tension in Pynchon's texts.
Modernist conventions and subversive Postmodernist techniques coexist without
invalidating each other so that if the subversive PoMO
really subverts, in the end it subverts the law of
contradiction.

Romance and Satire

One of the important elements of Menippean Satire is Carnival. One
function of the Carnival in GR is to cast-off what is according to
Pynchon, a natural disposition
of the Modern Western Mind, that "A is B and A is not B
cannot both be true.

According to Pynchon, the drive to establish systems at the expense of
the other(s) or
differentiation, on the social level, and we can say, on the
aesthetic level, leads to repressive technocratic society
and an art that is only one tool of the repressive system.

There is the critique of Rand.



The "Counterforce" or the crazy crew in TSI or sick crew here in V.
and the "System" also exist in conflict and nearly every relationship
and every environment in P's texts obeys an S&M pattern.

"We define each other."

V. is not an ugly book. It's a beautiful book, for its ideas alone,
most stolen from others like Conrad, Fitzgerald, yes Joyce, and mostly
Adams, are amazing, and young P's fitting them together into a work of
art is astounding. stand back and look at it, like a jackson pollack
over and under a rdiego rivera mural---B-YOU-Tee-Full

The narrators here in V. are not even a scratch on GR or M&D, where
the narrators play parts in the S&M drama, both with an imagined
reader (see naratee and the 2nd person Brian McHale), the characters,
each other, the author, and the reader.
Sometimes they are dominant and sometimes they play victim
to the naratee or another narrator or character, or even
their own stories. .  Some of the narrators work for Them,
are henchmen or masters in the "system" and they will quite
frequently address an imagined reader, mislead him (I think
he is male?) or tell him lies or tell tall tales, or tell
ridiculous paranoid parodies, or give bad advise, or insult,
or mock the reader's "bookish" reflexes and natural
proclivity for patterns and systems and, well,  "cause and
effect."


Diversity is often reduced to a Binary.

"Ideas of the opposite"…pleasure from pain, light from dark,
dominance from submission…life from death and guilt from
innocence…GR.48

We also have, in addition to the "YOU" that is addressed in
GR, the "WE" that is addresses, and this "We-Address" often
makes the naratee and the narrators accomplices or
supporters of the Masters or Henchmen or System or a
defender of  character that has been a victim at some point
but is now a victimizer.

GR is loaded up with a mature genius that, as Robin suggested, is
embryonic here in touches, although not at all where Robin sees
them--dialogue. P is a quick and quipping wit at a young age. while it
may seem stale or stolid or stilted now, V. puts P at the head of his
class--he's got talent and could write for stages or sets with his
eyes wide open. Fortuneately, he writes with his eyes closed.
Beautiful dreamer.


The Economic They of GR: The Kartell, The Firm, The Syndicate, The
Management,


The Political They GR:  Empire, CorporateSstate, Ruling Elite or the
degenerate aristocracy.

Allusions and Personifications of THEY: The Elect, The Studio, the
Octopus, Adenoid, Dracula.

THEY

Soldiers stand every few yards, a loose cardon, unmoving, a
bit supernatural. The Battle of Britain was hardly so
formal. But these new robot bombs bring with them chances
for public terror no one has sounded. Jessica notes a
coal-black Packard up a side street, filled with dark-suited
civilians. Their white collars rigid in the shadows.

 "Who're they?"

 He shrugs: "they" is good enough. "Not a friendly lot."
[GR.40]

Does GR pin down or name an unequivocal source for the evil it portrays?

Who are THEY?

"From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to
Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, Isn't it
now…behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles
just like rats 'n' mice….But who watches from above, who
notes their responses?"

This terrible description, dark and grim,  is subverted by a
silly song-PAVLOVIA. [GR.229]


THEY are universal conspiracy. THEY appear under
every imaginable manifestation of power. Ultimately, all of
these are subordinated to the "the needs of technology… a
conspiracy between human beings and techniques…these needs
are understood only by the Political They or the "ruling
elite."


THE ECONOMIC: The Kartel, The Syndicate, The Firm, The  Management

In economic terms, They are "the growing organic Kartel",
the "IG" that Smarargd says is "ours" but which Herr
Rathenau, from the expanded, though not perfect view from
the "other side" says is "only another illusion."

Rathenau seems to know more about who They are, but he can't
tell. He can only tell what the questions are: "You must ask
two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis?
And then: what is the real nature of control?" [GR.166-167]

Pointsman, the profane Pavlovian Knight, knows that the
"agents of the Syndicate… wait in the central chamber" of
the labyrinth, that "its only a job they have…." And to fund
his project and keep Mexico, he will do a job on Pudding and
R&J.

Funding the War and the Laboratory is expensive. Men and
women can be very valuable assets to The Firm When the
Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit argues that the MMPI only
"tests for whether a man will be a good or bad soldier," and
not any "human values," Pointsman, a Utilitarian, replies,
"Soldiers are much in demand these days, Reverened Doctor."
[GR.81]

Of course, The Firm is particularly interested in any
soldiers that possess special talents or "gifts."

 Brian McHale says the opening dream scene of GR is a "paradigm of
problematic passages throughout Gravity's Rainbow: the
reader, invited to reconstruct a 'real' scene or action in
the novel's fictive world, is forced in retrospect -
sometimes in long retrospect - to 'cancel' the
reconstruction he or she has made, and to relocate it within
a character's dream, hallucination, or fantasy." And, more
important to our current concerns, Pirate's gift for
"getting inside the fantasies of others…is a gift the Firm
has finds uncommonly useful."

The Firm's or Their control over the narrative is another subject, but
we can
see that They control the funding with the War, and that
although Pirate saves Europe from the Balkan Armageddon, the
Firm only allows him "tiny homeopathic doses of peace" and
he does not save Europe from World War II.

The Firm uses men or women to get what They want. Roger Mexico
knows that the War is his mother and that the business of the War "is
buying and selling."

IG

Pynchon's representation of IG adheres to the historical
view that combined power was based on the bypassing of
national politics and the stimulation of military activity.

Spencer provides a brief historical account of how IG and
its affiliates bypassed political boundaries and alliances
to establish a transnational power structure that included
Standard Oil and ICI etc.

And he says,

"However, Pynchon especially emphasizes the
post-war reconfiguration of these elements...where
technological domination, as mobilized by the increasingly
autonomous multinationals and supra-military, has broken the
efficacy of national politics even in peacetime."

The clearest example of this is not Germany or even Europe,
but Japan. Remember, that immediately after the war the
"allies" are now out of the theatre and into the theater.
The U.S. quickly abandons its policy of anti-monopoly break
ups, the breaking up of large companies and cartels was not
followed through in Japan or in Europe.   Cold War, "Self
Defense Forces" "The Dodge Plan", etc., the prime mover was
more concerned with greater production by existing companies
and structures. Rather than ensuring a competitive market by
breaking up big companies, the goal was to strengthen
productive capacity quickly. The goal was met, the Cold War
was set, the oil would flow, the hot conflicts, Korea, SE
Asia would depend upon the strengthened structures of
manufacturing, technology,  US/UN bases, and oil in the
Theater.



"Practical men are usually the slaves of some defunct
economist." --John Maynard Keynes

"Knowledge is the only investment not subject to the law of
diminishing return."
		--Alice