V-2nd Dopplegangers

[alice wellintown]

> Rich sez:
>
>> let's not overemphasize how integrated and united these "primitives"
> are/were. I think Pynchon gets all hung up on his romantics at times,
> particularly w/r/t to native americans. that was a strong vibe in the 60s in
> leftist circles for sure... I can't say ultimately that some huge and
> beautiful perfect society was laid waste...

I'd say that vibe is still strong and, while it is a naive and
ill-informed and mostly lazy vibe about the complex history of the
peoples who have lived on the north and south american continents and
the island lands about them, I don't think this vibe can hang on P or
his romantics. The Seed Letter we discussed, a letter written after
V.'s publication and before GR's publication, makes this point:
Imperialism & Colonialism & Genocide are not the slaughter of
innocents. Native Americans,  Herero, Jews, Vietnamese Buddhists,
slaughtered were not Saints. P doesn't slide to the other end of the
Devils & Saints continuum either, making the white man's burden blames
the victim argument. Indeed, what makes P's fictions far more
intersting is his romantics. Now, to be fair to Rich, I've used this
word, "romantics" not as he does above, but as a literary term. P's
romantics include an ambiguity, an irony, and a bunch of other
romantic texhniques that, as Hawthorne sez, hit on the human heart.
This hammer blow on the human heart does not wash the blood off Lady
Macbeth's hands or silence the voices in Mason's skull. it does not
make Dixon a cartoon Quaker, wakebrim tilted toward God, confiscated
whip tightly clenched in a rightous fist. People like James Wood, who
don't much appreciate American Romance, who claim Pynchon has
inherited Melville's Broken Estate, miss the point of modern and
postmodern allegory. It's not cartoons and Speilberg cameras and
computers showing off and reducing the complex human heart to a ticing
clock. In fact, to take one example from the current discussion of V.,
when Benny notes that the Gator's heart will continue to tick like a
clock, the allusive parable (I forget who this fine study of P?) under
the street is not Captain-hooked off the stage, but remains on stage
as it fills up with more Peters and pans. It's not that the political
P is a 60s Lefty who falls hook pan and silver into the mine of save
the Gators and Tibet. Although he, like any honest, though not
necessarily Left, student or scholar od history, notes, with some
outrage and fear, the pattern of mass murder and culture destruction
visited upon heads by those who have the current advantage of being at
the head of the caravan, moving inexhorably, and seemingly in a unit
or with unity, toward some telos or point in time and space, he is a
student of history and not a naive, ill-informed, or lazy one.
Moreover, as a post-colonial writer, he is not intersted in the simple
devils and saints settle the score hornbook of history we get from,
say, Howard Zinn's graphic novel, wonderful as it is. P is intersted
in the forces, the forces that attract us and that, as they are
harnessed with greater and greater machines, extend our faculties, our
propensities. Unfortanatley, we are killers, and, we are all now like
Adams or like Taylor in Planet of the Apes. What are you afraid of
Doctor? ....Damn you all to hell!

How much its character had changed or was changing, they could not
wholly know, and they could but partly feel. For that matter, the land
itself knew no more than they. Society in America was always trying,
almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself;
to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its
tail. Society offered the profile of a long, straggling caravan,
stretching loosely towards the prairies, its few score of leaders far
in advance and its millions of immigrants, negroes, and Indians far in
the rear, somewhere in archaic time. It enjoyed the vast advantage
over Europe that all seemed, for the moment, to move in one direction,
while Europe wasted most of its energy in trying several contradictory
movements at once; but whenever Europe or Asia should be polarized or
oriented towards the same point, America might easily lose her lead.
Meanwhile each newcomer needed to slip into a place as near the head
of the caravan as possible, and needed most to know where the leaders
could be found.

One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten
years had given to the great mechanical energies -- coal, iron, steam
-- a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements --
agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution
on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm;
he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no
longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam
of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew
Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or
Cracow -- not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto,
snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs -- but had a
keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he --
American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots
behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war. He made no
complaint and found no fault with his time; he was no worse off than
the Indians or the buffalo who had been ejected from their heritage by
his own people; but he vehemently insisted that he was not himself at
fault. The defeat was not due to him, nor yet to any superiority of
his rivals. He had been unfairly forced out of the track, and must get
back into it as best he could.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfs5E7IjvE