V-2nd - Chapter 11: Those kids

[Mark Kohut]

Alice sez:
"The children of Malta dismantle the bomb."

yeah...........so their malicious glee is just that-----an innocent glee? 

it is not their evil as innocence dismantling decadence as evil? 



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, December 5, 2010 8:07:47 PM
Subject: Re: V-2nd - Chapter 11: Those kids

> I have read the scene again and am reminded I thought of
> "Lord of the Flies" to some extent....kids going evil with some glee...

But the kids in Golding's classic, as Faustian and as Foolish as the
adults of an analogous world, set off the Atom Bomb and nearly destroy
the world; the island is set ablaze after the kids push the atom bomb
rock off its precipice and it drops through the canopy of trees and
explodes in a great pink mushroom cloud. The Beasty, they discover, a
man on strings, pulled hither and pushed thither by the winds, is
inside them, as Simon in the famous romantic scene, where the woods
becomes a cathedral (Golding surely ripped this off from Crane) comes
to understand. The children of Malta dismantle the bomb.