The torture of Baha Mousa - P mentioned more than in passing

[Mark Kohut]

incredible use of P, his understanding. Great find. I'm shaking.

Thank you

--- On Sun, 2/28/10, Kunal Shah <xibulbamao at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Kunal Shah <xibulbamao at gmail.com>
> Subject: The torture of Baha Mousa - P mentioned more than in passing
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, February 28, 2010, 8:41 PM
> 
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/27/adam-thirlwell-baha-mousa-author
> In the lunch break, reading Pynchon's cartoon
> novel, the violence
> seemed like cartoon violence. It seemed made-up. And I
> continued with
> Pynchon's conspiratorial gadget, his crazed apocryphal
> stories of the
> New York sewers, and their severe conclusion: "It is
> this way with
> sewer stories. They just are. Truth or falsity don't
> apply."After
> the break, the hearing was shown a video of something
> resembling the
> "choir". And I rethought my theory. The
> "choir" wasn't a choir at all.
> Because there's no such thing as cartoon violence. It
> is only a cartoon
> in edited descriptions. The TDF was a dirty concrete cube,
> with a
> painted-out window, where men hooded in sandbags, their
> shirts
> imprinted with damp patches of sweat or blood or water,
> slumped and
> cried while a soldier screamed at them. (And suddenly, the
> heat was
> visible. The heat was nearly 60C. I had thought this was
> unimaginable.
> I didn't think this now.)But then I remembered
> another sentence in Pynchon. In the introduction to Slow
> Learner, a collection of his fiction written before
> V.,
> the older Pynchon itemises the younger Pynchon's
> faults. One, he
> argued, was the way death is dissolved in the fantasia of
> his style.
> Whereas, Pynchon worried: "When we speak of
> seriousness in fiction
> ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death .
> . .
> Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever
> brought up with
> younger writers . . ."The two separate ideas
> – that some stories
> are so crazed that this crazed unreality is part of their
> form, and
> that, on the other hand, death should not be treated in
> such a
> delinquent way – seem to describe two halves of a problem
> for the
> apprentice novelist: how to be true to the world's
> appropriation of
> fantastical forms, and simultaneously the recalcitrant
> facts.So
> I sat there, and listened. One soldier, said the lawyers,
> had been
> accused of sitting a hooded prisoner in front of an open
> jerrycan of
> petrol. The prisoner could smell the fumes. Then liquid was
> poured on
> his head. Then his hood was removed. And a soldier lit a
> match, as if
> about to burn the prisoner alive. The liquid was really
> water. The
> prisoner was hysterical.This isn't, perhaps, so
> implausible. The
> stealth torturer is fond of mock executions. And so it
> might also be
> possible to say this: nothing is ever one thing. Torture
> can share a
> structure with a practical joke.After all, I
> thought, in the
> airconditioned room, finding equivalents for this gruesome
> coincidence
> of horror and comedy isn't impossible. There's Tom
> Stoppard's great
> play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which finds a
> fantastical levity in the Soviet incarceration of
> dissidents in lunatic
> asylums. And there are Pynchon's own pastiche novels
> about brutal
> power. And then . . .Then I went home tired and
> watched cartoons.
> -- 
> Kunal Shah
> 
>