Rocky, fella

[Robin Landseadel]

I see Pynchon looking at his family's involvement in this history as  
well as the author's perpetual habit  of overlapping the past over the  
present. I think coming away from Gravity's Rainbow with a different  
view of the involvement of American Plutocrats with the Nazi machine  
[as exemplified by I.G. Farben's entanglements with funding from the  
U.S.A.] happens to be one of Pynchon's primary purposes in GR. Joseph  
Heller's Catch-22—a book Pynchon particularly admired—is in large part  
about the essential corruption inside the U.S.A. military empire.  
Gravity's Rainbow greatly expands upon that theme, among many others.

On May 17, 2010, at 7:03 AM, rich wrote:

>> For Pynchon, World War II was a monstrous holocaust, a cataclysm of  
>> 40
>> million souls, resulting from a competition among technologies. The
>> old dynasty, the J. P. Morgan dynasty, was built on the technologies
>> of coal, steel, and railroads; the newer Rockefeller dynasty on the
>> technologies of oil (petrochemicals, plastics), aluminum, and
>> aircraft. Pynchon says that World War II was a corporate war
>> reflecting those technologies, that for many their “first loyalty,
>> legal and moral, is to the estate [corporation] she represents. Not  
>> to
>> our boys in uniform [the nation-state], however gallant, whenever  
>> they
>> died” (  Lot 49,  53).
>>
> __________________
> as a theme within Pynchon's worldview and artistic renderings that is
> fine but ultimately its bad history. But as we've mulled over again
> and again here, Pynchon's WW2 is loosely veiled Vietnam-era America.
> No great shakes there. To mistake Pynchon's WW2 however for the
> historical I think can lead to some pretty unsavory conclusions, e.g.
> that Hitler (or even Stalin) was only a stooge of corporate elites.
> Ultimately what I'm saying (I think) is that Pynchon's critique works
> much better or is a better fit for a critique of post-war American
> dominance. At least that;s how I see it.
>
> rich