To Be REAL or not to Be Real (Allegorical hands that turn the time)

[Dave Williams]

To point to the Real or Not Real is not the question. Who decides what is real and what is an illusion? How does P apply what he learned from Adams? This is the key. Yes, it's that important to the current discussion of how young P developed to the P of GR because control of the historical process, what Wicks Cherrycoke tells the children in America (this is KEY--in America), must be countered by,  ROMANCE. 

  "We have, then, with Adams and Nietzsche, a common prognosis of a nihilistic future, and two diverging reactions that may be roughly characterized as Apollonian rejection and Dionysian embrace.


Both reactions are incorporated into Pynchon's work, where they correspond
roughly to a humanity-centered norm without effective defenders and to the
dehumanizing forces and/or conspiracies that besiege it. 

Yet another antithesis that correlates with these reactions is that between the scenario of an existential wasteland that is prey only to a growing spiritual emptiness and entropy's indifferent ravagings, and the scenario of a world in the grip of fanatical cabals that seek control of the historical process. 

It would not be an unfair summation of Pynchon's development to say that he moves from the scenario in his early short stories to the most urgent consideration of the second in Gravity's Rainbow. In between, the two possibilities form, in various mixtures and guises,the onto-epistemological cruxes that have fascinated critics

  These considerations constitute the parameters that generate
  the complex RELIGIOUS DIALECTIC (my caps) of Pynchon's
  fiction: a fluctuating tension between nostalgia for cosmic
  harmony and commitment to amoral power worship, superimposed
  upon the fluctuating tension between the notion of a
  neutral, structureless universe and that of a universe
  infiltrated by insidious structures of Control.

  *The Gnostic Pynchon*  Dwight Eddins,  Cutter's University
  Press  1990