AtD, grace-filled Lew gets a clue

[Joseph Tracy]

If I remember correctly there is a section in Klein's Shock Doctrine where she quotes someone about the psychology of the disappearances in Argentina and Brazil and Chile. At any rate a psychologist collected data on these and similar events and the idea is that people in such regimes experience strong psychological pressure to inwardly assume that there must be some guiltiness of the disappeared/condemned even if it contradicts personal knowledge. People where this is happening assume those judged have done something wrong and that they will be left alone because they have nothing to hide. The force of an accusation by any "authority" figure, witness, associate, or system of law does not require evidence to carry weight and influence in most human cultures.
In many ways Lew occupies an amoral middle space where he investigates possible crimes or undesirable activities for various authorities, but he filters what he finds, never really specifically fingering anyone, and is more a monitor of Karma than its agent. But his role and the structure of thought his story represents - the all knowing parental judge and the misbehaving preterite - is being examined particularly through his story and that of Vibe/Foley. The chums go through an increasingly democratic transition away from this structure of thought.
On Feb 12, 2012, at 8:43 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Lew's sin. Real or the perhaps-misjudgment of the community? Remember the Blindside Gazette from Vineland? Even Lew's wife
> seems to believe what she hears w/o any direct knowledge of how he sinned.
>  
> Is it Original Sin, which is why he can't remember?  [Joseph Tracy] links to Inherent Vice (maybe) and Protestant Ethic possible associations.  
>  
> The Upstate--Downstate Beast---another woman/women elsewhere?--Mrs. Lew: 'go to your other wives'. Or belief there was.
> Later Erlys, who will break her marriage vows for Zamboni, is accused of Beastliness,
>  
> So, real or gossiped falsely, the sin seems sexual.
> 
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
> Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2012 1:29 PM
> Subject: Re: AtD, grace-filled Lew gets a clue
> 
> 
> On Feb 12, 2012, at 7:21 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> 
> > Lew just sort of wandered into the detectvie business---much like Doc Sportello---by way of a sin he was supposed to have committed.
> Lew is one of the characters who ends up almost everywhere the novel goes. If you had to pick an author of the story from within the story, he would be my candidate. His inquiries track the core events, he works for many players but his loyalty is hard to discern. But on his arrival in Chicago he is adopted into a kind of anarchist collective.
> 
> Pynchon too seems to have broken from his "home" on many levels.  During the process of Pynchon''s break from trust in author-I-ties he seems to find himself first attracted to and then at home with people like Farina, Baez,  J Siegel and the whole outsider lefty pot smoking counter-fly- high-culture of the 60's , 70's,. He seems to find similar sympaties in his inquiry into history with the colonized and disposessed: hereroes, tribes of Turtle Island, heretics, the preterite, the labor movement, the Luddites  etc.
> The sin he is supposed to have committed really seems to reflect the tautalogical legal  trap of original sin.  To be a writer is like being a detective of he culture, and the work of the detective is to report the truth.  So many of the answers you find in this process depend on your premises. Lew seems to have no  or very few premises, to live in a nether space, to have been kicked out of grace and found it anyway. 
> > Is his possible amnesia about his past bad action(s) a fictional represenatiaon of his lack of self-knowledge [thanks to J. Tracy who may have meant this or something similar] ? Clueless about himself, he
> > becomes a detective following clues?      More on this................
> To be accused opens up a world of questions and the process can be clarifying or Kafkaesque. Lew seems to be somewhat heartbroken and inclined to believe his wife that he did something.  To be guilty without  empirical evidence or even memories is  a mystery that we all face on some level.  Why is detective fiction the most popular genre of the modern world?  Here there is a crime and a perpetrator/s. We long for this clarity in public life, but perhaps less  in our private conscience. 
> 
> I find 2 kinds of cluelessness about the self  to be the most common patterns. 1 is where people take a side in a given culture war and build their core identity around the characteristics and enemies of that identity. This simplifies the world but falsely. The other is a life long process of skeptical inquiry, which may complicate the world to the point of passivity  and produce trouble and dis-satisfaction in every human contact. 
> 
> I 've said too much.  
> >  
> > First appearance of the concept of grace. Lew realizes, almost unbearably, that things were exactly what they seemed. Specifically embodied in
> > some fine lyrical prose about Chicagoans simply commuting to work on the dangerous EL......maybe also this is used to show the inevitablity
> > of industrial history in hard-working Chicago?......
> >  
> > That is, his epiphany contains the sadness--almost unbearable---of seeing that everyone risks danger every day just to make a living?
> > Not just the poignance of all appearances (transitory and unique)?
> >  
> >  
> 
> 
>