Against the Day after Inherent Vice again

[Joseph Tracy]

Earlier in touching on this topic I wrote as follows 
"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 personal story represents -  a confrontation between 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."

"Then one day THEY arrived".  Who areTHEY? Where did they come from? I would say Pynchon plays with different  answers to those questions and dismisses no possible answers out of hand. Maybe the very notion of 'them' is the arrival of them. Pynchon shows a civilization intent on colonizing eden. ATD , like all his books looks at the defining qualities  of that colonial force and at the defining qualities and successes and failures of the counterforce, the resistance to that hungry hierarchy. 

The detective genre is a kind of secular version of conscience, the enforcement of divine law, the light of truth revealing misdeeds and affirming the ordained order. Lew doesn't seem to believe in this role, but wants to trace the questions and clues back to their source.

I'm reading  Jay Griffith's Wild, where she goes to what are called wild and "primitive" places and peoples. She often quotes  the literature of explorers and colonizers and proselytizers . Truly weird shit. "Explorers" go to a place where people live and regard as home and which is full of meaning  and culture and beauty and complexity and food, but these strangers  see it as  either a wasteland or "Virgin" , something to be claimed, penetrated and conquered. They can't see what is there or who is there, blinded by the inability to know themselves  or the place they have come through the eyes of others, the maps they wish to impose more real than what is there to learn.

Vormance expedition. V romance.   

Mark
When the Gand Cohen is talking to Lew about the concept of the Psychical Detective----who by the
way asks if he talks too much, bloviation itself asking, we can laugh:
 
"Suppose there were no such thing, after all, as Original Sin. Suppose the Serpent in the Garden of Eden
was never symbolic, but a real being in a real history of intrusion from somewhere else. Say from 'behind the sky'---
--Say we were perfect. We were law-abiding and clean. Then one day THEY arrived."

Mike
> What the Cohen was saying reminded me of Velikovsky et al and even Scientology - attempts to answer the immediate question but ignoring the regress which that leads to (why were those guys bad?)  what is badness? why should we be susceptible to it? is there a remedy?

> Mark

> Ignoring the Regress.......like that....
> feeds the reading that all Coehn says is being
> satirized along with almost everything of an ULTIMATE kind that all the bloviaters
> say.............
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