Guilt against Death

[Dave Monroe]

Guilt Against Death

July 23, 2008

Now reading: Vineland.

For all his theological concern, I’ve never been sure what Pynchon
makes of Jesus. His concern is primarily with the lost and outcast —
all of us, or damn close — and not with the saved and saving.

But one of the most surprising elements of JC’s teaching is his
emphasis on love and his deemphasis of guilt. He talks to prostitutes
and Samaritans, recruits tax collectors and peasants, asks forgiveness
for his punishers. A revolution of personal orientation toward the
world: doing good not because you’ve done bad and feel bad about it,
but doing good because you love your neighbors and your God.

Of course Christianity has very little to do with Christ.  (Did it
ever?)  But I do think Pynchon addresses himself in the long chapter
covering pages 130-191 to the lack of love in our contemporary
discourse, and the preponderance of guilt.

The startling passage that got me thinking on these lines occurs as we
meet a Thanatoid, one of Pynchon’s underground people. Thanatoids are
ambiguous beings, creatures of entropy. They “watch a lot of Tube,”
living in ghostly communities like Shade Creek, where DL and Takeshi
(the “Karmic Adjuster” almost accidentally killed by DL thinking she
was killing Brock Vond with the ninjic “Vibrating Palm” — is anything
harder to summarize than a Pynchon plot?) meet Ortho Bob Dulang, their
first Thanatoid. They “limit themselves… to emotions helpful in
setting right whatever was keeping them from advancing further into
the condition of death… the most common by far was resentment…”

After a cool exchange in which Takeshi is revealed as a kind of
anti-Thanatoid, “trying to go — the opposite way! Back to life!” from
his dead-man-walking condition as DL’s victim, we get this doozy, as
Ortho Bob comments on the arrangement by which DL is assisting Takeshi
for a year and a day to atone for her, you know, killing him slowly
with her ninja moves: “My mom would love this. She watches all these
shows where, you got love, is always winnin’ out, over death? Adult
fantasy kind of stories. So you guys, it’s like guilt against death?
Hey — very Thanatoid thing to be doin’, and good luck.”

He’s right: very Thanatoid thing to be doin’. But what does that mean?
The Thanatoids are still quite slippery, Pynchon keeping their meaning
ambiguous: sometimes they seem to stand for American culture as a
whole, a culture glued to the TV and losing the will to do just about
anything else; sometimes they seem to be presented as victims of
Vietnam or the reactionary elite, made half-ghostly by their inability
to overcome their desire for revenge; sometimes they seem simply a way
of presenting the human condition: always moving towards death. But
it’s the way Ortho Bob frames his argument, his sarcastic, typically
Thanatoid comment that there’s no way that guilt (much less love!)
could ever overcome death, that’s interesting.

Because the Thanatoids do practically nothing but watch TV, the idea
of “love winning out over death” strikes him as an “adult fantasy.” In
the arrangement before him, he doesn’t see love as entering into the
equation at all: guilt is the emotion he sees, incapable of believing
that DL could possibly have any other motivation. But of course, I
think the point of the whole exercise from the SKA’s point of view is
to move her past guilt, to a desire to operate in the world out of
something more than rage and resentment. And it works, maybe — she’s
still with Takeshi an undetermined number of years later, in a
presumably platonic relationship that seems to bear many of the marks
of love.

It’s a very cool, dense passage. It reminds me a helluva lot of DFW,
with those extra commas, that broken grammar, the filtering through
TV. And also in the way that love is dismissed from the discourse, as
something too often exaggerated and mediated and sold to possibly be a
real opportunity for salvation. And that does seem to me a Pynchonian
commentary on the 1980s, in the time’s utter repudiation of something
like “love” — say, concern for fellow citizens and humans, a desire to
live peacefully and simply.

One more note here. We saw The Dark Knight last Sunday, and I was
struck by what a strange movie it was, so very different from so much
else that’s been released in recent years. What made it strange, I
think, was its attempt to move past our societal obsession with blame
and guilt — if only we can identify and punish the “evildoers,” surely
everything will be all right — and its amazingly old-fashioned climax,
a fascinating variation on the “prisoner’s dilemma” of game theory set
up by the Joker (and seriously, it’s not just hype: Heath Ledger is
really unbelievably good as the Joker). It’s hardly a Batman movie at
all: it’s a movie about wanting a man, a city, a country to move past
guilt, towards decency, regard for fellow humans, something like love.

http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/guilt-against-death/
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