BE: Pears Not Pixels

[Joseph Tracy]

Being or writing with a 'purely' amoral vision seems as contrived and tedious as writing with all your chips riding on some particular moral truth, fad, vision. I am personally a moral thinker who, I believe, also knows the limits of moral thinking.  I feel it is more honest and real to defend my moral and ultimately spiritual sensibilities than to abandon them for something that I don't trust , admire or consider valid.  Nevertheless the world sings its own song and I hear but a fragment of that world or of the writing of the elusive Mr. Pynchon. I grow pears and they are as mysterious to me as pixels.

It feels to me that part of what Pynchon does is describe the world with such colorful intensity, and with such a fearless inner urge to tell truth that most moral or spiritual ways of seeing( from Buddhism to fun loving hedonism and may points between or beyond)will find entry into his novels.  It is less accommodating to the humorless, the close minded, the literarily or ideologically orthodox, and he can even be quite satirically vicious about moral hypocrisy or destructive addictions. Still, that satire always requires a moral fulcrum to be effective.

 Pynchon also creates a universe layered  with different dimensions, some having karmic rules, some inscrutable and poetic, many silly but all clearly referencing both the sublime grace and total weirdness of the inner lives of human culture. Some reader seem to think these underground, terrestrial  and floating worlds are  a gentle or ungentle mockery of all cosmic visions, but they can equally be read as a gentle openness to all such things. Generally with Pynchon there are appearances and disappearances but no grand moral finales,  no final word. The apocalypses he describes are not a function of spiritual beliefs or cosmic judgement but our own miserable capacities for poisoning everyone to kill what we fear and hate most.  

Maybe P's morality is suited more to talking monkeys than angels,  Karma 101: why making the planet a battleground is bad for everyone, The ass you kiss goodbye could be your own.  

On Jan 29, 2014, at 8:45 AM, Monte Davis wrote:

> Yep. One of the unexamined (or at least not-often-enough-examined) assumptions about modern / post-modern fiction, especially among observers with an axe to grind (I'm looking at you, John Gardner) is that because we all know how sanctimonious and hypocritical those dopey Victorians were, we Don't Do Moral Judgments Any More.
> 
> I'm not immune: for years, every time I found in Pynchon a resonance or even explicit reference to Dante, or to Dickens the moralist, or to Greene's and Le Carre's dramas of faith and doubt and betrayal, I'd wonder: is this only because I happen to like those guys as well? Doesn't TRP riff on, undermine, and implicitly reject any moral scheme more ambitious than 'keep cool, but care'?
> 
> But I was so much older then.   
> 
> "Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell today." (GR 537)
>  
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Magnificent,wonderful review...i remember when my use of "moral' got some blowback but
> Pynchon is what she says in every book, every scene,every word.
> Cassandra, I salute you.
>  
>  
> 
> From: Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
> Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 4:02 AM
> Subject: BE: Pears Not Pixels
> 
> http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/02/pears-not-pixels
> 
> 
> 

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