Question concerning GR

[Mark Kohut]

I'm reflecting lots more and probably won't get to any deeper answers, but in the Zen first thought "tradition" the old 
Marxist line--which I think I first heard Doris Lessong use---came to mind in a slanting way: Freedom is the recognition of necessity. THEY recognize that the least.    ???

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 14, 2014, at 9:56 AM, Andrew Field <andrewfield2002 at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

> Hey P-Lister's,
> 
> I'm going through my second reading of GR and it is clear that it is an absolute masterwork. There has been a passage that has always stuck out for me, and I'm undecided what rationale Pynchon gives to the following:
> 
> "I would see you free [talking to the rats), if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, all the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize about freedom, but the least free of all."
> 
> The character who speaks it is Weberly Snail, but it is almost an inclusion of the author's voice at this part.
> 
> - This paragraph mirrors, ostensibly, the key theme of the book, technology and control (or freedom and domination, if you will), but the question is: why are the few elite the least free?
> 
> To me, it seems this is an evasion on Pynchon's part - an almost throwaway answer - that resists the complication of the obvious reply: they are more free than you because they are not part of the system of control the same way that we are. So who can blame the master for making you a slave, if he becomes more free because of it.
> 
> From the outset, to me, it seems the elite are more free because they can choose your bondage, and you will always be part of the scientific-technological control system. It doesn't make sense to think the elite are less free because they have to spend their time controlling you. It would amount to, in the master vs. slave dialectic, that the slave is more free. A counter-intuitive answer.
> 
> So, who is more free, and why did Pynchon think they were the least free?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Andrew Field
> 
> 
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