What to make of TRP's conspiracies

[Mark Kohut]

Joyce's Stephen Daedalus: History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken. 

Pynchon? : History is the nightmare within which I am trying to get a little light and love. And I hope it--History--doesn't end. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 9, 2014, at 12:05 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I meant that as on offlist message to John Krafft, to elicit his comments before a revision and P-list posting, but WTF: there are no accidents, right? 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> John: I don't know if you've followed any of the Project Paperclip thread on the P-list,  but it got me thinking about all the conspiracies in all the books. Below is a rough-draft, outrageously simplified rundown of what I see as the "conspiratorial" questions posed by the novels.
>> 
>> Now... I happen to believe that they are, in fact, the MacGuffins of the novels; that Pynchon is less likely to be telling us "Beware conspiracies" than "Beware our penchant for projecting (and blaming) conspiracies." But that's for later. What I'm asking now is: do these strike you as reasonable distillations? Any reactions, corrections, suggestions much appreciated.
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> V: Henry Adams worried about the headlong dynamism of history, gathering speed via technology towards the end of the 19th century. Has that destructive energy "come alive": taken substance in V., a woman (or feminine principle) who appears at critical moments from the 1890s to the 1950s as Victoria Wren, Veronica the rat, Venus/Vheissu, Vera Meroving, the feminized city of Valletta, and Veronica Manganese?
>> 
>> CoL49: Is every kind of communication in 1960s America compromised -- blocked, distorted, turned into entropic noise -- by a secret, centuries-old struggle between the Trystero and "official" channels?
>> 
>> GR: Were the "political" WWII -- and implicitly, the Cold War and nuclear arms/missile race -- just covers for rearrangements of power within a single global Force, most clearly seen in multinational corporations in oil, synthetic chemistry, and other industrial technologies?
>> 
>> Vineland: In the 1960s, activists campaigned against the war in Vietnam, and the government took secret steps to infiltrate and suppress their groups. By 1984, has that grown into a full-scale fascist apparatus, ready to impose (or unveil) a police state, target and round up even former activists who've taken refuge in the woods?
>> 
>> Mason & Dixon: Were all hopes for a fresh start in the New World doomed by the "bad habits" -- slavery, land-grabbing, imperial/colonial power games -- brought or copied from the Old World? e.g., did simply measuring and mapping a magical wilderness along the Mason-Dixon line carry the seeds of the Civil War schism along that line? How much was that fostered by secret schemes of small groups: the Royal Society, Dutch East India Company, Jesuits, Sons of Liberty et al? 
>> 
>> Against the Day: At the turn of the 20th century, were all the possibilities and energy of new politics (anarchism, organized labor), new ideas (in art, science, mathematics) and new technology (photography, electricity, aviation, movies) foreclosed by industrial plutocracy and by preparations for WWI? Were the Chums of Chance, living out a dozen genres of pop fiction, "above" all that -- or serving an unnamed power that was bringing all that about?
>> 
>> Inherent Vice: Behind the noir + Cheech & Chong mashup, one question about the end of the 1960s: "Was it possible, that at every gathering — concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?"
>> 
>> Bleeding Edge: Information technology and the Internet serve both centralizing organization and decentralizing, community-building creativity. DeepArcher -- an anonymous, potentially utopian virtual world -- is created, then corrupted and "colonized," just before and after the blowback catastrophe of 9/11, when the "freedom fighters" the US had fostered in Afghanistan in the 1980s returned as Al Qaeda "terrorists" (or so we're told). Is that coincidence -- or were a few schemers such as Ice and Windust instrumental in both?         
> 
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