What to make of TRP's conspiracies

[David Morris]

I understand Monte's schema, and I largely agree. But *MacGuffin* is too
strong a dismissal. Those themes are launch pads to bigger realms, not
things to be dismissed as excuses for other concerns.

On Sunday, March 9, 2014, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> While outlining some form of the conspiracies or conspiracy theories that
> function as plot devices, IMO they are framed to be over literalistic and
> to focus on an easily dismissed version/interpretation of the historical
> references.  Still, with a little tweaking to be somewhat less loaded
> toward your MacGuffin theory, I think they form the basis of potentially
> worthwhile discussion.
>
>
> On Mar 9, 2014, at 12:05 PM, Monte Davis 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<javascript:;>>
> 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?
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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