What to make of TRP's conspiracies

[Joseph Tracy]

Below are  my comments on  and personal  suggested alternate versions of Monte's summaries of conspiracy themes. There is a whole lot of Pynchon that is obviously more personal and deals with sexuality, the pursuit of justice, the hunger for love and inner liberation,  the constant changes and uncertainties we live with the difficulty  and beauty of family etc.  I am in no way negating the importance of those or other thematic materials. 
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? 
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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?
I think V best fits the theory of conspiracy as McGuffin and the self delusory outcomes of looking for that  attractive force( V) which has seduced the fathers and which might explain one's own history and destiny.  The whole sick crew functions as the entropic and self indulgent launching ground for the quest but also as the seedbed for internal change and reflection,  they are the somewhat privileged disaffected, preterite the less noble qust for action on the street.. But I do see more than MacGuffin in V's conspiracies. To my mind , that seductive V force an be summarized as colonialism and I think colonialism can be looked at as a conspiracy of the armed and powerful against the weak and vulvanerable.  The story of the rats is one of the funniest and most vicious attacks on the spirit of colonialism ever written. The account of the castle in southwest Africa is among the darkest passages of historical fiction. Some events in Egypt, Europe and Malta are historic and all concern colonialism or resistance to colonialism. 
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> 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?
 Obviously nobody thinks there is a literal Trystero.  The questions here are about inheritance. Inheritance of wealth, inheritance of roles, inheritance of information.  Where does this inheritance comes from; was it legitimately earned? And does  the omnipresent media message that it was and is  legit really hold up to investigation?  In other words, is the media ( for which the postal service is a metaphor)compromised by  those who control it?  What is our proper role as executor and therefor endorsers of the legitimacy of this will and heritage. In terms of conspiracy, do the great powers conspire to control the media and cover bloody murder? Is there a counter culture media with information more relevant to the preterite and dispossessed. Is there a legitimate reason to challenge the execution of the will?  Early Chomsky is relevant.
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> 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?
 This seems basically workable.  My only squabble would be about what is meant by a single global Force. I see The force more as a single colonial imperialist power structure which can be thought of  as corporatized nationalism with its alliances. In GR different faces of that power structure are competing in WW2 for dominant economic and power  roles. 
 The role of movies as the art and propaganda medium of the 20th century is so palpable it seems that the entire book takes place in black and white celluloid except for the scenes of Slothrop in pigsuit romping over the green hills and disappearing with the rainbow into thin air. 

> 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?
I agree with the substance of this as long as we recognize that full-scale fascist" is infinitely arguable and that fascism is as varied as democracy. Were people killed by Reagan's police state, were people persecuted by Reagan's police state, were prison camps prepared, weak countries invaded or overthrown?  Is TV, as in 1984, a major tool of corporate state control?  In Vineland  the tone is much more comedic than earlier work as is the outcome in which Reaganism goes too far  and has to change course. So the conspiracy was at least temporarily foiled.  The results of the 60s are imperfect but unfriendly to fascism, which is, you know, better than jacking off to cop shows..
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> 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? 
Close enough.  
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> 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?
 To me this is the tour de force and most of what P talks about is here.   The central question is what  produced the deadly industrial slaughter of WW1, and did that end history as an evolving relation with nature? Capitalism and nationalism have taken the center of the world stage.  Some conspiracies that enabled this ascent include the Pinkertons and plutocrats,  the greed and power fueled great game and its outreach in the orient and the American west especially through the railroads, calvinism and varieties of antinomianism including the inherent racism and classism of spiritualism and secret societies, the revival of slavery in extractive industries like goldmining, steel,  the corrupting power of violence even in self defense and resistance.
 I think this is the most metaphoric and even metaphysical use of conspiracies and could be looked at as the historic showdown between individual genius/ mystical insight/spirit/intuition/morality and the logic of industrialized technological violence. The important forces in history as shown in ATD are not conspiracies but the paranoia and lusts that give rise to the conspiracies,  and to imperial surveillance states, their technologies of control, and their control of technologies. 
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> 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?"
Specific questions of conspiracy include  the role of heroin traffic in US and CIA doings. The role of currency as a mechanism of state control. The role of Howard Hughes and the mob  in clandestine politically motivated violence. The organized political racism in Los Angeles.  The connections between police and convenient crimes by professional criminals all in the service of political goals. The way the police, media and politicians used Charles Manson's violence to smear antiwar and counter culture people, while taking no responsibility for the slaughter in Vietnam which they had promoted. 

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> 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?    
 I wouldn't put Deep Archer at the center of the story except as a metaphor for a new shared mind and its potential for liberation and whether it was always destined to fall under the control of "Them".  To me it is, like most Pynchon, about what happens when you follow the evidence, follow the money, follow the bodies, and how quickly you can find yourself in very dark terrain. It also stands as a metaphor for various contenders for the hand of the lovely, lusty, and curious body politic.
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