Thomas Pynchon Explained In GIFs Form

Sat May 10 13:49:38 CDT 2014

this is what made me wonder, too. but then i found a sort of answer in V.

"Not so. Because: all along the first thread, from a young, crude Mata 
Hari act in Egypt - as always, in no one's employ but her own - while 
Fashoda tossed sparks in search of a fuse; until 1913 when she knew 
she'd done all she could and so took time out for love - all that while, 
something monstrous had been building. Not the War, nor the socialist
tide which brought us Soviet Russia. Those were symptoms, that's all."

symptoms, that's all. he clearly is either not interested in this part 
of the world or, in his system of the world, global problems he's 
dealing with, lie deeper than the "evil empire" (this country turns back 
to now)

imho, of course
Mx

On 10.05.2014 21:02, Monte Davis wrote:
> I'm just finishing Against the Day again: recall that circa 1919 (p. 
> 1024) we see "... the old /Bolshai’a Igra/... The Romanoff crest had 
> vanished from its envelope, which instead was now all a single chaste 
> expanse of saturated red, and the ship’s name had been changed to 
> /Pomne o Golodayushchiki. '/Remember the Starving,' explained Captain 
> Padzhitnoff...these days his ship and crew flew everywhere across 
> Europe and Inner Asia, no longer dropping brickwork but sending food, 
> clothing and— since a great influenza epidemic the boys had not till 
> now been aware of—
> 
> medical supplies, gently down by parachute to whatever populations 
> below were in need of them.
> "
>
> The Russian dirigible, while pointedly "red," is floating out of the 
> new government's control, just as the Inconvenience is becoming 
> independent of the shadowy (capitalist? imperialist?) Chums of Chance 
> headquarters. We have seen the tsarist state almost entirely in terms 
> of 1) Its "Great Games" in central Asia and the Balkans, and (2) its 
> barely acculturated Islamic and shamanic reaches; we will see nothing 
> of its successor. Similarly in GR, we see the rocket-hunting great 
> power game of the Zone and the remote Kirghizhstan of the 1920s, but 
> only glimpses of the USSR of 1945.
>
> I'm not saying that either book conceals (let alone excuses or favors) 
> the authoritarian communism of the USSR, but it's not unfair to say 
> that it elides the matter compared to its treatment of authoritarian 
> forces in 20th-century Europe and the US. AtD both celebrates 
> anarchism and trade unionism and explicitly foreshadows the death of 
> the former in WWI: "Industrial corporations, armies, navies, 
> governments, all would go on as before, if not more powerful. But in a 
> general war among nations, every small victory Anarchism has struggled 
> to win so far would simply turn to dust." (Ratty McHugh, p. 938)
>
> What Pynchon *doesn't* do is engage in any depth with the theoretical 
> communism of pre-1914, which coexisted and at times overlapped with 
> anarchism and the union movement, or with the actuality of state 
> communism after 1917. The latter managed to co-opt enough of the 
> workers' hopes and rhetoric of the earlier period to seem a desirable 
> alternative to many for decades to come, although it was as top-down, 
> controlling and brutal. That' betrayal -- and reluctance to see it -- 
> was long a sore spot for the American left (which may be why Pynchon 
> elides it), and an all-too-easy avenue of attack for the American right.
>
> You mention the relation of "the intellectual lineage of fascism" to 
> "the project of objective scientific inquiry." In the spirit of double 
> refraction, we (if not Pynchon) we might also contemplate the 
> intellectual lineage of "scientific socialism," i.e. Marxist-Leninist 
> claims of historical inevitability (shepherded by a vanguard party 
> elite, of course)... and decades of prominent Soviet (and then 
> Chinese) enthusiasm for  science, heavy industry, vast infrastructure 
> projects, collective farming, etc. I think both have the same roots 
> not only in the Enlightenment, but also in the "ancient forces of 
> greed and fear" (IV 130) behind *all* ideologies of control and 
> domination.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 5:06 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen 
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:
>
>
>     >> It would be fair to say, though, that Pynchon is obsessed with
>     the relationship between reason and authoritarianism, and
>     specifically with how the intellectual lineage of fascism—both its
>     roots in the Enlightenment, and the way it informs present-day
>     social and political structures—is intimately related to the
>     project of objective scientific inquiry.<<
>
>     This sums it up for me.
>
>
>
>     On 09.05.2014 21:23, Dave Monroe wrote:
>
>         http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/gif-explainers-explained-in-thomas-pynchon-explained-1573696149
>         -
>         Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
>
>     -
>     Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>

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