Thomas Pynchon Explained In GIFs Form

[Mark Kohut]

Possible he was "simply" satirizing Marxism--and by extension, maybe,
all 'isms"?--and casino capitalism by metaphor, as he does
elsewhere?

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 11:01 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I fully agree that "how exactly the spiritual and the polit-economical
> dimension do interact" is mysterious: Pynchon writes often of moral
> balancing, accounting, atonement, reparation, and justice in language that
> is variously Christian (multiple flavors), Hindu/Buddhist karmic,
> ecological, mathematical/scientific -- but the effect for me is almost
> always aporetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia), and I have no idea
> whether he arrives there deliberately or faute de mieux.
>
> BTW, a visiting Marxist economist would hardly be puzzled even by a Las
> Vegas where only wholesome, legal entertainment is "produced" and
> "consumed": Marx enjoyed London music halls himself, and  But
> resort/vacation cities from Pompeii onward have always had a reputation as
> places where you could find not only good clean fun, but also a bit of
> economic or erotic wink-wink, nudge-nudge (if you know what I mean, eh?)
> What makes Las Vegas special is that Nevada was sparsely populated and poor
> enough, and LV's post-WWII boom and cash-flow fast enough, that organized
> crime could penetrate its government and law enforcement from the ground up,
> more thoroughly than it had in, say, Atlantic City or Brighton.
>
> I also agree w/r/t  Pynchon not wanting "to become a mouthpiece of the
> so-called Free World." In Anglo-American ideological rhetoric, where any
> workers' organization at all was an "illegal combination" for much of the
> 19th century, "socialist" and then "Bolshevik" and "communist" were handy
> sticks with which to beat even the mildest liberal reform -- just as
> "fascist" would later become a loose, all-purpose condemnation from the left
> (or even from today's Moscow, however you care to label *that*). I don't
> fault Pynchon for rejecting and satirizing the former. I don't claim he has
> any obligation in the name of "balance" or objectivity" to give equal time
> to all horrors driven or justified by ideology. But I do think it's
> significant that he writes so much more about the underdog left in
> opposition than the revolutionary left in power. I do think it's significant
> that so many of his alternatives -- his portrayals of bottom-up,
> communitarian, non-power-addicted human relations -- are explicitly
> transient, marginal, family- or village-scale, in remote/exotic settings
> beyond imperial frontiers, other-worldly, and otherwise far from (as he says
> so often in AtD) "the given day."
>
>
> On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 6:51 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>> In Inherent Vice there's a satirical passage  (p. 232): "When he got back,
>> he flipped on the TV and watched Monkees reruns till the local news came on.
>> The guest today was a visiting Marxist economist from one of the Warsaw Pact
>> nations, who appeared to be in the middle of a nervous breakdown. 'Las
>> Vegas,' he tried to explain, 'it sits out there in the middle of the desert,
>> produces no tangible goods, money flows in, money flows out, nothing is
>> produced. This place should not, according to theory, even exist, let alone
>> prosper as it does. I feel my whole life has been based on false premises. I
>> have lost reality. Can you tell me, please, where is reality?' The
>> interviewer looked uncomfortable and tried to change the subject to Elvis
>> Presley." I doubt that a Marxist economist would really be so overwhelmed by
>> the facts of money laundry and organized crime. But that's not the point
>> here. Thing is that Pynchon indeed avoids to "engage in any depth" with
>> communisms. Why? I don't think that he's simply "not interested in this part
>> of the world," an author with his encyclopedic spectrum of themes could not
>> allow himself this. My guess is that Pynchon, who had been immediately
>> involved into the Cold War during his Boeing years, didn't want to be part
>> of it as a writer. So he focused on the American side and its entanglement
>> with the Third Reich, as it became manifest in Operation Paperclip.  Not
>> just despite yet because of Pynchon's special affinity to paranoia no
>> anti-Soviet motives can be found. He didn't want to become a mouthpiece of
>> the so-called Free World. At least I like to think this.
>>
>> That there are problems in Pynchon's universe that "lie deeper" than
>> political economy seems obvious; maybe some of them can be explained through
>> catholic (original sin) or gnostic (the fall) models,  - but with each
>> other, I don't have any idea at all. It's probably part of the magic that
>> makes Pynchon a great author.
>>
>
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