BtZ42, Vp.41 (the real thing)

[Mark Kohut]

one possibility for me: That they mistake lust for love and believe the war*
can be* fucked.

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 10:02 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> [Please excuse the previous version, sent prematurely]
>
> Roger & Jessica's life in the evacuated town "is marginal, hungry,
> chilly—most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire— but it’s something
> they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than
> propaganda has ever asked them for."
>
> What propaganda "asks them for" is outlined a paragraph earlier: "it’s
> better to-gether, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires, khaki,
> steel of the Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a
> fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert
> love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death."
>
> Restated later, p. 177: "Damned Beaver/Jeremy *is* the War, he is every
> assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and
> government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams,
> the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found
> among the idle and mindless hours of the day . . "
>
> Question: what exactly is the "more" that R&J will take on to keep what
> they have? What do they do to themselves that is somehow *like* and
> *beyond* what the collective psychosis of "total war" is demanding?
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160424/b996f040/attachment.html>