BtZ42, Vp.41 (the real thing)

[Joseph Tracy]

Good question. I assumed the “more” was about risk to personal safety, that the town is evacuated because it is a target, and/or  damaged and without the safeguards of a well maintained infrastructure: gas, water, police???

> On 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?

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l