BtZ42: Ethical Pitfalls

[Smoke Teff]

One of the things I like about this chapter (though not necessarily something unique to this episode) is the way it drops a lot of different ethical systems--and, not coincidentally, different tongues of "rationalism," different interpretations of time, causality, so forth--into the same pot, like a mad khemist, and allows them to interact how they will. 

I don't think we can isolate a functional, fully explicated, fully endorsed ethical system here. It'd be a worse book if we could. But we do see, in this chapter, many people being seduced into making decisions most of us would agree the book specifically disendorses. 

Pointsman, corrupted by ambition, hero worship, and maybe just too unambiguous an embrace of determinism (but at least he is willing to modify the direction of cause-and effect, and is a multi-temporal-directional determinism that different from the everything-connects-ism of the paranoiac?). 

Pointsman justifies "meddling with another man's mind" as Pudding has it by making fallacious appeals to authorities--"Harvard University, the U.S. Army? Hardly shabby institutions." (85)

Once crystallized, Pointsman's ambition infects others like a virus. But what allows it to take Mexico as host? Mexico is not ambitious. He believes in love. 

But he is, perhaps above all else, fearful. There is a war going on, after all. And in times like these, even the well-intentioned words of a lover we are afraid to lose can lead us down a path we might never have chosen...

"Last night, in the house at the edge of the stay-away town, Jessica, snuggling, afloat, just before sleep was to take them, whispered, 'Roger...what about the girls?' That was all she said. But it brought Roger wide awake." 88

The next day (the next paragraph), Mexico is SEEKING Pointsman for answers, for comfort. 


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