BtZ42: Ethical Pitfalls

[Mark Kohut]

The most heartrending line in GR? One of them anyway...and a woman thinks
of the women (girls).
Since a lot of bombs fall where people aren't,  Slothrop seems to bring
actionable intelligence, as the phrase goes.

Do they ever think to act on it, ---what does that say?--or is it, of
course, always too late?

On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 12:30 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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