M&D CH 29

[Mark Kohut]

Yeah, all is the case.

This 'mass killing of animals', besides asserting how cities start--as a
kind of self-created barrier to "the Country Realities" of nature, of
natural life & death maybe? can remind  Pynchon readers of the
slaughterhouse scene and riff in Against the Day. Where it is linked to the
abstraction of technology doing the dirty murderous work
and very possibly--in fact almost surely--linked to a famous essay by
someone on how such technology helped enable the mass slaughters of the
20th Century, is indicative what modernity brought us,  in fact, is
explicitly linked to the gas chambers of the Holocaust, I think. .....[the
essay is, not P in the text overtly, only by his usual indirect
semi-allegorical reach]

That same essay/judgement is used by Coetzee in his novel *Elizabeth
Costello,* which is about, among other things, in what ways it is morally
acceptable (if it is) to not be a vegetarian, which embodies an answer
along lines developed way back from even Unamuno or the like about how
killing animals oneself, being personally enmeshed in the necessary life &
death connection of it, is about the only way.

Elizabeth Costello is a philosopher in that novel and in real life, a
philosopher named Corey Diamond, I believe, is the one with a
much-discussed essay on all of the above using Coetzee's/Costello's
argument and moral dilemma in the novel. (I once heard another philosopher
argue that Elizabeth Costello is totally unreliable). Just FYI.

Waxen faces, the faces of P's despised bureaucrats.
Commissioning bodies = They. Them.

On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 3:25 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> CH 29
>
> We are with M&D in Philadelphia somewhere near the Shambles. The mass
> killing of animals always receives commentary from P:
> “Cities begin upon the day the Walls of the Shambles go up, to screen away
> Blood and Blood-letting, Animals’ Cries, Smells and Soil, from Residents
> already grown fragile before Country Realities. The Better-Off live far as
> they may, from the concentration of Slaughter. Soon, Country Melancholicks
> are flocking to Town like Crows, dark’ning the Sun. Dress’d Meats appear in
> the Market,— Sausages hang against the Sky, forming Lines of Text, cryptick
> Intestinal Commentary.”
>   From slaughter to wax effigies to a meeting with the the commisiners of
> M&D’s survey, commisioners who first appear unexpectedly in the back room
> of a bar with waxen faces and then in daylight “ to greet him with the
> same, O God in Thy Mercy, the same look…”
>   The whole chapter strikes me as black humored foreshadowing ending with
> Ben Franklin dressed as death holding a scythe designed to channel
> lightning and some electricity fans heading out of a pub into a lightning
> storm.
>     We also see that in Philadelphia political affinities and arguments,
> as in England, South Africa have a strong religious component, boundaries
> again.
>
>     DISCUSSION ?     Commisioning bodies in M&D are powerful agents, but
> anonymous, mysterious and associated with fear and death. They do little or
> no speaking in the novel. Thoughts?
>
> --
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>