Pynchon & The Death of Truth.

[gary webb]

Sadly, I spent Sunday sitting by the pool, reading Beyond Good & Evil. I
read some passages in Neitzsche's fantastic ramblings which provided an
excellent analogy to every partisan fighting over which version of a
seemingly bifurcated reality they live on:

"The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth,"
forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and
if one has so far contemplated him (her) only with artistic curiosity, with
regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire
to see him also in his degeneration (degenerated into a "martyr," into a
stage - and platform-bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a desire
to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case- merely a satyr play,
merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real
tragedy is at an end, assuming that every philosophy was in its genesis a
long tragedy. (pg. 37, Translated by Walter Kaufmann)"



On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 8:26 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> In Michiko Kakutani's new book---entitled what appears after the "&"--
> Pynchon is one of the few writers quoted---many writers of fiction
> name-checked and alluded to though . She quotes
> the words from Gravity's Rainbow about how "religious--comforting" paranoia
> can be and---"there is
> still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything---a
> condition not many of us can bear for long."
>
> A Pynchon fave, John Le Carre, supplies a chapter epigraph: "Without clear
> language, there is no standard of truth."
> Orwell throughout this chapter.
>
> And, she quotes Roth [American Pastoral] as defining anew--like an
> artist--Hofstadter's "paranoid style in America":
> "this counternarrative Roth entitled "the indigenous American berserk"." I
> think of another great American writer, Charles Portis, with this phrase.
>
> Michiko says that Hofstadter's original essay was
> "spurred by Goldwater's campaign and the right-wing movement around it."
> It's seen then in Lot 49.
>
> (From another source, a scholar says
> that the modern bashing of the mainstream media--liberal bias and more-- by
> the Right began then (and even with Goldwater's
> book, I believe,he says, but I'm not looking anything more up).
>
> She focuses on Hofstadter's words: paranoia characterized by "heated
> exaggerations" and more words but seeing these two
> in quotes put Woods on Pynchon's "hysterical realism" into my head.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>