M&D: Edges & Kafka

[Smoke Teff]

Was responding to Joseph's notes on Ch. 7 & 8 and thought I might send this
under its own headline.

Thinking about the dynamism--like Ginsberg's mad generation, down on the
rocks of time--of edges Joseph notes...

Thinking about the way certain kinds of precarious and tenuously held
situations of equanimity emerge anarchistically in suddenly-ungoverned
spaces in Pynchon's work...

Maybe part of the question right now, in terms of what we are anticipating
as human readers of narrative fiction, is: will it happen that these edges,
which are also more lawless, as well as the sudden absence of any kind of
authority (even an authority that is hypothetically more
communally/diffusedly/rhizomatically//unofficially exercised & manifest)
allow for or even create certain kinds of novelty in the arts of human
atrocity and cruelty?

Not that you need to mix or lose or dilute a systematic authority to get
that, as we are reminded of by the slaves who seem to be constantly
slipping offstage--seems v true to some contemporaneous theater, actually.

And yet, because the moral implications of the slaves' very existence is so
incongruous with the amount of attention they are getting as
characters--and yet because we suspect the novelist's vision is vast enough
contain those implications--there's a weird moral-aesthetic effect that's
very reminiscent of Kafka, to me. And building tension in a similar way.

Mentions of The Castle several times by now. The invisible power. The
hypnotized populace. The hypnotized reader.

This bizarre effect is, I think, where M&D becomes one of Pynchon's more
specific and masterful books. Though the effect is much easier to feel
after having read the thing before.
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