M&D: Edges & Kafka

[Smoke Teff]

More Kafka resonance, p. 293, as Mason suffers unquiet insomnia...

“That’s it, then. Himself a giant Bug, he rolls quietly from under the Counterpane and crawls from the Room[...]”

> On Jan 5, 2018, at 5:18 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l