BEg2 ch25 summary - forgot the most important part

[Hübschräuber]

This didn't reach the list. Sorry.

rich wrote:

> My point as much as March Keller and

> others rant about late capitalism or the horros of the US government

> abus=s as on the money as they are, there seems to be something bigger

> going on, of which even Mr P himself can only allude to. He does it

> well, dont get =e wrong, and maybe this is just my take on it and

> Pynchon never thought the=e things. But as I read BE again, it

> disabuses me of the previous notion I had that Pynchon was more clear

> about them, the bad dudes in the later books (well at least the last

> three and Vineland) being obvious. and despite so much nonsense in BE

> and clutter and waste, there are some real=y frightening things at the corner of the reader's eye.

You are not finally warming to BE, rich? I should very much hope so.

Here is a quote on VL that appears to echo your thoughts on BE:

-- [S]uch appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates. There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow, is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing pattern of executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in Vineland something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has simply gone unrecognized. --

https://web.archive.org/web/20100607060958/http:/tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpo=/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm

Yes, there are dark and troubling things mixed in with the "clutter and waste" (of course, I don't see it that way). I would say Pynchon IS clearer about them in VL than in BE, and I believe that there is a simple reason for this.

I will come to it, but first:

Every novel by Thomas Pynchon has a parapolitical, or deep-political, layer that serves as a more or less well-hidden frame of reference (some readers never want to discuss this aspect of the novels at all). In VL, this parapolitical frame of reference includes the Iran/Contra hearings, especially the infamous testimony of Oliver North, COINTELPRO, and Nixon's War on Drugs (a thrilling take on the WoD and its link to the Fascist International is: Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism; I also highly recommend the books of Michael Levine who quit the DEA in disgust after his most important undercover operations against drug kingpins were sabotaged by the CIA).

Oliver North and REX 84:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug0IL7k3elQ

Even if we do not know what exactly was discussed in "closed session"

about REX 84, we can say that Iran/Contra was a conspiracy at the highest level of the US government to circumvent the Boland Agreement in order to deliver weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua. To this end, the government was prepared to let the Contras smuggle cocaine into the US and, if the US decided to wage war against Nicaragua, round up dissidents and incarcerate them in FEMA camps:

"Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go.

Reagan’s got it for when he invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it out.” (264)"

(It should also be noted that these are

Continuity of Government measures. CoG also plays a role in BE.)

My point is, this is historically proven. The evidence is in. In BE, the case is different. There is no generally accepted historical evidence for alternative explanations of the events on 11 September. On the other hand, the official narrative was controversial from the beginning and remains so today. Pynchon is therefore not in a position to say "Look it up, check it out." What he does instead is, amongst other things, use March Kelleher as a mouthpiece for alternative explanations.

She surely does not mince words (perhaps it is just me, but I find this very funny):

-- "Its the Reichstags fire," she greets Maxine.

"The what?"

"Those fucking Nazis in Washington needed a pretext for a coup, now they've got it." --

(317)

I hope to write more on the historiographic aspects of this as we proceed.

Meanwhile many thanks to the keeper of the flame, Michael Bailey.

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