BEg2 ch25 summary - forgot the most important part

[rich]

Hi Thomas

Yes, I got more out of BE last time around. I missed Pynchon's voice most
of all.

rich


On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 5:30 PM Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at protonmail.com> wrote:

> rich wrote
>
> > My point as much as March Keller and
> > others rant about late capitalism or the horros of the US government
> abuses
> > 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
> me
> > wrong, and maybe this is just my take on it and Pynchon never thought
> these
> > 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
> really
> > 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/lpop/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.
>
>