BEg2 ch 30 aftermath paragraph 1
Mark Kohut
mark.kohut at gmail.com
Wed May 18 21:05:08 UTC 2022
I only read the line "There can be no question where Pynchon's sympathies
lie" and I do not
believe it as written.
Not the Pynchon I read or what many say here as we explore his richness of
ambiguity and meanings.
On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 4:59 PM Thomas Eckhardt via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> Am 18.05.2022 um 06:00 schrieb Michael Bailey:
>
> > Paragraph 1:
> > “If you read nothing but the Newspaper of Record, you might believe
> that New York City, like the nation, united in sorrow and shock, has
> risen to the challenge of global jihadism, joining a righteous crusade
> Bush’s people are now calling the War on Terror. If you go to other
> sources—the Internet, for example—you might get a different picture. Out
> in the vast undefined anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of
> self-resonant fantasies, dark possibilities are beginning to emerge.”
>
> >Paragraph 2:
> > “The plume of smoke and finely divided structural and human debris
> has been blowing southwest, toward Bayonne and Staten Island, but you
> can smell it all the way uptown. A bitter chemical smell of death and
> burning that no one in memory has ever in this city smelled before and
> which lingers for weeks. Though everybody south of 14th Street has been
> directly touched one way or another, for much of the city the experience
> has come to them mediated, mostly by television—the farther uptown, the
> more secondhand the moment, stories from family members commuting to
> work, friends, friends of friends, phone conversations, hearsay,
> folklore, as forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize
> control of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play and
> dependable history shrinks to a dismal perimeter centered on “Ground
> Zero,” a Cold War term taken from the scenarios of nuclear war so
> popular in the early sixties. This was nowhere near a Soviet nuclear
> strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat “Ground Zero” over
> and over do so without shame or concern for etymology. The purpose is to
> get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless.”
>
> BE, 326-327
>
> Thank you, Michael. These are important quotes. They should be read
> alongside the following paragraphs from M&D:
>
> “Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-- Tops and Hoops, forever
> a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History
> is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,-- nor is it Remembrance,
> for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to
> the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-- her
> Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc,
> spy, and Taproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one
> life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in
> forever,-- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose
> us All,-- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short,
> weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their
> Destination in common.”
>
> M&D, 349.
>
> And, coming after a mention of Jack (Jean de) Mandeville, Captain John
> Smith, Baron Munchausen, Herodotus, who are (in)famous for liberally
> mixing facts and fiction:
>
> "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in
> Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left
> within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her
> Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs
> rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and
> counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of
> Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech
> nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of
> Government."
>
> M&D, 350.
>
> The first quote is historiographical, the second is poetological.
> Perhaps it is the most important poetological statement in Pynchon's
> works. It beautifully describes what he himself does or tries to do -
> tendering history lovingly and honourably but always nimbly enough to
> keep it beyond the desires of government.
>
> What Pynchon describes by way of example of the NYT in BE is history in
> the making - the immediate emergence of an "official narrative", cause
> and effect, the creation of a national myth. This official narrative
> serves the interests of Power as BE's narrator spells out with unusual
> candor: "forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize control
> of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play". As in M&D,
> history is narrowed down to one, and only one, line.
>
> The official narrative has an objective (even a telos, if you will): Get
> people "[c]ranked up, scared, and helpless." In other words, get people
> to go along with everything the government does in order to get revenge,
> remedy, consolation. This is the objective of every Strategy of Tension,
> regardless whether there has been a terror attack under a false flag, as
> was the case in the original Strategy of Tension, or whether the powers
> that be use a genuine terrorist attack in order to implement their
> goals: Get people to unite behind their government.
>
> This way fascism lies, and in its concern about the danger of fascism in
> the US, BE is closely related to VL.
>
> Juxtaposed with the official narrative of the "Newspaper of Record" are
> alternative narratives, other explanations, different possibilities in
> the brandnew online world.
>
> I suggest that there can be no question where Pynchon's sympathies lie.
>
> I'll add that the use of "Ground Zero" here is quite remarkable: First,
> there is a simple, rational assessement: As horrible as events on
> September 11 were, they were "nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on
> downtown Manhattan" (cf. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/). Secondly,
> "Ground Zero" is a perfect term for the narrowing down of possibilities,
> both literally, as the phrase evokes thermonuclear war, and
> figuratively, because by evoking thermonuclear war it serves to justify
> any and all measures the government might take against that danger.
> Thirdly, it relates to the various references to planning for the
> Continuity of Government in the Cold War era in BE.
>
> We might remember that Vineland's REX84 also was a CoG measure and that
> CoG measures were initiated on September 11 and have, to the best of my
> knowledge, never been rescinded.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
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