CoL49 - 2nd section of chapter 5

[Joseph Tracy]

In a materialist, competitive society there is a fair amount of confusion between love and capital assets . Miles, Dean Leonard and Serge have names but their companions are “their chicks”. The confusion is a marketing bonanza for capitalism. .  But the net effect on marriage  is that a better position is offered and the acquired partnership fails while the abandoned partner may have seen love and meaning and a human sanctuary where there was really  only a contingency. This is echoed with the drummer when his girlfriend still called only "Serge’s chick" leaves him for Metzger. The reaction of the jilted  can be cynicism about love or a search for the real thing in self and relations. Of course there are many versions of what is real, and it is hard to see Pynchon taking this topic over seriously apart from OM’s intense pursuit of what is real in both love and capitalism, good faith and foul play, law and truth, the lives of the powerful and the powerless. 

What I mean is it is hard to take seriously the problems of either the paranoids shallow youth culture and art; or the problems of weapons and aerospace  executives, who don’t know what they are signing, getting replaced by a computer; or lawyer/actors  like Metzger  going for easier prey.  What I take more seriously  is the IA, the rejection of love  that grows out of  and is really essential to Yoyodyne policies and is a powerful force in the dark satiric vision of America Pynchon is elaborating. Money from violence or deception is real and highly desired, and human commitment and shared values are slogans for productivity and sales tools.  That this IA  organization is followed in O. M.’s next personal encounter by the CIA seems no accident to me. Claims of clandestine intelligence  instead of love, secret power vs local post colonial collective decision making, coercion versus anarchism, Angelo/Angleton versus Niccolo/Kennedy. Cities designed like printed circuits with fake lagoons vs (Arrabal arable) land from Mazatlan still connected to its own history, where the CIA is not shaped by fascists but anarchist collectives as they resist becoming another plaything of rich gringos..









> On Jul 2, 2024, at 6:37 AM, J K Van Nort via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
> 
> Questions:Why is it love and not capitalism that the founder of IA believes has ruined his life?