COL 49 End of Chapter 3 summary

[Joseph Tracy]

Couple more honest thoughts: The whole self exaltation of Driblettes direction is weird  for me on 2 fronts,  1) if the text is so unimportant why didn’t he write his own play ? And how/why did he choose this play in particular?  One possible answer is that he saw a correspondence in events that would speak to the audience or spoke to himself. The Paranoids  saw it as sick but were fascinated, and particularly by the similarity to story of the bones in Fangoso Lagoon.  Again that real story came from a particular incident of Jews murdered in Italy by Nazis.  The play itself sounds awful unless you like torture, and blood  which may be all that is left for America’s viewing pleasure in the following decades of endless war.  

In some ways I feel like Pynchon is showing a country in denial, or just the distance we put between ourselves and the horror that is not just the demonic other, but our unacknowledged deeds,  the bones we sunk into our subconscious and look at as the fascinated teenager staying up late to watch a horror movie with coffins, mutilated corpses and screaming women, the entertainment of imaginary survival.