on 12/10/99 8:35 PM, Bergesons at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> I was curious about your inclusion of Pynchon on this list.  What, in your
> mind, qualifies him as a "genuine" anarchist?
Anarchism figures throughout his works, but especially in Gravity's Rainbow.
There is even a minor character who is an anarchist, Squalidozzi, and he has
several good lines in a Dostoevskian like dialog with the major character,
Slothrop. Thematically it is reflected in his distaste for closed systems,
bureaucracies, hierarchies, and control. Biographically it is reflected
(IMO) in the trivia that one of his best friends, and old college roommate,
is the deep ecologist Kirkpatrick Sale.

I learned just the other day that one of the so-called anarchist factions at
the WTO calls itself the Black-Clad Messengers, which is an allusion to the
secret couriers of the Thurn and Taxis postal system in The Crying of Lot
49.

--
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA