/lit/ - Literature

>>12469432
aye

i think that anon is absolutely right, btw. and that is a really good post. i agree with a lot of it. i would only want to add that i think terminal burnout/collapse/catastrophe is secretly part of the whole enterprise. that the whole thing should stagger towards ruination, or that Uncle Nick should find his nemesis in Woke Capital isn't necessarily a bad thing, in a certain sense. the whole reason to read him is to expose the grotesquerie within the heart of neoliberalism, as well as the narrow superficiality of both forms of socialism that emerge as self-propelling countermeasures - socialism *and* fascism.

you don't have to work too hard to find in The Beast a figure of Sun Wukong. the Beast is who he is not because he is an enemy of the system of his world, but because he is an absolutely complete personification of it, and who finds *peace* in the asylum. the Beast isn't insane (but he would probably tell you that he is, and to kindly fuck off and leave him alone - so does this make him crazy, or...?) and the Axe Gang gets its deliverance from him - unless i'm mistaken, it's the Beast himself who kills their leader.

and then you have these guys. yes, they are landlord-rentiers of Pig Sty Alley, and clearly benefiting from the system of production - but their lives are just as hellish as everyone else's, in a way. they are landlords in a permanently impoverished system, and custodians of a certain lie. in the end, we might even say that the hero's greatest action isn't just defending the polis to which he belongs, but actually enlightening its greatest threat, which turns out to be, in the end, no threat at all. but the Beast doesn't know there is an alternative. that's what makes him what he is.

in some sense i don't think comparisons to Uncle Nick or /acc along those lines are all that crazy.