<div dir="ltr">Is there a pattern to Pynchon's interest in automation and the work place? And has that patter been broken (during, after Vineland)? <div><br></div><div>Pynchon in the Navy and working at Boeing, Benny's Yo-Yo labor, like Slothrop's peregrinations, shattering, invisibility... an American GI...a Rocketman....a  swing shift from the government job to the military industrial complex, is a pattern that is still there in Vineland with Zoyd, who lives off a government check, but has moved as far away from Boeing as he can get, works a gypsy roofer, though he's married to Labor and all her fragmented workings, globalization has taken hold. </div><div><br></div><div>All are highly influenced by Orwell's 1984, the year he set the novel VL in, the year he published Luddite...and later he would publish an INtroduction to Orwell's classic. </div><div><br></div><div>But the government is a paternalistic force, from V., where we see Benny sucking on the rubber breasts in the sailor's grave after he has been weened from the government's tit (the Navy), and the MID, the global capital, the late capital forces are not only dehumanizing, but against life, all life, nature and her scatterbrained creation. </div><div><br></div><div>Readers of P, have, I suspect, misread his works as predictions of, callings for, the end of capital and American hegemony. It's OK to Dream, to wish, to hope, but the inexorable force in these works  is not Marxist, is not even economic. </div><div><br></div><div>So in the later novels there is more not less capitalism. </div><div><br></div><div> <br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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