Political Pynchon

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Jan writes:
"My problem with Lot49 is that I don't think Pynchon's artistic project is as
coolly, symetrically beautiful as Borges.  Last time I said what I'm about
to say, I got asked to define my terms, but once again: Pynchon is
political, and GR is a work of revolutionary poetry.  Besides which,  you
sure wouldn't catch ol' Jorge Luis hoboing from country to town to country,
sleeping under bridges, baiting JohnBirchers at country fayres, let alone
dressing as RocketMan with a sizeable stash secreted beneath a billowing
cape..."



Well, since COL49, yeah, but I think COL49 catches Pynchon at that point when
he was becoming more overtly politicized himself--"The Secret Integration"
and "A Journey into the Mind of Watts" are the even more overt manifestations
of that urge.  There is little in the early short stories, or even V. that
is overtly political--P seems much more concerned with metaphysical matters in
those works, even when they do relate in some way to an image of lost chances
or dispossession (as in "Lowlands").

I think COL49 marks a turning point.  Keep in mind that P himself was about the
same age as Oedipa when he wrote the book.  And consider that moment of shock
Oedipa has on going to Berkeley and seeing the plaza lined with tables
advertising political groups from anti-war protestors to the Young Americans for
Freedom.  In that passage (p 76 in the Bantam paperback), he seems to describe
the issue that marked those like him who came in at the end of the 1950s
Silent Generation:

"For she ahd undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and
retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible
structure around and ahead of them . . . this Berkeley was like not benevolent
Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or
Latin American universities you read about, those autonomous culture media
[as in bacterial culture?] where the most beloved of folklores may be brought
into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments chosen--
the short that bring governments down. . . . Where were [Forestal and Dulles
and McCarthy], those dear daft numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's so
temperate youth?  [Now, NB the following!] Along another pattern of track,
another string of decisions taken, switches closed, the faceless pointsmen [!]
who'd thrown them all now transferred . . . impossible to find ever again.
Amongl them they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare creature
indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but jsut a whiz at pursuing
strange words in Jacobean texts."


I think it is also revealing that this is one of the best passages of *writing*
in the book!

(Apologies for typos above)_


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)