Less is More...

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Don writes
>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,

Jan replies
> As regards V., I'd have to reread the Weissman/Herero sections before I'd
>be willing to agree that their political content is minimal; certainly the
>history itself is radical and new and the product of TP's own digging 
around
>obscure texts and magazine articles.

>But I do think the suggestion of a Pynchon getting more politicized thru 
the
>sixties is an intriguing one.  Guess we'll have to ask the man himself...

...Difficult for me not to see TP as "politicized", even in V.    The issue 
seems more complicated to me.  Its not apolitical vs politicized, but more a 
question of exploring a character's relationship to the political dimension 
of their history.  No one as obsessed with history can be not politicized. 
 For example V has a lot to say about the Edwardian's relationship to 
imperialism.
What I think *is* a good generalization is to say that TP in all his work 
explores as one of his two or three most basic projects the dialectical 
process of a character reacting across the gap between their own personal 
history and the (unavoidably) political history in which they find 
themselves embedded.  A closely related theme, again exploiting the 
potential across the gaps individual to group and individual to community is 
paranoia:  this is the engine of history and its secret politics 
(conspiracies, secret messages, covert agendas, unexposed economic 
connections, even talking to the dead) as strongly felt but dimly understood 
by the mere individual.
So its not metaphysical vs. politics---its both at the same time, in 
dialectical relationship.  We might look (in terms of "revolutionary" 
politics) to some strands of French Marxism, for example, particularly 
Sartre at the time of Search for a Method and the later Critique.  He also 
is concerned to place the individual and groups into the broader political 
process without losing the power of individual psycology.

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Lindsay Gillies                           FMR Corp.
lindsay.gillies at fmr.com         82 Devonshire Street, R22A
617-563-5363                              Boston, MA 02109
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