(Fwd) Political Pynchon

[Aaron Yeater]

Lindsay Gillies writes:
" He also
is concerned to place the individual and groups into the broader political
process without losing the power of individual psycology."

I wonder if we might see pynchon's project as a piece of a supreme 
literary irony on this count, in the following sense.  F. Jameson 
claims, in an article whose title I cannot recall fully but it ends 
with "...Third World Literature", that psychological writing is a 
western conceit, that the third world is bound by political reality 
to political literature, and in didactic form, ne'er the twain shall 
meet (actually, I wonder what he would have thought of twain.)  So 
what pynchon does is create characters whose political reality is (or 
might be) an imagined psychological pathology.  Or they might in fact 
have no psychology at all, and are just pawns of a political struggle 
so grossly intertwined with reality so as to be indistinguishable 
from it.  
The point is, maybe TRP is saying "Hey, the line between the political and 
 psychological isn't blurred, it's useless.  It's artifice, 
designed to protect us from whatever reality threatens us most.  
Sure, the individual is a myth, and guess what, so's the conspiracy."  
A 
sort of "Jameson Inside-Out" approach (not to suggest in anyway TRP 
was engaging Jameson's piece, since he preceded it significantly...) 
my $.02, anyway (depreciating quickly...)

aaron
***********************************************************

"Look at the mess we've got ourselves into," Colonel 
Aureliano Buendia said at that time, "just because we 
invited a gringo to eat some bananas."
                           --Gabriel Garcia Marquez
                             "One Hundred Years of Solitude"