Political Pynchon

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

On Wed, 28 Jun 1995 johns at nbn.com wrote:

> Don Larsson writes:
> > 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").

My own reading of _V._ revealed to a more subtle, complex politically 
imbricated text.  I just wrote about it on my LAST DAY, YES, LAST DAY, of 
exams (today) so I don't want to go into detail.  Actually, much of my 
argument was based upon Robert Holton's "In the RAthouse of HIstory with 
Thomas Pynchon: Rereading _V._"  Holton looks to the debate over the 
"sublime" and the "beautiful" in order to ground his discussion.  
BAsically, Holton sees the work as a retrieval of historical events as 
a way of problematically locating historical discourses that 
comment discursively on the text and thus on themselves. By thus 
retrieving the sublime, Pynchon critiques notions of the "beatiful" that 
are manifest in unified themes on the nature of the complexity of human 
experience.  That we are comfortable with the grand narrative becomes, or 
seems the key to viewing the kinds of epistemologies under scrutiny.  

Bonnie