Vineland, anonymity, limbo

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

ronkarate writes about Vineland:

>                          I, too,
> began feeling that this was some misty eyed reminiscence of the sixties until
> I reached the following passage:
> "Brock Vond's genius was to have seen the activities of the sixties left not
> threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was
> proclaiming youth rebellion against parents of all kinds...Brock saw the
> deep...need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national
> family."
> Some 200-plus pages into _VL_, my images of these characters were completely
> changed by this passage. I'm not making any assumptions as to what was
> intended, but it seems that trying to pinpoint TRP's particular Grand Scheme
> or Great Message (as Gore Vidal does in the recently posted quote) is futile.

Not futile, but fortunately a little more complex, a little less 
two-dimensional than the ordinary public discourse suggest. Once we 
stop seeing the world in terms of simplistic oppositions a la 
Republican / Democrat, Richard Nixon / Oliver Stone, and start seeing 
complexity and depth going beyond a film/TV analysis, then we can get 
somewhere with TRP, and have more fun in the process, too. I also 
quoted the above passage recently (or parts thereof) - it is, I 
think, the key to unravel much of TRPs attitude towards the sixties 
in general, and the USA-dominated post-WW2 zone in particular (in 
_all_ his works).

hg
hag at iafrica.com