Defending Later Pynchon

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Steely explains:
"Perhaps what you're getting at is that Vineland works best as a kind of
confessional novel for the Lost Generation Part 2, a guiding testament to
the oncoming therapy state--presaged by the success of all those self-help
books, new age cults, campus PC, and that dreadful It Takes a Village by
HRC herself. But is TRP really the one to write this book. Hasn't Pynchon
become something like the Brian Wilson (or who was the original leader of
Pink Floyd, Syd somebody...starts with a B...yes, Barrett, Syd Barrett) of
contemporary literature, trundled out every now and then with his trophy
wife for inconsequential appearances just to prove that--yes, the odds are
still being defied--he's still upright, such as the Lotion interview or the
sloth piece.
 
Jody concludes: "My perceptions of Pynchon's feelings for humanity as
expressed in GR were reaffirmed in Vineland." No argument. But if that's
all we're after wouldn't we be better served by reading the sermons of Desmond
Tutu, the wonderful jailhouse diary of Ken Saro-Wiwa (murdered last year by
the Nigerian military dictatorship at the behest of Shell--fucking--Oil) or
the writings of Rigoberta Menshu?"


I've been reluctant to join in this debate over the lack of/merits of
VINELAND because 

a) some of it, from some readers, smacks of that terribly boring and
male-centered agonizing over How Do I Top This that drove Hemingway to
suicide and infects so much of Mailer;

and
b) so much of its seems to show that TRP is a mirror for our own visions.
VINELAND, it seemed to me, cleared the air about much of the mixed feelings
TRP has always had, I think, about the "'60s," about political counterforces,
and about California Kulture.  I think some readers see him as having given
in to what he most criticized before, but I'm not all convinced of that.
Perhaps, too, it's merely a matter of Taste (and, as we all know, de gustibus
non est disputandum--or something like that!).

But I think that the much-maligned Sloth piece offers a key--to the Tyrone
the Slothful and at least some of VINELAND.  While the essay is more like
a set of meditations on the subject of Sloth than a complete and crafted
argument, I (at least) see in parallels with a piece by one of HG's mentors:
J.M. Coetzee.

In a piece published a few year years ago in HARPERS (and collected with
other pieces in WHITE WRITING), Coetzee notes that the Boers who first
occupied South Africa claimed to be appalled by the idleness and lack of
industry in the Hottentots of the Cape region.  In turn, the British settlers
who displaced the Boers into the interior found the Boer farmers to lead
lives of sloth and indolence.

Coetzee continues:
"The fact that Boer idleness is achieved at the expense of a servile class
and therefore differs in a crucial repsect from the old Hottentot idleness
has the natural consequence that the philosophical question that did not
get asked regarding the Hottentots gets asked all the less regarding the
Boers, namely: . . . can these frontier farmers not be said to stand for
a rejection of the curse of discipline and labor in favor of a prelapsarian
African way of life in which the fruits of the earth are enjoyed as they
drop into the hand, work is avoided as a scourse, and idleness and leisure
become the same thing!"

He continues later: "The challenge that idleness poses to work, its power
to scandalize, is as radical today as it ever was," 

and, "The luxurious idleness of the settler is still denounced from Europe,
the idleness of the native still deplored by his master.  I hope it is
clear that I by no means add my ovice to the chorus of moralizing 
disapproval. . . ."


Some of the thinking of this article seems to lie behind Coetzee's novel
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K.--and I think Pynchon would find affinities
here!

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)