Pynchon as historian? (was: meshugginah posts)

[Jules Siegel]

At 11:38 AM 07/5/97 -0400, Joaquin Stick <dmaus at email.unc.edu> wrote:
>By the way, you weren't a part of historical reality. That term is a
full-blown oxymoron.

Not even budding, really. We have historical novels, among other uses.
History is not reality. A historical reality is a reality of history, as
opposed to, say, an invention of history.

>if his "political" impact is so injurious I suspect that is peripheral
rather than intentional.

I don't know that Pynchon's political impact is all that peripheral. I did
know that Vineland is considered by some commentators to be a political and
historical statement. I find it a hostile one.

When I knew Thomas Pynchon he was a very astute observer of American
politics. His father had been Supervisor of the Town of Oyster Bay, in other
words, a Republican politician. I think he was very aware of the political
impact of his writing. In a certain sense, I think much of his writing is
political satire.

The distortions in Vineland tend to ridicule the culture it describes. Were
this merely a matter of denigrating ethnic speech patterns (as in his
embarrassing attempts at black dialogue in Gravity's Rainbow) it might be
dismissed as poor taste.

In Vineland, however, we are dealing with a political crime called substance
abuse and commercialization. Pynchon's drug satires tend to dehumanize their
subjects and present them in a very unattractive light that is every bit as
offensive as Hitler's caricatures of Jews. When you dehumanize a class, you
make it easier for others to invent crimes, round them up and put them in
jail without due process and seize their property, even when they have been
convicted of no crime.

This is what happened to the Jews under Hitler. This is what is happening to
the subculture that Pynchon ridicules in Vineland. They execute drug dealers
in some countries. Is the United States next?

Although Pynchon is usually believed to be sympathetic to drug use, I think
he reveals his own tormented Puritanical conflicts in Gravity's Rainbow and
in Vineland. When I knew him he struggled with marijuana use and very
ostentatiously gave it up at one point. When Chrissie and I visited him in
Manhattan Beach in 1966 we offered to leave him some of the grass we had
smoked together and he refused it very emphatically: "Do you know what it's
like to smoke grass alone?"

Not fun for him I guess, but I never did understand what he was trying to say.

I do know that both Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland contain material that is
more like "Reefer Madness" than R. Crumb, who satirizes all the same themes,
but with a warmth and affection that is entirely absent in Pynchon's work,
which in some cases could be used directly as anti-drug propaganda.


--Jules Siegel Apdo 1764 Cancun QR 77501
http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/jsiegel.htm