VLVL(7) - Rex Vs Weed

[David Morris]

On  Mon, 11 Jan 1999 Paul Mackin wrote:

>My eyes and ears pricked up at David M's commentary
>on the differences between Rex and Weed and what the two
>respectively "stand for." When I myself came to these
>passages in the book I was kind of baffled. I wanted to place
>these two individuals in terms of the actual radical student
>controversies of the time that I  remembered. I couldn't do it.
>I do remember there were the consensus builders vs the
>action faction. Don't recall that  even the action faction ever
>considered  the use of guns. (Bombs maybe latter on by
>small groups)  More commonly the activists would be the
>ones engaged in taking over campus buildings and such
>things.  The smart money of course always said the distinction
>between consciousness building and action was false. The way
>you built radical consciousness was going out to do
>something against authority that would be repressed by
>some kind of force. This would radicalize people and build
>a new class.  It was hard for the middle class students to
>really get to feel that they themselves could personally be
>very inconvenienced by capitalism and such things. If you
>went South you might get your head bashed in by a sheriff
>but up North for a long time nobody thought affluent white
>kids would be in much danger. The Chicago Convention
>changed this complacency somewhat. Plus of course some
>of the movement kids (like Frenesi) had radical working class
>backgrounds and at least knew second hand what police
>clubs could do to the the not so well placed in society.
>Anyway I'm glad David brought this up. Gave me a chance
>to wonder again what Pynchon is up to here. I certainly don't
>see him trying to reproduce the radical student situation as
>it existed. Of course I may just be remembering things wrong.

Me again:
I don't think Pynchon is ever really trying to reproduce situations "as 
they existed."  As Pynchon posits in MD "History" can never now be relived 
or remembered as it was experienced then.  It can be fable-ized to 
represent numerous "truths."  Or as the lines just after this contrast of 
Rex Vs. Weed, it can be negotiated into a form mutually acceptable.  Here 
an alternate "future" is conjured with Rex and Weed surviving to recall 
their own naivete to a Prairie-like "fine-looking young teener.":

(232.26)"And we actually thought we were having it out over these points of 
doctrine" [...]"Well, we were set up all the time it turned out" [...] She 
is aware of her importance here, shaded, safe, saved, a person for them 
both to pretend to explain things to, as a way of negotiating an agreeable 
version of history.

Pynchon's "History of the 60's," VL, is his own, warped and distilled, 
containing alternate-alternate possibilities as commentary on what 
"actually" happened, and fable-ized to tell "truths" relevant to now.