Orwell that ends well

[Jane Sweet O' Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Orwell's influence on Pynchon is worth talking about, too.  I wrote
> some posts last year in that vein; the critical literature takes this
> up as well.


As far as I know the critical literature makes the
distinction I have made here. That is, that Pynchon is not
Orwellian, the world of his fictions is not Orwellian. 

Most importantly, Pynchon's victims and victimizers are
united. That unity  is a mythical or religious bond:
destroyer and destroyed,
Herero and German, sodomized and sodomizer. This is
supported by what Pynchon himself
says in the Hirsch letter. Pynchon attributes this state of
affairs to
secularization--Henry Adams.  In that letter and in all his
fiction he makes clear that it is the perversion,
corruption, coopting of Myth (mostly
Christian and Catholic) by the rational, analytical ("German
Christianity," Puritanism, Calvinism, in other words,
Gnostic scientism) culture that drives the quest for "death
transfigured" and exploits whatever is religious, natural,
magical, in the process. 

 

He works this out, I believe, in GR. He sticks to it in VL
and M&D. He says he was reading McLuhan, and although the
note says he denied having read Mumford, he suggests that
Mr. Hirsch read Mumford, so I think P got round to reading
Mumford, probably on Cities and Technology (I still think he
lifted part of the opening of GR directly from Mumford). He
also says that  it was his reading in comparative religion
that caused him
to realize that  the relationship of victim and victimizers
is much deeper
than he had depicted it in V. His sources for comparative
religion are known.
Also, although he doesn't mention these in the letter to
Hirsch, P read Norman O. Brown and Marcuse on top of Freud.  


See page 14 of Thomas Moore's The Style of Connectdedness,
where Moore makes this point and uses Orwell and Burroughs
as examples. 

In terms of the POMO or not to POMO, I think we agree that
the POMO reading of P is very limited. However, I don't
think this is a big problem and it is almost over anyway. 

As the critical literature, building on the good works of 
predecessors,  gets better,  and the dominant critical
theory collapses, the  problems that P's fiction presents
will become clearer (Some of these problems are obviously
caused by the opacities induced by critical and aesthetic 
theories-- McHale for example-- which were formed to clarify
or illuminate the nature of so called Postmodernist fiction
and its consequences) and defining what it is Pynchon has
written or what school he belongs to  will not be the
question of the day. At present, this is happening, and the
criteria set by the POMO style, which became a prescription
in the manifestos of schools reading Pynchon with theoretic
glasses as they pronounced the paradigm shift of all
paradigm shifts and  stacked Pynchon's books (Entropy, a
misread use of "science as metaphor" if ever there was,
CL49,  a book P honestly admits is not worthy of the
attention it has gotten, and GR, an encyclopedic text that
critics have had a field day with, making whatever they want
of it, particularly when they begin with the mirror turned
away from nature and art and artist and toward the
individual reader/creator of text) up to support the fulcrum
that would break away form that nasty old Modernism. So P's
books, although M&D seems to have convinced some that the
man is writing a more American (North and South) and less
European fiction have begun to find a ground on the Earth
and are not as easily coopted by the varied and changing
tastes of individual critics and what is  happening in
academic camps. His fiction will probably always be
subjected to the changing principles and assumptions of
aesthetic systems, but we must remember that under such
conditions, discussions are easily deflected from the
problem of  drawing attention to literary qualities and
facilitating their discovery to  discussions that involve
the fascinations of sectarian disputes and to the 
revelation or invention of absurdities in opposed theories.

Jane