answering jody Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1582

[jbor]

----------
>From: <monroe at mpm.edu>

> Now why the insult here, Jody?  For taking issue with a seeming
> elitism?

I don't want to speak for jody but I don't think that an insult was intended
(though you seem to have retaliated with one) and I certainly didn't read it
that way. I think his point ran more to the fact that whatever 'solidarity
with the proletariat' Pynchon's texts appear to advocate is undercut by the
fact that his audience is an elite (I'd say that educational opportunities
rather than socio-economic circumstances are the demarcator there, but
perhaps there is a greater convergence between those two in the U.S. than
here, though that has also changed of late), and that he appears to be
deliberately writing for that elite. Further, the final song of solidarity
with the preterite (on the screen, i.e. within the text we have just read)
is only one of several options given to the audience in the theatre under
the shadow of the bomb (which is, of course, us, you, me, the current reader
now etc), the other two being sexual self-gratification or the panacea of
companionship, family.

I think jody is a very perceptive reader. You accuse him of starting from a
notion of Pynchon's infallibility or "genius", which is inaccurate. This
latter is in fact one of the millisonian precepts, specious and banal as
those indeed are.

best



~~~
    "By 1945, the factory system - which, more than
     any piece of machinery, was the real and major
     result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
     extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
     German long-range rocket program and the death
     camps, such as Auschwitz.It has taken no major
     gift of prophecy to see how these three curves
      of development might plausibly converge, and
                before too long. ... "
                                 (T. Pynchon, 1984)
                                                    ~~~