Watts article (Re: NP Genoa)

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> Speaking for myself at least, your personal perspective on the article and
> the time is most welcome, of course, and imo insightful. I think Paul does
> have a point about Pynchon romanticising things a little (but if anything I
> think Pynchon romanticises, or, attempts to over-psychoanalyse at the least,
> the motivations of those on *both* sides *and* those in the middle of the
> Watts divide), but I don't find him naive or guilty of racial
> over-generalisations in the article. 



What can we make of Pynchon's admission, in the Slow Learner
Introduction, that some of the offensiveness in those early
stories can be attributed to his own prejudices? 



Pynchon develops, matures. Perhaps I am
over-psychoanalyzing. Maybe my own personal perspective is
at fault. I find his romanticizing is naive at best and that
he is guilty of racial over-generalizations. I apologize to
Paul, I should not have said he agrees with my position. 

Pynchon matures, he develops, he discovers his weaknesses,
his ignorance, his bias and he works them out in his
fiction.

A very good essay, related to this topic, is Molly Hite's
"Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland"

"What I want to note, however, is the kind of specificity
that Pynchon has given to this particular They-system in
making the hypothesized agent of this turn unequivocally
white and male. The adjectives "white" and "male," precisely
because they are unremarkable and even redundant, insist
that power is a function of privilege and that privilege has
racial and gender parameters." 

		--Hite

AND 

Hite explains how feminist theory informs VL and how, for
example, as opposed to V., where Hite says, 

" 'the feminine' was a force aligned with death-tending
natural and historical processess--and against human
agency..." 

"This meditation suggests some of things Pynchon was reading
in the seventeen years between novels."
		--Hite

Times change, and so does Pynchon, but I think this comment,
is also problematic. 

"Everything seems so out in the open, all of it is real, no
plastic faces, not transistors, no hidden Muzak, or
Disneyfied landscaping, or smiling **little chicks** to show
you around. Not in Raceriotland." 

			--Pynchon

Rachel, in Mercy & Mortality, is surely not the product of
17 years of reading feminist
scholarship and that D&G Fake Book. 

What of Paola's disguise, not quite a disguise, although she
fools and fools with  the Winsome Southerner? Why is she in
a whore house in Harlem? Why is Sphere there? What of there
conversation there? His complaining about the rich white
boys, wanting to stick his white ivory sax up their asses,
his depression, his reading fake books, his wearing J. Press
suits and driving a sports car up town to unpack his heart
to a "whore" (See Hamlet)?  





 "chicks" to describe the Disney girls in the Watts essay
may not offend us if we understand his romanticizings , but
it does differ from the use of the word later in his
fiction. 




There are several obstacles in P's way. One, is his own
life,
his gold coast immunity form what was all around him, no not
in Harlem or in SCLA, but down hill, where the black shit
always flow, in Bolingbroke's dump (see Lowlands).  His own
mother, if we can believe Jules, was an anti-Semite and his
disparaging depiction of the white and black social workers
are, I suspect, not only progressive, but a product of the
misguided and condecending/patronizing liberalism he
encountered in his youth. Two, P
attempts to instruct with irony and wit, he's not always
successful. He recognizes that the  ongoing racist
portrayals
of minorities in books (Tom Swift) and Film is a powerful
and
malevolent force that attracts even the child genius
(Grover) in TSI, and as he discusses in the letter about
researching
Herero, he is ps against the same difficulties, locating
sources of trustworthy materials.



P, like Grover, like Slothrop, like the progressive YOU, is
influenced by biased portrayals of non- white Americans. So,
he is trying to find his way through a maze of media or
texts, a media (remember that P's parody in TSI is Twain,
problematic too) that is white and often portrays non-white 
Americans as exotic, quaint, tough, violent by 
"nurture" if not by "nature" and even mythological. One
wonders if P ever attended lectures taught by non white
Americans. 

P opens himself to these criticism. Sure, it's 2001 and the
essay on Watts, from a white intellectual,  is better than a
lot of the stuff that was  written at the time, but 
I can't help but feel that P's approach is a "tourist's
approach," where the author "visit" a different culture and
picks up a few local phrases and "gospels" and tries to
incorporate these
into his more bookish tendencies.  Just like a
vacationing tourist, he experiences only the unusual or
exotic or surface romantics of the culture. So, while it is
only a short article, it is full of simplistic
generalizations about other peoples and this lead to and is
dependent upon, among other human tendencies,  stereotyping,
rather than understanding. So what is P teaching us? Maybe
he has no intention of teaching us. Why the stereotypes?
Risky! Stereotypes  are prevalent throughout mainstream
society, nothing profound in that. They are found, as is
racism, in all cultures. These stereotypes are inflated with
ignorance and fear and are sustained by and also sustain
racist attitudes. P recognizes that citizens, particularly
children, are exposed to this racist stereotyping, often
without
being aware it is happening. Television and movies still
tend to portray people as  historic figures, perpetuating
false--often romanticized--images, that contribute to the
trivializing of and the  misunderstanding of the
complexities of
cultures and groups. P watched lots of film, TV, with a
critical eye for sure, 
McLuhan on his lap perhaps, but I don't think it's unfair to
look back, as P does, honestly, at his Slow Learning and
when I do, I simply awe struck by what I can learn form one
man and his books.