Pynchon's Badass

[Eric Rosenbloom]

What I've found interesting since Rob brought up the Badass is how
useful it is for viewing Pynchon's characters along a Badass-Pink continuum.

(I took the term "Pink" from the old Church of the Subgenius, whose
"Slack" also has Pynhonian relations. Last night I re-read Pynchon's 3
New York Times essays, on Watts (1966), Luddism (1984), and Sloth
(1993). Pynchon described Watts as a pocket of reality in the white
fantasy of L.A. The whites' fear of failure and their consequent comfort
in submissive conformity is represented in Watts by "the little man"
(such as social workers) and defended by The Man with a quickly summoned
band of policemen. While white L.A. was expanding their fantasies with
LSD, black Watts sought simple comfort after the indignities of each day
in a shared pint of booze. Empowered by the civil rights movement and
Malcolm X, however, Watts was able to create a Badass out of their
opposition to the Pinks . . .)

"Choosing victimization" is perhaps better stated in this context as
"choosing martyrdom," that is, in principle, however vague, refusing to
live by The Man's terms, refusing The Man's control of potentially
liberating technology, refusing to submit your mind and body's life to
The Man's clock.

Sloth is a shutting down, an escape (to nothing) from The System.
Luddism is a futile gesture in which some dignity may be experienced
(like voting Green in the USA). Riot is the collective will to be The Badass.

Slothrop as a Badass can't be saved or Pynchon's Badass fiction would
not work. Blicero looks like a Badass but he is a product of the German
Imperial Reich -- the Pinks -- not the people. U.s.w.

--
Eric R

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Frankenstein's Monster and King Kong were looking for love, were
> misunderstood, and fought against Enlightenment or imperial forces,
> respectively.
> 
> In the moral scheme that Pynchon lays out in V. and GR, for
> Blicero/Weissmann to be in love with death is not a good thing, it is
> a twisted, anti-life tendency, a textbook case of the definition of
> "sin" = "missing the mark."
> 
> Victims "choosing victimization" -- that's the wishful thinking of
> the abuser and the victimizer, pure and simple.
> --
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>



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