History: Death Repression in Man

[Doug Millison]

I've got a copy of Brown's book, too, but haven't read much of it yet, and
it's packed up with the rest of our household goods as we prepare to move
house. I know Terrance had a lot to say about it.

The tricky part is to get a grip on what Pynchon is actually doing with this
sort of material - his response to Brown is complex, the way he weaves these
ideas into his fiction, and I expect it's not at all straightforward or
simple.  Does he use Brown's ideas in ways that tend to support and
strengthen them, or does he use them in ways that tend to undermine
confidence in them?

That's the sort of question a reader can ask in any Pynchon novel. How is
the reader to understand the political-historical views of a character like
Blicero, for example? How seriously is the reader supposed to take a
character who is described as a diseased monster, a travesty, more
plastic/synthetic/manufactured than human? Is that different from the way
that the reader reacts to a character like Roger Mexico, or Rev. Cherrycoke?
Do we take the material presented through Zoyd's point of view-- knowing him
as a pothead and masturbator -- as seriously as we take the material
presented through Prairie's point of view?  The authorial irony is deeply
layered in Pynchon's novels.

"David Morris":
My answers right now to your question can only be very superficial and
inconclusive because most of the material in this book is very new to me and
because I've not yet even made it half-way through.  But again and again
themes
and questions Pynchon "deals with" are explicated in a beautifully clear
presentation in _Life Against Death_.  Rather than jumping right into
another
Pynchon novel after VV, I would suggest a group-read of this book. [snip]