pynchon-l-digest V2 #2173

[Doug Millison]

The Oedipal situation in GR seems to have far more to do with the Father
trying to kill the Son, and while the literary roots of this story go deep,
in GR this may also have an origin a bit closer to home, as Pynchon sits
there writing that novel in the 60s, watching fathers send their sons off
to die in Vietnam for no good reason at all apart from lining the coffers
of multinational corporations and paying homage, in blood, to windy
rhetoric of "freedom" and "democracy" and "justice" that certainly don't
apply to the regime that the U.S. was then propping up in Vietnam, rhetoric
which applied only a bit less tenuously to the regime here at home.  As
their sons died in Vietnam, factional fighting was proceeding back on the
home front -- rear-guard white supremacists battling against proponents of
civil rights, U.S. armed forces called out to suppress the anti-war
protests, both struggles in which the forces of reaction, that stern
Father,  killed more than a few of our children.


>
>Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 01:49:31 -0400
>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>Subject: Re: P's Mothers & Why should we kill Daddy?
>
[snip re Hamlet, Oedipus, Freud, etc.]