Vineland

[jbor]

on 28/6/02 11:30 AM, Doug Millison at millison at online-journalist.com wrote:

> Vineland is set in 1984, with flashbacks.

Yes it is. And the quotation describing Brock as "like any of the sleek
raptors which decorate fascist architecture" (287.2) is situated in one of
these flashbacks, in the mid-late 1960s in fact, and almost certainly before
Nixon's election, when Brock and Frenesi were having their torrid affair and
Prairie was only a newborn infant.

    Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties
    left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. (269.5)

best

> The Reagan-Bush Administration,
> which employs Brock Vond (one of "the sleek raptors that decorate fascist
> architecture") and "the notorious Karl Bopp, former Nazi Luftwaffe
> officer"," begins in 1980.  The novel's association of Nazi Germany and
> Reagan-Bush America stands. That Reagan continues what Nixon inherited -- a
> "fascist architecture" onto which they both apply their own inimitable
> stains -- would seem to be an important element of Vineland, and
> constitutes an important link between GR and the later novel, which moves
> back and forth between the earlier and later historical periods.  Vineland
> associates Nixon, Reagan, and Bush with the Nazis; I can see how that might
> be unpalatable for readers who admire those presidents.
> 
> 
> jbor:
>> You do mean Nixon-Reagan, don't you? But if you read the novel a little more
>> closely you'll also note that Brock and his programs have been around since
>> the mid-late 60s at least, since before the siege at the College of the
>> Surf. Seems to me as if that "fascist architecture" has been around for some
>> time prior to 1970. (Vineland 268-9)
> 
> on 28/6/02 6:37 AM, Doug Millison at millison@[omitted] wrote:
>> Brock Vond works for the Reagan-Bush
>> Administration, so when Pynchon describes him as one of "the sleek raptors
>> that decorate fascist architecture" the text does invite us to compare Nazi
>> Germany and Reagan-Bush America.