SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[jbor]

on 5/11/02 2:26 PM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

> Talking about past events, is all, not (necessarily)
> past sentiments.

I agree. And Pynchon does distinguish in the introduction between
events/attitudes/sentiments which belong in the past and those which have
prevailed through to the present. As has been noted, Pynchon spends a lot of
time in the 'Intro' distancing himself from the writer, and the person, he
was "back then". The passage about the "new left" (p.7) in the early and
late 1960s where he overtly includes himself ("we were ... ") is pretty
firmly and unequivocally located in the past tense. Contrast the verb tenses
used in the passage about "the Bomb" - "[i]t was bad enough in '59 and is
much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow ... the rest of
us poor sheep have always been stuck with ... " etc (18-9) - to illustrate
this point.

What's interesting is that this card-carrying member of the "new left" of
the early 60s - and one can safely assume Pynchon was a one of the "college
kids", or student radicals, rather than a "blue collar worker" I think -
admits to both an "unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-fascist
talk" in one of his earliest stories (p11, 'Low-lands') and also a "pose ...
of somber glee at any idea of mass destruction and decline" (p13, referring
to 'Entropy' in particular, but applicable to 'The Small Rain' and 'MMV' too
I think.) It's no stretch at all to tie together these two threads  - the
literary and the political - in the confession or apologia Pynchon has
written, for these are the sorts of things which did and still do typify
much of the propaganda being churned out under the banner of "the Left"
nowadays. 

It's pretty easy to trace the theme of Pynchon's disillusionment with the
'60s radical "Left" in his novels: the Tristero in _Lot49_, whose members
are forced to send meaningless letters to one another on a daily basis or
face a fine; those inductees into "the Counterforce" in _GR_ being led
around by strings of taffy; the "People's Republic of Rock and Roll" in
_Vineland_ where Weed Atman is made the leader because he's tall etc etc.
Frenesi, the real leader of the student radical movement in that novel, is
actually responsible for some of the most reprehensible actions of any
Pynchon character in any of his novels.

Though His Most Royal Highness continues to censor discussion of the article
it came from on what I can only imagine to be political grounds, the
distinction made between "the mainstream Left" and "the radical, or
socialist, or anti-capitalist, or 'intellectual' Left" in 2002 has its roots
in the rift Pynchon describes between "blue collar workers" and "college
kids" in the later '60s. It's this "radical" clique which is continually
dragging down both the reputation and the social base of the "mainstream
Left", and actually enabling the rise and rise of neo-conservative
governments in Western countries. Whether or not some in this "radical"
group are in fact agents provocateurs for the Right, or whether they are
just fools, remains to be seen.

If it is to have any chance of regaining a foothold in government at a
national or international level the "mainstream Left" must work strenuously
to dissociate itself from those on the "radical" (or "stupid") Left - those
who circulate or believe in things like the French conspiracy theory that
claimed that a plane didn't fly into the Pentagon on September 11, or the
Nostradamus-hoax and anything else with which to make GW Bush out as the new
Antichrist; the rent-a-crowd rioters throwing fire extinguishers through
benign shopfronts in foreign cities who have no understanding of or real
care for the issues or initiatives against which they're ostensibly
protesting; those will-o'-the-wisps who go from chanting slogans like "Crush
Milosevic! Kill all Serbs!" one week to "Let Saddam range free!" the next.
The divide between Pynchon and Chomsky is as wide, if not wider, than the
divide between Pynchon and Bush, imo.

best


>  "We," "the 'new left.'"  But note
> also the sixties revisionism of, say, Rorty and Farber
> as I've posted here, my suspicion has been for some
> time here that Pynchon shares certain misgivings with
> them, about, say, that psychoanalytically, libidinally
> inflected cultural left (hence my periodic postings
> from Marcuse) and the perhaps lost opportunity he
> notes in that "Introducton."  Okay, definitely,
> Vineland next, Rorty and Farber have me interested
> again in precisely "the" American political history
> Pynchon draws upon therein ...
> 
> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
>> on 5/11/02 3:58 AM, Dave Monroe at
>> davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:
>> 
>>> Argue all y'all want about possible Pynchonian
>>> ironies here, this seems as straightforwardly,
>>> and decidedly aligned ("perhaps we should have
>>> been," "The success of the 'new left' ... was
>>> to be limited"), a political statement as
>>> Pynchon's ever allowed to be signed, authorized,
>>> with, by his name ...
>> 
>> It is indeed. N.B. past tense.
>