SLSL Intro: Pynchon bio

[jbor]

"As nearly as I can remember, these stories were written between 1958 and
1964. Four of them I wrote when I was in college .... "

This is time period Pynchon is talking about throughout the 'Intro'. He was
born in 1937, so he would have been 21 in '58. He was an undergraduate at
Cornell until 1960, and by the end of that year he was in Seattle working
behind a desk at Boeing.

On p7 I think it's safe to assume that he's talking about himself as one of
those "college kids" in 1958-1960 who failed to "get together politically"
with "blue collar workers". The point he seems to be making is that this
failure continued on throughout the 60s. In the paragraph on p9 where he
talks about "adopting Beat postures and props, and eventually as post-Beats
coming to see deeper into what, after all, was a sane and decent affirmation
of what we all want to believe about American values", and then notes how
the "hippie resurgence came along ten years later", the connection between
his generation ("Beat/post-Beat") and the one that followed ("hippie")
continues, and so does his critique of these.

In _Vineland_, one of the only redeeming things about Frenesi is when she
baulks at crossing the union picket line at the airport. After the total
sell-out which her life up to this point has been this could be viewed as
merely hypocritical or precious on her part, but on the other hand there
seems to be something which she has inherited from her parents and
grandparents, a vestige of those deeply-felt Labor scruples from the '30s
and '50s, and to my reading this is valorised way way above all the "college
radical" shenanigans of PR3 and 24fps.

best



> It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of
> possibilities. I don't think we were consciously
> groping after any synthesis, although perhaps we
> should have been. The success of the "new left" later
> in the '60's was to be limited by the failure of
> college kids and blue-collar workers to get together
> politically.  One reason was the presence of real,
> invisible class force fields in the way of
> communication between the two groups. (p7)