re Re: SLSL influences & Pynchon a '60s student radical?

[pynchonoid]

--- s~Z <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
>  The descriptions
> are almost like he is an
> outside observer. 

Not that unusual, really, for a 47-year-old looking
back at himself as a 21-year-old.  

One thing he doesn't do is to present himself as a
"student radical" in the 60s and talk about, now that
he's older and wiser, how he regets having taken that
role. Pynchon instead says  he was an "unpolitical
'50s student".  Once he gets free of Boeing, he spends
the rest of the 60's writing in California and Mexico,
not as a "student radical."  

He is a bit coy about his personal politics. But as I
watch him looking back at the '60s from the vantage
point of 1984, I note that he talks about class
differences ("the presence of real, invisible class
forces"; "it may yet turn out that racial differences
are not as basic as questions of money and power")
playing a role in US politics in a way that most
Americans ("liberal",  "conservative", and -- the
largest faction -- "alienated") don't -- Bush and his
ilk, for example, are always quick to pooh-pooh any
mention of class as a factor in American politics,
even as they reap the harvest of class privilege.

Moving on to another topic,  as TRP describes the
influences on his early writing -- not only does he
fail to mention the novels and writers that some
P-listers think he should have mentioned (Nabokov,
etc.), he doesn't mention his literary studies
themselves.  He took an undergraduate degree in
English, but here he mentions only a creative writing
class he took.  If he had been consciously working out
various elements of contemporary literary theory in
his fiction -- as some of his readers have suggested
-- he doesn't mention that here.  In fact, he doesn't
have anything at all to say about literary theory in
the Intro.  

And, I agree with the P-lister who said that _The
Wandering Scholars_ is the oddest book of all the
books TRP mentions in the Intro.  I'm going to wait
until Dave Monroe has a chance to introduce this topic
properly, and because I'm still reading Waddell's
book.  

-Doug



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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