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

[vze422fs at verizon.net]

on 11/6/02 7:19 PM, pynchonoid at pynchonoid at yahoo.com wrote:

> --- 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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Doug

He blew contemporary literary theory out of the water. Why should he have
bothered kowtowing to the established ideas of the literary press? Nabokov
didn't need Pynchon's approval at that point, though I would like to have
seen a Bulgakov reference. Pynchon is like Hendrix. On the first take, he
seems to come from another planet to conquer the world. Look deeper, and you
see the precedent and influence, but that doesn't make it any less
revolutionary. As for the class vs race issue, I think you already know
where I stand. I've been flogging that horse corpse for years. It's like the
old jokes among friends : you number the punchlines and say "37" and
everyone convulses.

Peace
Joe