SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[jbor]

Actually, when you read this paragraph (pp.6-7) carefully, there is not only
a slide from the literary into the political, but also from
self-identification ("we were ... we were") into detached observation ("the
two groups"). In other words, there's a quite deliberate shift in the way
Pynchon is positioning himself. He does characterise himself as a "writer",
and as part of a "post-Beat" generation, but he stops short of identifying
himself as a member of "the 'new left' later in the '60's", which is very
interesting I think.

Having said that, of course there's an implicit affinity between the
Beat/post-Beat mentality and left politics - and the segue about
"consciously groping after a synthesis" does go in both directions - but the
autobiographical admissions Pynchon makes are pretty guarded and
carefully-worded on the whole.

best


 on 5/11/02 3:58 AM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

> Note, by the way, the (problematic, granted) slide
> from literary to political language here, from "two
> very distinct kinds of English ... allowed in fiction
> to coexist" to "the presence of real, invisible class
> force fields in the way of communication between the
> two groups," with, "perhaps," some
> regret-to-lamentation over not having "consciously
> grop[ed] after any synthesis," with particular regard
> to both the "success" and the "failure" of "the 'new
> left.'"  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 ...
> 
>> "At the simplest level, it had to do with
>> language.  We were encouraged from many directions
>> ... to see how at least two very distinct kinds of
>> English could be allowed in fiction to coexist.
>> Allowed!  It was actually OK to write like this!
>> Who knew?  The effect was exciting, liberating,
>> strongly positive.  It was not a case of either/or,
>> 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." (SL, "Intro,"
>> p. 7)
>> 
>> 
>> "It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of
>> possibilities"
>> 
>> Cf. ...
>> 
>> "'Either...or...or' instead of 'either/or'" (Deleuze
>> &
>> Guattari, Anti-Oedipus)
>> 
>> http://www.topy.net/organs.html
>> 
>> 
> http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/fai/Faculty/Professors/Protevi/DG/AO_brief.html
>> 
>> 
>> "real, invisible class force fields in the way of
>> communication between the two groups"
>> 
>>> From Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist
>> Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA:
>> Harvard UP, 1998), "A Cultural Left," pp. 73-107 ...
>> 
>> "One of the good things which happened in the
>> Sixties
>> was that the American Left began to realize that its
>> economic determinism had been too simplistic.
>> Sadism
>> was recognized as having deeper roots than economic
>> insecurity.  The delicious pleasure to be had from
>> creating a class of putative inferiors and then
>> humiliating individual members of that class was
>> seen
>> as Freud saw it--as something which would be
>> relished
>> even if everybody were rich.
>> "With this partial substitution of Freud for Marx
>> as a source of social theory, sadism rather than
>> selfishness has become the principal target of the
>> Left.  The heirs of the New Left of teh Sixties have
>> created, within the academy, a cultural Left....
>> This
>> cultural Left thinks more about deep and hidden
>> psychosexual motivations than about shallow and
>> evident greed.
>> "This shift of attention came at the same time
>> that
>> intellectuals began to lose interest in the labor
>> unions ...." (pp. 76-7)
>> 
>> "... one of the essential transformations which the
>> cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding
>> of
>> its semi-conscious anti-Americanism,  which it
>> carried
>> over from the rage of the late Sixties.  This Left
>> will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and
>> abusive names for 'the system' and start trying to
>> construct inspiring images of the country.  Only by
>> doing so can it begin to form alliances with people
>> outside the academy--and, specifically, with the
>> labor
>> unions....
>> "If the Left forms no such alliances, it will
>> never
>> have any effect on the laws of the United States."
>> (pp. 98-9)
>> 
>> And from David Farber, "The Silent Majority and Talk
>> about Revolution," The Sixties: From Memory to
>> History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: U of North
>> Carolina P, 1994), pp. 291-316 ...
>> 
>> "At the close of the sixties, a machinist tried
>> to
>> explain his sense of frustration.  He treid to
>> explain
>> how he divided up the world.  He was struggling to
>> say
>> something never expressed in the mass media, never
>> taught at the universities.  What he felt was so
>> obvious and in some ways so gross a truth that it
>> escaped most of America's professional observers and
>> commentators.  What he felt was that what some
>> people
>> called the establishment and antiestablishment
>> forces
>> were really just two sides to the same coin:
>> 
>> The way I see it, you've got these people who run
>> big companies.  Then you've got others who run the
>> newspapers and the magazines and the television
>> stations, and they're all full of themselves....
>> They're full of long lectures....  They can take
>> anything and make it into what they want.  I guess
>> they're just smart talkers....  What I don't like
>> about the students, the loudmouthed ones, is that
>> they
>> think they know so much they can speqak for
>> everyone,
>> because they're right nd the rest of us aren't
>> clever
>> enough and can't talk like they can....  There are
>> people in this country who make all the noise and
>> have
>> their hands on most of the money....  I have a
>> friend,
>> he and I work together, and he says he wishes they'd
>> get rid of each other, the rich guys and the college
>> radicals.
>> 
>> "Many working-class Americans hated the student
>> protesters of the sixties, not beacuse they
>> disagreed
>> with the students' opinions on this issue or that
>> (more working pwoplw opposed the war in Vietnam than
>> did people of the upper and middle classes), but
>> because they could not stomach the idea of the
>> nation
>> not only being run by corporate elites but also
>> litsening so seriously to the clamorous claims of
>> the
>> corporate elites' privileged children.  Richard
>> Nixon
>> tried to take people's resentment against all the
>> 'smart talkers' and 'loudmouths'--young and old--and
>> turn it into a political weapon." (pp. 296-7)
>> 
>> Citing ...
>> 
>> Coles, Robert.  The Middle Americans: Proud and
>> Uncertain.  Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.  44-6
>> 
>> And cf. here ...
>> 
>> "Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine
>> anybody these days wanting to be called a literary
>> intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you
>> broaden the labeling to, say, 'people who read and
>> think.'"
>> 
>> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
>> 
>> 
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
>> 
>> 
> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/luddite.html