Foreword "Orwellian, Dude!"

[jbor]

There's a connection too with Frenesi's fetish for the motorcycle cop from
CHiPS (Erik Estrada?) and how that translates into her attraction to Brock
Vond, and the anecdote and rant about police surveillance in the 'Intro' to
_Stone Junction_.

>From the few edited bits and scattered pieces I've read so far there's
nothing earth-shattering. Pynchon plays fast and loose with the "fascist"
label again (lumping Attlee's Labour Government in Britain with Stalin or
the Third Reich is ridiculous in the extreme); he travels the familiar
surveillance, social control, technophobia terrain which does indeed verge
on paranoiac; he roundly satirises those who appropriate elements from
novels like _1984_ (and his own work, it can be inferred) for propagandistic
purposes ("Wow, the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell
predicted! Something, huh?" haha); and he foregrounds the fact that racism
has "determined too much history since 1945" which is such a prominent theme
in his novels. It seems he doesn't subscribe to the Orwell as anti-Semitic
(and, again, it can be inferred, "Tolkien as racist") school of thought
which some cultural studies ideologues get into such a lather about. And it
seems he genuinely likes the novel, and makes a good fist as a lit critter.

Still, it would be nice to read an uncorrupted version of the Foreword.
Looks like those of us not blessed to be American will have to wait until an
unexpurgated version goes up on one of the Pynchon websites.

best

on 26/4/03 3:32 AM, RUTHSINGS at aol.com wrote:

> What I found notable in the 1984 foreward is Pynchon's preoccupation with TV
> cop shows as a form of propaganda:
> 
> "Looking around us at the present moment, for example, we note the popularity
> of
> helicopters as a resource of 'law enforcement,' familiar to us from countless
> televised 'crime dramas,' themselves forms of social control--and for that
> matter at the ubiquity of television itself."
> 
> This echoes a passage in Vineland describing Hector Zuniga:
> 
> "It was disheartening to see how much he depended on these Tubal fantasies
> about his profession, relentlessly pushing their propaganda message of
> cops-are-only-human-got-to-do-their-job, turning agents of repression into
> sympathetic heroes. Nobody thought it was peculiar anymore, no more than the
> routine violations of constitutional rights these characters performed week
> after week, now absorbed into the vernacular of American expectations. Cop
> shows were in a genre right-wing TV Guide called Crime Drama, and numbered
> among the zealous fans working cops like Hector who should have known
> better."  (page number unavailable right now).
> 
> Guess I never really thought that enough people watched these shows to
> contribute in any significant way to the widespread American indifference to
> violations of constitutional rights.
> 
> And, of course, we note the use of helicopters as a "resource of 'law
> enforcement' " in Vineland.
> 
> Ruth
>