VLVL2(10) Power to Restore memory

[Terrance]

Kinda interesting that the more recent dissertations on VL take this
position. Pynchon is not being compared with Melville or Gaddis or Roth
or Nabokov or even with Delillo, but with Toni Morrison & Co. 

The texts are often ignored to make these silly readings fit together.
VL isn't a feminist novel by any stretch. It's not that Pynchon takes a
traditional position or a conservative male political stance or
something like that, although his novels are decidedly masculine in the
1950's sense and not feminized 1960's androgynous, but his females are
all caught in the same machinery as his males. Henry Adams, as most of
Pynchon's more astute critics recognized long ago, haunts every page
Pynchon writes. 




Bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Definitely Herstory. Above all, it's clear, Vineland is a
> feminist-political novel intent on recognizing the reality
> of what binds culture together- that is, women with their
> ability to transcend arbitrary divisions of race, class and
> the politics of divisiveness, even when they stumble, or
> fail, inorder to ensure our survival.
> 
> respectfully, and Happy New Year to all
> 
> In a message dated 12/30/03 12:59:58 PM, lycidas2 at earthlink.net writes:
> 
> << Sounds like you are agreeing with RC.
> 
> History is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,
> 
> —who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd,
> 
> as if it had never been.
> 
> She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and
> 
> counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of
> 
> Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech
> 
> nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of
> 
> Government...
> 
> Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc,
> 
> spy and Taproom Wit ...
> 
> DL and Takeshi & Co. are a lot like RC.
> 
> Of course, as we discovered in our reading of M&D, RC's ideas about
> 
> history are problematic. RC is not the author of M&D. How is Nabokov or
> 
> Roth for that matter related to Pynchon?
> 
> Her story must "be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and
> 
> conterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius"?
> 
>  >>