Varsava

[Terrance]

Just wondering if you've gotten round to reading


"Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern Liberalism." The Canadian Review of
American          Studies 25.3 (1995): 63-100.

Or

The Dialectics of Self and Community in Toni Morrison and Thomas
Pynchon, by Jerry A.
Varsava (Review of Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the
Problem of Liberal Ideology , by Cyrus R. K. Patell [Duke, 2001])

At 167 Patell turns to Vineland and notes its departure from the
pessimism of its predecessors and two reviews of the novel, Mendelson's
and Rushdie's. 

Mendelson notes that Pynchon, it seems, has taken his own advise: in the
Introduction to SL Pynchon claims that his earlier work ignored the fact
that the fiction that moved and pleased him was "precisely that which
had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and
taken up, always at cost, from the deeper and more shared levels of life
we all really live." 

Rushdie claims that community, individuality, family, serve as
counterweights to power, as values the Nixon-Reagan era stole from the
60s and warped, aiming them back at America as weapons of control. These
are values Vineland seeks to recapture by remembering...



Patell (168)  argue that "Mordant poststructualist critique of
individualism implicit in the earlier novels is replaced in VL by a more
optimistic communitarian critique that accounts for the novels stylistic
difference from it predecessors." (CH 4, note 7, p.217)

In his TP and Postmodern Liberalism, Varsava argues that "Pynchon's work
embrace[es] a determinate political stance [and] political philosophy.
In particular, he contends that "Pynchon's two domestic novels [CL49,
VL] provide a powerful, if often diffuse and direct, defense of American
political liberalism." The liberalism that Vasarva has in mind here is,
not "a retro-liberalism determined by the social and political
exigencies of 1776 or the 1930s, but a "postmodern" version shaped by
both liberal traditions and those cultural circumstances and impetuses
peculiar to the late twentieth century. Certainly, irony, self-doubt,
and even self-deprecation figure more prominently in Pynchon's
liberalism than in classical manifestations" (64). 

Varsava and I disagree, however, about the extent of Pynchon's
commitment to traditional liberalism and particularly in our
interpretation of the attitude toward communitarianism implicit in VL.
Varsava reads VL as a defense of liberalism from the antagonistic
communitarian philosophy pursued by Brock Vond. I think that Pynchon's
exploration of communitarian alternatives to liberalism is more subtle
and more balanced than Varsava suggests...Pynchon finds an appealing
communitarianism in the extended Traverse-Becker family while
registering the ever-present danger that an untempered communitarianism
can devolve into the oppressive majoritarianism that both Reagan and
Vond represent. 

Patell didn't bother to read much of Pynchon criticism. He cites  only a
few brief articles and reviews and fails to  (considering that his
subject is Pynchon and Morrison) discover the published material and so
claims that critics have rarely if ever consider the Pynchon and
Morrison  together. (XVii) Preface Note 5 p.198 

Maybe he should consider lurking on the Iraq-L list here. 

 All this talk we've been having about Cowboy W and the like is
considered, but Patell stretches both Pynchon and Morrison out of shape
to fit his read of Emersonian/American Individualism, this is pretty
typical of the stuff that is being published on both these authors of
late: And I'm like, pynchon's project is like not so nihilistic but like
sort of a range of units in language that reinscribe without proscribing
the demonic-newcritical tendency to marginalize the disenfranchised in
some sort of closure since even if pynchon is not familiar with
theoretical expression of these focused and dynamic subjectivites
interrelating images, myths, logocentric assumptions of human lived
experiences his novels by virtue of their punctuated
fantasticmagicsurrealism  reject the absolutes of enlightenment's
rationalist modes of thought and its forms of domination via narratives
that impose the will of a dominant white male culture.