Pynchon's "Knewspeak"

[Terrance]

Thomas R. Pynchon is a far better novelist than essayist, the opposite
is true of George Orwell. So why is Pynchon penning a Forward to 1984?
What else needs to be said about Orwell's novel? Will he say something
stupid? We don't know, but we can expect that he will say something
unintelligible. Why do it? Does he need the money? Does he fear he's
perhaps played the Salinger game too well? Maybe it's a matter of
timing. Pynchon seems to take, at least half seriously, some sort of
Jungian synchronically and what the bastard Edmund called "the excellent
foppery of the world." C.P. Snow and Orwell, might be comets come round
again, new points in the body of God or pin pricks in the screen of
Imipolex G, that mysterious plastic that seems to be no longer a
metaphor for Death stretch across the sky in the theater/theatre, but
the real thing, repressed and returning, nailed with the karmic hammer,
sealed with duct tape. What will Pynchon do? Will he draw arbitrary
lines and show us constellations and kute connections? Will he say
stupid stuff about GR? Will he be honest? Will he play some sort of mind
game, invent a persona, persuade us that five is four and that four is
five and that we are all slow learners after all? 

"The whole effort of the culture of the last hundred years has been
directed toward teaching us to understand the economic motive as the
irrational road to death, and to seek salvation in the rational and the
planned. Orwell marks a turn in thought; he asks us to consider whether
the triumph of certain forces of the mind, in their naked pride and
excess, may not produce a state of things far worse than any we have
ever known. He is not the first to raise the question, but he is the
first to raise it on truly liberal or radical grounds, with no intention
of abating the demand for a just society, and with an overwhelming
intensity and passion. This priority makes his book a momentous one."

So many of Pynchon's comments about authors and books focus in on their
moral vision and moral authority. Perhaps that is another reason why
Pynchon has decided to write a forward to 1984. The passage I've quoted
above was written by none other than Lionell Trilling in his review of
1984, in 1949. And it's not difficult to discover several reviews like
it. So what will Pynchon say? Anything new? It's kinda foolish for a
famous author to say what has been said many time before, especially  if
you can't say half as well. Pynchon is a fine novelist, but he can't
hold Lionell Trilling's ink well when it comes to writing about
fictions, even when he has the advantage or disadvantage as the case may
be of having written them. Paul often reminds us that an overt and
hard-lined political agenda can ruin a good conversation and destroy a
novel. There is little, I think, about 1984 that holds up aesthetically.
The novel is, as most critics acknowledge, a good-bad book. Akin to
Uncle Tom's Cabin, the novel is dated by its political agenda and heavy
with bad characters, scenes, didactic moralizing and the like. But it
has become something of momentous book despite its obvious flaws. It has
become an easy tool, like the bible, or Marx,  a book everyone knows
well enough to use even if they don't really know it. 


"All Left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at
bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against
something which they do not really want to destroy." 

  --Blair