Pynchon's "knewspeak"

[Terrance]

>From Chapter Two, Brownlie, The Paranoid Response, Cold War Politics in
The Crying of Lot 49

Michael Parenti, examining Cold War domestic policy in 1977, claims that
the CIA...was also illegally involved in domestic affairs. By means of
electronic surveillance and break-ins, Parenti claims, the CIA had in
addition to the files gathered by the FBI and other sources collected
some 10,000 files on American who oppose government policy. The CIA
provided financial support for corporations, and universities;
"infiltrated student,  labor, scientific and academic groups" and
"secretly financed the writings of 'independent' scholars"; and used
"Mafioso gangsters to assist in CIA assassination plots against Fidel
Castro" (Parenti, Democracy for the Few 163). 

     Thomas Pynchon, like a lot of Americans, including his friend
Richard Farina, felt the need to speak out against what he perceived the
limitations of freedom in his country. Indeed both writers appear to
accept the sorts of models of Cold War America constructed by Zinn and
Parenti. Charles Hollander speculates on a variety of reasons, based on
the history of the Pynchon family, for the author's tendency to bury
(encode) his political beliefs in the texts. He cites an essay by
Farina, "Baez and Dylan: A Generation Singing Out," in which Farina
writes: 

It was as if the undergraduates
had been whispering of his [Dylan's] 
imminent arrival [at Berkley] for months. 
The seemed, occasionally, to believe he might 
not actually come, that some malevolent force or
organization would get in the way...Catch him now, 
was the idea. Next week he might be mangled on a 
motorcycle. (Hollander, 17)

In APril of 1966 Farina died in a motorcycle accident, and in July Dylan
just survived a similar accident, a coincidence Hollander suggests was
"not unnoticed by Pynchon" (17). 


Like Oedipa Mass, though, we and Pynchon would be hard pressed to
conclude with certainty that these accidents were the work of government
agents of that they were part of a conspiracy. 

TPN.42, Brownlie

"The Jester [Jetster] on the sidelines in a cast..."

Zinn, Howard. Declarations of Independence: Cross Examining American
Ideology, NY Harper, 1990

Parenti, Michael. Democracy For the Few. 2nd ed. NY: St. Martin's, 1977