Pynchon's "knewspeak"

[Otto]

Is it the most important thing Brownlie has got to say about "Cold War
Politics in The Crying of Lot 49" that he doesn't buy Hollander's
argumentation? I don't buy it either. His conclusion is very far stretched.
Charles quotes from the Random House publication to introduce a possible
conspiracy here:

"(...) the Random House editors wrote: "Two days after the publication of
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, Richard Fariña was killed in a
motorcycle accident near Carmel, California." "Was killed," implying
agency -not "died as a result of injuries"- nourishes the germ of
intelligent, not paranoid, suspicion. In Gravity's Rainbow, dedicated to
Fariña, Pynchon writes: "Prophets traditionally don't last long -they are
either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them
stop and think, and most often they do pull back." Pynchon seems to be
referring to both Fariña and Dylan, believing, fearing, suspecting (which is
it?) that Fariña was "killed outright," and Dylan "given an accident."
http://www.vheissu.be/english.htm

I wonder why Charles doesn't quote what Pynchon has written himself. No hint
to a conspiracy at all:

"He'd been riding on the back of a motorcycle on Carmel Valley Road, where a
prudent speed would have been thirty-five. Police estimated that they must
have been doing ninety, and failed to make a curve. Fariña was thrown off,
and killed."
(Introduction to: "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me", xiv.13-17)

I've never heard that Dylan has claimed to have become the victim of a
conspiracy. Or that anybody has said that Duane Allman or Berry Oakley were
killed with intent.

I would like to read more from Brownlie.

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2003 2:54 PM
Subject: re: Pynchon's "knewspeak"

> 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



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