Pynchon's "knewspeak"

[Terrance]

Otto wrote:
> 
> 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:
> 
> I would like to read more from Brownlie.

I think you will be disappointed. There isn't all that much in the book
that will enrich your reading of Pynchon. On the other hand, Cyrus R. K.
Patell's book, _Negative Liberties_ is one I'm sure you will enjoy. 

Brownlie does agree with Hollander. His reading is a lot like Hollanders
and seems to have been influenced by Hollander and Dugdale. But just as
the example you provide makes those who really know Pynchon's books
question Hollander's paranoid coded reading, 
several examples in the Cold War Chapter of Brownlie, equally
questionable, if not dismissed on the facts, make those who know know
that Brownlie has misread the books and the facts around them and
supported his misreading with extra textual support that doesn't quite
cut the ice. It's the modus operandi of conspiracy authors. 

Brownlie argues that the narrative voice of CL49 is singular and that of
the author of both the Watts essay and the Slow Learner Introduction
(Pynchon). He doesn't says what Hollander says, that  Pynchon fears
being assassinated by the government and the Rocket-fellers, but that
Pynchon fears being censored. He cites Pynchon's comments in SL Intro
about Lolita and so on and confuses the issue of censorship for explicit
sexual narrative with overt political criticism, not to mention the fact
that Pynchon had already published the novel V. which does contain
sexual scenes that far exceed anything in CL49. Brownlie dismisses this
objection by noting that the narrative voice of V. can not be so easily
attributed to the author because of Stencil and and so on. But anyway,
his argument doesn't hold water. 

This sentence on page 57 seems to have been influenced by Hollander's
Magic Eye approach. 

"By introducing Maxwell's thought experiment, Pynchon leads us to
associate Oedipa with the sorting demon and thus with the notion that
sorting and ordering--wheather intellectual or social--must be into two
values." 


It's interesting too that Brownlie tries to bring Nietzsche into the
mix. But, like so many before him, he can find no evidence that Pynchon
has read Nietzsche. 

Try Patell. I'll post a bit more from it. It's really quite a
professional study.