Is Brock Vond a NAZI?
Terrance
lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Tue Feb 18 21:28:19 CST 2003
Brock Vond is a sadistic villain.
As Mendelson and Patell and several others have argued, Pynchon's VL is
a moral and political novel. And P sees no reason to place blame on
those who
are unlikely ever to read it. From the novel V. to M&D, P is determined
to make his readers uncomfortable.
While VL seems to provide some solace and succor to the self-satisfied
reader's conviction that his/her post-60s revolution unhappiness is the
result of the repressive policies of Nixon and Reagan, what happens in
the novel, shows that it is not Nixon or Reagan or Brock that afflict
the
revolutionaries most and ultimately defeat them, but their own actions
and their own failures and their own betrayals.
The New Left betrays the Marxist and Leftist political history,
traditions, communities in the USA. The New Left, as Pynchon notes in
the Introduction to Slow Learner, failed to hook up with working people.
How could they have fallen in with
Neo-Freudian/Marxists like Marcuse?
How could Frenesi betray here heritage?
Was it sexual obsession? Was it a mysterious power that Vond held over
her?
Was it something in her genes, some genetic attraction to men in
uniform?
What was it?
And Prairie has it too.
Where did she get that desire for Brock Vond?
Is it a female thing? Something matriarchal perhaps?
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