_1984_ Foreword Re: Fact and friction

[pynchonoid]

--- Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
> 
> The Foreword is a foreword to a dystopian postmodern
> novel. Pynchon's
> Foreword is an interpretation of literature, of the
> novel itself, of some of
> Orwell's essays and parts of the official biography.

How to account for what I've been calling "dual-use"
references in the Foreword, which help explain
Orwell's work but which also might be seen as a series
of pointers to Pynchon's other writings?  Pynchon
seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to interweave
this Foreword with his past published works:

Pavlov & his dogs

enemy bombs falling in WWII England

Nazi death camps

law enforcement helicopters, TV crime dramas, TV 

Holocaust

author as songwriter coming up with a melody for the
lyric to a song in the novel

"beauty as Rilke defined it, the onset of terror just
able to be borne"

sexual desire and fulfillment (orgasm) as subversive

It's not difficult to imagine Pynchon writing the
Foreword (another of those Forewords he chose not to
write) and finessing the larger points he's making in
the passages without using material that so clearly
reflects GR, Vineland, and his other novels -- he
could have made the same points without such specific
reminders of the novels he, Pynchon, has written.


> [...] Does Pynchon say that Churchill has been a
fascist?
> No, he's not, but he
> shows clearly that some (maybe inevitable to defend
> the homeland) measures
> of wartime politics could be regarded as fascistic
> as the methods fascists
> use to maintain their power, even in peace.


If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like
a duck -- it's a duck.

Thanks for another thoughtful post, Otto.


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

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