"4891" Don't get angry get even...

[jbor]

on 7/5/03 9:46 PM, Mutualcode at aol.com wrote:

> How, for example, is doublethink- being of "at least two
> minds on most issues...of inestimable use to those in power"?
> One might initially have thought that such a state of uncertainty
> is what Pynchon has always preached in his works. Isn't this
> latest statement a complete contradiction of that time-
> honored Pynchonian creed?

Indeed it is, which is why Pynchon tries to dilute Orwell's contempt for it
by bringing in those superfluous references to social psychology, F.S.
Fitzgerald, Whitman, Yogi Berra and Schrödinger's cat, and then in the next
paragraph claiming that it both repelled Orwell and "at the same time
fascinat[ed] him with its promise of a way to transcend opposities - as if
some aberrant form of Zen Buddhism" (xi-xii). For Orwell, the tyranny of
doublethink is exemplified in Winston being tortured and brainwashed into
accepting that 2 + 2 = 5 (or, indeed, 3, or any number). Orwell was
rationalist through and through - it's pomo Pynchon who seeks to "transcend
opposites" and who likes to think of himself as a "Zen Buddhis[t]".

best