�re "not arresting growers, but supervising quality control"

[pynchonoid]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> There is a strong sense in the novel that Victory
> gin is used by the regime
> as a drug to deaden the spirits of minor Party
> bureaucrats like Winston.

Can't disagree with that. 

In the Foreword Pynchon doesn't mention _1984_'s
portrayal of alcohol, but he begins the essay with a
reference to opium as one of the British Empire's
trade commodities and social control mechanisms (a
history with parallels in the US experience with the
international drug trade, colonies, proxy wars, etc.,
which are to be found throughout Pynchon's work). From
the start Pynchon's broadening the perspective,
pulling back from a strict focus on _1984_ itself to
embrace issues that his work shares with Orwell's, as
well as bringing what Orwell presents in _1984_ about
facism into a discussion of what's happening "circa
2003" (a phrase he repeats in the Foreword) into
"looking around us at the present moment". 

Where does one text end and another begin, moving out
from the Foreword into the current events Pynchon
points to, into Pynchon's other novels? Why mention
Hitler's "unconventional sexual tastes" in the
Foreword if not to point to Gravity's Rainbow? with
its WWII setting and sexual material, and the echoes
of same in Vineland).  He creates an opportunity to
mention Pavlov's dogs -- gratuitous in this context
unless it's taken as one of the many pointers to other
Pynchon works, in this case GR. He brings in
"helicopters as a resource of 'law enforcement'
familiar to us from countless televised 'crime
dramas'" -- not to mention, the helicopter as deux ex
machina in Vineland, or the way crime dramas
themselves work as elements in Vineland. He brings in
Rilke , "beauty as Rilke defined it, the onset of
terror just able to be borne" and forges another link
to GR. 



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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