"Orwellian, dude!"

[pynchonoid]

Sorry for the typos.

> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> [...]


I find your argument against my interpretation 
quite weak.  I stand by the close reading I provided
in my earlier post. 

Pynchon seems to have a soft spot for the Valley
Girl/Boy/mall rat,  of a piece with the more
general concern for children seen throughout his works
and particularly evident in Vineland. He's not
ridiculing the "Orwellian, dude!" speakers as much as
he's celebrating and reversing the stereotype  -- they
may sound funny, they may see only the easiest-to-spot
resemblances between the US "circa 2003" and _1984_ ,
but Pynchon observes that they've hit on the essence
of things (reading signs of fascism) just as Orwell
hoped that readers might. 


> this pair of
> dim-witted "Bob and Ted" stereotypes 

Pynchon treats them rather better than you. 


> But I agree with the more general point that US and
> Britain "circa 2003" are
> not like the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia (or
> Orwell's Oceania), just as
> they were not like them in Orwell's "1948".

I haven't offered such a point, of course, and there's
no need for you to attribute to me something I haven't
said. In this instance I agree with Pynchon and the
Valley Boys, that what happened to Germany under
Hitler and the USSR under Stalin might happen in the
US or Britain.  

"Specific predictions are only details, after all.
What is perhaps most important, indeed necessary, to a
working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most
of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood
that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had
not gone away, that far from having seen its day it
had perhaps not yet even come into its own-- the
corruption of spirit, the irrestible human addiction
to power, were already long in place, as well-known
aspects of the third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the
British Labour party-- like first drafts of a terrible
future. What could prevent the same thing from
happening to Britain and the United States? Moral
superiority?  Good intentions?  Clean living?"
-Pynchon, 1984 Foreword


> pynchonoid at yahoo.com wrote:
> > 
> >Pynchon makes fun of the way
> they
> > talk, but he endorses the basic point they make
> and
> > says there is nothing to stop the US and Britain
> from
> > becoming like the third Reich and Stalin's USSR.



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

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