Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> on 22/5/03 11:49 PM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> > You see, Robert, P does in fact parody the common left leaning pot
> > smoking paranoid dude in the Foreword, but the dude in the parody is not
> > his target. He's just your average American "schlemiel."
> 
> No argument here, though he or she is "Western" rather than just American I
> think. The "those among us ... " from earlier in the essay are just your
> average person too. It's the extremist attitudes ("justifying any government
> action, whether right or wrong", and announcing that "'the Government has
> turned into Big Brother'") which are being satirised in both instances.


OK, P's audience is Western as was Orwell's audience when _1984_ and
Animal Farm were first published. 

P swings back and forth between the West generally  and the Unites
States specifically. 


He starts off talking generally about the  reception of Orwell's novel
in the West, but then he focuses on America (the US): "This did not keep
the book from being marketed in the US as a sort of anti-Communist
tract." 

He talks about the McCarthy era and the Korean conflict. 


The "generations of anti-Communist ideologues with Pavlovian-response
issues of their own" lived in the US. 

He argues that Orwell did not write his novel so that anti-Communist
ideologues in the United States could refer, allude, cite it, as they
interrogated Lefties. 

So P sets up a dichotomy. Left and Right in the United States. 

"Orwell's politics were not only of the left, but to the left of left" 

And next he he situates Orwell Left of the Left (and now he's talking
about England and more generally about the West--Spain, Franco,
Nazi-Germany, Totalitarianism, Socialism). 

And he says that Orwell considered himself a member of the "dissident
left," and he goes on to talk about England and the Labor Party and
Socialism in the West. 

In the "those of us of fascistic disposition" paragraph  he talks about
Orwell and England,  Churchill in England, the war in Europe, bombs
falling on England.  

He never mentions America or the United States. 

Now, when I read that P was going to pen a Foreword to _1984_ I asked
the P-List why P do it? Other than the obvious fact that Orwell was born
in 1903 and the fact (as P notes in his Luddite essay--sounding a bit
like one of those Orwellian Dudes: "As if being 1984 weren't enough ...
"-- that our world is beaming more and more Orwellian, why do it? 

I had a hunch that P was going to say something about 9-11 and the Bush
response to it. 

I think he does. 

After swinging between how the book was received in the US during the
McCarthy era and England and Europe P introduces "those of us" and the
homeland. 

 
> Parodying a conversation between two "far out" empty-heads is the technique
> via which Pynchon satirises the point of view offered therein.


"As if being 1984 weren't enough...."

No.