Why Sista be messin wit the Devil

[jbor]

Thanks. It's an excellent essay, and I have to say again that I agree with
Otto's comments about Sullivan's conclusion. I don't think that the ending
trades the "master-narrative" of Brock Vond for that of Reaganomics at all.
It's a supreme irony that Brock has his funding cut right at that moment --
a case of poetic justice a bit like Major Marvy's castration in _GR_ -- but
Vond's and Reagan's "master-narratives" and modus operandi are pretty
compatible in most other respects. And I'm not sure how a resistance to
master-narratives (cf. Lyotard) can become a "master-narrative" in its own
right, one that Pynchon has "fallen victim to". For one, there is that
characteristic self-conscious or reflexive irony which permeates Pynchon's
work (eg. the Deleuze & Guattari "fakebook"), and postmodern writing in
general, wherein the text demonstrates an acute self-awareness of itself as
a narrative construct. Secondly, what is the alternative? Sullivan poses
nothing, and the tone of Pynchon's ending scene with Prairie and Brock is
wistful, almost despairing. Finally, the rejection of postmodernism as just
another "master-narrative" is a "master-narrative" in itself, and a
reactionary one at that.

The quote I like is this one: "some white male far away must have wakened
from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over" (Pynchon 376). Word
choice here is everything. Brock's "clambake" ends just like the '60s
"clambake" ended for those in the ascendant when Nixon came into power. It's
the continuity in American society and history which Pynchon invokes, social
and civic regimes motivated by self-interest and arrogance ousting one
another in generational cycles.

best

on 1/11/03 7:36 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> Totalizing Postmodernism: Master-narratives in
> Pynchon's Vineland
> 
> By Bruce A. Sullivan
> sullybaby at hotmail.com
> 
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_sullivan.html
>