VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables

[jbor]

on 3/10/03 12:30 PM, Mike Weaver at mikeweaver at gn.apc.org wrote:

> Perhaps you'd care to offer your comments on the part of my notes ( now
> slightly rewritten) where I do refer to  We/They :

Sure. I disagree with where you end up positing different cosine ratios of
internal "we" and "they" in people: it's not in the text and it's just
another way of trying to set up those "sides" you're so hooked on. I think
Frenesi rejects or resists Sasha's rationalisation of why they'd both sold
out on their ideals because she wants to go on wallowing in guilt and
feeling sorry for herself. But the text does show us just how much she is
under the spell of the "uniform fetish" her mother describes. The "political
incorrectness" thing relates to the inherent chauvinism of the theory, I'd
say. And whether *Pynchon* is "pessimistic" is irrelevant to the text,
surely -- Sasha certainly is, as she has even come to doubt the motivation
behind those ideals of her younger days. In fact, Sasha's self-analysis here
is pretty close to Brock's later on in the text.

But perhaps you'd like to address those passages you've been studiously
trying to avoid: the one about Frenesi and the lead-up to Watergate (71-2),
or where Sasha, with a "right" to be "bitter", describes how "[e]veryone
they knew" during the '50s "sold out" everybody else, when they all "made up
a different story" (81.7-25)?

best

> 83.19 Sasha's thought's on her own uniform fetish are another great
> Pynchonian dialectic. Those of us who consciously resist authority in some
> ways are resisting the seduction of uniformity, we are still children
> attempting to escape parental control, i.e. to take responsibility for our
> own lives.
> The question I have is whether this paragraph shows P's pessimism ("were
> really acts of denying") or a deliberate provocation to the reader. I
> favour the latter, especially given Frenesi's reaction. Finding the view
> politically incorrect, getting angry - when added to her own almost total
> succumbing to the fetish, throws a light on the paucity of the concept of
> political correctness, which treats political strivings as if they can be
> tidily framed, and drained of any dialectical tension. Sasha's fear is the
> healthy self doubt which reminds us that the We/They tension is as much an
> internal struggle as it is social one. It is not as the likes of Dave
> Morris would have it, that We are They, we all contain both in different
> proportions and those aspects influence how we act. Whether we choose in
> any given decision to swing with the (internal) we or they decides to which
> side our energies are added.
>