VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables

[jbor]

on 4/10/03 1:57 PM, Mike Weaver at mikeweaver at gn.apc.org wrote:
> 
>>> No reference to everyone selling out everyone else,
>> 
>> Except, of course, where it says: "Friends of Hub's had sold out friends of
>> Sasha's, and vice versa .... Everyone they knew had made up a different
>> story .... " (81.7-25)
>> 
>> Sasha's "[b]itter" about their "friends" -- "everyone they knew" -- all the
>> "betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying" these "friends" indulged
>> in, and the way they all kept trying to rewrite the script "to make each of
>> them come out looking better and others worse." Active betrayals. By members
>> of "the left".
>> 
> You can only achieve the sense you want to make of it by altering the order of
> the statements on the page, by blending two distinct stages, the events
> themselves, (lines 7-13), and the mythologising which came after (lines
> 14-25.) 

Are you trying to say that the people involved in the events, Hub's and
Sasha's "friends", and the people making up the stories -- "[e]veryone they
knew" -- are two different sets of people?! Good luck!

> There is no reference whatsoever to everyone selling out everyone
> else.
> Friends had sold out other friends (which means some not all) but all the
> participants had made up a different story.

Sorry, it's not a "but", it's an "and". And "the participants" -- your
euphemism -- equates to "[e]veryone they knew", their "friends".

I'd say it's pretty clearly an account of the "betrayal, destructiveness,
cowardice, and lying" of people on "the left", *as well as* of the way they
tried to cover up and rewrite their actions afterwards.

best

> And Sasha's comments do relate to
> the rewriting of the events not the events themselves.