VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables

[Mike Weaver]

>Fair enough. "Everyone they knew" told lies. *Many* of their "friends" sold
>one another out. The '50s in Hollywood was "thick with betrayal,
>destructiveness, cowardice, and lying" -- from people on "the left".

IMO still not fair enough! Where in the text does it say *many*? where does 
it limit the betrayals etc to 'people from the left'?
You are just as much an ideologue as I am, at least I'm taking the text as 
it comes and extrapolating from it - you try to avoid exposing your own 
agenda by taking scissors to the text and claiming your cut ups as the 
Voice of Pynchon.

> > turning a simple
> > demurral into an heroic act of defiance for example - and don't go hunting
> > the text for that, it's just a possible example.
>
>Another one from the Weaver edition of Pynchon's novel, obviously.

Since I just said it wasn't, obviously not - I was just giving an example 
of how someone who'd held to their principles might rewrite their past.

>I think that pretty well all of the characters in the
>novel are sympathetic in part -- multi-faceted at the very least. You on the
>other hand compute the "goodness" and "badness" of characters according to
>their "left" quotients, otherwise known as the "internal 'us' factor", which
>is some nonsense formula you've worked up from your own doctrinaire
>attitudes and which you're determined to apply in spite of anything the text
>has to say.

If you define the 'left' as those resisting the authoritarian state, take 
out the moral implications of your "goodness" and "badness" categories, and 
see my "nonsense formula" as a way of describing the imbalance of internal 
contradictions in a character, then you are getting the idea. When you say 
'sympathetic in part', how do you decide where on the sympathy spectrum 
they lie - barely to utterly say? and what difference does it make to the 
way you judge the characters and read the book?