VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables

[jbor]

>> 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".

on 5/10/03 9:58 AM, Mike Weaver at mikeweaver at gn.apc.org wrote:

> 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'?

The passage focuses overtly on the betrayals etc of "friends" of Sasha and
Hub, "[e]veryone they knew" telling lies. The time was "thick" with
"betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying". Sasha is "[b]itter" (and
"had a right to be", according to the narrator or Frenesi) because of all
the treachery and dishonesty which went on, specifically that of their
"friends", "[e]veryone they knew".

The sequence of passages focusing on Sasha's life (75-83) describes how her
political ideals and level of commitment gradually ebbed away, first at the
outset of WWII and then during the '50s, her consciousness of this ebbing
away, how she has come to rationalise and justify the times when she had
betrayed her ideals, and it even hints at the possibility that the seeds of
her betrayal (her "helpless turn") were manifest to begin with in what was
little more than a show of commitment ("acts of denying that dangerous
swoon"). The ebbing away gets to a point in the mid-'50s where the extent of
Sasha and Hub being "politically active" is yelling at the tv set.

> You are just as much an ideologue as I am,

Hardly.

> 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.

Yes, but it's *your* idea. You've yet to demonstrate that it has anything at
all to do with Pynchon's text. Or reality.

> When you say 
> 'sympathetic in part', how do you decide where on the sympathy spectrum
> they lie - barely to utterly say?

It's not a "spectrum" or contest, that's your way of looking at the world
and relating to other people. It's the way the characters and their
relationships are presented in the text. Their motivations are made
understandable, they develop and change, they think and act differently in
different situations, are perceived differently by other characters, we get
insight into their thoughts and feelings, their motivations, their humanity.
You judge and condemn Frenesi and exonerate Sasha and Hub, or Zoyd,
according to your own pre-defined conception of "good" and "bad". The text,
however, doesn't render any such judgements.

As I've already said, I've enjoyed debating with you. I understand and
respect your political affiliation, and I can see why you selected
particular passages and references in this particular chapter of this
particular book to try to yoke Pynchon and his work to your party line.

best

> and what difference does it make to the
> way you judge the characters and read the book?