Pynchons to the left of them(was Re: Vineland underrated)

[Mike Weaver]

Terrance:
>Now how about you try defending those nice opinions with the book. All 
>you've provided here to support your claim are notes picked off the 
>internet and out of the P-L archives. Very disappointing.

No Terrance, that was partly how I put the intro to the chapter together. 
What I just did was describe a rather prominent thread in the tapestry 
which is the book. You saying that thread isn't there?

>However, this book is full of Betrayals and Frenesi has little or nothing 
>to do
>with most them.
>
>How about Sasha? Hub?

How about them? Warmly portrayed lefties living through a period where less 
resolute members of their community sacrificed their liberal integrity on 
the altar of anti-communist hysteria.

It is daft to claim that
>Pynchon simply rips a few pages out of Labor History and pastes
>them onto Frenesi's Mother's Family.


He sets them firmly in the flow of that other history which your lords and 
masters would rather you ignored. Would you describe the descriptions of 
Dora or the DPs as pages ripped from the history of WW2 and pasted onto 
Slothrop's quest.

The IWW material may be little more than backstory but it offers a glimpse 
of US history likely unknown to many of the books readers. Why would he do 
that if unless he has the sympathies you are keen to deny him?
As I pointed out in my notes the HUAC section focuses on the workforce 
rather than the stars. The Hollywood Ten continued working, in Europe or 
via pseudonyms or fronts, not an option for the gaffers, script readers or 
best boys forced out of work by their political choices. (Do you know of 
any factual coverage of that?)

The subject matter of Vineland includes a critical but sympathetic view of 
radical politics in the US in the late sixties.
It seems to me that the mistake that the anti-lefties here make is by 
taking P's critiques of US radicalism to be made from outside the 
tradition. Recently Rob J wrote

>Pynchon's disillusionment with the "hippie resurgence" is pretty
>   explicit in the _Slow Learner_ 'Intro' (SL 9.18-26), and ... amplified 
> in _Vineland_ into something
>   which approaches a full-on critique


Trouble with this is that there is no evidence that P ever had illusions to 
be dissed. The final ineffectuality of the Counterforce in GR wasn't the 
creation of someone who overrated their strength and sinew in opposition to 
the "massive presence of money".