Vineland underrated

Otto ottosell at yahoo.de
Fri Sep 26 07:16:11 CDT 2003


----- Original Message -----
From: "Carvill John" <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 1:30 AM
Subject: Re: Vineland underrated

> Hi all
>

Welcome to the list, John.

> Well I certainly got more than I bargained for!
>
> On 25 Sep 2003 09:25:36  Terrance <lycidas2@[omitted]> wrote:
> >We're all pretty confused about it, but maybe you can help straighten us
> >out because I for starters don't have no idea how anyone could review VL
> >and complain about it's apparent Left-Wingedness. VL is certainly not an
> >overt Left-Wing novel.
>
> Well, I didn't actually claim that Vineland is a 'Left-Wing novel', I
> think what I said was that it displayed Pynchon's left-wing viewpoint.

I absolutely agree. Did you read the foreword to the centennial-edition
of Orwell's "1984" -- it's very good in displaying his views on more recent
events, obviously from a leftist point of view:

"Now, those of fascistic disposition--or merely those among us who remain
all to ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong-will
immediately point out that this is prewar thinking, and that the moment
enemy bombs begin to fall on one's homeland, altering the landscape and
producing casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort of thing,
really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in
danger, strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and
if you want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no
one is likely to be listening, unless it's for the air raids to be over and
the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument--let alone a
prophecy--in the heat of some later emergency does not necessarily make it
wrong."
(George Orwell: 1984. With a Foreword to the Centennial Edition by Thomas
Pynchon, pp. ix-x)

> To me, it
> is indisputably about (among other things) the contrast between 1960s
> radicalism and 1990s totalitarianism, how the struggle of the 60s against
> a right-wing establishment, particularly personified in Richard Nixon, had
> faded away by the time Reagan came to power. In particular, it's a lament
> for how the youth culture of the 60s became corroded to such an extent
> that the youth of the 90s didn't need subverting in order to bring them
> into line, they were already in line.

Sad, but true.

"In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a
failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the
rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and
30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the
Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike are full
of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort
involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good
present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them
by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life. Though it has never
lost its deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as
outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price,
a deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience
faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest. The
compulsive pessimist's last defense -- stay still enough and the blade of
the scythe, somehow, will pass by -- Sloth is our background radiation, our
easy-listening station -- it is everywhere, and no longer noticed."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html

> Business Studies (dread phrase) became the
> most popular degree course and the police, military, FBI, CIA, etc. were
> viewed as heroic and joining their ranks became seen as a laudable career
> ambition. Coupled with this is the way in which the right-wing
> consistently
> lampoons the whole decade of the 1960s, smothering all the great things
> about that time in a blanket of revisionism.
>

Pynchon's theme has always been the re-writing of history for the sake of
those in power. His oeuvre is historiographic metafiction.

> To be honest, I find it incredible that anyone could read Pynchon in
> general, and Vineland in particular, without realising that Pynchon's
> political sympathies are, at the very least, broadly left-wing.

You'll see that it is possible, that there are people here who claim that
whenever P. says something political it's "shitty writing" or a bad essay.

> The
> convenient fact, for those of a right-wing persuasion, that some of the
> left-wing characters, eg. Frenesi, 'sell out' should not obscure that what
> characters with their own human weaknesses and imperfections sell out to,
> is essentially evil.

What it tells us is that even if you sell out to "Them" they will kick you
in the ass some day, keep you in poverty, destroy your family.

> In Vineland, I feel that Pynchon's sympathies with the
> counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, of which he was surely a part, are
> simply displayed more openly or explicitly than previously. And this may
> in
> fact be the answer to my original question: the book is unpopular with
> right-wing Pynchon fans, a category I had not previously known to exist,
> because it leaves no doubt in the reader's mind as to the political views
> of the author. As well as offering a sad account of the ultimate failure
> of the traditional left and the student radicals to combine their forces
> during the 60s, it paints a depressing but accurate picture of the Reagan
> years, a decade where the right became even more extreme and the left,
> most notably among the youth, pretty much fizzled out and died.
>

Well said. Surely Pynchon is critical of the radical left, not for being
"left," but for their failure in the end.

Otto




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