VLVL Count Drugula, or Mucho the Munificent

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: VLVL Count Drugula, or Mucho the Munificent


> > What gets him into trouble fifteen years after
> > Frenesi has left him are the actions of a criminal, fascist bastard who
is
> > backed by a criminal government which is committing some genocide in
> > Asia at the same time.
> >
> > My point is that the 60's drug culture partly was a reaction to these
> > political circumstances too, and if you forget this as a general
> > background you're inevitably misreading the novel.
>
> <snip>
>
> > I've never denied Pynchon's critical
> > view of the 60's counterculture (political or hedonistic, but in the
puritan
> > America of the sixties hedonism was political), but I see him smiling
when
> > he wrote it. Compared to the reality of the Sixties he could've been
much
> > more malignant in writing about the SDS, Weathermen, Black Panther,
> > Feminists and Hippies.
>
> Just while I think of it, note the double standard being applied here.
> According to the above, even though they're not present in the text,

These "political circumstances" are very present in the text. It begins with
the first sentence of the novel that reminds us of Orwell's novel. We see
Zoyd being busted for a crime he hasn't committed, we see Brock's
concentration camp, his orwellian blackmail of Zoyd, his admiration of the
racist Lombroso-theories.

> if a
> reader doesn't overlay one set of "political circumstances" and a
particular
> attitude onto the novel then they're "misreading" it.

I've never said so. But the reader should be able to get the author's
attitude towards the 60's movement out of the text. And this attitude is
much friendlier than you allow.

> But in leaving out
> specific details relating to another set of historical data Pynchon's
> apparently "smiling" as he writes about the counterculture.
>

There's no leaving out of any specific details. Our argument is about the
interpretation of these sets of historical data presented in the novel.

> Why not turn this binary opposition on its head and say that the "Nixonian
> Reaction" (its tactics, its popularity) was in large part a response to
the
> divisiveness, intolerance, violence and terror tactics of radical groups
> like the Weathermen and Black Panthers and that if you forget this
> background you're inevitably misreading the novel?

Becasue it simply wouldn't go along with the historical facts. Because the
Vietnam War hasn't been fought because of the sixties counterculture or a
worldwide communist conspiracy. The war was there already when the American
youth began to stand up against it. The 60's generation did get up because
of it, even Manson's hippie chicks commited their murders because of the
war. The binary opposition you're setting up is simply confusing cause and
effect. It's nonsense, hocuspocus.

> And that, while accepting
> that he's critical of the Ricardo Montalban-mimicking Hector, and the
Robert
> Kennedy-lookalike Brock Vond, Pynchon was smiling when he wrote about
these
> characters and that he could have been much more malignant in writing
about
> Nixon and "Ronnie Raygun"? All you need to do to make these opposite
> assertions is to reverse the biases the reader has brought with him into
the
> text.
>
> best

Well, he is very malignant by drawing Vond as a very fascist-like federal
agent, and the Vietnam War is critisized as genocidal openly in the novel.
So what's on? He wasn't friendly to those "criminally insane" but his
depiction of the failed sixties counterculture is mild. That why Zoyd
survives in the end and Brock is dead.

Otto