Otto and davemarc's comments

[Joseph Tracy]

Yes! I find Otto's comments to be apt, clearheaded, and text based, same with davemarc.  

In respnse to terrance and jbor: Of course, Pynchon is exposing  and satirizing some of the immaturity, arrogance and distraction of the counterculture movement. But both in the novel, and historically, the members of this movement are responding within their cultural limits to very real  and large-scale  corruption of the democratic republic envisioned in the constitution. They are faced with ex Mcarthyite presidents,  large scale systemic racism,  the still strong FBI of J. Edgar Hoover,  The Truman legacy of world -wide imperialism, A CIA which functions as a private army for the likes of the Dulles Family, Bechtel, Anaconda Copper the Rockefellers etc., and a general worlwide assault on the natural environment and the remaining outposts of cultural and political independence.   True , these things are partly a response to the cruel totalitarian Soviet/Chinese versions of "socialism",  but the enemies in this endless war are largely chimeras. When soviet style communism  falls it is replaced by anti-globalism, terrorism,  drug dealers, evil humanist professors, Islamic fundamentalism, anti-americanism etc. We could all see the gleeful relief in the faces of Rumsfeld, Perle, Cheney and friends when Bin Laden came on the scene and managed to stay hidden long enough to get some good wars going.   But back to VL, this is a novel about the cultural changes taking place in the 60s 70s and 80s, and although Pynchon is critical of the counter culture,  and exposes the human frailty of these characters, I find the novel to be essentially sympathetic to Zoyd, DL, Sasha, Atman and "wives", college of surf students,  the members of the film coop, the Travers Becker clan, and even Frenesi.  In Z and CoL49( I plan to read  GR this summer) most of the characters seem to be self destructing, unable to cope with what their searches reveal; family bonds, and bonds of romantic love  are dissolving, history is a maze of lies and violence. In Vineland, every family and attempt at community is under assault from the state(!
and its concomittant human manifestation in personal power trips and sexual perversion), but there is a central image of a counter cultural movement toward a sense of place and family( I see several parallels to biblical stories of heroic survival), which with all its foibles and frailty, appears to me to be one of the warmest and most hopeful places in Pynchon's literature. 



Joseph Tracy
brook7 at earthlink.net
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
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