Otto and davemarc's comments

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <brook7 at earthlink.net>
Cc: "pynchon-l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 10:08 PM
Subject: Re: Otto and davemarc's comments


> Thanks, the problem I have with this kind of reading is that Pynchon
> simply doesn't include any of this stuff in the book. You say, in the
> novel and historically. But you don't mean in the novel because it's
> simply not in the book.
>
>

You say there's nothing in the book Joseph is talking about. But that's
simply not true.

>
>
> 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.
>
> As soon as you try to provide an example from the book, this historical
> interpretation falls apart.
>

We get enough info about McCarthyism in the novel, we hear about racism (the
radical students have to learn that there always will be a difference
between them and the radical blacks: you can change your political opinions,
but you can't change the colour of your skin). The novel tells us that we're
in an America in the middle of the Vietnam War (Zoyd and Frenesi's wedding),
and it presents the antidrug-war as an unlawful, semi-fascist enterprise.
Hardly the point of view of a conservative author.

There's nothing to object to in what Joseph says in the following:

>
> 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 enem! ies 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 the! ir searches reveal; family bonds, and
> bonds of romantic love&! nbsp; 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.

I'm relieved that I'm not the only one seeing Pynchon smile as he wrote
about the counterculture.

Otto