VL to SL: Pynchon's Self-Characterization

[jbor]

    We were at a transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of
    cultural time, with our loyalties divided. As bop and rock'n'roll
    were to swing music and postwar pop, so was this new writing to
    the more established modernist tradition we were being exposed to
    in college. Unfortunately there were no more primary choices for
    us to make. We were onlookers: the parade had gone by and we were
    already getting everything secondhand, consumers of what the media
    of the time were supplying us. This didn't prevent us from adopting
    Beat postures and props, and eventually as post-Beats coming to see
    deeper into what, after all, was a sane and decent affirmation of
    what we all want to believe about American values. When the hippie
    resurgence came along ten years later, there was, for a while anyway,
    a sense of nostalgia and vindication. Beat prophets were resurrected,
    people started playing alto sax riffs on electric guitars, the wisdom
    of the East came back in fashion. It was the same, only different.
                                                    (_SL_ Intro, p. 9)

A few points:

1) He's talking about 1957-8, when he returned to Cornell.

2) He's writing in 1984, or thereabouts, and he's writing about himself: his
past, his attitudes, his literary development.

2) The sentence about values is an endorsement of what the Beats stood for;
it's *not* an endorsement of "conservatism", however that might be defined.
(I.e., he is saying that the Beat movement was "a sane and decent
affirmation of what *we all want to believe about* American values"; my
emph.)

4) The sentence about values applies "now" (1984) as it did "then" (1956).
It has to, the verb "want" is in the present tense.

5) Pynchon acknowledges that his "loyalties" were "divided", between the
"modernist tradition" and the new "Beat sensibility" -- between, say,
Fitzgerald and Kerouac (6-7), and between whatever political and cultural
sensibilities underwrite each. He doesn't say which side he eventually came
down on, and I don't think he has ever really rejected either the one or the
other.

6) He notes that "when the hippie resurgence cam along ten years later" it
provided a sense of "nostalgia and vindication", but he qualifies that quite
conspicuously ("for a while, anyway").

best